The gaming world is so vast and shifts so quickly that it's hard to pick out critical moments and ends of eras until a long way after the fact, but today feels like one of those turning points.

Rockstar games co-founder Dan Houser, the man behind Grand Theft Auto, Red Dead Redemption, Bully and more massive games, is leaving the company he set up with his brother Sam back in 1998. Rockstar's publisher, Take-Two, put out a short statement to the United States Securities and Exchange Commission which didn't really shed any light on why Houser left.

preview for Red Dead Redemption 2: Official Gameplay Video (Rockstar Games)

"After an extended break beginning in the spring of 2019, Dan Houser, Vice President, Creative at Rockstar Games, will be leaving the company," it said. "Dan Houser's last day will be March 11, 2020. We are extremely grateful for his contributions. Rockstar Games has built some of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful game worlds, a global community of passionate fans and an incredibly talented team, which remains focused on current and future projects."

See? Nothing. Conspiracy theories about Take-Two abound, but the only certainty at the moment is that Houser's exit has left Rockstar fans bereft, and worried for the future of the company. Fortunately the games he helmed provide a lot of appropriate reaction gifs.

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There's a lot of shock around at the moment, but it's also an oddly appropriate point for Houser to move on. He's leaving at a time when the gargantuan open-world games which made Rockstar the most ambitious and wildly successful games studio around might well have peaked, both in their popularity and their cultural importance.

Sure, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox One X will arrive soon, and they'll be way, way more powerful than this generation of consoles. The canvas for future games will be that much bigger. But where else is there for these worlds to go? How much bigger could anyone actually want them to be? And how long could they take to make? Red Dead Redemption 2 included more than 300,000 animations and 500,000 lines of dialogue, and took eight years from start to finish. People are still discovering mad bits and pieces – giant bones, a UFO, a very sad robot on a mountain – a year and a half after the game arrived. Rockstar did open world best, and Death Stranding and Outer Wilds continued to carry the flag for open world games in 2019, but that thrill of knowing you're playing through a peerless technical achievement can't be repeated.

Red Dead Redemption 2 review - ps4 - PlayStation 4 - release date - UK
Rockstar

The next step appears to be for games to depend on players spending even more real money on microtransactions in-game. Even Red Dead Redemption 2 and GTA 5, Rockstar's crown jewels, are starting to sour for players because of them. By getting out now, Houser might have spared himself any future blame for it from disgruntled players.

On top of that, the curtain has been yanked away from the mysterious process of actually making these games. The shockwaves that followed revelations that getting RDR2 finished to the Rockstar standard meant that various staff members had to work 100-hour weeks cracked the sense of joy around the game.

Rockstar is far from alone here, and we've been talking about gruelling conditions in the gaming industry for at least 15 years now, but it's much harder to enjoy a game when you know that at least one person developed depression and a drinking problem while working on it.

So as painful as Houser's exit is to everyone who ever got obsessed with GTA, Red Dead and Rockstar's other megahits, and as little as we know as to the ins and outs of his departure, it might be the right time to ride off into the photorealistic sunset.

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