'Grand Theft Auto 6' Preview Signals Blockbuster Demand, Analysts Say (cnbc.com) 23
Rockstar Games has released a 26-minute "extended look" at Grand Theft Auto VI, due for release November 19th.
After one day the video had nearly 10 million views on YouTube, and when Netflix streamed the footage, "some viewers had to refresh the page after receiving error messages, indicating high usage levels," reports CNBC:
"Some members briefly experienced an issue accessing Netflix, but we quickly recovered," the company told CNBC. Game streaming platform Twitch, where many viewers were posting their reactions, also experienced bandwidth issues when the trailer was released, according to analysts at Wells Fargo.
CNBC notes predictions the game could become one of the most profitable entertainment products of all time, while the Washington Post predicting it's "about to be the biggest pop media event of the year, if not the decade." The data backs this up. The latest evidence arrived Thursday, when Netflix viewership surged for the long-awaited first look at gameplay footage, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The firm estimates "GTA VI" has already received about 4.6 million preorders. Box office blockbusters like "The Odyssey" take weeks to hit $1 billion. "GTA V" famously did it in three days. Analyst firm Newzoo projects the new game could generate between $3.3 billion and $5.2 billion by the end of its launch week in November...
The influence of the series, created by Rockstar Games, extends beyond sales records. In 2025, "GTA V" accumulated 1.89 billion hours watched despite being a 12-year-old title, according to Stream Hatchet. Much of those hours are spent watching people role-play in "GTA Online," particularly through role-play servers managed by studio Cfx.re, which was acquired by Rockstar in 2023. By 2024, the studio said more than 20 million players used its platforms. GTA role-play involves players pretending to be cops, robbers, hapless retail workers or any functioning member of society within the online game... The game can lift up music sales and streams. Tom Petty's 1989 song "Love is a Long Road" saw stream numbers increased by nearly 37,000 percent on Spotify after it was the soundtrack to the debut "GTA VI" trailer in 2023, according to Universal Music Publishing Group.
Christopher Dring, editor-in-chief and co-founder of analysis firm The Game Business, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" that GTA 5 is still in the top five bestselling video games every year, despite being released 13 years ago, reports CNBC: The response to Thursday's gameplay debut indicated that leaks of the content in advance would not impact the launch commercially, he continued. Rockstar Games, which makes the GTA franchise, had called the leaks "heartbreaking...."
The GTA 6 preview follows a mixed reaction from players to the news that GTA 6 would only be released as a digital download, with no physical disc. The alleged source of the leaked content has claimed the leaks were a protest over Rockstar's release strategy, and Sony's plan to end to new PlayStation disc production in 2028. Speaking on the last earnings call on Aug. 7, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said discs did not make sense to the consumer, adding that its business was "well over 90% digitally distributed." Data from Circana shows the sale of physical game discs in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest level on record, with spending at $85 million.
CNBC notes predictions the game could become one of the most profitable entertainment products of all time, while the Washington Post predicting it's "about to be the biggest pop media event of the year, if not the decade." The data backs this up. The latest evidence arrived Thursday, when Netflix viewership surged for the long-awaited first look at gameplay footage, according to data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The firm estimates "GTA VI" has already received about 4.6 million preorders. Box office blockbusters like "The Odyssey" take weeks to hit $1 billion. "GTA V" famously did it in three days. Analyst firm Newzoo projects the new game could generate between $3.3 billion and $5.2 billion by the end of its launch week in November...
The influence of the series, created by Rockstar Games, extends beyond sales records. In 2025, "GTA V" accumulated 1.89 billion hours watched despite being a 12-year-old title, according to Stream Hatchet. Much of those hours are spent watching people role-play in "GTA Online," particularly through role-play servers managed by studio Cfx.re, which was acquired by Rockstar in 2023. By 2024, the studio said more than 20 million players used its platforms. GTA role-play involves players pretending to be cops, robbers, hapless retail workers or any functioning member of society within the online game... The game can lift up music sales and streams. Tom Petty's 1989 song "Love is a Long Road" saw stream numbers increased by nearly 37,000 percent on Spotify after it was the soundtrack to the debut "GTA VI" trailer in 2023, according to Universal Music Publishing Group.
