Sony's new PS5 ad sells GTA 6 with 15-month-old footage

Sony built its biggest console ad of the year partly around GTA 6, and it could not put a single new frame of the game in it. The It Happens on PS5 campaign, published on the PlayStation Blog on August 17 by Sony's global marketing VP Isabelle Tomatis, names "the highly anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto VI" alongside Marvel's Wolverine, 007 First Light and God of War Laufey as the reasons to own a PS5. Every GTA 6 shot in the minute-long spot comes from Trailer 2, which Rockstar released in May 2025.

What is actually in the ad

The game appears three times, always briefly: Jason jumping into a getaway car with Lucia driving, Jason on a motorcycle with a seaplane low behind him, and Jason slamming a car trunk near the end. All three are Trailer 2 shots. The jet ski chase that Sony's own blog post highlights, and that some readers assumed was Vice City, is live action with actors — not game footage at all.

What changed is presentation. Comparisons published by GTA BOOM and Notebookcheck line up the same frames side by side: Trailer 2's cinematic letterbox bars are gone and the shots fill a standard 16:9 screen, so you see slightly more of each one; the getaway shot reads brighter; a fresh sound effect was layered over the trunk slam; and the motorcycle shot is staged as a billboard on what looks like a real building in Warsaw. None of that is a change to the game. It is a color grade, a crop and an audio pass by a console marketing team.

That distinction matters, because the frame-by-frame threads that followed the ad were arguing about a downgrade and about Lucia's face. A brighter re-grade of a year-old clip cannot tell you anything about how GTA 6 runs in August 2026.

The interesting part is what Sony did not have

Sony is the partner with the GTA 6 marketing arrangement, the console the game has been sold against since pre-orders opened, and the budget for a global campaign with physical installations in several countries. Nine days before Rockstar's own Extended Look, the newest GTA 6 footage available to that partner was fifteen months old.

That is the cleanest evidence yet of how tightly Rockstar is holding the material. Take-Two's own CEO has already described the August 27 premiere as an early course in a longer marketing meal, which fits: nobody outside Rockstar gets fresh footage until Rockstar decides to release it, and the next time that happens is on a Netflix stream at 3 p.m. ET on August 27.

Until then, anything circulating that looks like new GTA 6 gameplay is either recycled, re-cut or fabricated — and this ad, made by the company with the most to gain from showing something new, is the proof.