For all the Grand Theft Auto VI billboards, artist teases and streaming deals, Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick has a blunt reminder about what all that marketing can and cannot do. Specifically, according to one of Grand Theft Auto's biggest fans, marketing can sell a great game to more people, but you can't rely on it to save a bad one and, by his account, this is the whole reason why the way Rockstar Games is marketing GTA 6 works at all.
Take-Two's mission, he says, is to "make the best entertainment on earth." Everything else follows from that. A campaign can amplify a game people love. It cannot manufacture love that is not there because, as much as you can spend, a game that isn't fun stays a game that, well, isn't fun at all.
His phrase for it, in the interview, is that "you can't game the system," basically saying that word of mouth only spreads if the thing is worth talking about. You can market a terrible game to death, Zelnick argues, and people will still not pay it any mind because there is nothing real for the campaign to catch on.
Reviews, players and word of mouth will eventually tell the truth, whatever the ad budget says, especially in this day and age.
What Zelnick says marketing can and cannot do
Marketing can | Marketing cannot |
|---|---|
Turn awareness into real enthusiasm | Make a bad game good |
Show players how a game actually plays | Convince anyone a flop is a hit |
Amplify genuine word of mouth | Fake that word of mouth for long |
Spread hype creators actually believe | Pay a creator to lie without costing them their audience |
Sell a great game to far more people | Rescue a product that simply is not fun |
Zelnick's view of what a campaign can and cannot pull off even for a game like GTA 6.
It's the kind of limit that extends to creators too, which matters given how much of GTA 6's push runs through streamers and influencers. Paying a creator to praise a weak game does not work, Zelnick says, because the moment they push something their audience can see is bad, they start losing that audience. Their credibility is the entire value of the endorsement. Burn it on a bad product and the endorsement is worthless.
Authentic enthusiasm is the only kind that sells and this is Zelnick's way of saying that the honest reactions to the Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look counted for more than any paid post could.
Rockstar has the strongest track record in the business. Grand Theft Auto V has sold past 200 million copies over more than a decade. Early hands-on impressions have already called the sequel one of the most impressive games ever seen and pre-orders are already breaking records. Take-Two is not marketing GTA 6 this hard because it is nervous about the game. It is spending big because it believes the game can carry the spend.
It also ties the other two halves of Zelnick's argument from the same interview together. Marketing has to build enthusiasm rather than assume it and part of that is showing people how the game plays. Neither works unless the game delivers once the money is spent and, believe us, people have spent money on it.
So the safest bet about the biggest launch of the decade is that the marketing only gets to work because Rockstar built something worth marketing.