Reaction streams to the first Grand Theft Auto 6 gameplay presentation peaked at 3,970,738 concurrent viewers across livestreaming platforms, making it the largest gaming stream of 2026 so far, according to figures from Streams Charts reported by Eurogamer.
Streams Charts counted 9,038 streamers covering the Rockstar Games presentation, which went out through Netflix, accumulating 5,227,798 hours watched. That peak places the reveal ahead of Summer Game Fest 2026, which topped out at 3.81 million viewers, as well as June's Nintendo Direct and State of Play broadcasts.
Twitch carried the largest share of the audience at roughly 44 percent of total hours watched, ahead of YouTube on 34.8 percent and Kick on 20.2 percent. Spanish streamer Juan Alberto "IlloJuan" Garcia led individual channels with 233,520 peak viewers, a record for his own channel, ahead of Rubius on 191,056 and IShowSpeed on 177,887.
Outages shaped the reaction
The presentation aired at 8pm UK time, and demand caused technical problems on both Netflix and Twitch, with some viewers reportedly locked out for 40 to 50 minutes. Streams Charts tracked more than 100,000 chat messages about the game across the three-hour window it analysed. Between 65 and 72 percent of those messages were neutral, 11 to 15 percent positive and roughly 17 to 20 percent negative, with much of the negative sentiment aimed at the outages rather than the game.
Around a fifth of tracked messages compared the reveal to Grand Theft Auto 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2, generally unfavourably.
Traffic spikes beyond the stream
Cloudflare, which handles more than a fifth of global internet traffic, published its own measurements of the broadcast's knock-on effects. Netflix's global traffic rose 16 percent against previous weeks while the Extended Look aired, and 45 percent in the UK. Twitch averaged a 12 percent increase across the three hours following the premiere and peaked at 35 percent, while YouTube climbed 39 percent when the trailer went live there at 1am.
Rockstar's own website recorded the sharpest movement of all, with traffic up 172 percent worldwide and 1,210 percent in the UK.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is scheduled for release on November 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S. The reveal week followed a run of leaked GTA 6 footage, and arrived while dozens of staff dismissed by Rockstar North continue to pursue employment tribunal claims against the company over alleged union-busting.