Why the Industry’s Panic Over GTA 6 Is Overblown (And Nintendo Knows It)

The video game industry has treated Grand Theft Auto VI's launch month as the modern equivalent of the plague. Publishers have delayed and reshuffled release dates to steer clear, cramming into September and October instead, and some have even turned it into a form of marketing. It's come to a point that executives have described the game in the language of natural disasters, including but not limited to a meteor, a black hole, and an iceberg. Then Nintendo told everyone, "hold my beer" and dropped The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time's Switch 2 remake right into the blast radius, on November 5, two weeks before GTA 6.

We called it the only studio brave enough to do it, but historically, it's just very good at paying attention.

To be fair, the fear is not irrational. GTA 6 is projected to be the biggest entertainment launch ever attempted, with pre-orders already breaking records and a marketing machine running at full tilt. Player attention and wallets aren't unlimited, especially in this economy, modern AAA games cost hundreds of millions to make and nobody wants their pricey new release buried by Grand Theft Auto. So publishers did the cautious thing and scattered.

The trouble is that they all scattered toward the same direction, which may end up damaging more of them than a calm November slot ever would have. The stampede away from one crowded date created three crowded months.

The assumption underneath all of it is that launching near a Rockstar game is commercial suicide. The last two times the industry ran that experiment, it was not.

Take September 2013, when Grand Theft Auto V arrived. The game took more than half of all U.S. software dollars that month and helped push industry software up roughly 52% year over year. Yet the titles sharing the month with it did quite well for themselves. Diablo III's console ports charted near the top and helped drive the game past 14 million lifetime sales. FIFA 14 and the other sports games held strong while Total War: Rome II moved hundreds of thousands of copies within weeks. Sure, not everything thrived, since Rayman Legends reportedly missed Ubisoft's internal targets, but the market as a whole grew rather than shrank. GTA V was the rising tide that lifted all the boats around it.

October 2018 was more of the same. Red Dead Redemption 2 launched into a month that set U.S. spending records, around $1.55 billion, with software sales more than doubling year over year, and it was not even the best-selling game of that month. Instead, that honor went to Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, the multiplayer-focused shooter that arrived two weeks earlier and still took the NPD top spot for the month. Assassin's Creed Odyssey sold an estimated 1.4 million copies in its first week and finished third. Finally, Forza Horizon 4 and Super Mario Party both charted well.

A Rockstar tentpole and a Call of Duty shared a record-breaking month, and neither one collapsed.

Proximity to Rockstar did not decide who won. Quality, platform, genre, and marketing did.

This is why Nintendo's move is less daring and more calculated. It has run this play already. Super Mario Party launched in the same October 2018 window as RDR2 and still cracked the U.S. top five. Besides, Nintendo has never really obeyed the "avoid Rockstar month" rule because its games rarely fight for the same player in the first place.

The Ocarina remake is no different. It is a Switch 2 exclusive, an all-ages nostalgia trip and a 40th-anniversary remake of one of the most beloved games ever made. Nintendo is simply throwing a birthday party and saw no reason to move it because someone else booked the same month.

Sure, GTA 6 will dominate November. It will top the charts, own the conversation, and probably break every launch record there is. None of that requires the rest of the industry to evacuate the entire month. History shows other AAA titles can stand a few feet from a Rockstar juggernaut and walk away fine, sometimes better than the ones that ran.