Why does GTA 6 still need marketing? Zelnick's answer: awareness is not enthusiasm
Strauss Zelnick told a GamesBeat Insider fireside chat in New York on September 16 that GTA VI still needs aggressive marketing because awareness and enthusiasm are two different things, citing the Barbie movie's campaign as the precedent. He said Rockstar's 27-minute Netflix Extended Look carried 'an element of tutorial baked in', and that a publisher cannot pay creators to pretend a bad game is
The short answer
Because knowing about a game and wanting to play it are not the same thing. Asked why Take-Two and Rockstar keep spending on marketing for a title the entire planet has already heard of, Strauss Zelnick, Take-Two's chairman and CEO, said the job is not to build awareness but to convert it into enthusiasm — and he pointed at the marketing of Barbie as the model (GamesBeat).
Zelnick was speaking in a fireside chat with GamesBeat's Alex Lee at the outlet's GamesBeat Insider event in New York on September 16, in front of an audience of brand and marketing executives, a day before Take-Two's annual meeting of stockholders.
"It's not a dumb question"
The question, as Zelnick restated it, is the one investors keep asking: everyone has heard of Grand Theft Auto VI, so why not simply put it on the shelf and let it sell itself? His reply: "It's not a dumb question. It's actually a smart question. Who has not heard of the brand?"
He then reached for a 2023 film rather than a game. Everyone knew what Barbie was before it opened, and the studio still marketed "the living daylights out of that picture" — and, as he put it, "it was really everywhere, and, by the way, it worked." The lesson he draws is not about volume but about effect: "in launching broad-based entertainment properties, you don't have a choice. 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."
Why the 27-minute trailer worked like a tutorial
Zelnick's second argument is structural and specific to games. Films are lean-back: you buy a ticket and the film does the work. A game asks the customer to install something, learn its controls and commit dozens of hours before it becomes enjoyable — which, he says, is why Rockstar's 27-minute Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, streamed on Netflix on August 27, was built the way it was.
"What Rockstar did was incredible, but there was an element of tutorial baked in there," he said, adding that previous Grand Theft Auto campaigns shipped explicit tutorials, and that the Extended Look "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" (GamesBeat).
That framing matters for the rest of the campaign. If the trailer is doing the teaching, the marketing that follows does not have to explain the game again — it has to keep the enthusiasm up until November 19, which is what the billboards, the Spotify-branded artwork and the Miami signage are for.
What marketing cannot do
Zelnick was equally clear about the limit of his own trade. Asked how a game rises above the noise, he said quality comes first: a bad game cannot be rescued by a good campaign, while a great one can still be sunk by a poor campaign. His summary is that marketing "can take awareness and turn it into excitement, and take the lack of awareness and turn it into awareness" — intention, not illusion.
Creators sit inside that logic rather than outside it. Paid partnerships work, he argued, only because audiences would punish a creator who praised something bad: "you're amplifying word of mouth because what you can't do is pay anyone to say something that's terrible is good." Or, more bluntly: "You can't game the system. We cannot convince people that something that's bad is good."
He also called the Netflix premiere "good for everyone involved", noting that streamers who re-broadcast the show brought in reactions from people who would not have watched it otherwise.
What comes next
Take-Two holds its 2026 annual meeting of stockholders on Thursday, September 17 at 9:00 a.m. Eastern — a virtual, audio-only meeting that non-stockholders can listen to but not participate in (Business Wire). The agenda is corporate: directors, executive compensation, the auditor. The GTA VI date it repeats is still November 19, 2026, on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. The full GamesBeat conversation with Zelnick is scheduled to be streamed for GB MAX members from September 21.
