After months of speculation and leaks, the official trailer for GTA VI dropped on December 4, 2023.

Huge news in the world of videogames: the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI has been released, marking the start of what many are already predicting to be one of the largest and most successful marketing campaigns in gaming history.

The Grand Theft Auto (GTA) franchise, releasing its first title all the way back in 1997, has without question been a mainstay in the gaming world across multiple generations of players. Now, more than ten years on from the release of GTA V and twelve years since that game’s trailer, hype is swiftly growing for the long-awaited next installment.

Not without its controversy, the series, with its games usually being assigned a ‘mature’ rating by the ESRB, is famous for its violence, polarizing humor, and often over-the-top content within its satirized worlds. While critics over the years have been quick to point out the potential negative influence of the game, particularly on young players, overall support for the franchise and the creative vision of the team at Rockstar Games far outweighs the criticisms – and, as many have pointed out, the clash of opinions about the franchise only furthers its popularity. As the BBC succinctly described: the franchise has been a “mainstay of popular culture” for over a decade.

Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube: https://t.co/T0QOBDHwBe

— Rockstar Games (@RockstarGames) December 4, 2023

The first trailer for the game (warning: may contain content inappropriate for children) received millions of likes on YouTube within less than an hour of its release. For reference, that’s more than the total number of likes on the twelve-year-old GTA V trailer to date. With statistics like those, it’s easy for even an untrained eye to begin to comprehend the immense popularity of the franchise, and just how successful the next installment is likely to be.

GTA V, the previous GTA game, is to date the second best selling videogame of all time, behind only Minecraft, and ahead of games and franchises like Mario Kart, Zelda, Overwatch and even Tetris. Multiple sources have also cited it as the most financially successful single piece of media of all time – making more than any individual movie, book, album or other work, with approximately $8 billion in overall revenue – and $1 billion in just the first three days of the game’s 2013 release, which also makes it the fastest selling piece of media in history. This incredible success is not without a substantial cost, of course, with production costing hundreds of millions of dollars when all is said and done – more than many movies.

These overwhelming numbers give us another clue into just how successful the latest installment is likely to be – but there’s still a long way to go – the trailer concludes by announcing that the game will release in 2025.

The trailer also confirms a long-rumored fact about GTA VI – for the first time in the franchise, the game will feature a female protagonist, a fact which has been largely celebrated in and out of the gaming community.

While GTA VI was only formally announced last month by Rockstar Games President Sam Houser, that wasn’t the first time the world got a form of confirmation that the game was in development. Over a year ago, a series of leaks exposed in-development footage of the game to the world, considered to be one of the most major leaks in gaming history. The premature exposure of unfinished content typically serves to significantly hurt morale among development teams – standing with Rockstar after the leak, many other gaming companies also shared unfinished footage of upcoming games following the leak to show their sympathies and stand with the company and its creators.

While the actual release of GTA VI is still anywhere from one to two years away, fans are already eagerly circulating ideas about what gameplay might look like. The previous installment was hailed for its incredible story, innovative gameplay and incredibly immersive world – veteran gaming YouTuber Daniel Hardcastle referred to GTA V as “the best Grand Theft Auto game…by an absolutely long way,” “the best story in an open world game,” and, at the time, “the greatest a videogame has ever been.”

Charlie White Jr., better known by his longtime online alias Critikal, expressed optimism that the new game would feature improved combat dynamics, such as those demonstrated in Rockstar’s 2012 release Max Payne 3. Fans of the franchise also point to Rockstar’s 2018 release Red Dead Redemption 2 as a sign of the level of quality that is hoped for from GTA VI, with that game being considered by many to be one of the greatest, most creatively important and most immersive videogames ever conceived.

If Rockstar Games follows its usual marketing strategy, we can be sure that more trailers for GTA VI are soon to follow – and that the game will be a commercial and social success the likes of which only a Grand Theft Auto game is capable of achieving.