Two doors at midnight, one broken gateway

Grand Theft Auto VI did not arrive on the internet at one moment. Rockstar’s pre-load notice of 3 November splits the start in two: PlayStation buyers from midnight local time, Xbox buyers from 00:00 GMT. Those two sentences describe a different event in every country, and the first set of carrier numbers published this week reads best as a map of where the two lines happened to land on top of each other. Britain is the cleanest case. The country is on GMT in November, so local midnight and 00:00 GMT are the same minute and both console doors opened in the same second. Virgin Media O2 measured the hour that followed at 51.6 per cent above the same hour a week earlier, the largest single-hour figure any operator has attached to this launch. Germany is the other case. Central European Time runs an hour ahead, so the PlayStation window opened at 23:00 GMT on 9 November and the Xbox window at 01:00 local on the 10th. 1&1 described a whole night rather than an hour, and its spokesperson told Golem that an unusual spike had been observed across it. The distance between those two descriptions is a time zone, not a difference in demand.

Read Virgin’s numbers closely and every one of them is a ratio against a named holder. Traffic between midnight and 1 a.m. on 10 November ran 51.6 per cent above the same hour on the previous Tuesday. By 9 a.m. the volume downloaded was 73.3 per cent above the equivalent stretch of 3 November. The evening peak beat the record set by Arsenal v Atlético Madrid in a Champions League semi-final by 3.8 per cent, and the full day’s data volume beat the mark set on 1 November by Fortnite’s Chapter 7 mini-season by 4 per cent. The whole-day record fell at 11.05 p.m., fifty-five minutes before the day it belonged to ended. No absolute figure appears anywhere in the release: no terabits, no petabytes, no customer count. That is not a complaint, since a percentage against a named holder is more honest than a tonnage with no baseline, but it does mean the size of the event remains unknown while its rank is settled.

Set the operators side by side and the table stops being a table. 1&1’s tenfold increase counts connections to PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, a session count that says nothing about bytes. GlobalConnect’s 50 per cent is throughput on its Swedish network overnight, with Denmark and Estonia reported in the same shape. Deutsche Telekom converted the figure into hours instead. Comcast published no measurement before the fact at all: Xfinity said it expected the week of 10 to 19 November to be the busiest in its history, which is a forecast with a promotion attached, a fifteen-day speed boost of up to 2 Gbps for eligible customers advertised as enough to pull the game down in about half an hour. Five organisations, five quantities — sessions, bytes, throughput, hours and a prediction — and not one of them isolates the game’s share of the traffic. A sentence that adds them up, traffic rose tenfold across Europe, describes nothing any of them measured.

The only network that visibly broke is a small one. YouFibre, a British altnet, emailed customers on 10 November: “We are aware of a network capacity issue affecting the YouFibre network, due to the high demand of GTA 6 downloads. Unfortunately, this has caused the overall download speeds of the service to decrease.” Its chief executive, Jeremy Chelot, put the cause more plainly on X — the game was “causing issue with one of our BNG”, the broadband network gateway, and engineers were “trying to rebalance the traffic” while people around Yorkshire suffered congestion. A second email that evening said emergency traffic management had spread the load and service was back to normal, with one line that matters more than the outage: customers actively downloading the game could still see slower speeds, because the game download was being prioritised. That is the cost of the launch charged, explicitly, to people who did not buy it, and the remedy described as continuing to charge it. The hour is worth noting too. The second email speaks of the surge that evening, which puts the failure in the evening of 10 November, roughly twenty hours after the doors opened rather than at the stroke of midnight.

Rockstar’s own figure is up to 212 GB, and 212 GB is 1,696 gigabits, so the arithmetic is short division. A gigabit line needs 28 minutes at perfect line rate. A hundred-megabit line needs about four and three-quarter hours. Fifty megabits needs a little over nine hours, and a ten-megabit line, still common in rural Britain and much of southern Europe, needs more than 47 hours of continuous download. Deutsche Telekom published the same three answers, which is a check on the sum rather than a source for it. The point of the table is that the nine-day window is generous only to some of the people inside it. A slow line that starts on the 18th does not finish by unlock, and a slow line in a congested evening is being asked to spend two nights on a download that a fibre customer clears over lunch.

Three things are unresolved. The first is whether any operator will publish an absolute figure; none has, so the scale of this week is a set of ratios that cannot be added, and the operators that measured most precisely measured the least comparable things. The second is 19 November, when the pre-load cohort is joined by everyone who buys on the day and by whatever day-one patch ships — a size neither Rockstar, Sony nor Microsoft has published. The third is whether the priority rule YouFibre admitted is common. Vodafone’s head of network development, Marc Hölzer, gave the other account to 3DM: the download is spreading across several days, the peaks are therefore manageable, and the network was built for them, while conceding that the base load stays elevated for the whole period. What remains is advice rather than a forecast. On a fast line this is a coffee break. On a slow one, the cost of waiting is measured in days, and the only thing still available in useful quantity this week is time.