Back in September 2025, the launch of Hollow Knight: Silksong crashed the digital storefronts of Nintendo, PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam, as players who had waited over eight years for a follow-up to 2017’s Hollow Knight rushed to download the highly anticipated sequel.
The wait for a sequel to Grand Theft Auto 5 has been even longer – some 13 years – and the launch of Grand Theft Auto 6 will be orders of magnitude bigger than Silksong’s.
Silksong sold 7 million units in the first three months, reaching a peak of over half a million concurrent players a day after launch. GTA 6, by contrast, has already been pre-ordered by nearly 8 million players according to Sensor Tower estimates, with many more sales expected at launch on November 19. And whereas Silksong came in at a svelte download size of 8GB on Steam, GTA 6 weighs in at a whopping 212GB.
Importantly, GTA 6 is also the first AAA blockbuster of this scale to launch as a digital-only release. When GTA 5 launched back in 2013, the focus of the games business was still largely physical – but this time around, everyone who wants to buy the game will have to download it.
The pre-load period for GTA 6 starts at midnight on November 10, ahead of the official launch on November 19. Will the PlayStation and Xbox digital storefronts hold up? And how will the internet more widely cope with the strain? GamesIndustry.biz asked a group of experts about what to expect.
Prior evidence
Joost van Dreunen, founder of Aldora and author of the SuperJoost Substack, points to the launch of Grand Theft Auto 5’s online component in October 2013; it’s not well remembered now, but it didn’t go smoothly.
“It effectively melted Rockstar’s infrastructure, which ultimately didn’t hurt the franchise, but did create a massive hiccup at the time,” he says. The online component for GTA 6 is still further down the line, with just the single-player version launching next week, so Rockstar doesn’t have to worry about its servers just yet – that’s the platform holders’ concern. “The heavy lifting sits with Sony and Microsoft, not Rockstar,” says van Dreunen.
“Nobody wants to be the platform that fell over on the biggest launch in a decade”
He expects the platform holders will be adding plenty of server capacity, and the lack of other game launches around GTA 6 (aside from a gung-ho few) will help to ease the strain, along with the option to pre-load well ahead of release. It’s likely that both Sony and Microsoft are pulling all the stops out behind the scenes. “Nobody wants to be the platform that fell over on the biggest launch in a decade.”
GamesIndustry.biz contacted both PlayStation and Xbox for comment, but neither has responded. However, an old Sony hand says there’s good reason for optimism.
Gordon Thornton spent 17 years at Sony, during which time he oversaw the development of PlayStation Network and the PlayStation Store, and he is now chief commercial officer at ZBD. He says that Sony is well equipped to deal with the infrastructure demands of GTA 6, having previously fallen short in the past.
“If you go back as far as the first Call of Duty map packs, we were overwhelmed and learned the hard way,” Thornton explains. “My claim to fame is we took out Apple and every other digital merchant working on Worldpay at the time with the first Call of Duty map pack, because the transactions per second on our payment gateway failed. Access-wise, however, we now understand that through a very sophisticated distributed architecture.”
Drip feed
Thornton says that in the years since, the option to pre-load games has eased the strain on download servers, as players can begin downloading huge files well before the day of release. And the fact that Rockstar started taking pre-orders back in June will no doubt help. Silksong, by contrast, only had its release date revealed a couple of weeks before launch, and there was no option to download the game ahead of time.
“Silksong had no pre-orders, so the entire download and the entire purchase hit Steam and the console stores in the same minute, and the stores buckled,” notes van Dreunen.
Thornton adds that the sheer level of excitement surrounding Silksong “likely stumped” the platforms, but says that pre-loading will help manage demand for Grand Theft Auto 6.
“Consoles load it up and download it gradually, ensuring the distribution network is not overloaded. When reaching the launch minute, it is just a key exchange, which is quick even with millions of downloads.”
Simon Carless, author of the GameDiscoverCo newsletter, says that the pre-orders and pre-load will “significantly alleviate pressure” on PlayStation and Xbox.
“The pre-load is starting November 10, and requires up to 212 GB of local drive space, so that’s very hefty,” he explains. “So having an extra nine days to gradually send out the bulk of the data to players’ computers is vital. There still might be a Day 1 patch/extra download, but if so, it’ll be very incremental.”
But van Dreunen warns that the real bottleneck could come on launch day, which in contrast to Silksong, could see “tens of millions day-of buyers, not a few hundred thousand.”
Neil McRae, chief technology and innovation officer at UK internet provider CityFibre, says that although pre-loading will help to manage overall demand, “there’s no getting away from the fact that launch day will be extremely busy, as many people will wait until launch to buy.”
Internet infrastructure
There’s also the question of what kind of pressure will be placed on the telecom infrastructure more broadly, as millions of people simultaneously cue huge downloads at launch.
“For network providers, this will raise the peak transfer rate; essentially, the high traffic will drive record-breaking throughput,” says McRae. But he thinks the network can handle it. “Whether it’s the launch of GTA 6, or major Fortnite or Call of Duty updates, network spikes are now a common occurrence rather than an anomaly, and providers are well equipped to handle them. Our network was designed to support heavy digital asset delivery, and we’ve shown that we can deliver at even the busiest times.”
Even though the pre-load period will help, van Dreunen still expects some internet issues at launch: “Where I’d watch is the evening of November 19 in the US and Europe, when the day-of buyers and the people who didn’t pre-load all start pulling 212GB at once. But that’s a local congestion story, not a global one.”
Yet even pre-loading can affect internet and platform infrastructure, as Carless points out. “There will absolutely be an impact on worldwide internet traffic,” he says. “For example, the pre-load for Black Myth Wukong on Steam in 2024 spiked Steam bandwidth usage up more than three times to 70 terabits per second, apparently one of the all-time highs for the platform, and this pre-load is both a bigger set of files – Black Myth was 118 GB – and likely multiples more pre-loaders.”
All told, there’s a lot riding on this, especially as the industry heads towards an all-digital future, where huge downloads will be the only option. As McRae says, “people’s chances of being among the first to experience GTA 6 rest entirely on the quality of their network connection. We expect that network providers and game developers alike will be watching the GTA 6 launch with interest, to see how it shapes the future of the industry.”
Yet despite the challenges facing the people behind the scenes at PlayStation and Xbox, Thornton is optimistic the platforms can handle it.
“Based on my experience working with the [Sony] engineering team and Rockstar, I assume they have this handled,” he says. “They know the pre-order volumes, the bandwidth required to distribute those pre-orders, and the necessary capacity across local city-based distribution nodes.”
“It is the biggest title and opportunity on PS5, and they need to get it right.”