Realistically, we would expect the marketing push to start towards the end of 2015, possibly close to the holiday season as it’s a time when gamers pay a lot of attention to promotional materials for new games. The sooner they get the ball rolling, the better – the game already has a bit of hype around it and its developers can definitely benefit from getting people even more excited.
In the least, they should clear up the rumors about the game’s protagonists, as this seems to be the most interesting topic for fans at the moment. Even just releasing a brief official statement that talks about the main characters should generate a lot of hype for it.
So far though, all we have are rumors and we don’t know if there is any truth to any of these claims or not. “Mafia 3” may not even be being prepared for a 2016 launch – and while this would be disappointing to its fans, it’s at least better than getting a rushed release.
2K are definitely a company that knows how to polish a product properly before pushing it out on the market though, so we don’t really expect them to rush the game for no reason. Especially when it hasn’t even been announced officially yet, so they are under no real pressure to make any statements about it soon.