Since Rockstar released the first GTA VI trailer, it’s been known that the upcoming action game would have a massive impact on the gaming industry, with analysts predicting first-week sales of $4.5 billion when the game launches in November. Following Rockstar’s GTA VI reveal at Gamescom, reports emerged that between Netflix, YouTube and Twitch, nearly 4 million users tuned in live to the show, a number that had ripple effects across the internet. For starters, in the two days since the GTA VI Extended Look video was released on YouTube, it has racked up over 14 million views, while Streams Charts, a Twitch stream data tracker, reported 3,970,738 peak viewers of the Extended Gameplay stream across official and unofficial commentary livestreams and watch parties during 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 a 16% traffic increase during the event, and Twitch and YouTube saw a respective traffic increase of 12% and 39%. The latter was likely due, at least in part, to how ubiquitous YouTube embeds are in news reports and publishers’ official websites, as Rockstar’s own website saw a 172% global traffic increase following the trailer’s release.
