When Rockstar Games released the second trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI on 6 May 2025, the response on Twitch was as significant a cultural moment as the trailer itself. Unlike the December 2023 first trailer — which leaked hours before its embargoed premiere — Trailer 2 dropped at a time of day calibrated to maximise concurrent western viewership, ensuring that the biggest Twitch personalities could broadcast their reactions live to millions. This report surveys how Twitch streamers reacted to GTA VI Trailer 2, focusing on the largest English-language broadcasters (Kai Cenat, xQc, Tyler "Ninja" Blevins, TimTheTatman, Zerkaa and members of the NoPixel roleplay community), the resulting viewership spikes on the platform, and the broader sentiment that the broadcasters projected to their audiences.
The Trailer 2 release was treated by streamers less as a piece of marketing and more as a live-television event akin to a sports broadcast or awards show. Aggregator footage compiled by reaction-channel curators captured more than twenty major Twitch and Kick personalities watching simultaneously, including Zerkaa, xQc, IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat, with each broadcaster pausing scheduled content to play the trailer for chat (The Times of Clips, 2025). The pattern mirrored the audience behaviour first observed during Trailer 1's December 2023 premiere, when "LET'S GOOOO" reactions from TimTheTatman, HasanAbi, TmarTn and Zerkaa went viral within minutes (Sportskeeda, 2023). The May 2025 reaction wave was, however, more orchestrated: Rockstar's pre-announcement of the precise drop time allowed streamers to schedule "watch parties", and Twitch's Just Chatting category briefly became dominated by overlapping GTA VI thumbnails.
Kai Cenat — Twitch's most-subscribed streamer — was once again the centre of gravity for the reaction discourse. His Trailer 1 reaction in December 2023, recorded the day after a serious dental injury sustained during a video shoot, had already become canonical streaming culture (Talwar, 2023). For Trailer 2, Cenat amplified that history by publicly committing to a 100% completion marathon livestream of GTA VI upon release, a pledge first floated in January 2025 and reiterated after the May trailer (Daily Star, 2025). Cenat's reactions, characterised by repeated exclamations about graphical fidelity and the protagonists' chemistry, framed Trailer 2 as confirmation that Rockstar had "really did that" — a refrain that became a meme across short-form clips of the broadcast (GTA 6 Insider, 2024). His promised marathon, given AMP's audience scale, is widely expected to be one of the platform's biggest non-esports events of 2026.
Félix "xQc" Lengyel — formerly Twitch's most-watched English streamer and now a Kick exclusive who still maintains an enormous mirrored Twitch presence through clip channels — delivered a more analytical reaction. His Trailer 1 commentary, archived on YouTube, drew nearly 400,000 views (xQc, 2023), and his Trailer 2 response continued the same dissection-style format, pausing frequently to scrutinise lighting, NPC density and the in-engine "captured on PS5" tag at the trailer's conclusion (Busby, 2025). This last point was central: Rockstar's confirmation that the footage was rendered entirely on a base PlayStation 5 prompted xQc, alongside Ninja and TimTheTatman, to declare on stream that the visuals had "ended the generation" of console graphics, a sentiment that propagated through clip-economy accounts on X and TikTok within hours.
A distinct sub-community on Twitch — the NoPixel-adjacent GTA V roleplay scene including streamers such as Buddha, Koil, Penta and Mr K — interpreted Trailer 2 through the lens of future RP potential. Their reactions, captured in aggregated reaction compilations, focused on map density, interior fidelity (notably the strip-club and bar interiors), and the implications of the new dual-protagonist structure for player-driven narrative servers (The Times of Clips, 2025). For this audience the trailer was not merely a teaser but a preview of the next decade of their livelihoods, since the GTA V RP ecosystem has sustained full-time careers for hundreds of broadcasters. Their reactions therefore skewed more cautious and technical than those of variety streamers, with discussion focusing on whether Rockstar would permit modded private servers at launch.
The unifying sentiment across all Twitch reactions was disbelief at the graphical leap, particularly given the trailer's "captured on PS5" disclosure. Gillingham (2025) documents fan comments calling the visuals "the best graphics I've ever seen" and "more real than real life", a framing that streamers amplified to their audiences. Crucially, the trailer's release neutralised much of the negativity that had built up around the simultaneous announcement of GTA VI's delay from autumn 2025 to 26 May 2026; streamer reactions, by celebrating the visual fidelity, effectively performed the work of justifying the delay in real time to millions of viewers. In doing so the Twitch reaction wave functioned as an unpaid second marketing layer — an organic amplification mechanism that Rockstar's first trailer had also benefitted from, but which Trailer 2 capitalised on with greater intentionality.
Twitch streamer reactions to GTA VI Trailer 2 illustrate how livestreaming has become an inseparable component of AAA game marketing. From Kai Cenat's hyperbolic enthusiasm and pledged release-day marathon, to xQc's frame-by-frame technical scrutiny, to the roleplay community's career-oriented analysis, the platform's diverse streamer ecologies produced complementary forms of reaction content that collectively reached tens of millions of viewers within 24 hours of the trailer dropping. The episode reinforces a now-established pattern: for franchises of GTA's scale, the Twitch reaction window is itself part of the launch product, and Rockstar's promotional cadence appears increasingly designed around it.
Busby, J. (2025) 'Rockstar confirms GTA 6 trailer 2 was fully captured in-game on PS5', Dexerto, 7 May. Available at: https://www.dexerto.com/gta/rockstar-confirms-gta-6-trailer-2-fully-captured-in-game-ps5/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Daily Star (2025) 'Streamer Kai Cenat vows to 100% GTA 6 in marathon livestream but fans worry', Daily Star, 6 January. Available at: https://www.dailystar.co.uk/tech/gaming/kai-cenat-gta-6-twitch-34424446 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Gillingham, J. (2025) 'GTA 6 trailer 2 blows fans away with insane graphics on base PS5', Dexerto, 6 May. Available at: https://www.dexerto.com/gta/gta-6-trailer-2-blows-fans-away-with-insane-graphics-on-base-ps5-3190716/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
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Talwar, Y. (2023) 'Twitch streamer posted reaction to GTA 6 trailer despite his teeth-breaking injury', India Today Gaming, 6 December. Available at: https://www.indiatodaygaming.com/news/international/story/twitch-streamer-posted-reaction-to-gta-6-trailer-despite-his-teeth-breaking-injury-3426 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
The Times of Clips (2025) 'STREAMERS REACT TO GTA 6 TRAILER 2!!', Rumble. Available at: https://rumble.com/v6t5w7x-streamers-react-to-gta-6-trailer-2.html (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
xQc (2023) 'xQc Reacts to Grand Theft Auto VI Trailer', YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMmtSIsOZOA (Accessed: 14 May 2026).