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Grand Theft Auto VI Leak Is a Shock To Video Game Studio Rockstar (bloomberg.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
A hacker published authentic, pre-release footage from development of Grand Theft Auto VI, the most anticipated video game from Take-Two Interactive Software. From a report: The cache of videos offers an extensive and unauthorized look at the making of one of biggest games in the industry. A leak of this scale is so rare that some people cast doubt on its authenticity when it emerged over the weekend, but people familiar with the game's development said the videos are real. The footage provides an early and unpolished view of plans for Grand Theft Auto VI, though the final version will look much more refined, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the details are private.

Take-Two issued requests for YouTube and other websites to remove the videos, citing a copyright claim, but not before they were widely disseminated. Rockstar Games, the Take-Two studio that makes Grand Theft Auto, confirmed the hack in a statement posted to Twitter on Monday. It blamed a "network intrusion" that allowed the hacker to download the content. Take-Two shares were down as much as 3.3% on Monday. The hacker posted dozens of never-before-seen videos from Grand Theft Auto VI on an online message board over the weekend. On the forum, the person suggested they were the same hacker who infiltrated Uber Technologies in a high-profile incident last week. The claim is unverified. The hacker indicated in a follow-up message about the upcoming Grand Theft Auto game, "I am looking to negotiate a deal," and raised the prospect of publishing more internal information about the project.
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Grand Theft Auto VI Leak Is a Shock To Video Game Studio Rockstar More

Grand Theft Auto VI Leak Is a Shock To Video Game Studio Rockstar

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  • but the news starved gaming press. There's going to be thousands if not tens of thousands working on the game. Leaks are gonna happen. You can try going without play testers like Square did on Final Fantasy 13, but we saw how that turned out.

    • Leaks are gonna happen.

      Sorry to burst your bubble but this actually is a shock to everyone. Leaks such as this are incredibly rare in game development. Most high profile hotly anticipated games not only get published without any leaks at all, but leaks are so rare that hackers have historically held pre-release information on a game to ransom against studios and some even netted themselves a proper payday in the process.

      Yeah lots of people may be involved, that doesn't mean anything will necessarily be leaked.

    • Regardless of the potential impact of a video leak, which has been already addressed in this thread:
      What this Slashdot story misses is that the hacker has alleged to also have the source code in his possession. It is left to see if this is true. But if true, this would be a whole other set of consequences than a video leak...

      • Does this really matter? All I can see with the video leak it will create more hype for the game, is any significant amount of players going to say well I saw the game in development (even if it has bugs) so I don't want to play? Seriously if this is going to effect your purchasing decision, wait a week after its release and see the real game play on a finished version. Also I don't even think if the source is released anything of any significance is going to change, it will still be illegal to own a pirate

  • Breathless much? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by necro81 ( 917438 ) on Monday September 19, 2022 @09:33AM (#62894677) Journal
    The title and summary read like so much breathless excitement. For goodness sake - it's just a f*#%ing video game! Just how much impact will this leak, or even the completed video game, have on the average gamer, let alone the average person?

    • I'd say that depends.

      Regardless of obvious impacts to employment and legitimate forms of income during a recession, if one political party happens to see a 0.002% increase in the crime called "grand theft", then they're going to abuse the shit out of it to blame their political enemies, blame "video game violence", and then lobby for Greed to mandate even more surveillance tech at your cost and their profit.

      No better way to Think of the Children then have a Government-mandated GPS bolted to your 1988 pickup

      • Regardless of obvious impacts to employment and legitimate forms of income during a recession.

        What obvious impacts? I see none, it is not obvious at all that seeing game play in advance of a release will prevent people from buying it might do the opposite and create hype.

        • Yes, you're right. We re-defined "recession" to mean something that could never happen under Biden's rule, so I guess it'll never happen.

          Oh, Biden caused a 9% drop in vaccine stocks with little more than a brain-dead comment? Don't worry. I mean, it's not like a shitty Tweet could crash that House of Cards, decimate employment and wipe out the kind of expendable income that plays for video games.

