I have never had the issue with needing to buy Shark Cards.. It's easy to get money online. All I used to do is grind GTA Stunt Racing.. it's fun and get a fair bit of money from it to.
Same here. I've never bought a Shark Card and can't imagine I ever would. My point was that a ton of people who are not you and not me DO buy shark cards, and so Take2 has been slowly tinkering GTAO more and more towards Shark Card transactions. While GTA5 has been in the top 5 charts pretty consistently since it's release -- I think it's been absent only 1 month, and that was early on before GTAO was fully up and running -- the sales of the game are, I THINK, less than sales generated by Shark Cards.
Okay, boring stuff here after a very quick lookup: I haven't checked this myself because I don't have the energy to dig through their financial statements. And it's also from July 2017, so take that with a grain of salt, but also note that unless I'm mistaken, Take2 posted its most profitable quarter ever either in Q2 or Q3 of this year, 2018, and I'd be surprised if it was due to anything other than GTAO. It would not be from RDR2 pre-orders because those cannot be recorded until the game ships. These figures are from a market analysis firm, not Take2 itself, so I doubt they're spot on, but the data these sorts of firms produce is exactly what institutional investors on Wall Street use in deciding whether to buy shares of a company and at what price. Meaning, they know what they're doing when they research junk like this.
And from their July 2017 analysis, as of then Take2 had earned $1.4 billion in US Dollars from GTA5 / GTAO total. Of that $1.4 billion, a whopping $1.092 billion came from "add-on content through GTA-Online." Now I haven't really looked around their store to see what they sell besides Shark Cards and packages of Shark Cards. Maybe they sell avatars too? I think there are other microtransactions like some new Executive thing that came with an office and a collection of vehicles. But it all boils down to the same microtransactions, unless we're talking about avatars and themes. All of the updates have been free. The analysis says that this "add-on content" for GTAO is 78% of the $1.4 billion, and I'll trust that because I don't much care to break out a calculator.
Point being, I'm with you. I've never bought a Shark Card. I played it in the beginning, got my Rank 100, and it was a much easier grind back then albeit annoying. Can't imagine I will ever buy a Shark Card, if for nothing else out of principle. But that was almost 5 years ago when I ranked up enough. I'm not sure if you've tried to rank-up with a newly-created online character, but it's a massively-different experience than it used to be. RP are much harder to come by than they used to be, and racing is no longer the most efficient way to get RP. It's become a mind-numbing grind, and if you start out at level 1 with no good weapons and vehicles there's practically nothing for you to do except get killed every 5 seconds by some young punk who has few gaming skills but an arsenal of things he's bought either by playing the game normally or through Shark Cards, including weaponized orbital satellites to obliterate anyone he wants to on the map. I lost my 100+ character a few years back and even then it was a hugely noticeable difference to rank up again, and I hear it's even worse now, with the intent to be to encourage sales of Shark Cards.
I'm just worried RDR2 will be like it is NOW from the get-go, or will become that way once they start adding post-release trophies to it, including up to 5 years down the road. It'll be PC for me if they ever release it there, and I hope they do.