A veteran developer who used to work at Rockstar Games thinks the massive GTA 6 leaks are no biggie because the majority of people who will inevitably buy and play the game aren’t going feral over the various two-minute clips that have been spilling onto the internet.
For the past week, a hacker known online as Cyberleek has been leaking footage from GTA 6 in an effort to promote their crypto scheme and pressure Rockstar Games to protect players’ digital rights, apparently. Parent company Take-Two is certainly taking the leaks seriously, but Obbe Vermeij, the technical director on games like GTA 4, says it’s a “nothing burger.”
“Calm down everybody,” he tweets. “The leaks are a nothing burger.” He explains that Rockstar has been keeping its crown jewel under wraps for “longer than other publishers” as a marketing strategy – mystery creates hype, after all – and “all that has happened is that some footage has escaped.” If GTA 6 had gone through a regular marketing campaign with gameplay trailers already out in the wild, then these leaks wouldn’t be revealing much in the grand scheme of things.
“90% of future players don’t spend their time on the internet looking for video snippets,” Vermeij goes on. “They don’t have the time and don’t want spoilers. I imagine the teams are a little annoyed about it but not more than that. I was there during Hot Coffee” – the scandal involving a sex mini-game accidentally left inside GTA San Andreas. “It was a nightmare for management [Rockstar’s New York offices] but didn’t affect us [Rockstar North] much. The current leaks are far less consequential than [Hot Coffee] was. It looks like GTA 6 will be phenomenal and sell for the next 15 years or so. The leaks are just a tiny blip.”
In a slight twist, a couple of days ago Cyberleek posted footage that implied they have an actual playable build of the game, which could complicate matters if they ever decided to dump it build online. Still, Vermeij says “it probably only runs on a devkit” since development kits have far more memory than an Xbox or PlayStation or your regular PCs: “There probably isn’t a build in existence that would run on a retail PS5 at the moment.”