The GTA 6 marketing panic doesn't line up with the GTA 5 timelineEN

the marketing is dead on schedule if you actually line it up. the gta 5 boxart landed april 2013, five months before the september release. the michael, franklin and trevor character trailers came about a month after that, roughly four months out. run the same clock and trailer 3 lands late july or first week of august, and thats when the proper push starts with the murals and big billboards. the only thing that would actually worry me is reaching the august earnings call with still nothing said.

look at the run up: 4 got its third trailer 145 days out, 5 got its at 140, and rdr2 was a massive 177 days before launch. were sitting at 126 days right now, so going by that pattern the third one is already overdue.

the rdr2 gameplay trailer only showed up like two months before release. sure theyll do more before then, but four months is honestly loads of runway to work with.

the gta 5 billboards didnt even go up til a month out. august 6th 2013. everyone keeps saying a year, it was weeks.

half of you forget the world was a completely different place 13 years ago. barely anyone doomscrolled, ads lived on tv and billboards, and catching a gta poster stuck on a random wall actually meant something because you werent already swimming in it 24/7. back then id have to wait til i got home to read one article on a capped connection. all that friction made it feel like an event. now the hype burns out in a week, so holding the campaign til youre near launch just makes sense.

this is basically what zelnick meant when he said the campaign would fit where attention actually is now. i dont reckon he only meant tiktok and insta as ad channels, he meant the timing of it too. wouldnt shock me if the whole run for six ends up half as long as 5 was, just one big blitz right before it drops.

theres genuinely no point running a real campaign right now with the game four months away. all you do is burn people out early, especially these days when everyone gets sick of anything within a week.

287 million views on the first trailer, 175 on the second. at what point does rockstar even need to pay for a campaign lol

the whole gta 5 comparison falls apart the second you remember the billboards there went up about two months out, not a year. its not the gotcha people think it is.

zelnick literally said its gonna be a short one, a couple months max, kicking off around september. and the campaign is already running for free anyway, its just youtubers and articles and reddit doing it for them.

the slow drip is exactly why the hype feels unbearable, which is sort of the point. i dont want a gta ad shoved in my face every single break for six months. give me two weeks of it before launch, all different, each one showing something we havent seen.

my worry honestly isnt the marketing, its that we still havent seen a second of real gameplay and the crunch sounds rough. im bracing for a decent chunk of stuff getting cut just to hit the date. not 'how dare they cut content', every game does that, just more than they normally would.

went back to gta 5 lately and it feels kinda flat now, rdr2 was on a whole other level. bit wild that were pre ordering something none of us have seen running though

it feels kinda flat now

did you actually play it back when it dropped though? if not then obviously it feels flat now, you have to judge it against 2013 and everything that came after. thing still pulls massive player numbers a decade on, barely any game gets a second life like that.

'gta 6 marketing is a catastrophe' is just engagement bait and people keep biting. they literally havent started and the whole internet cant shut up about it. thats free advertising forever