There’s only so many times that gaming industry analysts can say “Grand Theft Auto VI” will be the biggest entertainment release of all time before the phrase seemingly loses all meaning to those who have never played a “GTA” game before.
With just one week left until the Nov. 19 release of the most-anticipated video game release ever, everyone from the bystanders passing Vice City billboards and watching “SNL” sketches to Hollywood execs who’d seen Netflix’s “extended look” back in August knows the hottest topic right now is the Rockstar Games title. According to market research firm Newzoo, the game is currently estimated to bring in $3.25 billion to $5.2 billion in first week sales across PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S gaming consoles on a reported $1.5 billion budget.
“Even if you don’t play games, chances are you’ve heard it,” Netflix’s vice president of nonfiction series Brandon Riegg tells Variety. “Just like maybe you’ve heard of a famous athlete or you’ve heard a famous song. So I think they had that in their favor.”
But not everyone knows what it is about “GTA 6” that will take up pop culture’s collective attention (and money), and those who do are very likely already off in the massive echo chamber that has been waiting for the game for 13 years.
The simplest possible answer is that the “Grand Theft Auto” franchise created a new type of video game, the open-world genre, and that new kind of video game has steadily grown to become the most immersive form of entertainment we have today. In these games, you have almost limitless possibilities for how you interact with the virtual world, making the normally collective experience of consuming the same piece of narrative media a personalized one as well.
“Really, ‘GTA’ was the pioneer of the open-world game,” Game Awards creator, host and longtime gaming industry journalist Geoff Keighley tells Variety. “‘GTA 3,’ that’s really where Rockstar crossed over to do a 3D open-world game. So many games are so linear, where they are effectively scripts that you’re playing through and having a little bit of choice. But ‘GTA’ revolutionized the industry with a true open-world game that let you decide what journey you wanted to go on inside of this simulated environment. When ‘GTA 3’ came out, that was ahead of its time. And Rockstar has, with every game, the ambition has gotten bigger and bigger and bigger about what the density of the simulated world is. And that allows players to have a huge sense of agency to create the story that they want to create inside the world.”
Riegg, who collaborated with Rockstar Games studio director Jennifer Kolbe to launch the “GTA 6” extended trailer in what he says “wasn’t a monetary sort of deal,” says “the game itself is probably the closest thing to this full immersion in this video game world.”
“It’s ‘Ready Player One,’ maybe without the headset,” Riegg says. “There is a narrative to the game and objectives, but you can also just live in that world. You don’t have to do that stuff. I can have a relationship with somebody. I can text them. I can do crimes. It’s this immersive alternate universe that you can actually participate in in whatever way that you choose.”
Strauss Zelnick, the head of Rockstar Games parent company Take-Two Interactive, says he has “so many thoughts” about the game, but he’s at a loss for new words until it’s unveiled.
“It’s a nice question to ask,” Zelnick told Variety Monday when asked if there was anything specific that the Take-Two CEO feels he and the team at Rockstar haven’t said yet about “GTA 6” that they can say about the game before it’s out. “No, I mean I think our point of view has been well represented, and I think at this point, I put myself in the camp of cautiously optimistic.”
Zelnick, formerly the president of 20th Century Fox and head of BMG Entertainment, has done so many “GTA 6” preview interviews at this point that apart from recently defending Take-Two’s track record with hit franchises (“GTA,” “Red Dead Redemption,” “NBA 2K,” “Borderlands” and “Sid Meier’s Civilization”) in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal, not much has changed between Q&As.
“Everyone here is incredibly excited about the upcoming launch,” Zelnick says. “Pre-orders are running far in excess of our expectations, so that’s a good thing. That said, we never claim success before it occurs, so we’re just days away from beginning to see the fruits of our labor.”
“GTA 6” is a guaranteed hit (“Lord knows I need it,” Zelnick joked) so measuring the $80 game’s success is going to go well beyond analyzing financials and into hours played, time spent away from other forms of entertainment and the percentage of the workforce that takes the day off. And that last one is no joke.
“I honestly think hardly anyone in the gaming industry is going to be working that day,” says Christoph Hartmann, the former head of Take-Two Interactive’s 2K Games and currently the chief at Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment.
“I actually downloaded it today, and I’m upset because the Wi-Fi went really slow in our house,” Hartmann told Variety Wednesday. “I think it was 212 GBs. And yes, I’m gonna take a day off, and then I have the challenge about my 14-year-old son insisting he can play as well, and I told him it’s mature, and I he said, ‘Yeah, but Dad, you worked on that game. Shouldn’t I know what it is?'”
“Grand Theft Auto 6” is the story of Jason and Lucia, a pair that “have always known the deck is stacked against them,” per Rockstar Games. “But when an easy score goes wrong, they find themselves on the darkest side of the sunniest place in America, in the middle of a criminal conspiracy stretching across the state of Leonida – forced to rely on each other more than ever if they want to make it out alive.”
Rockstar Games co-studio head Rob Nelson has said the game’s main narrative should take approximately 80 hours to play through. The title will have the largest open-world map in the franchise’s history and offer new ways for players to shape their gameplay, from deciding the level of romance between Jason and Lucia to what their physiques look like based on what they eat and how often they work out.
“‘GTA’ games have been unique in their ambition, and certainly this one. The scale of what they built over a decade is incredible,” Keighley says. “So I think that’s why players respond to these games, because there’s just so much possibility inside the world of how you play it. This is not a game that you play in 20 hours and finish. You continue to exist in this world and explore it. And obviously, ‘GTA Online,’ that’s been a big thing that continued to go on for a decade. So the ‘GTA’ experience is unlike anything else in gaming, much less entertainment. That’s what is so unique about the ‘GTA’ games, is that they really are peerless across all of entertainment because of the scale.”
Since its founding by brothers Dan Houser and Sam Houser in 1998, Rockstar Games has become the “largest American games publisher” and owns “the largest entertainment franchise” with “Grand Theft Auto 6,” according to SuperData CEO and NYU “Business of Video Games” professor Joost Van Dreunen.
On the massive success of “Red Dead Redemption 2” and “Grand Theft Auto 5,” “they’re not the underdog” anymore, Van Dreunen notes, meaning a big part of Rockstar’s counter-culture appeal has gone mainstream since its last hit released. “So can it maintain that character, and can it commercialize that?” Van Dreunen asks.
“GTA 6” will launch amid Rockstar Games workers’ continued efforts to unionize, now with public support from SAG-AFTRA. The timing isn’t a coincidence, with Rockstar employees aiming to call attention to their detailed work over the past 13 years while Take-Two Interactive is poised to make billions off their labor. The success of the game is likely to impact the gaming industry at large, as well as how the general public views the medium, which has long struggled to be taken as seriously as movies and TV despite the more than $200 billion in revenue games bring in each year.
“My hope is that they’ve taken the success of ‘GTA 5’ to manifest the creative vision that they had in their head this whole time, have really delivered on that,” Van Dreunen says. “And I think that will be its unique selling point, not the fact that it’s this sort of fringe form of entertainment and my mom tells me I’m not allowed to play this game. That was a big part of its selling point, its marketing. They used to guerrilla marketing. They would have stickers in Lower Manhattan and the East Village, these Rockstar stickers everywhere on lamp posts and on street furniture and all that stuff. They would take a very rebellious approach to marketing because it’s in line and on brand with the game.”
