GTA 6 Trailer 3 Is Dropping At the Worst Time and in the Weirdest Possible Way

It took all summer, but we’re finally getting a third look at Grand Theft Auto 6. Developer Rockstar Games announced Thursday that the long-anticipated “trailer 3” will be released at 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, Aug. 27, via… Netflix? Sure! Why not? On one hand, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that Rockstar is eschewing traditional promotional models, given that GTA 6 is just about the most anticipated entertainment release of all time. The open-world crime game, which returns the series to its Miami-inspired setting of Vice City, hasn’t seen its hype train derailed by delays, by years of steadily heightening expectations, or by an abject lack of any gameplay footage to date. Its first trailer, from December 2023, has racked up nearly 300 million views on YouTube. May 2025’s second trailer also put up staggering numbers: nearly 200 million views. As my colleague Giovanni Colantonio has noted, an unconventional preview strategy is par for the course for Rockstar Games. Where most game developers follow a typical roadmap — drop a teaser, then a gameplay trailer, then a story trailer, then follow those with a round of previews, interviews, and reviews — Rockstar plays its cards