Rockstar Games is in full marketing mode right now and it dares not to leave a single set of eyeballs unspent, including Grand Theft Auto Online players. Over the past few days, players have spotted a new Grand Theft Auto VI pre-order tile sitting right in GTA Online's menu, quietly turning Rockstar's decade-old live service into an ad for its own sequel.
The tile points straight to pre-orders and the November 19 release date. It's not a dramatic move on its own, but it's part of an orchestrated strategy that fans have waited for years to finally turn up a notch. It also makes sense when you think of how GTA Online still pulls in millions of active players years after Grand Theft Auto V launched in 2013. Its menu is the single most efficient place on the planet to advertise the next Grand Theft Auto because Rockstar is doing it for free and to people who are most likely to buy it, and pre-orders are already breaking records without it.
GTA 6's Marketing Ramp So Far
Beat | When |
|---|---|
Pre-orders open, Sony's PS5 system takeover | Late June |
Official cover art, screenshots, Ultimate Edition details | Summer |
The Extended Look on Netflix | August 27 |
Pre-order tile added to GTA Online's menu | Late August to early September |
The escalation from pre-orders to the in-game tile, over roughly ten weeks.
Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has said all along that this was coming. It's just that, well, it's hard to believe his words when it's basically his job to talk GTA hype, and he's mighty good at it, too.
With that said, Rockstar's concerted GTA 6 marketing effort hasn't fully peaked yet. We're so far in the appetiser stage with Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look and everything else Rockstar's been doing. Despite this, it's already topping Netflix's charts and setting new precedents for other publishers to follow. Can you imagine when Miami-Dade approves its plans to turn Miami into a real-life version of Vice City?
Going back to GTA Online, there's a tiny bit of irony in this. The game will launch as a single-player title with no new online component on day one, while GTA Online keeps running and earning right alongside it. So Rockstar is pitching a game with no multiplayer to its multiplayer crowd, betting, correctly, that the people still logging into Los Santos every night are exactly the ones who will buy Vice City the second they can.
Perhaps Rockstar know something we don't, especially since it's also advertising the launch of NoPixel V next week. Maybe it just wants to remind GTA Online fans that the game is not going the way of Red Dead Online anytime soon.