The GTA VI Trailer Reaction: The Definitive Review

Billions from Bedrooms

Last weekend, I was lucky enough to share a car with three industry people as we sped through France and Belgium to watch a motor race at Spa Francorchamps. Delays and pitstops included, it was more than 8 hours of my Gen-X bitterness being sprayed in the faces of three highly reasonable Millennials, and amongst my venomous assaults on Mass Effect, Aliens and AAA videogaming, there was a surprisingly calm and clinical discussion of GTA VI. It’s interesting to note the distinct lack of fervour behind the scenes here. None of us were particularly energised by the second trailer, nor did anyone seem to give a single shit about the array of characters that Rockstar so proudly introduced. It was a flat response, a shrug more than anything else. In my opinion, that’s down to the lack of any real substance in the current PR campaign. It’s tortuously glacial and annoyingly prolonged. Certainly the shock delay to 2026 for release pours water on any burning anticipation and, if certain sources are to be believed, May 2026 is only there to keep it in Take 2’s 2025 financial year - the date isn’t final by any means.

There is a kind of latitude that only Rockstar, and specifically GTA, enjoys. It’s a peculiar kind of trust that’s vanishingly rare in the lower strata of videogame IPs and their wranglers, but it’s hallmarked by a giant granting of the benefit of the doubt. There’s no Phelpsian ‘press X’ on Rockstar’s form, yet the one vitally important question that seemed to go unasked by formal media was “what the fuck is wrong with GTA VI’s gameplay?”. It’s been 12 years without a single indication of how the game will actually play. Much goodwill from the critical body is driven by the simple assumption that Rockstar cannot fuck it up because it is Rockstar.¹ And yet, any other IP that had been under wraps for over a decade and then, after an official reveal, delayed again, would be considered to have some problems at the very least. What’s interesting is that thanks to the 2022 leak, we got a pretty decent idea that VI would be business as usual in GTA terms. The content was obviously limited, but it seemed to show that GTA VI wouldn’t represent a radical departure or significant evolution of the classic GTA template, and it’s perhaps the generally lukewarm reaction to this from the community that prompted the series of stealth delays that were masked by absurdities like a trailer for a trailer (that leaked early anyway). There’s definitely a more subdued vibe following trailer 2, despite its seismic arrival on the socials and the weeklong cluster of depressingly predictable support pieces that rode in its wake. I saw hilarious arguments on TikTok of like-minded commenters asking to see gameplay, only to be told they’d already seen it because Rockstar does cutscenes in-engine. I couldn’t be fucked to wade into these battles between the little boys calling out the emperor’s nakedness and the true believers barraging any negative inference with a shower of ‘trust me bro’ artillery. Not showing mission/free-roam gameplay may be something of a Rockstar standard, but the question still remains - what the fuck are you scared of, you cowards? As for me, I was bored of trailer 2 within the first ten seconds. It went something like this: Oooh, it’s pretty. Oh. Oh dear. Oh fuck. Oh no. These people sound like a bunch of fucking tiresome pricks and I’m going to have to sit through literally hours of their tiresome monologues. Again.

