In just 22 hours, the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI has racked up 85 million views, breaking a MrBeast video’s record for most YouTube views in 24 hours. That ranking excludes music videos, but the hype around this long-awaited game could smash past those records too — right now, the most viewed YouTube video in 24 hours is the music video for K-Pop sensation BTS’ song “Butter,” which was viewed 108 million times in that timespan.
The excitement for Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6) is a decade in the making. The last game in the franchise, Grand Theft Auto V, was released more than 10 years ago, in September 2013. According to Guinness World Records, it broke the record for “highest revenue generated by an entertainment product in 24 hours,” earning $815.7 million on release day from the sale of 11.21 million copies. It remains the second-best-selling video game of all time, falling short only of Minecraft.
Rockstar Games, the publisher of the Grand Theft Auto franchise, planned to release the trailer on Tuesday morning. But the trailer was leaked on X (Twitter) a day early, so Rockstar just posted the trailer anyway and got the leaked version taken down.
“Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube,” Rockstar wrote on X; that X post itself has 1.1 million likes and 82 million views.
Excluding music videos, MrBeast previously held the record for most YouTube views in 24 hours. The stunt philanthropist’s August video, in which he had contestants from “every country” in the world face off in a series of contests, got 59.4 million views in its first day. In another one of the twenty-five-year-old YouTuber’s most popular videos, he recreated the Netflix hit “Squid Game” (no, no one was harmed in filming). Given the nature of Grand Theft Auto, we can only hope that MrBeast does not attempt to recreate a bank robbery or a prison break.
We’ll update this post if Grand Theft Auto manages to dethrone the BTS boys from their butter-sculpted throne — in the mean time, here’s the trailer for GTA 6, which will be released in 2025.