Mafia dev says GTA comparisons are an internet thing, not a studio conversation

Hangar 13 president Nick Baynes says the GTA franchise simply never comes up during Mafia development — not as a reference point, not as a strategic target, not in any meaningful way. He made the comments as part of IGN's new oral history of the Mafia franchise, which marks 25 years of the series.

Baynes was notably reluctant to even name GTA or GTA 6 directly in his answer. "I think that genuinely at the studio, we've got our own path," he told IGN. "It genuinely never ever comes up in conversation as a touchpoint or steering our strategy or anything like that. I think obviously there's a lot of stories about that game out there right now because something's coming out later this year! But yeah, genuinely, I think it's an internet thing. It's not something the studio looks at." The GTA comparison came up in the context of Mafia 3's shift to a fully open world, which at the time was driven by player demand after Mafia 2 and broader industry trends.

The two franchises are actually less similar than the online discourse suggests. Mafia — with the exception of Mafia 3 — has always leaned cinematic and linear rather than open-world sandbox. That distinction matters, because Mafia: The Old Country, the most recent entry, was a deliberate return to that tighter, more focused structure and ended up surpassing Take-Two's internal sales expectations. Both Hangar 13 and Rockstar sit under the same parent company, Take-Two Interactive, which makes the "we never look at them" line a little harder to take entirely at face value — but commercially, Mafia doesn't need to chase GTA's formula.

With The Old Country's success built on restraint rather than open-world scale, future Mafia games seem likely to stay on that linear path. Whether GTA 6's release later this year shifts any internal thinking at Hangar 13 remains to be seen — but if Baynes is to be believed, the studio isn't watching.