46% of American gamers saw the GTA VI trailer – but how many plan to buy the game?

When it comes to executing a marketing strategy, understanding why your competitors’ customers are choosing them over you can be just as valuable as knowing your own brand’s strengths. Targeted audience analysis can help marketers understand the ins and outs of a highly specific group - from X/Twitter users to mobile gamers; from Heineken drinkers to Honda drivers - allowing you to position your brand or product in the right place to take advantage.Using its targeting capabilities, YouGov Self-serve - our fully self-serviced research platform - allows marketers to quickly, easily and cheaply survey an audience and ask them whatever they want.In just a few clicks, you can target an audience of your choice (including customers of one or more of 1,500 brands in UK or 2,200 brands in US), and then create your custom poll using our easy survey builder. Within 24 hours, you could have the answers that make the difference between failure and success for your upcoming product launch, brand campaign or crisis management strategy.

In this piece, we used our survey tools to poll Americans who play video games on console or PC for more than an hour a week.

Last week, the trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI was released, and if you thought an official announcement would end the feverish, borderline conspiracist speculation, you were dead wrong. Fans and commentators are already interpreting a 90 second preview for a game about committing crime in pseudo-Miami as if it were a David Lynch movie.

But what do gamers (defined here as those who play video games for over an hour a week) think of the initial trailer for the game?

Our data shows that, of 760 gamers, 46% said they had seen a trailer for the game between December 8-9 2023. To put that in perspective, the trailer launched on December 5.

What’s more, half (48%) of those gamers polled said they were likely to buy the title when it releases in 2025 (or, well, whenever it releases – Rockstar has a history of delays). We also asked gamers without a current-gen console whether the release of GTA VI would make them more likely to buy one: a third (33%) of these gamers said it would.

Two thirds of US gamers have played GTA – and most were underage when they first played

Using YouGov Self-serve, we asked whether gamers had ever played an entry in the Grand Theft Auto franchise before. Some 67% said they had: rising to 76% of male gamers and falling to 57% of female gamers.

Our data also suggests that a majority of gamers were underage when they first played the (generally 17-rated) games. Some 57% were under 17 when they were first introduced to Grand Theft Auto, with 35% being under 12.

Methodology 

Methodology: YouGov polled 760 US gamers who play console or PC games for more than an hour a week on December 8-9, 2023. The survey was carried out through YouGov Surveys: Self-serve. Data is weighted by age, gender, race, political affiliation, education level and region. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Self-serve.