          And if this creates "hype" to generate sales, then this "leak", probably wasn't. After all, lying with clickb

    • Re:Breathless much? (Score:4, Informative)

      by OrangeTide ( 124937 ) on Monday September 19, 2022 @10:40AM (#62894835) Homepage Journal

      It's one of the top properties of an almost a $200B industry. We could be talking about frozen concentrated orange juice and just the money involve alone would make it newsworthy. Because this story is about a video game and about hacking it makes the rounds on the tech-centered news aggregators (which is why you're here, isn't it?)

      • Yeah, but will any of this get Jamie Lee Curtis' top off?

        Thought you'd get a Trading Places reference past us, did you? Not on my watch! I've got a black belt in Akido, with the boots to match!

    • Re:Breathless much? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anubis IV ( 1279820 ) on Monday September 19, 2022 @11:48AM (#62895083)

      For goodness sake - it's just a f*#%ing video game! Just how much impact will this leak, or even the completed video game, have on the average gamer, let alone the average person?

      To put it in perspective using some numbers:
      * With 169M sales to date, GTA5 is the second best-selling game of all-time [wikipedia.org], behind Minecraft's 238M, but ahead of Tetris' 100M. So, it's relevant to a LOT of gamers.
      * Here's a shocking one for you: we're now at a tipping point in our society where top video game streamers have a level of brand awareness and enjoyment that puts them roughly on par with A-listers like Beyonce and Lebron James among adults entering the working force [gamepressure.com].
      * Imagine a large-scale film leak, then realize that the film industry's best year (2019, $100B in revenue) is roughly half that of the gaming industry's typical year ($180B), with revenues going up every year in the latter. People spend way more on gaming than they do on movies.
      * Stepping back from revenues to look at how much the industry itself is worth, the latest numbers peg gaming at $145B vs. $42B for film and $20B for music [raiseyourskillz.com].
      * At this point, sports and TV are basically the only entertainment industries with values greater than gaming, but it's quickly catching up.

      Which is to say, it's big...if it's something you care about. For my part, I too will dismiss stuff like this in much the same way that I dismiss celebrity gossip I don't care about, but I also recognize that for large swaths of society a leak of this scale might be the biggest pieces of "news" for the entire year.

      • Imagine a large-scale film leak, then realize that the film industry's best year (2019, $100B in revenue) is roughly half that of the gaming industry's typical year ($180B), with revenues going up every year in the latter. People spend way more on gaming than they do on movies.

        These are 2 different things, I play a game, I watch a film, if I have watch a film I am not likely to watch it again. If I watch someone playing a game then it will not stop me playing the game, unless it seems buggy or horrible, but since this a in development version that would be highly unlikely to deter me either.

      • Ask a person with no video game experience to sit down with this new leaked footage and the last GTA game. Nobody would be able to tell the difference.

        • Ask a person with no video game experience to sit down with this new leaked footage and the last GTA game. Nobody would be able to tell the difference.

          Not everyone cares about Beyonce or the MCU or who won the big game last night, but you still recognize that her music, those movies, and sports matter to a lot of people, right? Deliberately excluding the people who care about a topic is not a good way to measure the degree to which the topic matters in a society (see: selection bias), hence why I tried using objective numbers so we could understand the degree of cultural impact we're talking about here.

          My intent wasn't to suggest that gaming should matter

      • Imagine a large-scale film leak, then realize that the film industry's best year (2019, $100B in revenue) is roughly half that of the gaming industry's typical year ($180B), with revenues going up every year in the latter. People spend way more on gaming than they do on movies.

        This just tells me that Hollywood sucks at giving people what the people want. They are giving people what the studios feel safe giving and therefore they fail. Still, $100B is a nice chunk of change, so failure is not too painful, but still. They suck.

    • Just how much impact will this leak, or even the completed video game, have on the average gamer, let alone the average person?

      The leak? Not much. The game itself? Likely massive. It's a sequel to a game that has defined not only the genre but affected the entire industry. These days it's genuinely difficult to find someone who has not played it, or find a studio that has had a more successful game. On its release it blew the minds of gamers and average people, and there's lots of interest to see if that was a one-off or if Rock Star will simply squeeze out a turd hoping for a paycheck.

    • GTA V alone has raked in $8 Billion dollars in 9 years....Its a huge business. For perspective that is TWICE the amount Disney paid for the ENTIRETY of the Star Wars IP.

