YouTube's GTA 6 Rule Change Isn't Stopping There, Brace Yourselves

The release of GTA VI was always going to be pretty monumental for video games as a whole, and it seems like the ripple effects of its arrival have already started to hit home, even with the game not set to hit virtual shelves until May 2026.

On 28 October, YouTube announced some pretty significant changes to its guidelines on graphic violence in video games, with many of the new rules seemingly centred on the flood of GTA VI videos that the platform will inevitably have to host when the game drops next year.

The headline changes are pretty significant, so we've included them in the company's own words below, to avoid any potential miscommunication around what they are going for:

"We will age-restrict an additional small subset of video game content featuring realistic human characters that focuses on scenes of torture or scenes of mass violence against non-combatants. We’ll consider several factors when reviewing this type of content such as:

• Duration - If the graphic scene is sustained (rather than fleeting). For compilation videos, we’ll now consider the cumulative duration of all of the graphic clips combined.
• Prominence - If the violent imagery is zoomed-in or the main focus of the scene
• Realistic human characters - If the violence is happening to a character that looks like a real human."

The big problems that will obviously arise here for potential GTA playthroughs (when the game is finally released) is the fact that the characters are nothing if not realistic, and longer videos will likely include a ton of violence across their duration.

What YouTube probably isn't considering in their haste, is just how much this might affect video content for other games, and the community is starting to fear the future.

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Mortal Kombat Could Be One of Many Games Affected

Over on Reddit, one user shared the news on the Mortal Kombat page with the titled concern that this may negatively affect some of their favourite content creators on the video platform, and plenty were in agreement.

"More obnoxious hoops to jump through that won't solve anything but will make everyone's youtube experience worse. Typical YouTube," one comment read.

"YouTube needs to fail at this point and I want them too. Sorry to my fave creators but I hope the platform goes under but it won't," another added.

In all fairness to the community here, they really do have a point. There's absolutely no way that GTA VI releasing should completely annihilate the relationship between content creation and advertising revenue.

In reality, most companies are going to be looking at how much money they can make advertising on the huge amount of views GTA content will generate, so kneecapping other games seven months before it even releases feels like a huge overstep.