By Berend Booms, Associate Editor | Future of Assets
My kids are back to school this week, which means I’ll finally get some more time on my PlayStation. It’s an old PlayStation 3 my wife got me for my birthday when we were newly married. It’s moved houses with me twice before, so I didn’t hesitate a second bringing it to my new house. In hindsight, I’m really glad I did: Lego Marvel’s Avengers has been a huge hit with my two boys this summer, we’ve gotten so much fun out of trying to collect all characters and completing all missions. Much like that game, my PlayStation 3 is more than 10 years old, and not once have I considered upgrading to a newer version of the console. That is, until last week.
On August 27, Rockstar Games dropped "Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look," twenty-six minutes of GTA 6-related footage that most of the internet, myself included, had been waiting for ever since the first teaser was released at the end of 2023. Rockstar knows what they are doing, and they like to set the pace – and so they did with the release of this extended look. Interestingly, Netflix got a six-hour exclusive window before the video touched YouTube or Rockstar's own site. That’s the same Netflix I’ll sometimes let my kids watch Paw Patrol on, or turn to in a rare moment of boredom.
My surprise turned into amazement once I got a hold of the ripple effect this exclusive premiere brought about. Not only did the extended look top all the charts on Netflix, the twenty-six-minute video soon turned into sold-out shelves and hyper-inflated figures in PlayStation and GTA sales worldwide. Although the attention this has garnered is massive already, whenever hype turns into concrete action, I feel compelled to expand on it a little more, and explain why I think this is such a big deal.
From Netflix to Sold Out Shelves
There are a couple of choices leading up to this success that deserve mention. First of all, all of the in-game footage shown was filmed on a base PS5. That makes the hype so real and attainable: it’s the same console people either already own, or want to make sure they buy next thing after seeing the video. Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick called the Netflix deal a first-of-its-kind partnership, and he’s absolutely right about that. This wasn't another trailer for the crowd already counting down the days on a gaming forum. It went straight to Netflix's subscriber base, most of whom have never opened a gaming news site in their life. And because the target audience for this game already spends substantial amounts of time on Netflix, you’d be hard-pressed to find an easier way to reach them in such a direct manner.
The numbers speak for themselves: the Extended Look rapidly hit number one on Netflix’s top ten movies list – which I don’t think any video game has ever done, and I’m having a hard time thinking of another franchise that can pull this level of attention. Looking at the spike in traffic Netflix endured, web climbed more than 125 percent above the average for the three months prior, while mobile rose close to 50 percent in the same window. Traffic was so intense in fact that for a brief period during the premiere window, Netflix’s services were affected.
These are the least surprising outcomes; I had no doubt the video would be received well. The movement that followed was much more interesting to me, because it was a showcase of how attention turns into money. Sensor Tower tracked GTA 6 sales and preorders around the release and found a 436 percent jump in game sales the day after, compared with the day before. Preorders climbed 572 percent over the following two days against the trailing thirty-day average. PlayStation sales alone rose 606 percent that day, while Xbox managed ‘just’ 127 percent. To me, this reads as a clear verdict on which console people actually want to play this game on.
The demand for the hardware went crazy, and reached heights that saw the PlayStation 5 Pro version vanish from Best Buy, Target, Amazon, and Walmart within twenty-four hours. I’ve seen resellers ask up to 1,300 dollars for a console Sony sells for a fraction of that. The enthusiastic reaction to the game footage went way beyond the game: people were ready to fork out for a machine to play the game on, months before they would be able to.
I want to acknowledge there are many more layers to this story than the ones I have discussed up until now. The footage did not stay exclusive to Netflix; it hit YouTube a mere six hours after premiering there and has been reshared and commented upon into oblivion by now. Even so, leaked footage had already been circulating for some time, which probably further boosted the hype and interest. At the same time, Sony reversed a price hike on the PlayStation 5 line days earlier, which made the console seem more attractive to buy at exactly the right moment. What I’m saying is that none of these threads can be fully pulled apart without unraveling some of the others. But what Netflix clearly did was open a door that gaming marketing has never used before, and ushered in a huge, mostly untapped audience that was eagerly waiting on the other side of it.
Hype, but the Kind that Sticks
Why I think this is relevant to our industry has very little to do with the PlayStation 5 or GTA 6; instead, it has everything to do with the mechanism behind what makes this combination a success. Rockstar figured out where attention already existed and built a straight line from that attention to an action, in this case a purchase. The word ‘hype’ really doesn’t do justice to how well this was orchestrated, but for lack of a better term, let’s discuss ‘hype’ as it relates to asset management.
We talk about hype in our industry constantly, and mostly around artificial intelligence. I’m no longer able to find a vendor website that does not at least mention, let alone lead with AI. Every pitch promises the model that finally clears your work order backlog, only for most of that noise to disappear the way hype usually does, forgotten by the time the next conference rolls around. But every so often, the hype is real, as in the case of GTA 6. It manages to reach the right audience, at the right moment, and puts the obvious next move in front of them. Hype on its own changes nothing; what decides if it sticks or not is whether there’s a door right there for people to walk through when the attention peaks.
My Case to the Board
That door has always been there in my mind, but seeing the Extended Look footage has put me on the other side of the doorstep. I am buying a PlayStation 5, but not because of FOMO, or because the figures tell me to. I have played the franchise ever since I was a young kid, probably way too young, if I'm honest, for the kind of game Grand Theft Auto is. I’ve seen it go from 2D to 3D, from local and co-op to online. When Rockstar Games announced GTA 6, I was hyped. Watching that hype build up to new heights over the last two weeks, I am determined to be part of this experience when the game releases this November.
Or, just maybe, I am writing this to convince myself that this makes sense, and the expense I am projecting is worth it. I am part of the approval committee after all, so I have been building a comprehensive business case in my head for why we would not only invest in a PlayStation 5 and GTA 6, but also in getting a new television ‘for the kids’, to watch Netflix. Fingers crossed the other members of the board will agree with my reasoning.