      "It is the second best-selling video game of all time with over 169 million copies shipped" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

  • I'll just say it. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 19, 2022 @09:39AM (#62894695)
    Why is it, that the article says ONE thing about the new game. And that ONE and presumably most important fact about the game is....

    It will feature a playable female protagonist for the first time in the series

    Why don't the articles or promotions ever talk about the quality of the game, of new features, or of exciting storylines?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
      Because the gall of "muh videogames" being infested with "females" will of course get the most engagement, and that's all news cares about.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Calydor ( 739835 )

        Tomb Raider says hi.

        Hell, Princess Peach (Toadstool?) was a playable character in the second Mario game America and Europe ever saw.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Merk42 ( 1906718 )
          Maybe it wasn't clear, but I was making fun of the kind of people that would be so offended.

          Also, Samus Aran, anyone?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Opportunist ( 166417 )

      Pfffft. Saints Row had this a decade ago. More, you could play a 50:50 androgynous person.

      Wake me when GTA invents something new.

      • You can actually chart the course of when the right wing noise machine make woke a boogieman. It was right after Steven Universe finished up. Notice how nobody much complained about that show and nobody does today?

        It's because it was finished up before the propagandists picked up the woke ball and ran with it. And we all followed them like Sheep.

        It's crazy how much control they have over our thoughts on both sides. About 1/3 of the country goes apeshit on command, about 1/3 of the country has to res
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • That shit is whack yo. If you think the people panicking and freaking out over critical race theory are done you haven't seen any footage from a recent school board meeting. They are absolutely batshit crazy. Worse they've got a lot of money from Big corporate donors who are trying to take over the school boards and fill them full of lunatics so they can wreck the school system and privatize it. Can you imagine the profits from privatizing public education? They can and they're buying off school boards to d

        • So last week we were supposed to be mad about the black Little Mermaid. It's a new week so now its about a female GTA character?

      • It's strange to me that with all the supposed freedom the player has in the GTA games they still have to play as the predefined protagonists.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • why do people get so whiny on Slashdot whenever the subject of women and videogames are used in the same sentence?

        Its not they care about women in video games, they have been around for ages. I can't remember the last role playing game I played where you couldn't choose a woman character. Its that they are making a big deal about it by putting in the summary, who cares its not new. It would be like saying GTA allows user to use mouse to look around. Its because there is either a political agenda around it, or its said in a provocative way to make people think there is a political agenda, in order to generate views.

        Its

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Nugoo ( 1794744 )

          Its not they care about women in video games, they have been around for ages. [...] Its that they are making a big deal about it by putting in the summary, who cares its not new.

          What makes it tough for me to believe you when you say "It's not that they care about women in video games", is that the gender of one of the protagonists is not mentioned in the summary. It's not in the headline, either; it's buried in the 5th paragraph, where the OP fished it out from. The OP is also wrong when he says, "the article says ONE thing about the new game"; the very same sentence he quotes from also mentions that the game is set in a city based on Miami (i.e. Vice City).

          • Why is it tough to believe? First I just believed the original post and that is my bad I can't actually read the article its pay walled or something for me. If we go and have conversations that we all think the opposing view is just lying or evil then we might as well not talk at all. Although I agree with you that this article doesn't actually do that there are plenty that do, and I wrongly assumed that this was one of them.

            I personally don't like GTA playing a criminal just rubs me the wrong way.

    • Why don't the articles or promotions ever talk about the quality of the game, of new features, or of exciting storylines?

      Because this is a leak and there's no information about the quality of the game or exciting storylines. Go do culture war bullshit somewhere else.

    • It will feature a playable female protagonist for the first time in the series

      It also just so happens this isn't true.

      GTA1 let you choose protagonists, and I think it slightly affected the 7 or 8 top down pixels you had to identify your avatar in game.

      I always played as bubba.

    • A game dare include 51% of the population? The audacity!

  • Most like now somebody is going to burn that engine into hardware, as cash-saturated Rockstar ought've done themselves five years ago. And, once that's done, we can all get to work building a lightweight 3D desktop paradigm-killer OS worthy to run on the thing. Make Computers Interesting Again.

