GTA6’s LOVE cover is the sixth of six

On 2 October LOVE showed the world the sixth cover of its 27th issue: artwork of Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos made by Rockstar, with an interview inside. Almost every relay described it as the cover, singular, and that is the version that travelled — “LOVE Magazine has put Grand Theft Auto VI on the cover of its 27th issue”, “puts Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos on its cover”, “featuring protagonists Jason and Lucia on the cover”. The seller’s own listing for the issue tells a different story, and it happens to be the only document in the whole release that puts a number on anything.

The listing is on KD Presse, the French distributor the coverage itself cited for the price, and it enumerates six covers for Love n°27, all at €25.00: Francesca Albanese by Ilyes Griyeb; Alex Consani and Anok Yai by Nick Waplington; Ms. Lauryn Hill by Ryan McGinley; Ghali by Casper Kofi; Young Miko by Luke Gilford; and “Artwork featuring Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos by Rockstar Games”. In the issue’s own description the game’s cover comes sixth and last, and the distributor’s default selection is the Albanese cover. That makes the object different from the one the coverage described: a variant among six, in a magazine whose other five cover stars are a UN special rapporteur, two supermodels, a rapper and two singers. The game has been placed in a lineup rather than given the issue.

The same page settles two numbers the coverage wobbled on. The price is €25.00 and not €24: one relay of the same listing converted €24 into about $27.02, two others printed €25, and the store’s own variant data reads 2500 cents on each of the six. Stock is legible as well. Read on 3 October, three of the six covers were available and three were not — Ghali, Young Miko and the Rockstar artwork were the ones gone — so the claim that the issue “sold out within minutes of preorder” is true of individual covers rather than of the issue, and the game’s cover is one you can no longer order. The Rockstar variant was created in the store on 2 October, the day of the reveal, and read unavailable the next day.

What the issue contains is thinner than the count of covers suggests, and the distributor’s own copy is the clearest evidence of it. It describes the feature as a conversation with “the team behind Rockstar Games’ upcoming Grand Theft Auto VI game” — nobody named — about “their decade of obsessive world building, the research trips that shaped Leonida”, and the American Dream now, closing on the line that in a world this dense nobody you meet in GTA VI will be an extra. The names arrived later and by instalments: RockstarINTEL and VICE carried Rob Nelson, Rupert Humphries, Elizabeth Gauvey-Kern and Alexa D’Agostino; the magazine’s own Instagram excerpts then added a fifth, the open-world writing director James Horton. Game Informer’s issue 382, four days earlier, put Aaron Garbut and three other staff on the record. Humphries is the only name the two magazines share, which is what a byline budget looks like when it is being spent.

Set against the campaign rather than against the issue, the trend is one this site has been measuring. Dazed had the pair on its autumn cover on 26 August, 85 days before launch. Game Informer revealed its cover on 25 September, 55 days out. LOVE revealed this one on 2 October, 48 days out, with copies shipping from 5 October. Three covers in six weeks, each closer to 19 November than the last, and the newest is the first of them to be a variant among six at a fixed retail price instead of the issue’s own face. The magazine cover has not stopped being a marketing instrument; the sixth-of-six structure shows what kind of instrument it has become.

What remains unestablished is what the coverage could not supply either. Nobody has published a page count for the LOVE feature — the listing gives the format, 23 by 30 centimetres, and a weight of 1,250 grams, and no length. And nobody has worked out whether the four stills released with the cover are new to Rockstar’s own gallery, which is the only place the question can be settled: that page held 70 screenshots in late August and 99 on 30 September, a jump of 29 images that arrived without a Newswire post, and the relay that headlined “4 New GTA6 Screenshots” still carries an address that says two. For anyone buying the game on 19 November, none of this moves a date, a price or an edition. It moves the question of what a cover is for.