Sex, if you’re bored enough to bother with something that has no gameplay value, is either implicit, or at the very most, no more explicit than what you’ve seen on television or in non-pornographic movies for decades. Paying for what amounts to innuendo if you go home with a prostitute in GTA V costs next to nothing. “We all have read some comments in the subreddit about it’s quite hard making money in the game, properties are not very profitable, and the missions that affect the stock market seem to be too few and too early,” writes the Reddit poster.
The Reddit poster explicitly fingers real estate and stocks at the outset, because that’s what the community impetus for a real money system would stem from, not some reductive obsession with relatively inexpensive guns and prostitutes. Never mind getting a haircut or shave or tattoo, detailing or patching up or upgrading your vehicle, shopping for t-shirts, shorts, shoes, shades and three-piece suits, paying to see actual movies, or delving into the game’s two biggest money-sinks by a mile: buying up real estate and playing the stock market. What’s irritating is the story’s reductive, lurid title, “GTA 5: players ‘could use real money’ to buy guns and prostitutes.” Because these two things, apparently, are the only salient things about Grand Theft Auto V - gats and hookers.
The real-money bit’s all in a day’s rumormongering, and likeliness aside, this is what fans do: sleuthing, speculating, littering message boards with clever guesses, wild hair notions, wishful thinking and so forth. It’s basically a rumor piece, sourced to Reddit, where someone speculates based on fooling with an XML file that Rockstar may be planning to offer a real-money system for Grand Theft Auto Online when the online mode - included with the game but currently dormant - launches on October 1, 2013. Follow don’t generally think of The Telegraph as a tabloid, but after this story, I’m not so sure.