Can Rockstar's new GTA 6 video reach 20 million views on YouTube?

On Thursday night, Rockstar Games put 26 minutes of Grand Theft Auto VI on YouTube. Four days later, 16.6 million have watched it. It may seem like a lot, but for Rockstar Games, that is quite small.

The first Grand Theft Auto VI trailer went up in December 2023 and took 93 million views in 24 hours, a platform record. The second did roughly 83.6 million in its first day. So the longest of the three, and the only one showing the game being played, is running at a fifth of the pace. There are four reasons for that.

1. It did not premiere on YouTube. It premiered on Netflix on August 27 and reached number one on Netflix's top ten films the next day.
2. YouTube requires identification. The Rockstar upload is age-restricted, so it cannot be watched signed out, embedded, or in restricted mode, which logically lowers the number of viewers.
3. In this day and age, most people watch somebody else watch it, because Streams Charts counted 3,970,738 concurrent viewers across 9,038 channels.
4. Due to the game's sheer popularity, many people have uploaded their versions with commentary and analysis.

As of September 1, Polymarket has a ladder on the official counter. Under 20 million costs 76 cents.

The week runs out at 01:00 UTC on Friday. This morning, the counter read 16,622,586 with 68.45 hours left, and twenty million needs 49,339 views an hour until then.

We read the counter every twenty seconds for 33 minutes, and it moved 30,024 views, which is 55,157 an hour.

That is 11.8% faster than it needs to go, but it is unlikely it will hold, because view counts fall away every day. Held flat, the video finishes at 20.40 million. Losing 5% a day, 20.14 million. Losing 8%, 19.98 million. The break-even is about 7% per day.

Due to an asymmetrical setup, we believe the ’20-22 million views’ contract is the most lucrative one at 43 cents, offering a 132.56% return.