After 10 long years, our first look at the next GTA game is finally here with the launch of the Grand Theft Auto 6 reveal trailer following just an absolute cavalcade of leaks. The minute and a half long trailer showcases the state of Leonida (Florida), the grime of Vice City, a bunch of absolute nutjobs that you’d expect for a Florida stand-in, Tom Petty, and a pair of protagonists who call to mind Bonnie and Clyde and definitely won’t ruin us emotionally by the end of the game. The trailer has been as anticipated as you’d expect, even with leaks, and currently sits at 47.5 million views at the time of writing this, 8 hours since it was first released.
If you’ve somehow avoided the GTA 6 trailer until now, you can check it out for yourself down below. Prepare the twerk counter.
Within such a short space of time, GTA 6 is comfortably the most popular reveal trailer for a game ever and is being carefully disseminated and picked apart with us all probably starving for updates for at least the next six months. But it still has a long way to go to beat the most viewed YouTube videos within the space of 24 hours: the music video for ‘Butter’ by BTS.
‘Butter’ managed to accumulate 108 million views within the space of 24 hours when it launched back in May 2021, which is some way above another BTS song which is currently in second place, ‘Dynamite’, which has a record of 101.1 million views in 24 hours. ‘Butter’ currently sits at 926 million views.
The South Korean septet (a brand new word for me, that) are among the biggest boy bands in the world with some of the absolutely wildest fans anywhere who will do anything to help out the band — I’ve never heard this song, and yet it nearly has a billion views. The band’s squeaky clean nature is almost the perfect foil for the gritty, adult-oriented Grand Theft Auto. It almost calls to mind Rage Against the Machine versus whoever won The X Factor that year for Christmas no. 1, except I doubt one of the Housers is going to go and swear on Radio 1 (maybe they should). Maybe BTS should.
Here’s the current live view count for the GTA 6 trailer on YouTube:
As I continue to write, GTA 6’s reveal trailer has now become 9 hours old and has crossed 48.5 million views, gaining an extra million views in about 5 minutes. Now it’s 48.8 million. Okay, just gonna refresh the trailer page again…49 million. Doing some quick maths of just multiplying that earlier 47.5 million views within 8 hours by 3 to make it 24 hours, GTA 6 is going to hit around 140 million views by the time 24 hours are up.
It’s worth bearing in mind that a lot of people in Europe probably haven’t watched it yet as it launched late on December 4th for us, but I do expect the views to slow a bit following the huge peak so maybe 140 million views is a bit on the high side. Still it’s very likely to at least crack 100 million views within that timeframe as it’s the most hyped entertainment product of all time, and I don’t think it’s particularly close either.
Unless GTA 6 ends up getting cancelled within the next 15 hours (imagine), it will still definitely be among the 10 most watched YouTube videos within the space of 24 hours ever, as it’s already nearly caught up to the 65.2 million YouTube views in 24 hours for ‘Me!’ by Taylor Swift and Brendon Urie.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch in 2025 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. I think it’s also coming to Series S but the prospect of that makes me feel uncomfortable.
READ NEXT: Can GTA VI Actually Live Up To The Hype?
Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site.
