GTA 6's Pre-Load Could Take a Week for 870,000 UK Homes, Study Says

Broadband Genie says homes under 2.8Mb need 168 hours of nonstop downloading to finish the 212GB file before the Nov. 19 launch.

On Britain's slowest broadband lines, the GTA 6 pre-load takes 168 hours to finish. That's a full week of a console doing nothing else.

Broadband Genie, a UK broadband comparison site, estimated in research released Friday that 870,000 British households are on connections slower than 2.8 megabits a second. At that speed, Grand Theft Auto VI's 212GB file needs a week of nonstop downloading, and IGN reported the findings the same day. The pre-load was supposed to be the fix for a game this big, but for those homes it only works if they started within about two days of when it opened.

Here's the math. Sony's PlayStation Blog said pre-download would open at local midnight on Nov. 10 for anyone who pre-ordered, nine days before the Nov. 19 launch, and told PS5 owners to clear at least 212GB. Using Broadband Genie's timings, a 2.8Mb home that started at the unlock would finish around Nov. 17. One that started on Friday would still be downloading on launch day.

Newport, Wales, came out worst. Broadband Genie said 35% of speed tests there came in under 2.8Mb, and 41% fell below 9.8Mb, the speed it says is needed to finish in under two days. Nearly one in ten tests in Bangor and Torquay fell under the week-long line, while 24% of users in Ely, 17% in Hereford and 16% in Bath face at least two days.

The figures come from 17,135 users' speed tests taken between Sept. 11 and Oct. 14, sorted by the nearest city. The 870,000 is the site's 3% applied to the UK's 29 million homes, so it's an estimate, not a headcount.

On a fast line the same file is barely an errand. Germany's Telekom calculated that a gigabit connection pulls down the 212GB in about 28 minutes and a 50Mbps line in about nine and a half hours, the German news agency DPA reported.

The rush is already showing up on the networks. Virgin Media O2 said Tuesday was its highest-ever day for data volume, with broadband traffic up 51% in the first hour of pre-loading compared with the week before, DPA reported. In the U.S., Comcast said it was bracing for the busiest week of traffic its Xfinity network has ever carried, stretching from the pre-load through launch. Sony says GTA 6 is the most pre-ordered game ever on PlayStation Store.

Alex Tofts, a broadband strategist at Broadband Genie, says slow homes should start right away with auto-downloads on, plug the console into the router with an Ethernet cable if they can, and leave it in rest mode so it isn't doing anything else. Even so, he isn't promising everyone makes it. "The pre-load window is meant to guarantee day-one access, but it simply won't save everyone," Tofts said in the release.

Source: pressreleases.responsesource.com, retrieved November 13, 2026. Other sources: blog.playstation.com, tech.yahoo.com.