GTA 6: The video game of video games

Dusseldorf. The moment that Helen Krüger has been waiting for almost half her life comes in the middle of the night. On November 19th, like probably more than ten million other people, the gamer will not be lying in bed at midnight, but will be sitting in front of her Playstation. Then, it is hoped, video game developer Rockstar Games will reward fans' 13 years of patience with the biggest new game of all time: GTA 6. The sixth edition of Grand Theft Auto. In German: aggravated car theft.

“I really notice it in my upper body area: there is excitement, anticipation,” says the 29-year-old. "I'm thinking about it all the time: Do I still have enough overtime? Can I maybe take a day off, Friday? And how do I organize this day?" Other gamers take a week's vacation. At the end of October, a Spanish economist publicly calculated that he was expecting 1.5 million GTA-induced sickness reports in the USA alone - and economic damage of a billion dollars.

Sales success has rarely been so predictable in the gaming industry, which is difficult to plan. More than ten million people have pre-ordered GTA 6. The first real trailer, which premiered at the end of August parallel to the leading trade fair Gamescom, mobilized so many fans at the same time that Netflix crashed. And when the downloads started this week so that everyone can start immediately on November 19th, network providers such as Vodafone reported significant performance peaks.

Its direct predecessor, GTA 5, is one of the most successful video games ever, with industry experts estimating more than 220 million copies sold. Developer Rockstar Games and its listed parent company Take-Two have probably generated a good ten billion dollars in sales over the years. Industry experts and analysts expect sales of around 8.6 billion for GTA 6 in the first financial year alone. The game takes up so much time and attention that other manufacturers generously avoid the GTA release period with their top titles.

For Helen Krüger this also has to do with road traffic. Even as a child, at the age of six or seven, she was allowed to watch the third part of GTA “Vice City” being played. And driving a car is “more bad than good”. “As a child, my greatest joy was following the traffic rules,” she said about the action-packed gangster game, which the USK has only released for adults.

Following the rules of the road is pretty much the opposite of the core brand of the GTA series. As henchmen, players carry out orders for criminal organizations. There are points for stolen cars, especially if the driver is dragged out of the car. There is shooting, robbery and murder.

Today's GTA are playable gangster films. The pixelated graphics that started the success in 1997 have given way to detailed 3D replicas of metropolises like Miami and Los Angeles, which players can explore with all kinds of vehicles. The scripts are now Hollywood-ready and the characters have depth. Special songs are composed for the radio stations playing in the game.

Krüger, now a project manager at the Hamburg location initiative Gamecity, caught up on the other parts as a teenager and discovered the open game world for herself, the feeling of freedom. This is why gamers like her today spend hours relaxing and driving through the open game world and listening to music. And stop at red lights instead of dragging people out of their vehicles.

“It's certainly part of the appeal that you have to play against your own personality,” says Krüger, referring to the aspects of the game that have been criticized as glorifying violence. For example, when players have to go through a complete torture sequence as Trevor, one of the main characters in GTA 5. "That did something to me as a player. I didn't want to do that," she says. The game doesn't convey "look what a cool guy this is", but rather: "What the fuck, what kind of guy is he?"

For André Price, this form of breaking taboos is actually a key success factor of the series. “GTA allows us to go overboard, break social rules and simulate a version of ourselves that is completely unbridled,” says the brand and advertising expert. Price, who, among other things, used insider knowledge and market research at the advertising agency Jung von Matt to analyze the demographic makeup of the gaming community and what drives it, is now co-founder of the brand consultancy “The Forge”. He says: "It's a special form of escapism. Not just the escape into another world, but the freedom to experience a different version of ourselves."

Rockstar manages to condense social developments, clichés, music and zeitgeist into a world that “feels amazingly alive”. He now sees the GTA as a social event: "A bit like before, when it felt like the whole of Germany was watching 'Wetten Dass..?' and people were talking about it in the office or at the supermarket checkout on Monday." So it's also about being able to have a say. This is also a point for Helen Krüger. She says about herself that she is a person with a lot of “Fomo”, i.e. the fear of missing out on something: “When everyone is playing it and everyone is talking about it, I want to be there, have a say, join in the discussion.”

