In a rare break from tradition, Rockstar dropped the GTA 6 trailer roughly 15 hours ahead of schedule in direct response to a leak.
"Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube," the publisher said in a tweet, no-doubt simultaneously garrisoning an army of lawyers.
It's a brief and straightforward comment, but also a surprising one coming from Rockstar, one of the blackest of the games industry's notoriously opaque black boxes. Rockstar has declined to comment on or otherwise deal with leaks of any sort for years and years, apart from copyright takedowns that is. It seems this one was too big to ignore even after the initial leak was removed, to say nothing of mirror uploads.
Rockstar's tweet was posted at 6:10 pm EST, a little over half an hour after the GTA 6 trailer initially leaked via a Twitter account which was struck down just minutes before the official trailer went live. Presumably because it didn't want the debut of its hotly anticipated open-world game to be marred by confusion (and a hideous bitcoin watermark), nor did it want to miss out on the views, Rockstar was quick to get the trailer out.
At the time of writing, including the pre-release engagement, it's amassed over 2.2 million likes on YouTube in 36 minutes. The YouTube view counter can't keep up and is stuck at around 87,000. Rockstar's tweet, meanwhile, has already brought in 11.8 million views according to Twitter's (quite fuzzy) metrics, with thousands of likes pouring in every few seconds. It's on track to become the highest-engagement gaming post in the history of the platform.
An unfortunate road to release for the GTA 6 trailer - but ultimately one of the most exciting ever.