  • Seems mostly from testing and development rather than gameplay so you don't see much. Considering the last game came out ALMOST TEN YEARS AGO I thought it'd be farther along at this point.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Having just quickly watched through it, I'm now not surprised that it's taking so long to develop. Implementing in-game tilting and telescoping steering wheel is very challenging and time consuming.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      Rockstar isn't know for pumping out games at a fast pace like other big studios. With GTA V and GTA Online they have a solid revenue source so they have milked the shit out of it. They have also re-released the game several times with the "Next Gen" (now last gen) upgrades and the PC release that came out years after the initial game released. I suspect GTA VI is timed to release around when they feel the GTA V revenues will have crossed a threshold that they had in mind as the point to drop a new game. Exp
      • they "skipped" the PS4 generation. Yeah, GTAV is on the PS4, but there wasn't a PS4 specific entry.

        I wonder if GTA6 will show up on the last Gen. PS5 availability is still heavily constrained.

        • Based on the videos I've seen they are testing it on 2080 and 3080, and on the PS4. I have read that other videos also show them testing on the 1080. These are pretty early days but it doesn't look like they've blown up poly counts too much, except for some in-car views that might be the exception rather than the norm. It would be wise to provide support for older systems. OTOH I will be surprised if they support DX11. Then the question becomes will they provide Vulkan support, and if not, will it run in Wi

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by EvilSS ( 557649 )

          wonder if GTA6 will show up on the last Gen.

          Doubt it. The game is probably another 2 years from release. It will not be released on the last gen consoles.

      • Oh I know that they're printing money now, but ten years is a loooong time. Like yo could've played GTA5 when you were like 16 and by the time 6 comes out, you have a job and a partner and a child possibly.

        I know adults play games too, and I do as well, but way less than before. And anyway mostly the point is that this is a long time, even if we aren't talking about annual EA Sports releases.

  • There's no excitement here whatsoever...

    None of these publishers have done anything original or ground breaking in recent memory. This leak is supposed to be exciting?

    It's just 3-4 weeks of disappointment and a video card I didn't need in the first place... ... ah well... at least the card will be cheapish.

    • Graphics cards don't seem cheap to me. The RTX3080 came out almost exactly 2 years ago for $699 and now it's $799. This is not how things worked for computer parts in the good old days.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Binestar ( 28861 )

        Graphics cards don't seem cheap to me. The RTX3080 came out almost exactly 2 years ago for $699 and now it's $799. This is not how things worked for computer parts in the good old days.

        With Etherium going Proof of State, ebay has started to light up. 3080's are going for as low as $550 including shipping, and I think that the price hasn't hit the bottom there.

    • GTA RP is really unique and interesting, though.

  • Management is heartbroken not because the leak means they can’t publish the game, or that it would cause online cheating (there is no online mode I’m aware of) but rather that it would screw up their ability to micro transaction every little thing with shark cards because people could more easily just get it for free (maybe, it’s looks a ways from being a finished product and the code isn’t posted publicly that I’m aware of). Just charge a flat fee once, it’s a profitable
  • The Half-Life 2 leaker wanted something similar, ask him how that worked out. (Spoiler: Lured to US where he was arrested.)

  • News at 11.

    Anybody who has worked in gamedev knows that unfinished stuff looks like a hot mess, because you're often building individual pieces and testing them in boring test environments before you start putting them together. And yes, video gets taken of that stuff, so that there's reference and other team members can check it out.

    Why is anybody surprised that an unfinished game looks like junk? That's like saying the pile of bar stock and rolls of sheet metal in a foundry don't look like a Corvette.

  • Why on earth do stock prices go DOWN when players get a sneak peek of a long anticipated product?

    • Because among many things, the surprise is gone, as is the possibility of blowing away expectations, and competitors can steal ideas. In turn that can reduce developer morale and the public's trust in TakeTwo to keep even customer info secret.

      • What surprise? its not like GTA VI is going to massively innovative, maybe better graphics, different story its version 6 after all, if it differs significantly a lot more people will be annoyed than happy. Competitors can already steal ideas from versions 1-5, people will still want GTA VI. Developers moral, why would they care are they stopping production because of the leak. As for public trust, maybe they just won't store as much of the public's data, but really I think the public don't really care, jud

  • Irony Meter at 11. Target store being hacked was a 10.

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