Are gamers who have waited 13 years to return to Vice City really going to spend their time in Panem, Middle-earth, and the Underworld instead?
The massively anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto VI, coming Nov. 19, will land amid a slew of expensive and high-profile movies and returning TV shows dropping within several days of each other. Most of them offer their own escapist fantasy worlds that will compete in the attention economy with a title that’s expected to be the biggest video game launch in history.
Season three of Amazon-MGM’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is rolling out episodes over three weeks beginning Nov. 11 and Johnny Depp’s comeback vehicle Ebenezer lands Nov. 13. Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping opens the day after GTA 6 launches on Nov. 20 along with the fourth season of the studio’s Paramount+ hit Yellowjackets. The same day, Disney rolls out the third season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Five days down the road comes Amazon MGM’s limited series Blade Runner 2099.
“It’s going to be a watershed moment for not only the gaming industry but also all the folks in the media and entertainment industry who are going to have to deal with the fact that eyeballs are going to be leaving their environments to go play GTA 6,” said Bart Spiegel, global media, entertainment, gaming and sports leader at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
It’s indeed tough to overstate the earthquake GTA6 is expected to create in terms of entertainment spending, distraction hours and pop culture noise. The Rockstar Games project has a first-year sales forecast of 45 million copies and $3.2 billion in sales — a figure which would top all-time box office champ Avengers: Endgame. A whopping 29 percent of U.S. gamers expect to purchase the title and one economist suggested, rather wildly, that the game would cost the U.S. economy $1 billion in lost productivity due to PTO requests. Other video game publishers have run for the hills and surrendered November to Rockstar’s sun-drenched, pastel-colored 800-pound gorilla.
“I think GTA 6 will be the biggest entertainment launch in history,” predicts Geoff Keighley, gaming industry producer and entrepreneur behind The Game Awards. “Not just as a game in terms of dollars it will make — this will easily trump Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three — but how much it will impact moviegoing, streaming, and the way people spend their time. Hollywood should look at the hours as closely as the dollars because GTA 6 is going to be some people’s entertainment plan for the rest of the year, basically. The entertainment industry has never really seen something like this before.”
While the game’s core mission will likely take around 80 hours to complete — which alone is a massive amount of hours for one title — the title is also an open world environment where players tend to return again and again, and insiders assume the game will allow some kind of online multiplayer mode as well. “So this is not just about opening weekend,” Keighley says.
But for Hollywood, which is accustomed to largely owning the entertainment attention economy, particularly around the holidays, the impact of GTA 6 seems almost certainly to be felt — if difficult to measure.
Spiegel noted streaming is likely to take the biggest hit because a console game directly competes for viewing hours on living room TVs. Last year’s fourth quarter streaming numbers were rather strong, he noted, but he suspects GTA 6 could put a real dent in the year-over-year comps. The live urgency of sports viewing, however, will be safer from erosion than entertainment programming. “But trust me, if that game gets boring, GTA 6 is going on pretty soon,” he quipped.
Behind the scenes, streamers are increasingly aware GTA 6 is coming and that Jason and Lucia might rob some of their viewers. “Everybody is rumbling about how big this game is going to be,” says a representative working with one potentially impacted streaming title.
On the film side, a major exhibitor executive said it’s “tough to know” the effect on films like Ebenezer and Sunrise on the Reaping. “It’s hardly come up in internal discussions, but anyone in the industry who’s ever been a gamer — or who lives with someone who is — knows it’ll have some impact,” he said. “Hunger Games presales are strong, which might point to it being solid counter programming. Ebenezer presales are dire, but I doubt GTA6 is the main reason. We’ll have to see how walkup sales go.”
Future box office heavy hitters like Avengers: Doomsday and Dune: Part Three, which open “Dunesday” Dec. 18. Such titles would seem to fall outside the game’s blast radius, but perhaps not. Spiegel has noted the game’s “pull could last through December.” While hardcore gamers will rush out and play GTA 6 the first few weeks, others will hold off until they have more free time during the December holidays, while some kids (with rather permissive parents) won’t even be unwrapping the presumably Mature-rated game until Christmas.
Music will be disrupted, too, with the game’s 34-song soundtrack already at 26 million monthly listens on Spotify and a 30-track original score by Justice coming Dec. 11.
One as-yet-unappreciated aspect of the game’s gravitational pull will be on social media, where you’re already starting to see anticipatory videos (such as a boyfriend getting his girlfriend a kitten so she won’t bother him while playing the game, or another boyfriend who seemingly wrote up a contract pledging a list of compromises if his girlfriend doesn’t, yes, bother him while playing the game). But social media is also massive part of entertainment marketing — not just direct advertising but fan-generated content that helps programs generate buzz and become part of the cultural conversation. But what happens if GTA 6 becomes all anybody is talking about?
“It’s going to take over live streaming and clips and content creators,” Keighley says. “Barbenheimer worked because you could go see Barbie and Oppenheimer, and you only needed five or six hours. People will still go see other things, but I think the entertainment value has to be extremely high.”
