GTA VI Extended Gameplay Preview Attracted Over 4 Million Live Viewers

It’s been known since Rockstar released the first trailer for GTA VI that the upcoming action game would have a massive impact on the gaming industry, and analysts have predicted week-one sales of $4.5 billion when the game launches in November. Following Rockstar’s GTA VI showcase at Gamescom, reports have emerged that, between Netflix, YouTube, and Twitch, nearly 4 million users tuned into the live show—a number that had ripple effects across the internet.

For starters, in the two days since the GTA VI Extended Look video launched on YouTube, it has racked up over 14 million views, while Streams Charts, a tracker for Twitch stream data, reported 3,970,738 peak stream viewers of the Extended Gameplay stream across both the official and unofficial commentary live streams and watch parties for the three hours it tracked viewership.

Netflix and Twitch users reported issues logging into their respective platforms due to increased traffic, while Cloudflare claims that Netflix saw 16% increased traffic during the event, and Twitch and YouTube saw a respective 12% and 39% traffic increase. The latter was likely at least partially due to how ubiquitous YouTube embeds are in news reports and official publisher websites, since Rockstar’s own website saw a global traffic increase of 172% following the trailer’s launch.