Rockstar is notoriously secretive about its games. Grand Theft Auto 6 has been in the works for a decade now, and except from a confirmation in 2022 that it was in development and a trailer released in December 2023, we know next to nothing about the game other than it will launch in 2025.
Fans have driven themselves into frenzies trying to predict when trailers will drop, clinging to obscure details as if picking apart a Taylor Swift album announcement. They come up with conspiracy theories, hunt the actors down, even figure out what sunscreen characters are using. The fanbase is so rabidly loyal that Rockstar doesn’t need to market the game – the fans do it all themselves.
Does Revealing Details Hurt Game Launches?
Compare this to launches like Starfield’s and Cyberpunk 2077’s. Starfield suffered at launch because it kept doing these long presentations where the developers talked in detail about the game, allowing fans to take those details and run with it. Cyberpunk faced a similar issue – its marketing positioned it as being much more ambitious than it actually ended up being at launch, and it only managed to redeem itself years after release.
Even now, CD Projekt Red is building hype for The Witcher 4 by saying it’ll be “bigger and better”, essentially retreading its mistakes with Cyberpunk 2077. We even saw Geralt’s voice actor, Doug Cockle, walking back his comments saying that Geralt would be in The Witcher 4, saying that he was going off a rumour and that he was “slapped by CD Projekt”. This doesn’t bode well for the studio, since we already know how the hype cycle can backfire on highly anticipated games.
From these examples, it might appear that big games like these benefit from their developers keeping their lips sealed. Fans are, in themselves, a hype machine. They take what they know and blow it up into theories of extravagant proportions, creating unfair expectations of the work. Everybody wants to believe the game they’re looking forward to will be the best thing ever created, the next Skyrim or, well, GTA 5. They want to believe their most anticipated title will change the landscape of gaming forever.
This is almost never the case. Silence means that fans will drive themselves into furors fawning over details, but they won’t have any basis to blame their incorrect speculation on the devs. This seems ideal in an industry growing increasingly hostile to devs and with increasingly massive expectations, especially for games that have been in the works for a long time and essentially have their own mythologies.
But at the same time, we have to remember that Grand Theft Auto 6 was already highly anticipated before it was even confirmed to be in development. It’s part of a wildly popular series, the sequel to an excellent game, and was the series that made Rockstar a household name. GTA 6 never needed marketing, and should be considered something of an outlier. It’s like very few other games, but the closest analogue is the next Elder Scrolls game – it will attract a ton of attention with very little effort.
Maybe more important is the fact that Rockstar’s silence is a symptom of the industry’s overall secrecy when it comes to development. Because games can change so much in the course of development, releasing details can lead to fans, again, getting unrealistic expectations.
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Secrecy Doesn’t Benefit Most Developers
But that secrecy is exactly what feeds this hype cycle and fosters hostility towards developers. The people who buy and play video games simply don’t understand how the things they love so much are made. They don’t understand why decisions are made – for example, why games might be reduced in scope during development – and therefore see it as malicious instead of financially necessary. The developers at CD Projekt Red didn’t release a broken game because they wanted players to be mad at them, there were external factors that caused that. Secrecy can be an effective marketing tactic, but it’s also a contributing factor to the way developers are increasingly being treated.
It’s interesting that early access development is starting to rise to the forefront, especially after the success of Baldur’s Gate 3 last year. As I’ve written before, early access is a way for players to get in on the ground level and see how games change over time, and it helps developers temper expectations while getting feedback from the people they aim to serve. This probably wouldn’t work for Grand Theft Auto 6, because of the hype around it – hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions, of players will jump in expecting a fully formed game, and probably get really mad when it’s not as polished as they want.
But why should the industry at large conform to secrecy instead of talking openly about the development process? Why shouldn’t big studios move towards early access releases in order to create games more collaboratively with their audiences and to make the development process more transparent?
Rockstar benefits from silence, because Grand Theft Auto 6’s mere existence markets itself. That doesn’t mean that the industry has to follow the biggest players. I want to hear more about games as they’re made, but not just the vague hype-building statements that say it’ll be better than anything the studio has ever made before, because they all say that. Silence isn’t always golden.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is an upcoming title in the long-running series from Rockstar Games. Currently scheduled for a 2025 launch, details are few, although it appears to focus on a Bonnie-and-Clyde-like pair of characters.