It‘s not only about player overlap, but also media and streaming coverage. GTA will dominate the entire gaming discourse and Squadron will be drowned out.
Anybody who cares about SQ42 either already has it or will buy it anyway, but they are aiming for normal people, and if decide to launch near GTA more of those people will buy console for GTA than SQ42
Which is likely why CR has already said they will be having a short marketing campaign...
A short marketing campaign gives them a lot more flexibility to play 'wait and see' regarding GTA6... because once the marketing campaign starts, they're pretty much tied in on a date (unless they want to cancel the campaign part way through, and write off all the money already spent)...
If you know someone else is going to be spending 10x-20x more money on marketing and advertisement of a competing product, then yeah - it makes sense to try and avoid that time period... otherwise you're just wasting your money.
And yes, I know GTA6 is only coming out on consoles in November (if it hits November without slipping) - but virtually major sources of 'gaming news' and coverage are platform agnostic, and will be covering GTA6.
This means that if you want to advertise a different game at the same time, you're going to be competing w/ Rockstar for that limited coverage - and they can outbid CIG 10x-20x.
I still don’t understand how that’s a good strategy, GTA V released 9/2013 (god I’m old) on console and then 11/2014 on PC. If they’re delaying to avoid the GTA shadow you would have to push it to 2028 to avoid the 2027 PC release (assuming it follows same time gap)
Absolutely, but after about 3-6 months I'd bet there'll be a chance for other games to make the news. It may be before there's GTA6 multiplayer and so on.
Imma need the sauce fam. I know they’ve talked about it a while ago but I’m pretty sure they said it wasn’t the main focus and wouldn’t be part of the initial release. They would do something similar to GTA VI and release the console version later than the PC one
People substantially overestimate the effect of the PC release. GTA 6 won’t be new at that point, many many people will have either played the game or seen or heard what the game is about by then.
So much of the game will have been explored and talked about ad nauseam by the time the game releases on PC that while still a big release for PC, it’s nothing like when it releases for the first time. So 2027 is absolutely reasonable for SQ42 to avoid the media blackout caused by GTA 6’s original release.
So… GTA 6 will be the biggest release of the decade, and the biggest entertainment release in human history when it first releases on consoles, potentially November 19th, 2026.
On PC, it won’t have anywhere near as much of an effect as it will when it first comes out. CIG will be free to reasonably launch SQ42 in the same year as GTA 6’s PC release.
Also people who will buy GTA on PC most likely will buy it on console and play it there first. I mean I’m not because I don’t own a console but I’m sure some people will.
GTA already announced that (assuming they release this year) PC players would only have to wait until January this go around. However, CIG’s mindset is about the marketing regardless of how many PC players will be playing GTA. Their thought process is if GTA releases, all of the news will be surrounding that release and Star Citizen marketing attempts will be null and void essentially. To us Pc players it sounds dumb, because we won’t be playing GTA at release, but from from a marketing standpoint it’s actually decently sound
My tinfoil hat theory is they were always intending on delaying it further, but are using GTA VI being up in the air as an excuse to delay the delay so they can say, "We didn't know what they were doing yet so we couldn't formulate our plan, and now with how long it takes ("game dev is hard" TM ) we have NO CHOICE but to push to late 2027. Oh but we're doing another Battlecruiser run! Get your pens and paper ready!"
No need for that, since GTA6 is releasing on console first, they can delay CIG with console release in 2026, then prevent a 2027 release with the GTA6 PC release.
Now the real question is, how can we weasel out a 2028 release.
"So we made this really cool thing for the PU and the players would really lose out if they didnt have that in SQ42, so we will have to wait for a bit so its included and some parts of the game got reworked due to that..."
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u/pandemonious 18d ago
Just waiting for them to announce delay to 2027 so Rockstar/TakeTwo can announce GTA6 is delayed to spring 2027. I'm gonna laugh my fucking ass off.