When the hype engine for GTA 6 roared into top gear this week, there was a quietly touching aspect amid the excitement that will stay with me for a while. As the 27 minute long extended look at the game racked up millions of views on YouTube, a theme emerged in the comments. Many of the most upvoted messages were brief tributes to friends and loved ones who adored GTA but had passed away before the game’s release – a surprisingly poignant response to the tongue-in-cheek ultraviolence of the video itself.
Those comments speak volumes about what GTA actually is – about the immense mindspace it occupies for entire generations. No other game has ever held that kind of dominant position on the cultural landscape, but it’s arguably been decades since any kind of media franchise held this level of public attention. One of the most extraordinary things about GTA is not just that it has this level of fame and influence, but that it does so in the fragmented media landscape of the 2020s, when even the world’s most successful movies, music, or TV rarely if ever attain the kind of mass-market reach that hits and stars of the 80s and 90s could command.
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I’ll admit to feeling a little trepidation about GTA 6. The previous game was so incredibly successful, such a landmark for the industry, and without Rockstar saying very much at all, the hype for its follow-up felt unstoppable even years out from launch. If GTA 6 were to disappoint or underperform its sky-high expectations in any significant way, it would be a hammer blow for the entire industry, sending investors running for the hills.
The halo effect from the biggest media launch of the decade being a videogame will be very significant
The optimistic flipside of that, however, is that if GTA 6 succeeds – and the rapturous response to this week’s extended trailer is a very good sign indeed – it will be a rising tide that lifts many other boats around it. It may not feel that way to other publishers who have scrambled to move their launches away from November to avoid sales cannibalism, but in the long term, the halo effect from the biggest media launch of the decade being a videogame will be very significant.
The stone hasn’t even hit the water yet and you can already see the ripples starting to spread. GTA 6’s extended trailer launched in a highly unusual way, premiering on Netflix several hours before it was made available through public platforms like YouTube. The business details of the deal aren’t known, but it’s reasonable to assume that Netflix paid for those hours of exclusivity during which time the 27 minutes of footage were locked away behind a subscription paywall. The implication is that Netflix thought that footage was so desirable, so anticipated, that people would subscribe simply to see it a few hours earlier than the rest of the world.
There are some partial parallels to this situation in other media – I’m thinking here, for example, of movies that are promoted in part by having exclusive trailers for bigger upcoming movies playing before them – but I can think of nothing in recent decades that matches what Netflix and Rockstar did here. It was only a few hours of exclusivity – both parties probably reasoned that you can only play whack-a-mole with YouTube uploads for so long – but the very clear implication is that Netflix, itself the owner of some of the biggest media franchises of recent years, sees GTA 6 as a media event it very, very much wants to be a part of, even in as small a way as this.
Though GTA 6 may ride roughshod over other titles this year to some extent, a company like Netflix being so keen to reach out and touch its hem as it passes by is a great sign for what the game’s impact will do to the broader industry. Netflix has a somewhat patchy history with videogames – it was very keen on making them into a major part of its media offering for quite a while, but of late seems to have scaled back and refocused its ambitions in the area significantly. That mirrors what’s happened at other major tech companies, including Amazon, Google, and Meta, all of whom have scaled down (or entirely ended) game related operations in recent years – leaving Microsoft as the last of the tech giants with a significant stake in the gaming market.
Its (assumed) multi-billion-dollar success will inevitably bring a wave of new investment
In part that pullback has been because of a lack of success with specific ventures, and a massive reallocation of capital to generative AI projects and infrastructure has also come at the expense of gaming efforts. Whatever the reason, though, the outcome has been pretty clear; between major technology and media companies dropping their gaming engagement, and investors following suit, project funding cash has become very hard to come by in this industry. GTA 6 alone won’t fix that problem – but the attention and interest its (assumed) multi-billion-dollar success will bring will inevitably trigger a wave of new investment (even if much of the money will be chasing ill-advised “the next GTA” style projects).
What will also be interesting to watch is the extent to which GTA 6 will influence broader culture in the coming years. The series has always drawn heavily from a wide range of media and culture, wearing its references proudly on its sleeve, but at some point that tide started to flow in the opposite direction. In the years after GTA 5, a handful of TV shows and movies had clear stylistic nods to the game; now that we live in a world where videogame-based properties are often among the most successful movies and TV shows of the year, the cultural impact of GTA 6 in other media is likely to be even more obvious.
Beyond the commercial importance of the game, that represents something culturally important too; a reaffirmation of videogames’ position on an equal footing with other media in the flow and transfer of styles, influences, and ideas. There’s a grim irony to how difficult the business of getting games made has become right at the medium’s peak of cultural importance and influence. Perhaps GTA 6 can make that relevance so unavoidable, so impossible to ignore, that its landmark release will also mark the turning point we’ve all hoped for in the commercial environment for game development. An optimistic read, no doubt; but it’s hard to look at a project on the scale of GTA 6 coming in to land without feeling at least a little sense that anything is possible.