There’s a lot of reasons, but the big thing you need to keep in mind is that the average gamer buys less than 2 games a year. That’s who you’re targeting if you wanna sell a million billion copies of a game. Where most years that’s probably going to be a sports game or cod, GTA is a cultural phenomenon that will have millions and millions of dollars of advertising behind it. First buying the game will be social, a way to engage with cultural phenomenon, then it’ll be a good value proposition (typically they’ve had a lot of hours of gameplay per dollar thanks to open ended sandbox gameplay and breadth of features), and then it’ll be social again when GTA6 Online drops, and again when the PC release happens. This is all staggered out to maximize sale and resale and stay in the discourse to the point that it’s what an AI would say a CEO should do for a big release. After that they’ll be targeting whales because old GTA Online still makes over a million dollars a day in 2026 but that’s drifting away from the why
There’s a lot of reasons, but the big thing you need to keep in mind is that the average gamer buys less than 2 games a year. That’s who you’re targeting if you wanna sell a million billion copies of a game. Where most years that’s probably going to be a sports game or cod, GTA is a cultural phenomenon that will have millions and millions of dollars of advertising behind it. First buying the game will be social, a way to engage with cultural phenomenon, then it’ll be a good value proposition (typically they’ve had a lot of hours of gameplay per dollar thanks to open ended sandbox gameplay and breadth of features), and then it’ll be social again when GTA6 Online drops, and again when the PC release happens. This is all staggered out to maximize sale and resale and stay in the discourse to the point that it’s what an AI would say a CEO should do for a big release. After that they’ll be targeting whales because old GTA Online still makes over a million dollars a day in 2026 but that’s drifting away from the why