Rebels No More: Rockstar, GTA 6, and the Art of Selling Out

At the time of writing this intro, it’s August 6th 2026. I’m on my lunch break, and I’m pissed (off, not drunk).

Tomorrow, at 12:00pm UTC, Take-Two will hold its Q1 2027 earnings conference call. This call will serve largely as an opportunity for the suits to congratulate themselves on the soul-crushing work being carried out by studios around the world at their behest.

They’ll be patting themselves on the back for two reasons:

1. Record projections suggesting 2026/27 will be the most successful year in the company’s history.
2. A fresh stock bump off the back of today’s announcement.

In case you missed it, this ‘announcement’ refers to the fact that after over 450 days, we’re finally getting our third proper look at Grand Theft Auto 6 – and no, I’m not counting June’s pre-order announcement and screenshot drop, why would I?

As a lifelong Rockstar Games stooge, I’ve been wishing for this day for over a year. But in a neat little monkey’s paw twist, it turns out we’re not getting a trailer ahead of the earnings call. Instead, Rockstar has taken what is presumably life‑altering money – life‑altering for regular people, pocket change for a corporation —giving Netflix brief but exclusive rights to an extended look at the game on August 27th.

Now, as someone eagerly anticipating the next entry in the GTA franchise, this should mean a great deal to me. In reality, I feel very little. Here’s why.

The long walk to Leonida

At this stage, it’s fair to say that the journey towards Grand Theft Auto 6 has been irritating at best, shambolic at worst. For the avoidance of doubt, here’s a timeline of the major announcements so far, complete with my reactions to each of them.

• February 4^th 2022 – Rockstar formally announce they’re working on GTA 6 – “Oh nice!”.
• September 18^th 2022 – 90 clips of leaked early development gameplay footage are posted online – “This is legitimately insane” (even in hindsight).
• December 4, 2023 - Trailer 1 is released – “Holy shit! GTA is back babeee.”.
• May 6^th 2025 – Trailer 2 releases – “Damn, they’re cooking.”
• June 18^th 2026 – Official cover art reveal  - “Yeah, I couldn’t care less about this”.
  • Pre-orders were also announced and they will start on…
• June 25^th 2026 – Pre-orders go live – “Not even Rockstar will get a pre-order out of me.”
• August 6^th 2026 – Rockstar announce an extended look at Grand Theft Auto 6, briefly exclusive to Netflix – “Yeah, this is fucking gross,” (we’ll get to that later).

I think you can agree, it’s pretty sparse. To be fair though, Rockstar’s marketing always is and it’s because they can afford to be. Theirs is a pedigree built over decades of industry-defining titles. To play a Rockstar game is to play something the rest of the industry will spend years and millions of dollars trying to replicate – only to be blown out of the water by their next title.

To play a Rockstar game is to play something the rest of the industry will spend years and millions of dollars trying to replicate — only to be blown out of the water by their next title.

However, there’s a crucial line in the sand that I’d like to draw here. Rockstar have gotten away with this historically because at the end of the day, they’ve given us games of unparalleled quality, detail and scope. Right? WRONG.

The era of corporate Rockstar begins

I think it’s easy for us to think of Rockstar as the Rockstar of old: the developers that gave us games which saw us through our childhood, the studio that delivered ten titles (including standalone expansions) during the seventh-generation of consoles. This is not who they are anymore.

In a very real sense, Rockstar had something to prove with Grand Theft Auto 6’s marketing. In recent years, the studio has made a series of uncharacteristic decisions, dealing them deserved reputational chip damage since 2013.

It began with the unprecedented success of GTA Online, a platform that continues to afford Rockstar generational wealth year-on-year and one that has steadily moved the needle on how the company operates and sees itself. Once the infinite money glitch of GTA Online was activated, priorities shifted: a single player DLC nixed here, a little microtransactional pressure there. And yet, the game was fun. I clocked hundreds of hours myself and made a lot of memories playing with my brothers and friends, happily lost in its madness. The worst was yet to come.

“Definitive edition”

On November 11^th 2021, Grove Street Games released Grand Theft Auto: The Trilogy – The Definitive Edition. In concept, it made perfect sense; a remastered collection of the three games that made up the GTA 3D Era and that had cemented Rockstars rep as an industry powerhouse.

In reality, it blew. The game released in an unacceptable state and even after years of patches, it’s still not up to the high benchmark expected from the studio. This was due in large part to the fact that Rockstar was not responsible for development of the collection. Instead, it went to Grove Street Games – a studio that, despite the name, is somehow not affiliated with Rockstar in any way, and is genuinely named after the street it was founded on. Insane.

I’ve seen many defend Rockstar based on this distinction but here, I have to disagree. Rockstar had (and still has) a duty to preserve these games as far as they are able – and financially speaking, they are more than able. These games made Rockstar what they are. For them not to step in, allow this to go out the door and at a $59.99 USD price point was, and remains, unacceptable.

Still, at least you can play these titles as intended on modern consoles via their PS2 ports. Well, no – actually you can’t. Once the “definitive” edition was released, the ports were struck from digital storefronts, meaning that the only way to play these titles today is by sailing the seven seas. Yarrr!

To sacrifice these games at the altar of financial reward rubbed me the wrong way at the time and it’s only rankled as the years have passed, but at least it couldn’t get any worse.

