GTA – “Just the Facts!”

GTA’s team was middle of the pack in our “Community First” scoring 

As a follow up to my post on “Community First” game companies I’ll go deeper into another one of the game teams we studied – The GTA online team. 

SOCIAL MEDIA ANALYSIS

GTA has the third highest total of social media volume (#1 Fortnite) but only a fraction actually comes from Rockstar with just 392 pieces of content from the dev team over the six-month period we studied (only Lost Ark published less). GTA is also our second worst performer as a % of total “engagement” content published at only 23%. Only Destiny 2 was lower. 

Some of this stems from the fact that Rockstar for the most part does not support individual game social media channels but rather consolidates around “Rockstar” social media channels. 

OPPORTUNITY

GTA’s fan base is massive but toxic and juvenile. Perhaps this is why Rockstar engages so infrequently. There could be an opportunity to lean into the snarky attitude the players have and embrace it to allow for a more self-deprecating social media personality. Also, giving players of a specific game (like GTA) their own separate social media destinations to express themselves.

COMMUNITY ANALYSIS

Grand Theft Auto Online has a massive community within Discord, and most users note the lack of involvement/company engagement outside of the twitter announcements and updates. Several users do not feel heard and are unaware of the “Feedback” section on the official website.

The biggest fan operated Discord that GTA has is a very toxic place and has the lowest net sentiment ranking of any of the games we analyzed.

OPPORTUNITY

Rockstar was ahead of their time, creating Rockstar Social Club as the gateway for the community to interact with each other 15 years ago. But as social media evolved and community channels like Discord gained prominence Rockstar has not kept pace. The community has evolved and has a more standardized way of communicating on Discord and Rockstar has let that go with little involvement. A big missed opportunity to embrace Discord or support it more directly.

ENGAGEMENT ANALYSIS

When interacting with its community, GTA tends to focus on informational content and not engage with it. They are very infrequent with follow-up comments or posts and are completely absent from some channels like TikTok. Note- they have an official TikTok with over 770K followers and 0 videos posted. 

Of all the games reviewed, GTA Online is the only game that does not have its own platforms. You can only find GTA’s posts on Rockstar Games’ social channels, including other titles such as Red Dead Redemption and Bully. This is evident in their engagement ranking of 9 out of 10 with only 23% of their content intended for engagement.

#community #GTA