Part of Grand Theft Auto VI's marketing is not really marketing. According to Take-Two Interactive CEO Strauss Zelnick, some of it is a tutorial, quietly teaching you how the game plays before you ever pay for it. He says that this is exactly why the first, second, and latest trailers look exactly the way that they do.
The logic comes down to a difference between movies and games. You enjoy a film by sitting and watching it. You enjoy a game by playing it, which means the marketing has a harder job of making you want to pay for a game that you will actually want to sit through for possibly hundreds of hours. Before people spend money on something interactive, Zelnick argues that they need to know how it works first.
In the interview, Zelnick praised what Rockstar Games pulled off with the 27-minute Netflix special. He then pointed out something a lot of people missed, saying that "there was an element of tutorial baked in there." It entertained for nearly half an hour while also showing, plainly, how a modern Grand Theft Auto set in Vice City, Leonida, plays.
Developers normally design the trailers to tease gamers. This one taught them how to play as Lucia and Jason, which makes sense based on the amount of free-roam activities, systems in play and other awesome stuff we got to see on screen.
Why GTA 6 Marketing Has to Teach
— | A movie | A game like GTA 6 |
|---|---|---|
How you enjoy it | Sit back and watch | You have to play it |
What marketing must do | Show you it exists | Show you how it plays |
The result | A trailer | A trailer with a tutorial inside |
According to Zelnick, interactive entertainment like video games, sells differently from a film.
A 27-minute "trailer" sounds indulgent until you realize it was doing double duty, entertaining and instructing at once. The length that seemed unusual makes sense as a teaching tool. You do not need half an hour to make someone aware of GTA 6. You do need it to show them how the systems work.
All of this connects to the case Zelnick made for marketing the game aggressively in the first place. If awareness is not enough for a game like GTA and you have to build enthusiasm, part of building that enthusiasm is proving the game is as fun to play as it is to watch. For an interactive product, showing the gameplay is the pitch.
So expect the trailers and demos between now and launch to keep doing this, entertaining while they teach and leaving us, the audiences, as the true winners.
Zelnick, as it turns out, definitely wasn't joking when he called the record-setting GTA 6 trailer on Netflix as merely the appetiser.