Three console generations. Twelve years on the market. And the latest version of Grand Theft Auto V — the single most profitable entertainment product ever made — sits at a 79% approval rating on Steam. Not “Very Positive.” Not “Overwhelmingly Positive.” Just “Mostly Positive,” sandwiched between games a fraction of its budget and cultural footprint.

That figure comes from 65,842 user reviews as of May 2026: 52,322 positive, 13,520 negative. Not a rounding error, not a review-bombing anomaly. A verdict, delivered over more than a year by tens of thousands of players who bothered to write in.

How Enhanced Got Here

When Rockstar dropped GTA V Enhanced on PC on March 4, 2025, it should have been a victory lap. The upgrade was free for existing owners and brought features PC players had been waiting five years for: ray-traced ambient occlusion, shadows, global illumination, and reflections, plus DLSS and FSR support, faster loading, and Dolby Atmos audio. By every technical measure, it was the definitive way to play.

While the launch was relatively smooth from a performance standpoint compared to many PC releases, other issues quickly emerged. Character migration — the process of carrying your GTA Online progress into the new version — broke for a significant number of players. Rockstar rolled out three patches in the first week, fixing a framerate cap and other bugs, but migration problems persisted.

The Steam rating at launch was brutal. IGN reported 54% positive from roughly 19,800 reviews in the early days. Rockstar Intel clocked it at 53.72%. That was low enough to make GTA V Enhanced the worst user-reviewed Grand Theft Auto game on Steam — below even the widely mocked GTA Trilogy Definitive Edition.

It has since climbed to 79%. But the original GTA V Legacy — now unlisted at Rockstar’s request — holds an 87% “Very Positive” rating from over 1.8 million reviews. The gap tells you everything about what players think of this upgrade.

The Migration Disaster

The single biggest drag on the score wasn’t graphics or performance. It was Rockstar telling longtime players their accounts couldn’t come with them.

“The GTA Online profile associated with this Rockstar Games account is not eligible for migration at this time,” one player reported seeing, before adding a colorful suggestion about what Rockstar could do with its upgrade. Another wrote: “I’m leaving a negative review mainly due to Rockstar deciding that some accounts should arbitrarily not be able to migrate, and if you ask for help from support, they just say they can’t do anything about it.”

These weren’t edge cases. Migration complaints dominated the “most helpful” negative reviews for weeks. Players with hundreds of hours invested in GTA Online were told to start over or stay on the Legacy version — a version Rockstar was already beginning to sideline.

The Meme Review Problem

Then there’s the other issue. The top player reviews for a $30 game that generated more revenue than any film, album, or book in history read like this: “strip club” (67.5 hours played). “good get it” (42.8 hours). “The goat” (93.9 hours).

This is what happens when a game becomes a cultural institution rather than a product. People pour dozens of hours into it and leave joke reviews because the exercise of reviewing GTA V in 2026 feels absurd. The game has been reviewed, debated, memed, and replayed into the ground. Nobody’s buying GTA V Enhanced to be surprised. They’re buying it because it’s there, and because their friends are there.

What This Means for GTA VI

Here’s the number that should worry Rockstar more than any Steam rating: 32,948. That’s the current concurrent player count for GTA V Enhanced on Steam, as of late May 2026. AutoEvolution reported that in a recent 24-hour period, nearly 56,000 players were on the Enhanced version compared to almost 90,000 still on Legacy — suggesting many players had yet to make the switch.

GTA VI was planned for fall 2025 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, with no PC version announced. If Rockstar’s handling of the GTA V Enhanced migration is any preview of how the studio treats its PC audience at launch, the words “not eligible for migration” could echo loudly when GTA VI Online eventually arrives on mouse and keyboard.

The 79% will keep climbing. The migration fixes will trickle in. The concurrent numbers will stabilize. But for a studio that spent a decade perfecting the art of the re-sell, landing at “Mostly Positive” on your flagship title’s fourth release isn’t the flex Rockstar thinks it is.

Sources