Plus ça change, right? What I find most fascinating, aside Rockstar’s endless obsession with ditchwater-dull crime fiction, is how despite the insane riches and arguably unlimited creative freedom that Rockstar enjoys, it's trapped in a gilded cage of utterly humdrum conservatism. Despite my singular disappointment at GTA V’s colossally underwhelming approach to advancing open-world game design, I hadn’t quite recognised that in actuality, GTA cannot change. It would be like EA trying to rewrite the rules of football for FC 2026, or Call Of Duty doing a Born On The 4th Of July. The games are trapped by being their own archetypes, and as hard as I rolled my eyes at Jason immediately robbing a shop in the trailer, I came to the realisation that this is all GTA can ever be. It made a fateful choice post-San Andreas to regress, and that almost sealed its fate. When GTA IV emerged as considerably less an open-world urban videogame than its regionally-developed neighbour Crackdown,² and yet still netted more 10s and vastly larger sales volumes, I should have seen the writing on the wall that once established, a megabrand simply has to maintain being the megabrand in order to survive, and megabrand audiences will lap that shit up forever. To deviate is to risk far too much, and so when some lowly johnny-come-lately like Saints Row 2 comes along, and through the medium of a piss-taking satire of GTA’s self-assured pomposity outdoes the juggernaut in so many creative metrics, the orthodoxy shouldn’t be forgiven for not realising the difference in play. What this rewarded was the idea that game design can enter stasis as long as a story unfolds that can convince enough critics that it represents the same value as improving or expanding the interactive design. Because the critical base essentially nodded along, it set a precedent that Rockstar duly followed as a simple path of least resistance to unimaginable riches. GTA V’s round of comfortable 10s depressed me no end, but that’s the power of the megabrand for a critical body that stopped caring about progression for the form and instead valued high-gloss assets, cobbled together pastiches of narrative and expensive voiceovers. Saint’s Row 2’s unapologetic parody exposed the weakness of relying on character and narrative over systome and customisation complexity in an open-world context and yet, was largely ignored until it doubled down on the stupid for entries 3 and 4. All of Niko Bellic’s grit and internal maelstrom means very little when you can jump from enforced pathos-leaden cutscenes and familial obligations into toytown slapstick cartoon with no recognition from either side that they co-exist. Saint’s Row 2 simply made it honest and went all-out on the spangles and was all the better for it. It’s a cohesive world where the characters and narrative understand they are a fucking cartoon and that cohesion, in conceptual terms at the very least, is what we should be rewarding. The real meat of the GTA gameplay experience doesn’t lie in sub-par crime fiction cribbed from TV and movies through the filter of writers who seem to think they’re far cooler than they actually are. It lies in the cartoon slapstick. A GTA without it simply wouldn’t be GTA.

Of course, we see very little of the absurdist cartoon reality of GTA in any of its formal publicity media. In a sense, it’s Rockstar’s dirty little secret. You can argue that vapid ‘Johnny Knoxville crossed with Jack Nicholson’ hybrid Trevor is an explicit coding of the true GTA spirit, but not as a fun hero, instead as a despicable sociopath. Evidence enough for me that as an entity with a giant fucking ego, Rockstar is ashamed of what GTA really is and as such seeks to condemn it within its own world fiction. It has loftier ideas of what it thinks it is; it's an industry-leading drama, dear boy. Don’t you know it’s a vital, urgent commentary on America itself? It’s something of a shame, then, that the layers of adolescent-bating satire it attempts to slather upon its cartoon world ring with an unavoidable hollowness when its game has made billions from microtransactions, and yet gave up on releasing single-player story DLC it had previously promised because it could make even more money from GTA Online. And therein lies the real, true rub of it all. The fucking money.

