Take-Two Interactive chairman and CEO Strauss Zelnick recently sat down with Bloomberg to talk all things video games. The conversation is pretty stuffy if you don’t have much interest in the business side of things, but Zelnick did provide some insight into how subsidiary Rockstar Games is handling Grand Theft Auto 6 marketing, specifically pointing out that the developer might not put out a second trailer for the highly anticipated game until we get closer to its tentative fall 2025 release window.
“We do have competitors who will describe their release schedule for years in advance,” Zelnick told Bloomberg anchor David Westin as the two spoke in an office full of pseudo-shrines to the company’s past successes. “We found that the better thing to do is to provide marketing materials relatively close to the release window in order to create that excitement on the one hand and balance the excitement with unmet anticipation. We don’t always get it exactly right, but that’s what we are trying to do.”
Going by Rockstar’s previous games, this is a strategy the studio has employed before. The initial Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer was released on November 2, 2011, but didn’t get a second until more than a year later on April 30, 2013. Similarly, Red Dead Redemption 2’s first trailer debuted on October 16, 2016, but it took until September 28, 2017 to get a second. Both games’ marketing campaigns picked up as they got closer to launch, but even then, Rockstar has never been about inundating the industry with commercial after commercial leading up to a major game like some studios.
While the hunger this creates in fans can sometimes be overwhelming, it also has the benefit of creating a different kind of marketing for which Rockstar doesn’t have to foot the bill. Back in November 2024, Polygon reported on a fan theory that the stage of the moon in a Grand Theft Auto Online screenshot was a clue towards when the next Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer would drop. Did this end up being true? Absolutely not — but it was a fun way to cover something silly people were doing online as they awaited one of the most anticipated games on the horizon.
“The anticipation for [Grand Theft Auto 6] may be the greatest I’ve ever seen for an entertainment property,” Zelnick said when Bloomberg asked about the game’s secretive release date, “and I’ve been around the block a few times and I’ve been in every entertainment business there is. We want to maintain the anticipation and the excitement.”
