GTA seperti Barbie, kata bos Take-Two

Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto 6 is one of the most-anticipated game releases ever, and despite the enormous hype, Rockstar and owner Take-Two are going to market the game aggressively. Why does the game even need a marketing push? According to Take-Two boss Strauss Zelnick, just because a franchise is popular and well known, that doesn't mean the company behind it can take their foot off the pedal in terms of spending time and money on marketing.

Zelnick said 2023's The Barbie Movie is a good example of this.

“All of us saw the Barbie movie, and they marketed the living daylights out of that picture. Even though the IP is very well known. Secondly, it was out there for a while. We all got the joke of what it was going to be. They did a phenomenal marketing campaign. It was really everywhere, and, by the way, it worked," he told GamesBeat.

For any "broad-based entertainment" property, companies "don't have a choice" but to spend significantly to push a new release, and GTA 6 is no exception, Zelnick said.

"You always have to go out and create enthusiasm. So, awareness is one thing; enthusiasm is another thing. And we have to show people what they’re going to get," Zelnick said.

He said Take-Two's investors have asked him why the company needs to aggressively push GTA 6 when it's a game everyone on Earth knows about. Zelnick said he learned from his time as a movie executive years ago that if your product is no good, "you can market the living sh** out of it, and people will still not notice the marketing." And if the marketing is terrible, "you can turn people off." If the marketing is good, however, "you can create more excitmement."

"And the whole goal that we always have, whether it’s this upcoming launch or any other title, is to take awareness and turn it into excitement, and take the lack of awareness and turn it into awareness," he said.

Also in the interview, Zelnick said Rockstar's partnership with Netflix for the GTA 6 extended trailer was akin to a "tutorial" to help fans see the game in action and understand why they should buy it.

“What Rockstar did was incredible, but there was an element of tutorial baked in there, right? It just was a different kind of proposition," he said. "If you look at Rockstar’s marketing previously for Grand Theft Auto titles, there are actual tutorials. This was just a different way of giving the same information, which I thought was really impressive. Rockstar figured out how to do that to entertain us for 27 minutes while also explaining to us how you’re going to play the game."

GTA 6 releases on November 19 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with a PC version expected to follow sometime after. In other news, Rockstar just announced GTA 6: The Album, and unlike the game itself, it will be available on a disc.