If as a global society, the human race is coming to recognise that we live in an increasingly feudal state under Billionaire control, it’s uncomfortable to think of media titans like Star Wars and GTA as cultural Billionaires with their own crushingly powerful spheres of influence and profound cultural consequences for us all.³ GTA’s delay has seen even the most dominant platform holders scrabble to readjust to the whims of the king, but the machinations of corporate whales vying for maximal market shares are the least of our worries. Pity the poor media outlets, which may have staked a fair bit on a Q3/4 rush of traffic from GTA VI content. More significant to me are notions that GTA VI’s music licensing budget alone would allow a coterie of the brightest and best Indie developers to make fabulous passion projects for years on end. For a game like GTA VI, which has the unique position of requiring zero publicity, the idea of it having any marketing budget at all should be obscene. In a post-Lemonade shadow-drop world, GTA VI would make a billion if released this very second without a single advert, yet it will probably enjoy a marketing budget in the hundreds of millions. A budget it absolutely does not need.⁴ I don’t need to tell you what hundreds of millions means to the deluge of new indies that should supposedly emerge from the redundancies born of videogame staffing contractions over the last two years, but consider what it means to fucking Gaza. Or your local hospital. Or mental health charities. And of course, the grim reality of the mega-rich is that the not-so-rich can eek out a slim profit from the mega-rich presence. Where morally we should be condemning financial greed as the greatest of all sins in the modern era, and Rockstar as an absolute exemplar of that greed, we instead saw GTA lauded and applauded with all manner of trailer analyses and anticipatory think-pieces, because it makes money for those that write them. Enough in fact to probably qualify as a specific microeconomy of its very own. Such is the servitude of the formal videogames media to the giants that fund it (both directly and indirectly), although post-Polygon and Giant Bomb, we can argue that this relationship isn’t just under threat, it perhaps needs to fucking die for quality videogames media to survive.⁵ I’m not sure why we don’t paint Rockstar with the same ruthless villainy we would ye olde Activision or current-form EA, but we should perhaps look even further and mark it with the disdain we should pile on Bezos’s orbital tourism or US healthcare insurers. The Billionaire Game is morally offensive like the Billionaire Platform Holder, in the sense that beyond a particular threshold, profit should become obscene, and some games and platform holders are more obscene than others in that regard. Instead, wild profiteering is celebrated to the point where things that are demonstrably shitter than previous iterations are considered better because of how much money they made. And in GTA’s sense, that threshold was breached many years ago. There are platform holders that did much the same, far earlier. And yet for all our decrying of new, unashamedly profiteering pricing tiers for that which we hold most dear, we still fucking pre-ordered the shiny new thing in our millions. What more should we expect of a world that raised a narcissistic bullying robber-baron like Steve Jobs to techno-sainthood? The Theils and the Musks merely follow in those footsteps, perhaps originally laid down in the modern information age by Bill Gates, so it’s a fitting circle that a Billionaire megabrand like Activision-Blizzard became just another part of Microsoft in the end. For Rockstar, for GTA, perhaps unashamed greed and under-criticised success has bought its own eternal independence, but it is absolutely in the same sphere as the ruthless platform holders, and we should absolutely see them all in the same light that we do the techno-oligarchs of the new American nightmare. If we despise the hyper-rich for their wealth vacuuming and undeserved political power, why shouldn’t we at least be wary of media properties that display the same traits in our beloved culture? I mean come on - estimates for GTA V run into the double-digit billions for revenue, and with it all pretty much leaving the industry in the end (or merely becoming vast battle chests for corporate warfare), so it’s hard to see that kind of wealth accumulation as anything other than obscene, of widening the gap, or to view it as exploitation by the mega-rich in some form or other. And even if you can somehow forgive all that, surely the thrall that GTA has over the media and playerbase is something to be concerned about, for it definitely borders on the unhealthily obsessional to a true outsider. For me, I’m guiltily, shamefully hoping for another leak, if only to skewer the pomposity, to hurt the seemingly invulnerable. If that happens, remember this: it was through their negligence that it happened, and they’ve got fucking billions to make sure it doesn’t. Billions that they, the Billionaires, took from us, the consumers they exploited.⁶ And after all these years, ask yourself this: what do you really have in return?

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1. That is, of course, unless you consider GTA V to be an insultingly drab PlayStation 2 game that forced to you play as one of three pitifully dull assholes, but the new graphics are pretty and it has a mercilessly monetised MMO tacked on the side (that didn’t fucking work for two months) so it's a [10].

2. I have a conspiracy theory that Realtime and Rockstar staff socialised together and that upon seeing/hearing what OG GTA originator David Jones was doing with the open-world city, Rockstar freaked out and took the narrative-lead path. I also wholeheartedly believe that Rockstar deliberately sabotaged APB because it is a billionaire supervillain in a world without a James Bond.

3. A sidepoint that I really should elaborate on for thousands of words is the relationship GTA has with the moral baseline for the videogame industry. If the the most successful single product is so morally ambivalent, derelict even, then what does it say for moral representation as a whole across the industry? In this sense, the moral ambivalence of GTA entirely matches its Billionaire-class persona as not needing to care about what’s right or wrong.

4. GTA V’s marketing budget for launch was estimated to be $120m. Given that a high-end Indie title taking two years for a team of five may reach $500k to develop and publish, that’s a whole lotta games.

5. Thank fuck I've not bothered to monetise so I can adopt an infuriatingly lofty moral position on this.

6. Again, there is a whole lotta words that could be written about Rockstar’s deliberate and dishonest exploitation of teenagers that had particular resonance in the UK. That is a very different story that swings between teenage murders and showboating unnecessary BBFC ‘18’ certifications, while at the same time booking six-figure ad campaigns in magazines with under-13s readerships, and how banned criticism of such shameless hypocrisy may or may not have lead to shock resignations. And still nobody really gave a shit as long as they could have their dose of GT fucking A.