While 48 hours ago, Grand Theft Auto 6 fans had once again set themselves up for disappointment by predicting a trailer release date, now, there may be a development on the GTA 6 front that is too corroborated to ignore.
A number of Best Buy affiliates have started getting emails about a promotional preorder campaign for GTA 6 that will run from May 18 to May 21, where Monday, May 18, would be the preorder date everyone has been waiting so long for. And the idea, of course, is that there would hopefully be some other matter of promotion on that day say, another trailer, though that is not confirmed.
Too many affiliates have received this email for it to be some sort of AI generation spread around, though I’m sure this is not how Rockstar wanted the date getting out. Then again, you can’t really start a promotion like this by sending out emails on the actual day. So it leaks today or on the weekend, no matter what.
The timing of this would make it during the same week of Take-Two’s earnings call on May 21, where you would imagine a talking point would then be able to broadcast how many preorders GTA 6 racked up in 24 or 48 or 72 hours, which would almost certainly be some sort of industry record. Investor confidence, and all that, although expectations for GTA 6 are so absurdly high, even breaking records may not be enough. You can’t just break records with this game; you have to annihilate them.
I am not sure about exact 24-hour totals, but ahead of release, in total, Cyberpunk 2077 appears to have the all-time record of 8 million units before the game came out. GTA 5 had 7 million preorders. Both of these are factored into “day one” sales numbers, and why those end up being so high much of the time.
There have been so many conspiracy theories about GTA 6 promotional timing that it’s hard to take any new predictions seriously. But this is one that has so many different points of corroboration that it’s hard to put that in the same pile.
The main question, I would argue, is not whether the preorder date is happening, but what else drops on that day. Obviously, the biggest hope is another trailer. The timing, again, lines up. The third trailer for GTA 5 was on April 30, 2013, about five months before the game’s launch. A May 18 trailer would be six months before GTA 6’s launch, so yes, close enough. We’ll see on Monday.
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