GTA 6 has become too big for Rockstar's own good, and everyone else's

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This week, publisher Take-Two Interactive did something totally normal for a publicly listed company to do: It held an earning call for investors. But because Take-Two owns Rockstar Games, which will release Grand Theft Auto 6 later this year, and because there hasn’t been any new information on that game in over a year, this earnings call became a major news event.

Normal people — not just journalists like me — made time in their diaries to tune in. At Polygon, we even ran a “how to watch” guide for an earnings call, a first in my experience. The call was preceded by weeks of speculation about what might be announced: Maybe a delay! Maybe a new trailer! Maybe pre-orders!

This is, objectively, nuts. Nobody in the games business, least of all Rockstar, has ever timed major PR beats to an earnings call, of all things. These are venues for CEOs to talk numbers with investors, to brag about sales success, and sometimes to break bad news. They are not consumer-facing launchpads for exciting new info about the biggest entertainment release of all time.

So what did we get? We got Strauss Zelnick, who is fine as game company CEOs go, but is just a business guy, and who does not work for Rockstar. (Rockstar works for him.) Zelnick told us that GTA 6‘s release date remains its release date. He told us that another trailer is coming at some point. And he told us that he expects GTA 6 to make a lot of money. (Take-Two is forecasting $8 billion in revenue this fiscal year.) Which, well… duh!

Jason and Lucia pulls guns from the trunk of a car in a screenshot from Grand Theft Auto 6

So were journos and GTA fans wrong to care about this earnings call? No, actually. These don’t sound much like stories, but they are stories, because the information vacuum around GTA 6 is so total, the anticipation for the game is so high, and the stakes are so consequential — not just for Rockstar and for GTA players but for the entire video game world.

Nobody wants to compete directly with GTA 6, but everybody wants it to succeed. The entire industry and community is looking to it as a much-needed shot in the arm: platform holders who want to sell consoles; publishers and developers who make games for those consoles; beleaguered media businesses that need traffic; players who want one game this generation, just one game, that makes it feel like the future has arrived… everybody.

It’s a lot for one game to bear, even the biggest game in the world, 14 years in the making. I don’t often feel sorry for Rockstar, but I do spare a thought for the devs there who are just trying to make a cool video game while the rest of the world loses its mind about what some suit has to say to a bunch of other suits about it.

To an extent, Rockstar creates this situation by starving us of information with its extremely quiet PR strategy. But I can’t really fault the studio for that, because it creates scarcity and excitement and a sense of event, and preserves the thrill of discovery for players. I’m sure every other developer would do the same if they knew they were going to sell hundreds of millions of copies of their game regardless.

So it’s nobody’s fault, and I guess there’s no harm in it. It’s just video gaming news. But I do worry that the wait has been so long, and the expectations are so high, and everyone’s level of investment in this game is so intense, that even Rockstar — which has a near-flawless track record of delivering the goods — can’t live up to it. And I really don’t want to see what things look like if it doesn’t.