Update: Oct. 18: Rockstar's third 9 a.m. Eastern tweet in as many days ends all the suspense, officially announcing Red Dead Redemption 2 for the Fall of 2017. The official teaser site promises the game will "provide the foundation for a brand new online multiplayer experience" but only includes PS4 and Xbox One logos, much to the dismay of hopeful PC gamers hoping for a port. A trailer is promised for release Thursday morning.

Even before this morning's official announcement, though, stock in Rockstar owner Take Two Interactive ticked up five percent yesterday merely on the expectation of a new game.

Original story:

For most game makers, hyping up a big-name franchise sequel that's been in the works for years is a big hairy deal. If you're Bethesda, you'll come back to E3 just to devote a huge chunk of your press conference to walking through the beginning of the new Fallout. If you're Nintendo, you'll devote your entire E3 booth to your big Zelda sequel , ignoring literally everything else your company makes. If you're Valve you... well, you just go silent about Half-Life for over a decade and leave it at that, I guess.

If you're Rockstar, though, all you have to do is put out a couple of tweets strongly hinting at a new Red Dead Redemption game for everyone to go completely. Utterly. Nuts.

It all started Sunday morning, with this unassuming tweet covering the Rockstar logo in red paint. In case that was too subtle, Rockstar followed it up almost precisely 24 hours later with another tweet, this time showing seven familiar looking Old West-y silhouettes marching toward the foreground with an orange sun low over the horizon.

The first tweet got over 100,000 retweets and 177,000 likes in just over a day. The second tweet is already over 40,000 retweets and 56,000 likes in just over an hour. At this point, Rockstar could probably drip out the entire opening trailer for the game, frame by frame, via daily tweets, and the excitement likely wouldn't die down until it was done.

Red Dead is one of the few franchises that can generate this kind of interest based on so little concrete information. Part of that is sheer size: as of 2015, Red Dead Redemption had shipped 14 million copies since its 2010 release. That might not match up with the 65 million units that a game like Grand Theft Auto V has shipped, but it's not bad considering that the 2004 predecessor, Red Dead Revolver, didn't sell even a million copies.

One big thing that Red Dead has going for it, currently, is that it has yet to be overexposed. Top-selling franchises like Call of Duty or Assassin's Creed justifiably generate a lot of interest from the press and fans. But those series see new games come out practically every year, like clockwork, which makes it hard to really be surprised or overwhelmed by word of a new game.

Even top-level franchises that spread their releases out—Grand Theft Auto, The Legend of Zelda, The Elder Scrolls, and Fallout—have by now generated enough sequels, spin-offs, and DLC episodes over the years to partially saturate the market. Red Dead is the rare franchise that's undeniably huge and also still relatively fresh.

Rockstar also cultivates the power of its own marketing by almost completely ignoring the press. The company rarely shows early preview builds at E3 or other major trade shows where press (and fans) gather, almost never grants interviews with its executives or designers, and barely sends out early review copies of their games before launch.

The response to Rockstar's two most recent tweets shows why it can get away with this kind of standoffish attitude. For the most part, game makers tolerate the press because they want us to help spread word of their upcoming game. They carefully grant access to journalists and critics, dripping information and early preview/review builds of their games through the press' filter because they want to reach our audience—an audience that's often skeptical of direct marketing and blatant advertising.

When a developer gets to be big as Rockstar, though, the calculus changes. When Rockstar's massive, rabid fan base can spread something as simple as a red-soaked logo through tens of thousand of retweets almost instantaneously, they can essentially serve as their own press outlet, no filter needed. When a parched public is thirsty for the barest hints of information about the next game in your big franchise, the press arguably needs you more than you need the press.

There are few other companies in the game industry with the scale and fan base to get away with this kind of thing. Valve is surely one of them—imagine a tweet with three copies of the Half-Life logo, followed by one with a date. But even the famously press-resistant Steam-maker pulled back the curtain a bit for its recent hardware rollout, attending the Game Developers Conference and other shows to build up press hype for the HTC Vive and Steam Machines.

Bethesda generated similar levels of direct-to-consumer hype with a countdown clock that presaged the announcement of Fallout 4 last year, but at least that countdown led to a relatively detail-filled trailer, not a vague and largely uninformative image. And while Nintendo to some extent goes around the press and straight to gamers with its Nintendo Direct info dumps , the company also often hosts preview events, grants interviews, and sends review builds to critics early and widely.

In an industry where companies work hard to control their own images, Rockstar is still largely unique in the amount of control it can exercise. Rather than massaging the press, the company can keep its head down and focus on making games, confident that a couple of vague tweets are all it needs to get that huge, devoted fan base back on the hype train again.