The Rotten Tomatoes Games YouTube channel uploaded the first and second Grand Theft Auto VI trailers as if they were new videos over a year after they first came out, to shocking numbers. The first trailer landed in December 2023 and the second arrived in May 2025. Rotten Tomatoes Games posted them in the last few days, in 2026, as if they were fresh, which begs the question: why would anyone upload a trailer everyone has already seen dozens of times?
Well, the answer to this is the hype. On YouTube, search traffic does not care how old a video is. If millions of people are typing "GTA 6 trailer" into the search bar every single day, then a video matching that search can pull views no matter when it was uploaded. The trailers are among the most-searched pieces of video on the entire platform, and that demand has not slowed down in the two and a half years since the first one dropped. So uploading them, even absurdly late, is a way to catch some of that endless search traffic.
Think about why old GTA 6 trailers are still this valuable. It is because there is nothing newer to search for. Rockstar Games has not released a third trailer, has shown no gameplay at all, and has kept the marketing quiet for months. In a normal pre-launch cycle, year-old trailers would be buried under a pile of fresh footage. Here, they are still near the top of the search results, because the shelf above them is empty.
So a channel re-uploading a 2023 trailer is not just chasing traffic. It is quietly demonstrating the size of the vacuum. When the demand for GTA 6 content is this enormous and the supply of new content is this small, old footage becomes weirdly precious. People will click a trailer they have seen fifty times simply because it is the closest thing to new that exists.
Why Upload a Year-Old Trailer
The Reason | How It Works |
|---|---|
Constant search demand | People search the trailers daily, regardless of upload date |
Algorithm favour | A channel posting on a hot topic gets recommended more widely |
Low effort, real return | The footage already exists, so the upload costs almost nothing |
Riding the drought | With no new trailer, the old ones are the only footage there is |
The reasons a channel would re-upload the GTA 6 trailers long after their original release.
Re-uploaded trailers, frame-by-frame breakdowns of footage everyone has memorised, predictions about when the next trailer might drop, and analysis of analysis. All of it exists because the hunger is real and the actual news is scarce, so anything adjacent to the game gets seized on.
We should be fair here and note there is nothing wrong with any of this, exactly. A channel uploading trailers is not hurting anyone, and people genuinely do want to rewatch them. We're simply saying that the appetite for GTA 6 is so great that it completely outruns the studio's willingness to feed it, and everyone who isn't Rockstar is rushing to fill the gap.
If you are searching for GTA 6 trailers, make sure you are watching the real ones. When old footage gets re-uploaded across many channels, it becomes easier for low-quality copies, misleading edits, or outright fake "new trailer" videos to slip into the results alongside the genuine articles. The only trailers that exist are the two Rockstar released, in December 2023 and May 2025.
Anything claiming a third official trailer right now is not real because there isn't one and Rockstar doesn't really need to do anything else at all.
So laugh at the year-late upload, because it is genuinely a little funny, but it also shows why everyone else is avoiding GTA 6 even against the warnings of other developers. This is the current state of the industry: a game so wanted that its oldest footage still pulls a crowd, a studio so quiet that there is nothing newer to post, and an internet so hungry that it will happily watch a two-and-a-half-year-old trailer one more time.