GTA 6 Launch Night: Openreach and Ofcom Brace for a Download Record

Openreach, which runs the largest broadband network in the UK, has been tracking Grand Theft Auto 6 for months ahead of the 19 November launch on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S.

Ofcom says the networks should hold. Sony and Microsoft sound less relaxed, and both spent this week telling players to pull the install down early instead of waiting for Thursday morning. The last storefront crush of this kind, Hollow Knight: Silksong, arrived with a far smaller audience and still took Xbox, Steam and Nintendo servers down with it.

Sensor Tower counted 11.27 million copies sold as of 12 November, worth about $1.09 billion before anyone has started a save, with PS5 holding roughly three-quarters of the total and Xbox the rest. Nearly a million of those arrived in a single day, and the game passed its first billion before release, whereas GTA 5 needed three days on sale to get there. Each of those copies is an install sitting on a release-day unlock, and most will begin inside the same handful of hours.

Trevor Linney, Openreach’s director for network technology, told Eurogamer the game has been flagged inside the company for a long time.

“GTA 6 has been on our radar for a long time.”

— Trevor Linney

Big releases already show up in national broadband figures, which is why the timing of one is a planning question and not a trivia item. Linney put Fortnite and Call of Duty forward as the measure. One major release or update already drives enormous volumes of data across the network, and he expects Rockstar’s game to go further. The network and the teams are ready, he said, and this is the launch Openreach is watching for a new download record.

Ofcom framed its answer around contracts rather than capacity. A spokesperson said providers ought to be in a position to carry the download, then pointed at the Broadband Code of Practice, which obliges them to give customers clear, realistic information and to guarantee a minimum speed. Anyone getting less than that may be able to walk away from the contract without a penalty. The regulator’s advice is to test the line now rather than on Thursday. Ofcom also negotiates with games companies over release dates, so that big launches avoid landing on top of sporting events and other national draws on bandwidth.

Sony and Microsoft are giving the same instruction in blunter terms. Both described the demand as unprecedented when they confirmed GTA 6 as the most pre-ordered game in each store’s history, and both told buyers to download ahead of time. I plan to pre-load on Tuesday and then leave it alone, because nothing ruins a launch morning faster than a progress bar stuck at 40 percent.

YouTube is running a YouTube 24-hour live stream that opens on 18 November at 11 p.m. ET, in eight languages, with creators including TGG and MikeShowSha. It crosses midnight into launch day, which means streams and installs will be pulling on the same connections at the same time.

Pocketpair has told its staff they get five days off from 19 to 23 November, written up as a company trip to Vice City, and the notice passed 550,000 views in a day. A Thursday release usually trickles through a working day. A share of this audience has already cleared the week for it, which tightens the window the networks have to absorb.

The Selfridges takeover in London produced the week’s biggest leak. A GTA 6 map from the Collector’s Edition reached social media after a store employee posted a photo to Instagram Stories and then deleted it: red for urban districts, yellow and orange for countryside, green for wilderness and reserves. Rockstar has still published nothing of its own. I skipped the photos, because working out where a map stops is most of what I want from a Rockstar open world.

Next week may not even be the peak: GTA 6 Online rumors put the multiplayer component in 2027, roughly a year behind the single-player game, after a Bloomberg Originals documentary described the November release as something short of the final version. Jason Schreier reported the same 2027 window back in October. Rockstar has not announced an online mode and is selling 19 November as a single-player experience, and Take-Two chief Strauss Zelnick told investors in May that it was too early to discuss how such a mode would be sold. GTA Online carried GTA 5 past 230 million copies and years of revenue, so that second wave would be a long one rather than a single night. I am in no rush for it, and a quiet Leonida at my own pace is what I am paying for.

GTA 6 launches on Thursday, 19 November, on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Openreach has already said what it will be looking at that night, and it is a number on its own network rather than one on a sales tracker.