Last Sunday saw over 90 video snippets of work-in-progress footage for Rockstar Games’ next Grand Theft Auto game leaked on the internet.
The videos are all rough looking with various debug lines and placeholder UI, as you’d expect from a game in development that is not meant to be seen in the public eye. But it all lined up with the alleged details first reported by Bloomberg that the setting will be based in Miami, and features two playable protagonists, one of them being female.
The leaks have been proven real, first by the series of takedown notices of said videos issued under Rockstar’s parent company Take-Two, and now Rockstar has issued a statement.
“We recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorised third party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from out systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto,” the statement reads.
“We do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects.”
In other words, Rockstar has confirmed how the leak happened, that is for the next GTA game (not officially called GTA 6 yet), and there are no delays happening due to this recent breach, for now at least. Though Bloomberg reporter Jason Schreier cautioned that there may behind-the-scenes changes that may impact the game developers.
As reported by Axios, the leak first emerged via a post from Teapotuberhacker on the GTA forums, saying that they got the footage from Rockstar’s employee Slack.
This massive leak has sparked various conversations, most interestingly how not many of the average gamers are accustomed to seeing work-in-progress footage at this level of roughness.
The art of making games, especially at big-budget AAA scale, is ridiculously complex involving multiple disciplines all operating at different schedules. It’s common for not every asset to come together at the early stages of development, and is usually not to be seen by the public.
Major game publishers have suffered security breaches recently, leaking information for upcoming titles as a result. CD Projekt Red, Capcom, and Sony’s Naughty Dog are some of the few that had this happen previously.