Odile Limpach reminds us of another entertainment brand: James Bond. “This is a completely social phenomenon,” says the professor of economics and entrepreneurship at the Cologne Game Lab at TH Köln. It's about setting the right impulse on a regular basis, so that there is always hype despite the long waiting time between two parts. What it takes: an absolute high-gloss product. “The most important point about the GTA phenomenon is the quality, the absolute demand for perfection,” says Limpach. The brand strategy is perfect for them: “When you see a screenshot, you immediately know it’s from GTA.”

This was also the case in the summer, when a hacker group published scenes of the unfinished game on the Internet. The gaming community recognized GTA immediately. The Rockstar Games studio and parent company Take-Two were intended to be blackmailed with the leaks. Sometimes it was about demands for a better working environment for developers, sometimes it was simply about money.

Shortly afterwards, what Limpach describes came true: "I don't necessarily see leaks as negative. They can build up the tension further and keep people busy." Gamers want the finished game, the overall experience. Rockstar's secrecy isn't a hindrance. “The fans keep the brand alive themselves. Through memes, mods, roleplay servers, videos and their own stories,” says André Price.

And they take it with humor. So a meme has spread beyond the gaming scene, along the lines of: Even this unlikely event happened before we got GTA 6. Examples include a new Beatles album, Donald Trump's two presidencies, a global pandemic. Now the resignation of Jensen Huang as CEO of the chip manufacturer Nvidia.

The hype is also not inconvenient for the gaming industry. After a significant boom in work-from-home peaks during the pandemic, industry growth has slowed. There is no one, clear reason for this. Part of the reason is certainly increased hardware costs due to the AI ​​boom. Graphics specialist Nvidia has oriented itself almost entirely towards AI. The data centers where the AI ​​models are trained and used account for the majority of the production of memory and hard drives. “RAM-a-geddon” is what the scene calls the memory apocalypse.

“Ultimately, hardware like a games console didn’t sell the most at launch, but rather when it became cheaper at some point,” says Odile Limpach, who was herself a senior manager in the gaming industry. "This is the first time we've seen consoles in the middle of the product cycle being more expensive than when they came out." The alternative cloud gaming, in which games are practically streamed from powerful computers to comparatively simple household devices, has been waiting for the predicted breakthrough for years.

GTA 6 will initially only be released for Sony's Playstation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox, not for the PC. This consolidates a trend that the business consultancy McKinsey has identified: brand loyalty and therefore increasing exclusivity are what counts. A survey of 3,000 US consumers showed that almost two thirds of gamers spend their time playing titles that are more than a year old. And according to data from industry analysts Newzoo, around two-thirds of digital sales in the console market go to the 20 biggest games.

“The growth from new players has largely been exhausted: the market will only grow by around five percent per year until 2030, after eight percent in the years 2015 to 2024,” says René Bienek, partner at McKinsey in Germany. “Every new game therefore has to fight for time and money that are often long gone.” For example in GTA.

This formula cannot be easily duplicated. “Rockstar doesn’t just sell a game,” says André Price. “GTA works over this long period of time because it lives not just from its stories, but from a very strong cultural identity.” What it entails: freedom, rebellion, social satire, music and a very specific sense of humor. What also comes with it: lots and lots of money.

“With this type of so-called AAA title, production costs are expected to be between 350 and 500 million euros,” said Odile Limpach. According to industry estimates, the budget for GTA 6 is up to three times that amount. Rockstar Games and Take-Two at least did not deny reports of costs ranging from one to 1.5 billion dollars. It is a presumed record investment for the industry.

And a bet that first has to pay off: “I would say that the gaming market is one of the most difficult markets to predict sales,” says Limpach. Investors in the gaming sector are correspondingly cautious, observes the professor, whose research focus includes start-up financing.

The bet must also pay off for Take-Two. The majority of analysts who cover the company's shares assume that this is exactly what is happening: they almost universally recommend buying. The share, which was still trading at under $200 at the end of October, was most recently trading at around $225. The price targets are now between $280 and $330. This also includes sales success that is above the company forecast.

The GTA makers have already achieved sales success with Helen Krüger, even if it surprised her. She didn't actually want to pre-order: "I still like to buy physically in the store, I've always celebrated that even with big releases." Then the Netflix trailer threw a spanner in the works. “I only watched the first ten seconds and thought: Now I’m really up for it.” She is also looking forward to GTA 6 having a female lead for the first time. And will be sitting in front of her Playstation at midnight on Thursday. Even if only for an hour; Everyday work doesn't allow for more.