Last month, after years of waiting and plenty of leaks, Rockstar finally unveiled the first official gameplay of Grand Theft Auto 6 via an extended trailer that premiered first on Netflix before hitting other platforms like YouTube. The trailer features what you would expect in a new GTA game, including guns, strippers, drugs, and violence. But if you watch the extended gameplay trailer on China’s popular YouTube-like video-sharing platform Bilibili, you won’t see all of that due to some odd and aggressive censorship.
Earlier this week, GTA Forums user BDF (as spotted by BenVideoTech) posted screenshots of what appeared to be a censored version of the GTA 6 extended look trailer on Bilibili. The video was uploaded to Rockstar’s official Bilibili channel and can still be found on the site as of September 4. However, in this version of the extended gameplay trailer, many parts of it are blurred out, seemingly to hide specific parts of the footage. As documented by BDF and confirmed by Kotaku, it seems that suggestive dancing, bloody bodies, underwear, and smoking are the main elements that have been blurred by Rockstar and Take-Two Interactive. This leads to a few really funny moments, like when Jason is walking through a nightclub, and basically the whole screen is censored.
What’s interesting about this censored version of the video is that Rockstar actually, at first, uploaded an unedited version of the extended trailer to Bilibili. That version stayed up until August 31, when it was reportedly replaced by this censored version. And weirdly, you can still find the original GTA 6 trailers uploaded to Rockstar’s Bilibili channel with zero censorship. It’s only this extended look that covered up cleavage and smoking.
According to BDF, while some believed that this change was simply Rockstar making a compromise to help keep mature content away from kids, other Chinese gamers suggested it shows that Take-Two, like many outside China, believes the country is “closed-off and backward” and heavily censors video games and sexual content. BDF claims Take-Two is also targeting re-uploads of the uncensored trailer and getting them removed. They claim a friend had this happen to them after sharing the original gameplay trailer online and shared a screenshot in support of this claim.
Kotaku contacted Rockstar Games about the censored trailer for more information.
Interestingly, without using a VPN, you can visit Rockstar’s website in China and watch the unedited, uncensored GTA 6 gameplay video with Chinese subtitles. So it seems Rockstar and Take-Two are only censoring the Bilibili version of the extended look. Exactly why is not yet known.