GTA 6‘s upcoming release is set to dominate November, with most other games fleeing from its enormous shadow, but it does have one major opponent in the form of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. One expert goes as far as to say Nintendo is “the only company in the industry with a fanbase loyal enough to make that bet.”
The GTA 6 and Ocarina of Time remake rivalry was the topic of a Saturday Night Live (SNL) sketch from a few days ago, in which the show fails to make Zelda sound boring and seemingly wasn’t expecting the crowd to react more excitedly about Link’s adventures in Hyrule than Rockstar’s upcoming blockbuster. Oops. That aside, it still makes a valid point about the two wildly different games having a sort-of-Barbenheimer moment next month (two weeks apart, but still), and one expert has weighed in on the matter.
Aakash Gupta served as a leader of product growth at multiple companies, as well as a Fortnite producer at Epic Games, and “spent a decade in product and growth,” now writing “deep dives on product strategy.” In a lengthy new post on Twitter, he discusses the “game of chicken” that comes with working out release date calendars.
“GTA 6 is so big that every major game publisher evacuated November. Except Nintendo, who scheduled a remake of the highest-rated game ever made, a 99 on Metacritic, two weeks in front of it,” Gupta begins.
“The money explains the evacuation. GTA 5 made $1 billion in 3 days back in 2013, faster than any movie, album, or anything else ever sold. DFC Intelligence projects GTA 6 clears $3.2 billion in year one,” he continues. “For scale, Hollywood’s biggest release of 2024, Inside Out 2, grossed $1.7 billion across its entire worldwide run. One game, one year, double that.”
Gupta says that “Call of Duty retreated to late October,” although it should be noted that even though GTA 6 certainly will have been on Activision’s mind (how could it not be?), Modern Warfare 4‘s release date isn’t particularly unusual. While the yearly CoD releases often arrive in November, we’ve seen them arrive in October before, too – just look at Black Ops 6 and 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 to name a couple. Similarly, while he says that “Phantom Blade Zero moved,” it was actually delayed from early September to late October – still missing GTA 6, but actually arriving closer to Rockstar’s launch.
Even so, he’s right to point out that “the rest of the schedule crowded into September and October and left November a ghost town with two names on it.” We’re currently in the midst of one of the busiest release schedules in recent memory, with the likes of Marvel’s Wolverine, Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave, Control Resonant, Silent Hill: Townfall, and The Witcher 3 Remastered all having launched in the last few weeks, with more, including Final Fantasy Resonance and Switch Sports Resort, to come.
“I watched this dynamic from inside Epic Games,” Gupta says. “Release calendars are a game of chicken, and when the biggest truck on the road picks a lane, everyone else swerves.
“Nintendo didn’t swerve. The math is clean. GTA 6 doesn’t run on their hardware, the audiences barely overlap, and a remake of the best-reviewed game in history gets two full weeks of oxygen before the asteroid lands,” he continues. “They’re the only company in the industry with a fanbase loyal enough to make that bet.”
As for the outcome of this rivalry, Gupta suggests that “the crowd cheering louder for Zelda than the punchlines tells you how this ends.” He adds: “The biggest entertainment event of the decade is a video game launch, and SNL just went where the audience already is.”
It’ll be interesting to see how things shake out, but again, Ocarina of Time does at least have two weeks before GTA 6 rocks up and grabs the full attention of the industry. Reacting to the Zelda remake’s release date previously, Krysta Yang, former PR manager for Nintendo of America, said she thought it was “great,” because “if it happened, where this was on the same day as GTA, and I saw that this was a faithful remake, I would be playing GTA.”