GTA 6 trailer smashes a YouTube viewership record—but still can't compare with another three-letter acronym

Before GTA 6 has the chance to break the sales records we're all expecting it to, its 90-second trailer has been busy shattering a couple YouTube records. Since Rockstar Games posted the trailer on Tuesday it's racked up a staggering 110 million views.

What's really remarkable is that over 90 million of those views came within the first day of the trailer's release, which makes it a Guinness World Record for the most viewed videogame reveal in 24 hours. In the non-music category of YouTube videos, that smashes through MrBeast's record 59 million views for his video "7 Days Stranded at Sea," a video has drawn nearly 200 million total views since it was posted in August.

To put it in perspective when it comes to trailers for other big recent games, Cyberpunk 2077's trailer from 2019 has had 17 million views to date. Starfield's first teaser trailer has 18 million views. Hogwarts Legacy's has 28 million views. Those are all impressive numbers, but they're already dwarfed by GTA 6's reveal just within the first 24 hours.

And yet, despite those numbers, the GTA 6 trailer didn't get close to dethroning BTS's music video for "Butter," which in its first 24 hours collected over 108 million views and now has close to one billion lifetime views since its premiere two years ago. That BTS record also tops the second place 24-hour finisher… which is also BTS, whose video for "Dynamite" caught 101 million sets of eyes on its first day.

As for how GTA 6's trailer reveal compares to GTA 5's trailer after it was released back in 2011, it also racked up a massive 100 million. It just took 12 whole years to get them, as opposed to GTA 6's trailer single day grab.

Now all that's left is the long, long wait for GTA 6 itself, which isn't due out until 2025—and even longer if you plan to play it on PC. Time to look for something else to watch on YouTube, I guess.

Chris started playing PC games in the 1980s, started writing about them in the early 2000s, and (finally) started getting paid to write about them in the late 2000s. Following a few years as a regular freelancer, PC Gamer hired him in 2014, probably so he'd stop emailing them asking for more work. Chris has a love-hate relationship with survival games and an unhealthy fascination with the inner lives of NPCs. He's also a fan of offbeat simulation games, mods, and ignoring storylines in RPGs so he can make up his own.