Rockstar have kept fans waiting for Grand Theft Auto 6 for a really long time. Even if we only take 2022 as the official start for the game’s development, fans were set up for disappointment when Take-Two formally delayed the release from 2025 to May 2026.
Why Fans Should Expect Disappointment For Marketing
It’s now industry practice to delay a video game’s marketing down to the last two weeks before the game actually releases. This has been annoying and frustrating rabid gamers, who were used to companies running hype trains for months and even years.
But this has happened for a reason. Apparently, there was some research out there that showed 90 % of a game’s sales only come from marketing from that time period.
How did things turn out this way? It looks like this is a consequence of the modern day attention economy. In a world where we see a new distraction every hour, even every minute, we easily forget games that were marketed months ago.
So we may be getting trailers and still pictures. But Rockstar is deliberately holding back most of their marketing until that time when they can tell everyone that Grand Theft Auto 6 is releasing soon.
The Fans Take The Hype Cycle Into Their Own Hands
As a result, redditor Denso95 has sprung into action. As reported by The Gamer, Denso95 started a weekly tradition called Frame Friday on the /GTA6 subreddit.
It’s easy to check Denso95’s reddit activity and confirm that they really have been posting a frame of the game once a week for weeks now. Now, if we count the days back, Denso95 started Frame Friday around the first week of June 2024.
That’s actually a few months after Grand Theft Auto 6’s 1st trailer on December 5, 2023. And that trailer got leaked a little bit earlier. So Denso95 didn’t jump to make Frame Friday as soon as the trailer came out.
Who’s Crazy Enough To Post Marketing For Their Video Game Once A Week?
Why yes, there was in fact a game company and game developer crazy enough to post about their game to market it once a week for weeks, for almost a full year.
Masahiro Sakurai, using Nintendo’s social media platform Miiverse, posted a screenshot from Super Smash Bros. For Wii U and 3DS from October 2014 to August 2015.
Incredibly enough, Sakurai, Nintendo, and Bandai Namco really did take the effort to include a spoiler for the game in each one of those screenshots. If that sounds like it happened a lifetime ago, that’s because it did.
That was a truly unique situation that no game company, including Nintendo themselves, are likely to try again. But it’s really interesting that gamers still remember that a hype cycle like that happened, and the emotions that evoked.
So kudos to Denso95 for trying to keep the notion of a hype train alive. And it’ll be interesting to see how much of the speculation will turn out to be on the money.
