Despite being the most anticipated videogame in history which is also destined to outsell everything else, both developer Rockstar and publisher Take-Two are coming up with fresh new ideas to market their open world behemoth, such as the recent Neflix extended showcase of the game. And according to Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick, even if a franchise is exceedingly well-known and popular, doesn’t mean it’ll be an auto-sell when it actually comes out, citing 2023’s The Barbie Movie as a fitting example of this phenomena (as told to GamesBeat in a recent interview):
“All of us saw the Barbie movie, and they marketed the living daylights out of that picture. Even though the IP is very well known. Secondly, it was out there for a while. We all got the joke of what it was going to be. They did a phenomenal marketing campaign. It was really everywhere, and, by the way, it worked.”
He added: “You always have to go out and create enthusiasm. So, awareness is one thing; enthusiasm is another thing. And we have to show people what they’re going to get.”
Zelnick also talked about how his time as a movie executive years ago had taught him about achieving a certain balance when it comes to marketing a product: “you can market the living sh** out of it, and people will still not notice the marketing.” Also if the marketing turns out to be terrible, “you can turn people off.”
“And the whole goal that we always have, whether it’s this upcoming launch or any other title, is to take awareness and turn it into excitement, and take the lack of awareness and turn it into awareness,” he said.
In the interview, Zelnick also weighed in on the overall impact of the recent Netflix Showcase of GTA 6:
“What Rockstar did was incredible, but there was an element of tutorial baked in there, right? It just was a different kind of proposition,” he said. “If you look at Rockstar’s marketing previously for Grand Theft Auto titles, there are actual tutorials. This was just a different way of giving the same information, which I thought was really impressive. Rockstar figured out how to do that to entertain us for 27 minutes while also explaining to us how you’re going to play the game.”
GTA 6 is currently slated to launch for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S on November 19, 2026.
