Take-Two Interactive’s CEO Strauss Zelnick recently confirmed that Grand Theft Auto VI will have a shorter marketing cycle than past Rockstar games. This shift moves away from the long promotional campaigns that usually come before the studio’s big game launches.
By trimming down the marketing period, Take-Two hopes to avoid the kind of online chatter that can develop during long promos.
By cutting the time between announcement and release, they want to reduce the chances for public nitpicking that can set unrealistic expectations and stress the development teams.
Another big reason for this change is to steer clear of announcing multiple delays. Rockstar’s previous games, like Red Dead Redemption 2, dealt with several well-known postponements that annoyed fans and made things tough for the marketing crew. A shorter promo timeline helps keep release dates realistic and cuts down on having to walk back what they promise.
The company is confident about this approach, thanks to the massive popularity of the Grand Theft Auto series. GTA V, which came out in 2013, has sold over 170 million copies and keeps making big bucks with GTA Online. This huge fan base pretty much guarantees the next game will sell well.
“Take-Two could do no marketing and it would still sell like crazy,” one industry observer pointed out, underlining the natural excitement that comes with any Rockstar game. The power of word-of-mouth and immediate social media reaction to any GTA news make costly traditional ads less necessary.
This approach also fits with what other companies are doing lately, as more publishers go for shorter marketing cycles to avoid leaks and keep the excitement alive. Games like Fallout 4 and Apex Legends showed how effective quick promos or surprise releases can be.
