You can play GTA 6 early before its official release day and we’re going to be showing you how. This is a legitimate guide that many gamers have used on their XBOX and PS5 consoles for sometime in order to get earlier access to new games. I’ve personally used this trick every time a new game or DLC drops in a different time zone first on my XBOX.

As we know, the game officially releases at midnight local time. This is a staggered release much like Rockstar’s other titles. New Zealand is the first region that gets the game at 12am NZST; that’s GMT +13. This means if you follow our guide below, you can play GTA VI around 18 hours early in the USA or 13-14 hours in Europe for example. That’s more than half a day ahead of most people. You’ll also need at least 212GB of free space to install the game.

Check out how to do this on both PS5 and XBOX below:

PS5

Create a new PSN account and set its country to New Zealand

Go to Settings on your PS5

Select Users and Accounts

Select Other

Select Console Sharing and Offline Play

Enable this setting

Buy a New Zealand PSN Gift Card from an online store

Add the gift card to the New Zealand account

Use this PSN credit to buy GTA 6 on the New Zealand account

Pre-load GTA VI from November 10th on your New Zealand account. This is important as there are 3 versions of GTA VI (worldwide, NZ/Australia, Japan).

When GTA VI is officially out in your region, continue playing the game on your main account

XBOX Series X|S

On XBOX, it is far more simple and quicker as you can see below:

Go to Settings on your XBOX Series X|S

Scroll down to System

Select Language & location

Select Location

Choose New Zealand from the dropdown menu

Select Restart now

Once your XBOX has rebooted, it is all set to play GTA VI when the game goes live first in New Zealand before anywhere else. Just make sure you have the game pre-loaded.

In other Grand Theft Auto VI news, nearly 40 new screenshots were released this week which you can view here. Plus, a map for the game will be purchasable on launch day.

For more news on GTA VI, stay tuned to RockstarINTEL and sign up to our newsletter for a weekly round-up of all things Rockstar Games delivered straight to your inbox.

Subscribe to our newsletter!