Will Rockstar take down your GTA 6 video on YouTube?

Rockstar can take down your GTA 6 video if you upload the ending, a cutscene compilation or any major story twist, but not if you upload your playthrough or a commentated Let's Play, even with story scenes in it. That's what its policy on posting Rockstar material online says, and it has been doing the rounds this week as if it were a new GTA 6 crackdown. It isn't. Here's what it allows, what it bans, how long it's been around and how strictly it has actually been enforced.

What does Rockstar's policy actually say?

The page is called "Policy on posting copyrighted Rockstar Games material" and it lives on Rockstar Support. It opens on a friendly note: Rockstar says it loves seeing players share their gameplay, enjoys the clips and machinima, and sometimes features them on the Newswire and its social channels. But it asks anyone posting or streaming on video platforms to follow a few rules, and the one that matters most two weeks before launch is about spoilers:

The key is context, not the scene itself: the same ending can be fine inside your full playthrough and grounds for a takedown if you clip it and upload it on its own.

What can you upload and what can't you?

On top of spoilers, the policy rules out a few more things. In short:

That last one matters most right now. With pre-load opening on 10 November and the risk of copies slipping out early, any footage posted before 19 November falls squarely into forbidden territory.

Is this a new rule for GTA 6?

No. The policy was last updated in January 2025, more than a year and a half before launch, and it covers every Rockstar game. Its backbone is even older: on the eve of GTA V's launch, on 16 September 2013, Rockstar published almost identical rules. Game Informer boiled them down at the time to three points: no footage before launch, not even unboxing videos; spoiler videos get removed; and none of the in-game entertainment (TV, radio, movies, stand-up) on its own. There was one more condition: use had to be non-commercial, with no charging subscriptions to watch the content.

Thirteen years later, the spirit hasn't changed. What's new isn't the policy: it's that this time far more people are going to read it.

Does Rockstar actually take these videos down?

With GTA V, not much. On 6 November we searched YouTube for GTA V's ending, and this is what's still up:

• "Grand Theft Auto 5 Ending / Final Mission" by theRadBrad: 25,063,992 views, posted 13 years ago. It's part 70 of his full playthrough, exactly what the policy allows.
• "GTA 5 - All Endings / Final Missions" by GTA Series Videos: 9,426,173 views, also 13 years old. All three endings back to back, no playthrough around them: precisely what the policy says gets removed.
• "GTA 5 - Ending C / Final Mission #3", from the same channel: more than 17 million views.

In other words, enforcement has been pretty relaxed, at least for a game that's now thirteen years old. Counting on the same with GTA 6 would be naive: Take-Two has spent months fighting leaks, as we saw with CyberLeek, who kept the ending under lock and key, and GTA 6's ending will be the most searched-for video on the internet for weeks.

What if you're not sure your video counts as a spoiler?

Rockstar offers a way out: email copyright@take2games.com explaining exactly which scene you want to upload and the context it appears in. It's the copyright address of Take-Two, Rockstar's parent company, so don't expect an instant reply in the middle of launch week.

For everything else, the rule of thumb is simple. If you're going to stream or upload your whole playthrough, go ahead. If you're planning to clip the ending for TikTok or put together an "every GTA 6 cutscene" video in launch week, expect it to get pulled. And the policy has no expiry date: there's no day after which spoilers become fair game.