GTA V pre-orders mistakenly ship early in the UK, more evidence surfaces on PC and PS4 versions of the game

Tomorrow marks the official release of Grand Theft Auto V on Xbox 360 and PS3. But someone at Amazon UK must have gotten a little over enthusiastic as pre-orders were being dispatched and delivered to customers’ doors ahead of time. It's unclear just how many gamers managed to get an early crack at the sprawling world of Los Santos, but Rockstar has confirmed it’s investigating how and why those deliveries occurred.

Whether that scales up to a full-on legal mess for those involved or not, it was certainly a nice surprise for buyers of the game. But the excitement was short-lived for some. After footage started to emerge on sites like Twitter and Instagram Microsoft reportedly began banning Xbox Live accounts of people it could identify.

Typically, having your system banned from Xbox Live means you’ll have to buy another one to access the console’s online component again. That certainly seems like a harsh penalty for legitimate paying customers who just happened to receive their copy one day in advance due to a shipping error. In fairness, though, pirated copies of the game were in the wild days earlier so it's unclear if Microsoft specifically targeted those.

We’ve reached out for an official statement on this and will update when / if we hear back.

In other GTA V news, calls for a PC version of the game might be answered in the not-too-distant future, as code from a configuration file posted on Pastebin and allegedly coming from a pirated Xbox 360 version of the game points towards PC and PS4 releases. We can’t vouch for the leak’s legitimacy but it seems to have been validated by a legal request sent to Cinema Blend asking them to remove links to the XML.

The site also mentions it’s not uncommon to see PC related code on a console release, as “most developers build games around a general code base and configure the game's specifications per platform within an single config file, as opposed to building new code or separate config files for each and every platform.”

Grand Theft Auto V is expected to smash sales records for the current generation of consoles, with some analysts predicting it could push up to 20 million copies by March of next year. Some have estimated the game's development and marketing budget at $260 million or more, right up there with big Hollywood blockbusters.

John Carmack isn't excited about next generation gaming consoles

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting the arrival of Microsoft’s Xbox 720 and Sony’s PlayStation 4, prepare to be disappointed. John Carmack of id Software / Doom / Quake fame believes that these next generation consoleswon’t be worth writing home about as they won’t do anything more than deliver better graphics.

In a recent interview with Gameindustry, the luminary shared his opinion about the next wave of game consoles. Carmack feels that while future consoles will be significantly more powerful than the aging systems that are still around today, it really all comes down to the user experience.

He says that anything a designer can come up with today can be done on the 360 or the PS3 and certainly on the PC. As such, the designer isn’t really excited about the future simply because it will be the same thing just “with the knobs turned up.”

“If you take a current game like Halo which is a 30 hertz game at 720p; if you run that at 1080p, 60 frames with high dynamic frame buffers, all of a sudden you've sucked up all the power you have in the next-generation,” Carmack said. “It will be what we already have, but a lot better. You will be able to redesign with a focus on D11, but it will not really change anyone's world. It will look a lot better, it will move towards the movie rendering experience and that is better and better, but it's not like the first time you've ever played an FPS.”

He points to Nintendo’s success with the Wii as a game-changing example of thinking outside of the box. While that system only has a tenth of the power of its competitors, it was able to sell extremely well because it was something new and unique.

So what does he feel is the next big thing in video games? Virtual reality. We’ve heard about this technology for years and for a while there seemed to be a pretty big push towards it but admittedly it’s been absent as of late.

Carmack is hard at work on a VR headset and reportedly spent most of his time at E3 demonstrating it with Doom 3 BFG Edition. He is working with Palmer Luckey, an inventor that will soon be taking to Kickstarter to get his head-mounted display funded for production. He hopes to eventually sell the units for $500 or around $600 with a copy of Doom 3.