It’s a game you’ve been waiting for as a PC gamer, for a very, very long time. You’ve been patient, you’ve been kind, and you’ve been understanding to Rockstar for delaying the game. Because you know it will be worth the wait. After all, it’s sold 45 million copies to date, how couldn’t it be? You’ve even scheduled time off work so you can play with your friends online, endlessly for 48 hours straight. Then it happens.

The game is delayed. Again.

Grand Theft Auto V isn’t just any game. It’s not another FIFA game, or a franchise that has a reasonably sized fan base. This is GTA, a series where Rockstar has been so confident about their property, that they never show anything at E3 (besides a tiny teaser at last years exhibition), and announce their new iteration on their own website, on their own terms, when they want to. So you may be asking, why do PC gamers always get the rough end of the deal, especially when the franchise originated on those clunky old CRT monitors? Put it simply, the industry has changed.

Before the world of fast internet and easy access file sharing, pirating a game was a lot harder and a lot less of a problem. The money is in consoles today, so understandably, Rockstar as a business has prioritised consoles first and PC second. That’s not to say it’s a bad thing. Because the game made ridiculous amounts of money during its initial launch, the developer can now take their time and get this exactly the way they wanted – 4K support, triple monitor configuration, Rockstar Editor (to make and edit movies easily) and (hopefully) a smooth running game. Just look at some of the most recent example of simultaneous releases – Far Cry 4 and Assassin’s Creed Unity, both releasing on all major platforms at the same time. Unity was an absolute mess that needed the biggest patch in gaming history to fix, and Far Cry 4 has the buggiest coop experience I’ve ever had in my life as a gamer. It tarnished the experience, it took away the immersion, the fun, and the joy of playing with your friends.

Largely, a big selling point for GTA V is its online. Thankfully, online can’t be pirated. Well, at least not properly anyway. Still, many people would have illegally downloaded the game if it had originally released in 2013,  just to play the single player campaign. Financially, that’s a massive loss on the publishers/developers side. Some might argue that they’ve pirated the game because Rockstar have “forgotten” about them or they feel “mistreated”. As one of the people in the PC gaming arena, I can speak for all of us – I hear you. It’s disheartening when you see such a brilliant game on consoles, and there you are sitting at your PC, still playing GTA IV from 2008. But once you accept that reality, once you respect that Rockstar as a business needs to make money, then all of a sudden you see the good side of things – the extra level of fidelity you’ll drool at when driving around Los Santos, the issues that were in the last-gen versions suddenly gone, and the oh-so-exciting FPS mode that you wouldn’t have gotten if you had bought the last-gen version.

So if you want the true experience, you will wait. You will wait because you want those high-res textures. You will wait because you want to play heists with a bunch of your friends in first person. And you will wait because there’s nothing sweeter then getting to the top of the highest mountain and looking over San Andreas, with beautiful draw distances and silky smooth frame rates… before you detonate C4 on your friends Surano and parachute away in to the glorious sunset.

It will be worth the wait.