Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto VI cover art reveal on YouTube, a roughly 33-second video posted around June 18, pulled about 10 million YouTube views in three days. For comparison, the God of War: Laufey gameplay reveal from the early June State of Play sat around 7.9 million views on PlayStation's official channel after two full weeks.
If this and the earlier comparison we made don't drive home our point about Grand Theft Auto becoming larger than gaming, we don't know what will.
The franchise simply operates on a different scale of attention than anything else in gaming at the moment, if not ever. People will watch GTA 6 cover art with the same intensity that they watch other games' full gameplay demos. That's not normal behavior. Then again, when it comes to GTA 6, people tend to do absurd things, like, you know, wait outside Rockstar North just to count cigarette butts and risk a dalliance with local law enforcement.
A single 33-second cover art video outdrawing specific AAA video game trailers, in a fraction of the time, is impressive enough without inflating it. It's not often that a box cover gets over ten million views over a weekend, after all.
Mind you, people aren't watching the cover art because it's compelling. They are watching because they have waited 13 years and will click anything with the GTA 6 label on it.
What this means for the actual Trailer 3, whenever it arrives, is that if a cover art video pulls 10 million views in three days, a genuine gameplay trailer, the first real look at GTA 6 in motion, will obliterate records in, well, record time. Trailer 2 did roughly 475 million multi-platform views in 24 hours, and Trailer 1 was meant to do more, if not for the earlier leak. Trailer 3, with 13 months of additional anticipation and pre-orders attached, could go higher, potentially beating out Spider-Man: A Brand New Day.
The franchise's cultural pull is simply unmatched right now, and Rockstar has not even shown gameplay yet.
When Rockstar does do it, Take-Two Interactive can sit back, relax, and watch as the projected numbers for its stock price start looking quaint.
