GTA 6 previews achieve 31.1 million views on Netflix

Grand Theft Auto 6 didn't need a full game to dominate Netflix's Top 10. The 27-minute previews pulled 31.1 million views from their Thursday, August 27 premiere to Sunday, August 30, the cutoff for Netflix's weekly rankings, according to Netflix.

Grand Theft Auto 6 didn’t need a full game to dominate Netflix’s Top 10. The 27-minute previews pulled 31.1 million views from their Thursday, August 27 premiere to Sunday, August 30, the cutoff for Netflix’s weekly rankings, according to Netflix.

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

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

Six hours are given to Netflix by Rockstar before the same content is published on its YouTube channel at 9 p.m. EST.

This has achieved 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 aims to take over all platforms.

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

Traffic went up by 125 percent, 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 is set to release on November 19, but on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S only. From the stats on Netflix alone, the coming marketing efforts by Rockstar until the day of the release are sure to generate similar attention.