Early yesterday morning, Rockstar made the clandestine announcement that Grand Theft Auto V does in fact exist and, more importantly, a trailer for the game will be arriving on November 2, 2011. As news of the game's announcement spread, players the world over were not the only ones taking notice. Investors on Wall Street were quick to buy into publisher Take-Two's stock. The mass buy of the company's stock has caused its value to jump 6% to close at $15.22 yesterday. Take-Two's stock traded as high as $15.71 and had settled to $15.36 in after hours trading.

Industry analyst Michael Pachter has already speculated that Grand Theft Auto is no longer the dominant mainstream franchise, and has been overtaken by Activision's Call of Duty franchise owing to its annualized nature. However, GTA IV was certainly not taken as a sign that Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive were done with the series.

Now it seems the infamous publisher and developer duo simply love to take their time with each game, waiting until now to confirm that GTA V was even in development. Needless to say many are hoping that the trailer has a release date also attached to it along with some information about which city the game will take place in. In fact, sources are already claiming that GTAV will take place in Los Angeles, or some fictional facsimile.

With such an immediate impact felt on the company's stock prices, what would happen if the trailer has a release date attached to it? Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia told Gamasutra that the stock price could increase even further if the trailer has a release date attached to it.

"Still, if Rockstar announces the official release date for the title, in conjunction with the release of the trailer, we think it will be positive for the shares."

A further increase in the stock's price probably seems pretty obvious to all, but by how much more the price would increase is uncertain. However, Bhatia also says that his firm speculates that GTAV will sell as many as 25 million copies. While some would cite all this as evidence of an incredibly fickle stock market, the sales projections for the game sound pretty realistic. And if all of this stock market craziness is possible with just an announcement more Wall Street weirdness is sure to follow as the game's marketing blitz continues.

Grand Theft Auto V has no release date or confirmed platforms at this time, but is expected to be released sometime in 2012.

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Source: Gamasutra