Rockstar Games will lift the lid on Grand Theft Auto VI later this month through an unusual distribution arrangement, with a lengthy new preview of the game going out on Netflix several hours before it reaches the studio’s own channels.
Titled Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, the preview arrives on the streaming service on August 27 at 3pm ET (12.30am IST on August 28). It then appears on the official Rockstar Games YouTube channel and the Grand Theft Auto VI website at 9pm ET the same day (6.30am IST on August 28). Neither company has said how long the footage runs or what it will cover.
Brandon Riegg, Vice-President of Nonfiction Series at Netflix, said in a statement that the anticipation and fan interest around the game were “unprecedented”, adding that the platform was pleased to be showing the next chapter of the series to its subscribers ahead of everyone else.
The two companies have worked together before. Netflix carried mobile versions of the original Grand Theft Auto trilogy for its subscribers, though a preview event of this kind — a games publisher effectively treating a streaming platform as a launch window for promotional footage — has no obvious precedent.
Rockstar has described the arrangement as a first of its kind, and the timing suggests the studio is treating the reveal as an entertainment event rather than a conventional trailer drop.
Development on the title has run for 13 years. Rockstar confirmed in 2022 that a successor to Grand Theft Auto V was under way, a statement that followed one of the largest leaks in the industry’s history, when unfinished gameplay footage found its way online. The first trailer surfaced in 2023 and a second followed last year.
The game returns the series to Vice City, this time within the fictional state of Leonida. Rockstar’s official outline centres on two protagonists, Jason and Lucia, who find themselves entangled in a conspiracy spanning the state after a straightforward robbery goes badly wrong. The studio has said the version shipping at launch is a single-player experience and has made no mention of a multiplayer or online mode, a notable omission given that Grand Theft Auto Online has sustained the franchise commercially for more than a decade.
Pre-orders opened in June, with pricing confirmed on June 24 by the Take-Two Interactive-owned studio. The standard edition is priced at $79.99, available either as a digital purchase or as a boxed copy containing a download code rather than a disc. An ultimate edition costs $99.99 and bundles in a set of premium vehicles, weapons, apparel and additional content distributed through the game.
Grand Theft Auto VI is scheduled to arrive on PlayStation 5 and Xbox on November 19, following a series of delays. The date has proved consequential for the wider industry, with several publishers shifting their own release schedules to avoid competing with it.
The scale of expectation is rooted in the performance of its predecessor. Grand Theft Auto V, released in 2013, has sold close to 230 million copies as of May, according to Take-Two, having shipped across three console generations and PC. It remains among the most played titles on Steam and one of the most watched on Twitch. In the intervening years Rockstar released Red Dead Redemption 2 and a steady run of updates for Grand Theft Auto Online, but has otherwise kept its flagship series waiting.