Christopher Dring, editor-in-chief and co-founder of analysis firm The Game Business, told CNBC's "Squawk Box Europe" that GTA 5 is still in the top five bestselling video games every year, despite being released 13 years ago, reports CNBC: The response to Thursday's gameplay debut indicated that leaks of the content in advance would not impact the launch commercially, he continued. Rockstar Games, which makes the GTA franchise, had called the leaks "heartbreaking...."
The GTA 6 preview follows a mixed reaction from players to the news that GTA 6 would only be released as a digital download, with no physical disc. The alleged source of the leaked content has claimed the leaks were a protest over Rockstar's release strategy, and Sony's plan to end to new PlayStation disc production in 2028. Speaking on the last earnings call on Aug. 7, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick said discs did not make sense to the consumer, adding that its business was "well over 90% digitally distributed." Data from Circana shows the sale of physical game discs in the U.S. has fallen to its lowest level on record, with spending at $85 million.
Re:Nah (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Troll)
The game will be trash ...
You could've had a legitimate point if you'd just continued with the actual reason this game is going to suck: the online portion is a fucking freemium game that isn't even free to initially download. I'm sure the folks who don't mind blowing their rent money on Shark Cards are going to love it, though.
Let me guess (Score:3)
Let me guess, it's exactly the same as every GTA game since GTA3.
Re: (Score:3)
It's going to be GTAV with nicer graphics and then degraded by attempts to maximize DLC and online subscriptions.
Re: (Score:3)
GTA-V Online is a multi-billion dollar enterprise, pretty sure the Rockstar leaks revealed they have a weekly playerbase of something like 9 million, of course they're gonna maximize that.
That's nutty bavarian numbers, a lesser company would have put all their efforts into online instead still delivering an entire single player campaign.
Re: (Score:2)
No guarantee of success through. If people can't carry their character through to the new game, or people are so fed up with microtransactions it could be a big failure stil
Re: (Score:2)
Sure no guarantees but unlike the two high profile Sony games here (I assume Concord is the other one) GTA has no real competition in it's genre space whereas those two had it in spades.
Concord was too late and didn't offer anything new to compete with Overwatch, Valorant and others while Marathon was having to go up against Tarkov and Arc Raiders and anything else in the extraction genre which is hot right now.
Really in this case Rockstar's biggest competitor to GTA6 is GTA5
Re: (Score:2)
They've been roughly, not exactly, the same.
Wow (Score:3)
Unfortunately the voice acting is some of the worse I've seen in a game. Mario 64 (SNES) had less wooden voice acting. Link (from Zelda) has better voice acting, it adds more to the game.
I don't know how they could get such bad voice acting. But wow, what graphics.
Re: Wow (Score:2)
Wow I missed Mario64 on the snes. I only got it on n64 when it *actually* came out.
Re: (Score:2)
Wow I missed Mario64 on the snes. I only got it on n64 when it *actually* came out.
Shows what you know - I had Mario64 on my Genesis!
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know how they could get such bad voice acting.
Maybe generative "AI" is the source of that?
Since graphics are not that important to me (as long as the mechanics work), but voice acting is, I guess I am not interested.
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts... [youtube.com]
The character models and world building is amazing, but the motion is a little uncanny, which makes it hilarious:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts... [youtube.com]
When your company has 2 competing products.... (Score:2)
Video gaming is going to suck for about a year and (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
And yet I am strangely unimpressed and looking forward to some other things. Maybe I am a total outlier, but I do not think so.
Re: (Score:2)
Hopefully the political trolls get addicted playing it as well.
The darkside of hype (Score:2)
As the hype bubble for Rockstar's latest Golden Goose continues to grow, can you
imagine the pressure that exists on the Company / Developers not to fuck this launch
up ?
If you let the hype get this crazy, you had damn well be able to deliver when the release
date drops.
I hope they succeed, but it's rare to see a clean launch and gameplay without some
multi-gigabyte patch within weeks of its release date. Very rare.
See Project Red for their colossal fuck up with Cyberpunk 2077 a some years back.
Re: (Score:2)