Rockstar calls time for GTA Online on Xbox 360 and PS3, halts further updates

Nearly two years after Grand Theft Auto V’s online multiplayer was launched, the service appears to be reaching its end-of-life on the older generation of consoles.

In an announcement of major changes coming to Grand Theft Auto Online on PS4, Xbox One and PC on September 15th, Rockstar said that new additions such as Freemode Events would not be coming to PS3 and Xbox 360.

This is due to the older hardware being unable to support the new features, an issue Rockstar formerly prophesised.

"As wementioned previously, we always knew there might be a point where we would reach the technical capacity of what the older generation of consoles can handle as each downloadable update requires additional memory both for assets and for additional scripting,” the publisher explained in a blog post.

We have continued to optimize the entire game over time in order to squeeze as much memory as we possibly could out of the last-generation hardware and at some point, continuing to add content for those systems could cause the risk of instability to the game overall."

That doesn’t mean that players won’t be able to continue playing Grand Theft Auto Online for the time being – Rockstar has confirmed that it has no plans to shut down the service’s servers yet.

But as the gap widens between the last-gen and new versions of the game, it would be little surprise to see fans of the mode transition across to the newer platforms.