[Mauzen]

Looking at the facts, as given by the chart, the player count is on a valley, but quite stable rising. Player counts usually explode when a new version is released, and quickly drop again after people tried all the new stuff. The 80k player maximum obviously was something like a fake server spam, means, some guys registered a lot of faked servers to the masterlist, that seemed to be full of players. Thats because playercount rose "slowly" (when new servers get created), but afterwards drop instantly (when the faking IPs got banned). It is obviously not a bug or a bot spam, as the servercount went up accordingly, and a single bug would not make the playercount grow slowly.

So, GTA V will NOT make the playercounts drop a lot. They might go down a bit as some people play the singleplayer, but will rise again afterwards. Even in the PC version, the GTA V multiplayer wont be a competitor for samp, as they got nothing in common, except that they take place in San Andreas.

It only get interesting, when GTA online comes up, as this will be competing with the RP servers. Not much revealed about it yet, but imo it was inspired a lot by samp.