GTA 6 trailer sends fans into frenzy, earns game dev praise, and leads people to ponder their inevitable demise: ‘What if we die before GTA 6 releases in 2025?’

Grand Theft Auto 6, the latest open-world crime simulator from Table Tennis studio Rockstar Games, got its first trailer yesterday. Perhaps you heard. So far as I can make out, the reaction so far has been a kind of obsessive euphoria, as literally millions of people around the world pore over 90 seconds of footage to pick out details, theorycraft, and plan literal crimes against humanity. 

So, yes, people are very excited. Type the letters GTA into a social media search bar or glance at any of the series’ myriad subreddits and you’ll find a sea of fans in ecstasy over Rockstar’s long-anticipated reveal. “What the fuck are those in-game graphics,” reads a relatively measured and highly rated comment from Reddit user aweh_sassy, “it looks real.” 

Other users pretty much echoed that sentiment in one way or another, at least when they weren’t kvetching about that 2025 release date, including redrubies20, who turned to Cartoon Network edits to communicate their boundless excitement for the sudden reality of GTA 6. 

Admit it. This was you. from r/GTA

The reaction from a lot of actual game devs was, well, pretty similar actually. Rami Ismail tweeted that he hadn’t seen “such a realistic depiction of any real place on Earth” since Flight Sim 2020. Neil Druckmann, of Last of Us fame, called the trailer “jaw-dropping,” and added that “for someone who grew up in Miami… This feels eerily familiar.” I was curious if Hideo Kojima had tweeted anything in response to the trailer, given his own experience cutting trailers for his games, but he’s mostly just been retweeting things about Léa Seydoux, which is fair enough.

The thing about trailers that send the whole world into a spin, of course, is they take a lot of work. That’s also why the fact this particular trailer leaked hours before it was supposed to air officially had Rockstar devs declaring that “this fucking sucks.” Despite the widespread excitement, lots of people seem to agree. Amid all the enthusiasm, some people are taking the time to offer Rockstar’s devs their condolences—and express their own upset—at the fact the trailer leaked early. 

“Teams work literally hours, days, weeks, nights, to build the best rollout to capture the attention of social media,” wrote Joshua Stein, senior social media manager at Xbox, “Leaks utterly ruin that and waste a ton of work and also risk flat spinning your whole marketing message.”

Even fans agreed. A commenter named Leddy12 on Reddit summed things up when they wrote, “I really despise leakers, I don’t know why, but I actually feel bad for Rockstar. They’ve been working on this for so long, and some hooligan comes along and leaks something they put no work into.” An upvoted post from cherryandfizz concurred: ” it’s kind of gutting that it got leaked as much as I loved watching it.”

But, from what I’ve seen, most people are too busy discussing the various ways that GTA 6 will change the world, the gaming industry, and their lives to get distracted by things like that. Everyone except us, that is. There’s no PC release date for GTA 6, meaning more than a few PC gamers spent most of their time lamenting that. Let’s not get it twisted: GTA 6 is almost definitely coming to PC some day, and I only really write “almost” so no one gets confused and thinks it’s been officially confirmed, but it looks like the game is set to pull an RDR 2 (and GTA 5) and come out a while after the console versions. 

“PC users probably not [getting] GTA 6 until or beyond 2026,” wrote Twitter account HazzadorGamin, “This sucks.” Indeed it does, not least for poor fans like Reddit user HallowedError, who wrote before the trailer leaked that they hoped Rockstar “don’t delay PC release again,” returning after the leak to pencil in a small “:'(” emoji that, I think, encompasses our community’s collective response quite neatly.

That almost covers the various reactions I’ve spotted so far to GTA 6. Except one. Some fans more keenly aware of the passage of time and our finite lifespans have noted that, boy, it sure has been quite a long time since Rockstar last released a GTA game. Naturally, that’s got them asking how old they’ll be by the time the studio is ready to release GTA 7, and they’re not reaching encouraging conclusions.

Others agree. “Calling it now: I will die before GTA 7 comes out,” wrote Giant Bomb games journalist Jeff Grubb. Heck, some aren’t even that optimistic. One Twitter user named TheCR7Verse is out there asking Rockstart to consider what happens “if we die before GTA VI releases in 2025,” which seems a tad pessimistic even for me.