Rockstar Games is able to maintain excitement over each new Grand Theft Auto game due to the fact they aren’t rushed to market and continue to innovate with every instalment, the company’s co-founder, Dan Houser, said during latest episode of the Lex Fridman Podcast.
When asked how the GTA series is able to drum up excitement, Houser also mentioned Rockstar’s ample marketing chops as a means of drumming up hype for the franchise with each new entry.
Because they don’t come out that regularly. And I think we did a really good job of constantly innovating within what the IP was. The games always felt different, you know, people have very strong feelings: ‘I like this one. I didn’t like that one as much,’ because they are pretty different. So, there would be simultaneously where you know what’s going to happen.
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It’s a Grand Theft Auto, you know, it’s going to be a game about being a criminal, but the way it’s going to be a game is going to change quite a lot. So I think the way the IP kept evolving made people really excited to play it. And we were good at marketing them as well. We really tried to market them in a way that felt like an update of classic film marketing, where you really felt like you’re already in the product just because you’d seen the trailers and stuff.
In the same interview, Houser discussed the reasons why the Grand Theft Auto series hasn’t ventured outside of the USA beyond 1999’s spinoff GTA London: 1969. Grand Theft Auto VI, the next mainline entry in the multi-million selling series, is currently scheduled to ship on May 26, 2026 for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.
[Source – Lex Fridman via TheGamePost]