In 2023, there are a lot of things I won’t do on Twitter. The biggest one is use it. But in my Twitter heyday, one of the things I avoided was watching videos on their. The quality was subpar. Aspect ratios were weird. It was just a suboptimal experience. However, Rockstar was called out by the Twitter CEO to upload the trailer to GTA 6. Rockstar acquiesced.
Rockstar’s headaches
Rockstar has not had that much of a good start to this week. Over the weekend, someone leaked footage of GTA 6. Then, hours before release, someone leaked the trailer. That prompted Rockstar to go ahead and make it live on YouTube.
Then something unusual happened. People started complaining that the trailer wasn’t released on Twitter. This is something I didn’t expect to hear as a legitimate complaint. Some people felt it too cumbersome to click a link and go to YouTube. I mean, you could just watch the YouTube video from Twitter. But they’d rather watch a worse quality version on Twitter.
Misleading Metrics
What’s funny here is the context added to the tweet. Twitter counts views as seeing a tweet while scrolling. YouTube counts views by people actually watching and engaging. It also adds that the video had been viewed 64 million times on YouTube 15 minutes before it was supposed to go live initially.
As of 11:31 PM ET, here’s what those numbers look like.
Twitter Supression?
But what’s odd here is what was reportedly happening on Twitter during all this. There were reports coming in stating that Twitter was suppressing the initial tweet from Rockstar if you were viewing replies to it. I was not able to replicate the issue, but Twitter may have since “fixed” the issue.
Rockstar gives in
All this kind of settled down when Rockstar finally gave in and posted the trailer to Twitter. The video posted (granted it was posted at 4:25 PM ET) has only garnered 10.8 million views as of this writing.
Many people, including myself, are speculating that Rockstar may not have intended to place the video on Twitter in the first place. After all, Twitter’s been in a bit of hot water with brands lately. I, again, would also like to entertain that why would I upload my 4K masterpiece to Twitter.
It’s like trying to watch an IMAX movie on HyperCard.
Source: IGN
