GTA 6 gameplay could be coming very soon based on Rockstar's history.

As weird as GTA 6's marketing push has seemed, it's on par with previous Rockstar launches

For a game that’s scheduled to launch in just five months, we sure haven’t seen much of Grand Theft Auto 6 yet. Despite first revealing the game in 2023, we’ve only gotten two trailers, a boatload of screenshots, and a look at the game’s box art. We haven’t seen any actual gameplay yet, and haven’t learned much at all about how it will differ from GTA 5. We didn’t even get a new trailer to hype up preorders when Rockstar revealed GTA 6’s $80 price tag.

Conventional wisdom would tell you that we’ll learn a lot more before Nov. 19, but GTA 6 isn’t really conventional. If Rockstar surprise launched it today, there’s a good chance it would still become the highest-selling game of all time without players ever seeing another second of it. It’s the rare game that transcends the rules of marketing; the less players know about it, the more excited they seem to be. Even if that’s true, Rockstar historically likes to roll out the red carpet for its games in the months before their launch. You can get an idea of what we’re likely to see this summer and fall in the build up to GTA 6.

Let’s turn the clock back 15 years to chart the history of Grand Theft Auto 5. It was November 2011 when Rockstar dropped the debut trailer for its now-legendary open-world game. We would get a second trailer one year later in 2012, though it has since been removed from Rockstar’s YouTube channel. By comparison, we had a slightly longer wait between GTA 6’s first two trailers, but only by a few months. So far, so similar.

The actual marketing blitz for GTA 5 didn’t actually begin until April 30, 2013, just a few months before the game’s Sep. 17 release date. That day, Rockstar dropped a three-part trailer dedicated to the game’s protagonists. As that was happening, select members of the press (including Polygon) were invited out to Rockstar’s New York City headquarters for a preview event. Rockstar didn’t let journalists go hands-on with the game; instead, it gathered them to show off a 30-minute tour of Los Santos. Official write-ups from the event dropped on May 2, giving players tons of new gameplay details.

A proper gameplay trailer followed on July 9. The five-minute video featured a narrator explaining the setting, story, and core gameplay features like heists. Then on Aug. 15, we got another narrated gameplay trailer, but centered around Grand Theft Auto Online. Those were followed by a one-minute “official trailer” on Aug. 29, giving players their final look at the game before launch.

Rockstar didn’t do a massive round of hands-on sessions with press ahead of the game’s launch. Instead, only a few outlets published their impressions ahead of Sept. 17. IGN locked down an exclusive English-language preview, published on Sept. 3, as part of a series of exclusive stories in the lead-up to release day. (Rockstar even published a blog post hyping up IGN’s coverage.) JeuxActu published a preview in French on that same day, while GamesAktuell ran a preview in German that’s no longer available online. Reviews dropped one day before launch on Sept. 16, and the rest is history.

Much of this timeline applied to Red Dead Redemption 2 in its two-year road from announcement in 2016 to release in 2018. We got three trailers, hands-off previews from select outlets, a few hands-on impressions a few weeks before launch, a set of gameplay trailers, and a launch trailer in that span.

If that pattern holds up, there’s good reason to believe that we’ll get gameplay trailers for GTA 6 later this summer, alongside guided previews from select outlets. As long and weird as the hype train has felt, everything has actually been unfolding pretty much according to previous Rockstar plans — aside from the fact that delays added an extra year to the timeline. There’s a good chance we’ll learn something new about the game every month until November from here on out.

Don’t take history as gospel, though. GTA 6 is a much bigger and more high-stakes game than anything Rockstar has made before. It can’t afford to flop, and it’s possible that we see a more tightly-controlled rollout because of that. Though frankly, the lead-up to both GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 were already as laser-focused as you can get; it’s not like Rockstar was showing these games off to every gaming publication and letting content creators go hands-on months before launch. If you need to see gameplay before you feel confident locking in an $80 preorder, hold the line just a little while longer.