GTA 6 preview hits 31.1m Netflix views in 4 days

Grand Theft Auto 6 didn't need a full game to dominate Netflix's Top 10. The 27-minute extended look pulled 31.1 million views between its Thursday, August 27 premiere and Sunday, August 30, the cutoff for Netflix's weekly rankings, making it the platform's most-watched title of the week, according to Variety's report on Netflix's own data.

It ranked first on Netflix’s English language films list in 87 of the 93 countries in which it monitors content, beating out The Whisper Man featuring Robert De Niro as a thriller, which received 23.2 million views in the same period.

It is viewed as the total hours viewed of the film divided by the runtime on Netflix, unlike YouTube, which counts each individual play as a view.

Rockstar gave Netflix six hours before publishing the same content on its YouTube channel at 9pm EST.

This has gone on to receive more than 17 million views alone. This cross-platform release strategy makes it difficult to compare YouTube and Netflix numbers, as they both indicate a marketing approach that wants to take over all platforms.

Netflix’s US mobile audience was reported to have increased by 35% hourly during the first window of the premiere. The increase is 50% higher than the 12-week average of the platform.

Traffic went up by 125%, which resulted in the service crashing for a brief period. Take-Two’s chairman, Strauss Zelnick, had already dismissed the importance of the premiere event within the bigger scheme of things, stating that it is just one of the appetisers before the actual marketing begins.

The game would come out for release on November 19, but on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S only. From the stats of Netflix alone, the coming marketing efforts by Rockstar until the day of the release are sure to generate similar attention.