GTA VI gameplay tops Netflix with 31M views, speeds past Robert De Niro and Outer Banks

Netflix had every reason to expect a dominant week on its own turf. The final season of Outer Banks premiered, and Robert De Niro returned to the platform in a new thriller in which he tracks down a serial killer alongside Adam Scott. By most reasonable expectations, one of these should have topped the charts. Instead, both were upstaged by twenty-seven minutes of video game footage.

GTA VI is a winner

Netflix pulled off something it had never attempted before, securing an exclusive first look at gameplay from Grand Theft Auto VI, one of the most anticipated titles in gaming history. The exclusivity window was brief, lasting just six hours before the footage made its way to YouTube and other platforms, yet that was more than enough time to rack up 31.1 million views. According to Tudum, Netflix's own data arm, that made it the most-watched title on the service for the entire week, ahead of everything else in its considerable lineup.

The rest of the leaderboard tells its own story about how decisively the game won out. De Niro's The Whisper Man landed in second place with just over 20 million views, followed by the Spanish thriller Facing El Chapo in third. On the series side, Death of the Pastor's Wife topped the charts with 19 million views, pushing the long-awaited final season of Outer Banks down to third place, a somewhat humbling finish for a show closing out its run.

Why the preview landed

The footage offered fans their first substantial look at the open-world crime game ahead of its planned November 19 release, and it marks the first time Netflix has featured marketing for an unreleased video game on its platform. The stakes behind that footage are considerable. The previous installment, Grand Theft Auto V, has sold more than 230 million copies since 2013, and expectations for this follow-up have positioned it as one of the most lucrative entertainment releases of all time, gaming or otherwise.

Developed and published by Rockstar Games, GTA VI is the eighth mainline entry in the franchise and the sixteenth release overall. The story is set in the fictional state of Leonida, a clear stand-in for Florida, and follows a criminal couple at the center of the narrative: Jason Duval, a former Army veteran who worked for local drug runners in the Leonida Keys, and Lucia Caminos, the series' first mandatory female protagonist, who was imprisoned at Leonida Penitentiary after fighting to protect her family back in Liberty City. When a bank heist goes wrong, the pair find themselves caught up in a conspiracy that spans the entire state, forced to rely on one another to survive it.

The scale of anticipation surrounding the game isn't new. Its first trailer, released back in 2023, has already accumulated 293 million views on YouTube and broken several viewership records along the way, so this level of interest has been building for some time.

The lead-up to the premiere wasn't without complications. More than a dozen clips from the game leaked online in the days beforehand, prompting Take-Two Interactive Software, the company behind the franchise, to subpoena Discord in an effort to identify the source of the leak.