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The rumors that Grand Theft Auto 6 and Half-Life 3 were going to be at The Game Awards were obviously bogus (for reasons I’ll elaborate on below), but I admit that the serious ‘I heard this from industry sources’ tone of the social media posts briefly had me doubting my certainty.
Of course, neither game was at the event. As far as we know, Half-Life 3 doesn’t exist, and even if it did, Valve is far more likely to announce it by putting up a blog post on a Friday afternoon. Rockstar is even more allergic to mainstream hype-building outlets like The Game Awards, so the thought of it bringing a trailer to Geoff Keighley’s show is just comical.
Case in point: YouTube had been around for a couple years by the time Rockstar revealed GTA 4 in 2007, and after so many awful years of RealPlayer, there was now a relatively reliable way to stream videos to millions of viewers on the internet. And yet Rockstar chose to host the first GTA 4 trailer on its own custom-built website, which of course immediately went catatonic when it was flooded with traffic.
If Rockstar was reluctant even to let YouTube share in its glory, you can bet that it isn’t going to hand the most anticipated trailer of the year over to Keighley. In fact, the first GTA 6 trailer seemed to taunt the awards: Rockstar posted it on December 4, three days before the 2023 Game Awards, which made it very clear that it could have used the awards as a platform, but chose not to.
So it’s not weird that GTA 6 wasn’t at The Game Awards, but it is slightly weird that there’s been no GTA 6 trailer at all this year. One new trailer per year is the typical cadence, and GTA 6 is supposed to release on consoles in the latter half of 2025, so the marketing machine ought to really be spinning up about now.
It’s possible that Rockstar had planned to post a trailer this year—maybe right before The Game Awards, like last time—but delayed it for some behind-the-scenes reason. It feels likely to me that we’ll see GTA 6 again in January or February.
The bigger question is whether GTA 6 will actually release in 2025. Delaying major games by months at a time has become so commonplace that it’s expected. Ubisoft just delayed Assassin’s Creed Shadows from this year to February, and Bethesda had originally planned to release Starfield in 2022 but didn’t get it out until September 2023. (It even had a great novelty date picked out originally, 11/11/22, which was 11 years after Skyrim’s release.)
Delay or no delay, we still don’t know when GTA 6 will come to PC. Rockstar has only announced console releases as of now, and our expectation is that it’ll remain a console exclusive until Rockstar is ready to put out an upgraded special edition. It’s annoying and old-fashioned, but all we can do is harangue them about it: Rockstar does what Rockstar wants to do. It might be gaming’s most appropriately-named studio.
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Kurt Indovina
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