Take-Two Interactive's (TTWO) subsidiary, video game publisher Rockstar Games, has created some buzz in the past 24 hours. Originally scheduled for this morning, the company released the first trailer for the next installment of their popular Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series early last night after the video was leaked on X (formerly Twitter). The game will be set for a 2025 release and will be titled Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA VI). The trailer has already broken the record for the most views of a YouTube video in under 24 hours (as of this writing it is 77.3 million), and mind you, it hasn't even been a full 24 hours since the video was put up.

There is a lot of interest in GTA VI, especially seeing as the previous installment from over a decade ago ranks as the second best-selling video game of all time; grossing over a billion dollars in sales in the first three days of its release. Additionally, the upcoming game follows the publisher's last major title release, Red Dead Redemption 2, in 2018 which has earned the rank of the eighth best-selling game of all time. Despite any excitement from gamers, investors have been less receptive to TTWO's trailer as the stock is trading down 1.7% today. Below we show the performance of the stock surrounding other debuts of Rockstar Games' trailers and title releases going back to GTA: San Andreas in 2004 (this was the earliest example of a debut trailer for a game that we could find).

The GTA VI trailer targeted a 2025 release date for the game, which follows the formula of other recent releases with a roughly two-year lag time between a trailer and a game's debut. As shown, performance in the year following a trailer debut has been somewhat mixed, but TTWO has often traded higher between a Rockstar game's first trailer and when the game was released. So with the trailer out, investors and gamers alike will now be playing the waiting game until 2025.

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