Unless Rockstar and Take-Two decide to ambush me in the middle of writing this very article—Grand Theft Auto 6, maybe one of the most-anticipated games of the decade, doesn't have a release date yet. We know it's meant to drop in 2025, sometime in fall, but that's about it. It's been over a year since the first trailer and nada, zip, nothin'.
Publisher Take-Two's CEO, Strauss Zelnick, says that's partially due to one thing—you gotta keep 'em thirsty. I'm very much paraphrasing, there, Zelnick is a professional and doesn't talk like that, but it's the spirit of what he said in a video interview with Bloomberg.
The interview is very dry and business-heavy—mostly angled towards people who've never thought about videogame development before—but towards the end, the interviewer asks Zelnick why GTA 6's exact release date is such a closely guarded secret.
"The anticipation for that title might be the greatest anticipation I've ever seen for an entertainment property," Zelnick says, with a confidence that's not entirely unearned—most publishers are scrambling to get out of the way of GTA 6 like it's a tidal wave. But it's not just flexibility that keeps the game's debut mystified… it's showmanship. "We want to maintain the anticipation and the excitement."
He says that Take-Two has "competitors who will describe their release schedule for years in advance," however, "We found the better thing to do is to provide marketing materials relatively close to the release window in order to create that excitement—and balance the excitement with unmet anticipation."
"Unmet anticipation" may be light language for what is a ravenous thirst for more GTA 6 news—when the trailer first debuted, fans started scribbling over still frames of freckles just to have a nugget of applicable knowledge about its story.
Zelnick's being cheeky, here, but he's also speaking with the knowledge of a man who knows he could set a horde of theorycrafting YouTubers into a flurry of free advertisement at the wave of a hand. Still, he makes a stab at being humble: "We don't always get it exactly right, but that's what we are trying to do."
