Will players who waited 13 years to return to Vice City really spend their time in Panem, Middle-earth and the Underworld?
The highly anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto VIcoming November 19, will land amid a slew of expensive, high-profile films and TV shows returning within days of each other. Most of them offer their own escapist fantasy worlds that will compete in the attention economy with a title that’s expected to be the biggest video game launch in history.
Third season of Amazon-MGM The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power rolls out episodes over three weeks starting November 11 and Johnny Depp’s comeback vehicle Ebenezer landed on November 13. Lionsgate’s The Hunger Games: Sunrise over the Harvest opens the next day GTA6 will launch on November 20 with the fourth season of the studio’s Paramount+ hit Yellow vests. The same day, Disney launched the third season of Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Five days later, Amazon MGM’s limited series arrives Blade Runner 2099.
“This is going to be a watershed moment not only for the gaming industry, but for everyone in the media and entertainment industry who is going to have to deal with the fact that eyeballs are going to leave their environment to go gaming. GTA6said Bart Spiegel, global head of media, entertainment, gaming and sports at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
It is indeed difficult to exaggerate the earthquake GTA6 expected to create in terms of entertainment spending, distraction hours and pop culture noise. The Rockstar Games project projects first-year sales of 45 million copies and $3.2 billion in sales – a figure that would be the best box office champion of all time. Avengers: Endgame. A whopping 29 percent of US gamers expect to buy the title and one economist suggested, quite wildly, that the game would cost the US economy $1 billion in lost productivity due to PTO demands. Other video game publishers ran for the hills and ceded the month of November to Rockstar’s sun-drenched, pastel-colored 800-pound gorilla.
“I think GTA6 will be the biggest entertainment launch in history,” predicts Geoff Keighley, gaming industry producer and entrepreneur behind Game rewards. “Not just as a game in terms of the dollars it will bring in – it will win easily Avengers: Apocalypse And Dune: Part Three – but what impact it will have on movie attendance, streaming and how people spend their time. Hollywood should look at hours as carefully as dollars, because GTA6 This is going to be some people’s entertainment plan for the rest of the year, basically. The entertainment industry has never really seen anything like this before.
While the game’s main mission will likely take around 80 hours to complete – which alone is a massive amount of hours for a title – the title is also an open-world environment that players tend to return to again and again, and insiders speculate that the game will also allow some sort of online multiplayer mode. “So it’s not just about opening weekend,” says Keighley.
But for Hollywood, which is accustomed to owning much of the entertainment attention economy, especially around the holidays, the impact of GTA6 seems almost certainly felt – even if it is difficult to measure.
Spiegel noted that streaming would likely be hit the hardest, as a console game directly competes for viewing hours on living room TVs. Last year’s fourth-quarter streaming numbers were pretty good, he noted, but he suspects GTA6 could really hurt year-over-year comparisons. The urgency to watch live sports, however, will be more secure from erosion than entertainment programming. “But believe me, if this game gets boring, GTA6 it’s happening very soon,” he joked.
Behind the scenes, streamers are becoming more aware GTA6 is coming and that Jason and Lucia might steal some of their viewers. “Everyone is wondering how big this game will be,” says a representative working on a potentially impacted streaming title.
On the cinema side, an official from a major exhibitor said it was “difficult to know” the effect on films like Ebenezer And Sunrise over the Harvest. “This hardly comes up in internal discussions, but anyone in the industry who has ever been a gamer – or lives with someone who is – knows that it will have to be the case. a few impact,” he said. “Hunger Games pre-sales are strong, which could indicate this is solid counterprogramming. Ebenezer presales are disastrous, but I doubt it GTA6 is the main reason. We’ll have to see how walk-in sales go.
Future box office heavyweights like Avengers: Apocalypse And Dune: Part Threewhich opens “Dunesday” on December 18. Such titles seem to fall outside the game’s scope, but maybe not. Spiegel noted that the game’s “appeal could last into December.” While the hardcore gamers will rush and play GTA6 the first few weeks, others will wait until they have more free time during the December holidays, while some children (with rather permissive parents) won’t even unbox the presumably adults-only game until Christmas.
Music will also be disrupted, with the game’s 34-song soundtrack already being streamed 26 million times per month on Spotify and a 30-track Justice soundtrack available on December 11.
An as yet unrecognized aspect of the game’s gravitational pull will be on social media, where you’re already starting to see anticipation videos (like a boyfriend giving his girlfriend a kitten so she won’t bother him while playing the game, or another boyfriend who has apparently drawn up a contract promising a list of compromises if his girlfriend doesn’t bother him, yes, while playing the game). But social media also plays a major role in entertainment marketing – not just direct advertising but also fan-generated content that helps programs generate buzz and become part of the cultural conversation. But what happens if GTA6 becomes everything everyone talks about?
“It’s going to take over from live streaming, clips and content creators,” says Keighley. “Barbenheimer worked because we could go and see barbie And Oppenheimerand you only needed five or six hours. People will still go see something else, but I think the entertainment value has to be extremely high. »
This story appeared in the November 12 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
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