A video game trailer beat Robert De Niro. That’s the sentence Netflix executives get to say out loud this week, and it isn’t a metaphor.
The gameplay premiere for Grand Theft Auto VI landed at the top of Netflix Inc.’s viewing charts last week with 31.1 million views, outpacing a new De Niro film and everything else the service had on offer.
Six hours of exclusivity did the heavy lifting
The video runs just under 27 minutes and shows off the open-world crime game ahead of its planned Nov. 19 release. Netflix had it to itself for six hours before the footage went up on YouTube and other video platforms.
That head start was enough. The company said the footage beat the new movie The Whisper Man and the fifth season of Outer Banks to debut at number one in 87 of the 93 countries Netflix tracks globally.
Worth knowing how that number is built, because it isn’t the metric you’re used to. Netflix sums total hours viewed and divides by a program’s runtime. It doesn’t tally everyone who pressed play. YouTube counts differently, which is part of why the 2023 first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI sits at 293 million views there and broke several viewership records.
Netflix has never done this for a game before
Featuring marketing for an upcoming video game this way was a first for the service. Then again, plenty about Grand Theft Auto VI is unfamiliar territory. The last edition of the game sold more than 230 million copies, and the new one is expected to be one of the most lucrative entertainment products of all time.
You can see why a streamer would want to be the room where that happens.
The leaks came first
In the days ahead of the premiere, more than a dozen clips from Grand Theft Auto VI were leaked online. None of that material came from Rockstar’s own rollout, and none of it has been confirmed as representative of the finished game.
Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., the company behind Grand Theft Auto, has subpoenaed the chat company Discord Inc. as it looks to find the leaker.
So the biggest debut on Netflix last week was a 27-minute ad for a game that doesn’t come out until November, and the company that made it is currently in court trying to figure out who spoiled it first.