(Un)Civil Union

Last year, Rockstar fired dozens of employees from its UK and Canadian studios, saying they had shared confidential company information — conduct it characterised as gross misconduct. The affected workers and the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IWGB) Game Workers branch, which had been helping them organise, dispute that account and say the dismissals were retaliation for union activity. Rockstar denies this, but the move has drawn widespread accusations of union-busting, and the IWGB has taken the matter to an employment tribunal. If you're looking for more information on this, I'd recommend the great work being done by the folks over at People Make Games.

It’s the latest in a long line of allegations levelled at the company and its employment practices. For years, the studio has faced reported allegations of crunch culture, gender-based pay disparities and the use of bonuses as a pressure or retention tactic, and it seems that this isn’t set to change anytime soon.

I’m old enough to remember the January 2010 anonymous open letter titled Rockstar Spouse, published by the partners of developers at Rockstar San Diego. It exposed severe, exploitative 12‑hour workday crunch during the final development of the original Red Dead Redemption.

It seems that mandatory overtime hasn’t improved in the years since, with Grand Theft Auto 6 developers claiming to have worked 80 hour weeks in the run up to the game’s release this November. I want to be clear: Rockstar’s developers are artists, and they deserve the respect and dignity that that title confers.

I’m not blind to the realities of modern business. At the end of the day I understand that GTA 6 is a product to be sold first and foremost but this shouldn’t come at the expense of the talent making you that money. Given that industry analysts anticipate the title could make between $3.25 billion and $5.2 billion in week-one launch revenue and its even less acceptable.

Rockstars or sellouts?

As well as all of this, Rockstar has proven allergic to quick wins in recent years. Despite many of their peers releasing next‑gen upgrades for last‑generation titles, Red Dead Redemption 2 — arguably the company’s crowning achievement — is still yet to receive one. The final update for GTA Online also left many fans cold with severe heist payout nerfs across the board, high entry costs for new properties, and low replay value.

All this is to say, I hope I’ve illustrated the point I made above: that the Rockstar of 2026 is not the Rockstar that many of us fell in love with and more than that I hope I’ve done so in a way that leaves emotion to the side. However, this brings me neatly back to this latest announcement.

It’s official: Netflix will host our next, and likely, first proper look at how the game plays and while they’ll only enjoy a six-hour exclusivity window to the news, this has really irritated me.

To put it plainly, Rockstar did not need to do this. Grand Theft Auto is a series so tied up in the cultural zeitgeist, so ubiquitous that you really don’t even need to market it that heavily. Alone, the second trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI shattered entertainment history by pulling in an unprecedented 475 million views across all platforms in its first 24 hours. People who don’t play games play Grand Theft Auto, they’ll even buy a console outright to do so. You could ask a perfect stranger in the street what does GTA stand for, their eyes would briefly glaze over and then, almost involuntarily the name of the series would pass their lips.

At its core, this is nothing more than two incredibly wealthy companies propping each other up for substantial financial gain. This is not an announcement for the fans, it’s one for the shareholders and it’s one that moves the argument further away from Grand Theft Auto 6 as a work of art and towards one that simply figures it as product. It’s also to say nothing of the fact that Netflix continues to engage in pretty hostile business practices, repeatedly hiking prices despite an ongoing cost-of-living crisis and a lack of meaningful updates that’d make that change in price acceptable

This is not an announcement for the fans, it's one for the shareholders...

I don’t think Rockstar really realise the extent to which they’ve sold their soul with this decision and there’s such a deep-seated irony to it.

One of the greatest strengths of the Grand Theft Auto series is its keen, biting satire. Established in Edinburgh, Rockstar gives us a view of America from the outside looking in — a view America rarely gets of itself — highlighting the excesses the rest of the world sees when it looks in that direction. Everything from celebrity to modern consumerism to institutional corruption is fair game. How then, can you have the sheer brass neck to deliver this kind of po‑faced, performative parody while engaging in the very practices you’re supposedly skewering?

When we refer to a ‘rockstar’ we’re talking about artists who stay true to their raw, rebellious underground ethos. When we refer to ‘sellouts’, we’re talking about those who trade stylistic integrity for commercial success, mainstream radio-friendliness, and corporate wealth. I’ll pay you the compliment of knowing which side of the spectrum I believe Rockstar now falls.

What next?

During Take-Two’s February investor earnings call earlier this year, the company’s CEO, Strauss Zelnick claimed: "I think you'll be pretty astonished by the creativity that Rockstar's marketing team brings to consumers in the coming months." Sorry Strauss, I’m not.

I’d go so far as to say that I think this announcement is bad for the industry at large. Instead of receiving a trailer this week, we now have to wait a further three. When the extended look drops later this month on the 27^th, it’ll be eating the lunch of several games set to release shortly thereafter.

Rebel Wolves’ The Blood of Dawnwalker releases on September 3^rd, Insomniac’s Wolverine on September 15^th and Remedy’s Control: Resonant on September 22^nd, just to name a few. Every single one of these titles deserves their time in the sun, time which they’re no longer getting and time which they thought they’d acquired by shifting release dates to avoid the industry juggernaut that Grand Theft Auto 6 will no doubt become.

Like I said, I’m extremely excited for Grand Theft Auto 6. I’ll also no doubt watch the extended gameplay look when it arrives on YouTube and there’s little doubt in my mind that when I play the game later this year, I’ll love it.

I guess what I’m saying is: I can’t wait for the game to be in my hands (via digital code, so not really) so I can play it, appreciate it as the artistic achievement I hope it is, and — crucially — ignore the company that Rockstar has sadly become.