Welcome to the initial installment of Video Games Weekly on Engadget. Expect a new story every Monday (yes, we realize today is Tuesday), broken into two parts. The first is a space for short essays, observations and ramblings about video game trends and related topics from me, a reporter who’s covered the industry for more than 13 years. The second contains the video game stories from the past week that you need to know about, including some headlines from outside of Engadget.
Please enjoy — and I’ll see you next week.
I’ve noticed a growing sentiment in some of my favorite queer gaming forums regarding Grand Theft Auto VI, and it’s both making me laugh and causing me deep anxiety about the malleable nature of our shared reality. When the second trailer for GTA VI dropped on May 6, one of its protagonists, Jason, became an instant sex symbol among the gays, and the thirsty memes started rolling in. This was light-hearted and fun, but at the same time, the alt-right gaming crowd was freaking out about Jason being too gay — even though, canonically, he’s clearly a straight dude. Queer players accused the neo-Nazis of projection, and the memes exalting Jason as a gay icon ramped up, until, somewhere along the way, it stopped being a joke. I started to see earnest comments suggesting the GTA franchise was a bastion of inclusion and an outspoken friend to the LGBT+ community. I saw queer players talk about GTA VI as if it were going to be a warm and welcoming space, something made for us.
And I oop — that is some serious grand theft gaslighting, friends.
I’m not here to burst any bubbles, and I sincerely hope that GTA VI presents well-rounded, diverse characters with thoughtful storylines. However, when it comes to queer issues, that’s just not what the series does. GTA has a history of perpetuating harmful stereotypes about transgender people in particular, and GTA V specifically provided a platform for players to enact violence against trans characters.
I covered this topic in-depth in 2020, and at the time I spoke with Dr. Ben Colliver, a lecturer in criminology at Birmingham City University and the author of “Representation of LGBTQ Communities in the Grand Theft Auto Series.” Violence against trans people in the United States has long been recognized as an epidemic, and in 2025, the situation is worse than ever — lawmakers are legalizing transphobia and shutting down access to gender-affirming care, using trans lives as a political football. It’s a bad time for the LGBT+ community to have false friends, which is one reason I cringe when I see people rewriting the history of GTA.
Ugly stereotypes and targeted violence are part of GTA’s DNA, so the common argument here is that, actually, the series punches in all directions and that means it isn’t discriminatory. But, this take doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Dr. Colliver’s analysis found that straight, cis men in GTA games remain largely unscathed, and characters who represent oppressed groups are often the ones used as punchlines.
“Largely it is LGBT people, sex workers and women who are portrayed in a bad way,” Dr. Colliver said in 2020. “Typically, men in the game conform to almost these traditional masculine stereotypes that we expect of men around violence and aggression.”
The only subject that GTA really takes seriously is masculinity, and even then it approaches the topic from a basic lens. GTA presents mainstream straight-male power fantasies with a Michael Bay flair and a teenage sense of edginess, and GTA VI looks to be more of the same. That’s even with the inclusion of a female protagonist — Lucia, who is very much involved with Jason, who is actually straight-coded despite appealing massively to gay men, which I believe was a total accident on Rockstar’s part.
(And because I can hear your screams from here: Yes, The Ballad of Gay Tony exists and it’s a fine piece of DLC for GTA IV focused on a queer character. The thing is, it came out 16 years ago — before Rockstar built trans violence into GTA V — and even though it was incredibly well-received, the studio has yet to return to its blueprint. I find that fact more telling than anything else.)
GTA is a non-subversive franchise built for basic bros, and this fact is only reinforced by the homogeneity of Rockstar Games and the complacency of its parent company, Take-Two Interactive. We don’t have data about queer representation at Rockstar, but at Rockstar North in 2024, women composed less than 12 percent of employees in the highest-paid roles. Across the studio, women’s average hourly pay was 43 percent lower than men’s. In its annual investor report filed this month, Take-Two removed all references to diversity and inclusion, and deleted any mention of awards the company has received for supporting LGBT+ employees. These moves are intended to appease President Donald Trump, and it’s the exact type of spineless, bootlicking behavior that the GTA series is supposed to mock.
Personally I love doing crimes and messing with cops, and as it turns out, so do most other video game fans. This mass-appeal ethos has helped make GTA one of the industry’s most enduring franchises. Please, just don’t bank on GTA VI being progressive or actively inclusive from a queer standpoint. We don’t need another reason to be disappointed nowadays.
More than that, we can’t let the alt-right reality consume our own. The people complaining about Jason being too gay are the same ones claiming that Widow’s ass isn’t visible enough in her Overwatch 2 Cammy skin — they are unserious people making bad-faith arguments about games as an art form. Do not absorb their messaging and do not engage with their lies. Think critically about their angles of attack and, meanwhile, play all the queer games you want to. One of my personal recent favorites is Sorry We’re Closed, if you’re looking for a sexy, campy place to start.
The news
Avowed director and longtime Obsidian narrative lead Carrie Patel has joined Night School, the studio behind the Oxenfree series, as a game director. This is a big get for Night School and a sign that the team has some stability in its future. Netflix acquired Night School in 2021, before the launch of Oxenfree 2 and as part of the streaming company’s big push into video game development and publishing. Netflix has since closed one internal AAA studio and reduced its third-party output, but it seems Night School is secure and working on something story-heavy, if Patel’s involvement tells us anything.
Lili made history in May as the first video game to be included in a Cannes Festival competition, and it looks super rad. Lili is a contemporary, neo-noir interpretation of Macbeth, presented in full-motion video and set on the streets of Iran, featuring webs of government corruption and witches who work as hackers. It’s a collaboration between the Royal Shakespeare Company and iNK Stories, the studio behind the award-winning game 1979 Revolution: Black Friday. Lili is already on the festival circuit but it’s still in development, and it’s due to be publicly available in or just after late 2025.
Bungie only revealed Marathon in April, but the game is already enduring a rocky pre-launch period. First, the studio had to publicly apologize and review all of its Marathon assets after it was confirmed that the game’s alpha included stolen artwork. Then, Forbes dropped a report documenting the current tensions at Bungie, saying morale at the studio was in “free fall” across every department. The most recent rumblings around Marathon, which is due to land in September, are that its marketing plans have been scuttled completely.
GeoGuessr will no longer be included in the Esports World Cup after a quick — and clearly effective — community blackout. The most prolific GeoGuessr map creators pulled their contributions from the game to protest its participation in the EWC, calling the tournament “a sportswashing tool used by the government of Saudi Arabia to distract from and conceal its horrific human rights record.” Less than a day after the blackout began, GeoGuessr AB responded by abandoning the event, writing, “You — our community — have made it clear that this decision does not align with what GeoGuessr stands for. So, when you tell us we’ve got it wrong we take it seriously.”
The FTC was the last remaining voice rallying against Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard, and it’s now been silenced for good. The FTC officially dismissed its case against Microsoft after losing its latest appeal earlier this month.
In a cute moment of serendipity, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 has sold 3.3 million copies in its first 33 days on the market. If you were waiting for a sign to start playing, this might be it.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/video-games-weekly-grand-theft-auto-is-no-friend-to-the-queer-community-193059427.html?src=rss
