Rockstar's extended look at Grand Theft Auto 6 debuted with an unconventional strategy: the video was made exclusive to Netflix for a few hours before being released elsewhere online, including YouTube. According to a Variety report cited by PC Gamer, Netflix said the showcase pulled in 31.1 million views between its August 27 debut and August 30, the cutoff for the streamer's weekly Top 10 rankings.
That total made the GTA 6 reveal Netflix's most-watched title for the week. It was categorized as a movie on the platform and topped the English-language film chart in 87 of 93 countries, per PC Gamer. GamesRadar+ reported that the next most-watched movie that week was The Whisper Man, a thriller that premiered on Netflix the day after the GTA 6 video went up, with 23.2 million views, while the top TV show for the week, the documentary Death of the Pastor's Wife, drew 19 million views. GamesRadar+ noted that Netflix's biggest-ever debut week for English-language content remains Stranger Things season 5, which logged 59.6 million views.
Comparing Netflix's numbers to YouTube's is complicated, according to both outlets, because the two platforms measure views differently. YouTube counts any click that starts a video as one view regardless of how much is watched, while Netflix calculates total hours viewed and divides that by the runtime. Since the GTA 6 extended look runs about 27 minutes, GamesRadar+ estimated it generated around 14 million hours of viewing time on Netflix in its debut week. PC Gamer noted that YouTube had logged 17 million total views on the platform since the showcase went live there, while GamesRadar+ separately reported that GTA 6 trailer 2 reached 19 million YouTube views within just a few hours—either way, YouTube is free and requires no subscription, unlike Netflix, which required a login and payment to watch.
Take-Two, GTA 6's publisher, has not disclosed financial details of the Netflix deal, according to PC Gamer, though the outlet speculated that money was likely a significant factor. PC Gamer also suggested the success of this exclusivity arrangement could inspire similar deals for other major gaming reveals in the future, floating potential future exclusivity windows for franchises like Call of Duty or PlayStation's State of Play showcases as gaming continues to reach mainstream audiences.