European ISPs are getting hammered by GTA 6 preloads, and we're still a week out

Push Square's reporting that ISPs across a bunch of European countries are seeing some seriously inflated traffic numbers now that preloads are live. Not shocking in the slightest, but still fun to watch from the outside.

Think about the scale here. GTA 6 is already the most pre-ordered game ever on the PlayStation Store, and a huge chunk of those people are pulling down the full install right now. That's millions of consoles hitting the same servers in the same week. Someone's network engineer is having a very bad November.

It lines up with everything else we've heard lately. The UK provider story was already floating around, and now it's spreading across the continent. Every ISP in Europe is basically getting a stress test they didn't ask for.

the install size isn't helping

We already knew the download was chunky, and when you multiply that by the pre-order numbers Sensor Tower was throwing around, the math gets silly fast. A 200GB-plus file times several million people in a week is a genuinely absurd amount of data moving at once.

Part of me wonders if this is why preload windows exist in the first place. Stagger it out, let the pipes catch up, and hope nobody's connection folds on the 19th. Seems like it's mostly working, but "mostly" is doing some heavy lifting there.

if yours is still crawling

• Start it now if you haven't. Do not wait until the night before.
• Wired beats wireless, every time, no debate.
• Pause and resume if it stalls. Sometimes that kicks it back into gear.
• Check whether your provider is doing anything nice for launch week, since a couple of them have been.

Honestly the whole thing is a decent reminder of how big this launch actually is. We talk about pre-order records like they're abstract numbers, then Europe's internet infrastructure starts wheezing and it gets real.

Anyone in Europe already seeing their downloads slow to a crawl, or has it been smooth for you so far?

---

Source: Push Square · Curated content.