To put it simply, the GTA franchise is one of the biggest and most profitable entertainment properties in history.
GTA 5 has sold nearly 230 million copies, making it one of the best-selling games of all time – which has generated billions of dollars in revenue for Rockstar.
The game’s sandbox gameplay, where players can explore vast open worlds with considerable freedom – sometimes controversially – has seen it be continuously lauded as the ultimate expression for what the interactive medium can do.
Freelance video games journalist Vic Hood said each entry in the series “continued to push technical and gameplay boundaries”, with GTA Online helping to “pioneer the live service model as we know it”.
She added that the games were also “extremely culturally relevant” too.
“Rockstar has always had its finger on the pulse of music, entertainment, societal, political, celebrity, and online culture trends, and they’ve never shied away from satirising these things in GTA games,” she said.
British gaming entrepreneur Sir Ian Livingstone told the BBC’s Today programme that the series, originally developed in Scotland, was “bigger than any film or song” and an “incredible achievement in interactive software”.
Speculation as to how a sixth game can top even the gigantic heights of its predecessor has meant that any latest news, no matter how small, has been met with a flurry of hype and excitement.
Both of GTA 6’s previous gameplay trailers currently have a total of roughly 447 million views combined.
