GTA 6 will have a halo effect for the entire industry | Opinion

What the report says

When the hype engine for GTA 6 roared into top gear this week, there was a quietly touching aspect amid the excitement that will stay with me for a while. As the 27 minute long extended look at the game racked up millions of views on YouTube, a theme emerged in the comments. Many of the most upvoted messages were brief tributes to friends and loved ones who adored GTA but had passed away before the game’s release – a surprisingly poignant response to the tongue-in-cheek ultraviolence of the video itself.Those comments speak volumes about what GTA actually is – about the immense mindspace it occupies for entire generations.

No other game has ever held that kind of dominant position on the cultural landscape, but it’s arguably been decades since any kind of media franchise held this level of public attention. One of the most extraordinary things about GTA is not just that it has this level of fame and influence, but that it does so in the fragmented media landscape of the 2020s, when even the world’s most successful movies, music, or TV rarely if ever attain the kind of mass-market reach that hits and stars of the 80s and 90s could command.I’ll admit to feeling a little trepidation about GTA 6.

The previous game was so incredibly successful, such a landmark for the industry, and without Rockstar saying very much at all, the hype for its follow-up felt unstoppable even years out from launch. If GTA 6 were to disappoint or underperform its sky-high expectations in any significant way, it would be a hammer blow for the entire industry, sending investors running for the hills.The halo effect from the biggest media launch of the decade being a videogame will be very significantThe optimistic flipside of that, however, is that if GTA 6 succeeds – and the rapturous response to this week’s extended trailer is a very good sign indeed – it will be a rising tide that lifts many other boats around it.

Key details

It may not feel that way to other publishers who have scrambled to move their launches away from November to avoid sales cannibalism, but in the long term, the halo effect from the biggest media launch of the decade being a videogame will be very significant.The stone hasn’t even hit the water yet and you can already see the ripples starting to spread. GTA 6’s extended trailer launched in a highly unusual way, premiering on Netflix several hours before it was made available through public platforms like YouTube. The business details of the deal aren’t known, but it’s reasonable to assume that Netflix paid for those hours of exclusivity during which time the 27 minutes of footage were locked away behind a subscription paywall.

The implication is that Netflix thought that footage was so desirable, so anticipated, that people would subscribe simply to see it a few hours earlier than the rest of the world.There are some partial parallels to this situation in other media – I’m thinking here, for example, of movies that are promoted in part by having exclusive trailers for bigger upcoming movies playing before them – but I can think of nothing in recent decades that matches what Netflix and Rockstar did here. It was only a few hours of exclusivity – both parties probably reasoned that you can only play whack-a-mole with YouTube uploads for so long – but the very clear implication is that Netflix, itself the owner of some of the biggest media franchises of recent years, sees GTA 6 as a media event it very, very much wants to be a part of, even in as small a way as this.Though GTA 6 may ride roughshod over other titles this year to some extent, a company like Netflix being so keen to reach out and touch its hem as it passes by is a great sign for what the game’s impact will do to the broader industry.

Netflix has a somewhat patchy history with videogames – it was very keen on making them into a major part of its media offering for quite a while, but of late seems to have scaled back and refocused its ambitions in the area significantly.