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GTA 6's Physical Release Could Be Delayed To 2027 Because of Leaks 38

An anonymous reader shares a report: An insider who correctly leaked information about Oblivion: Remastered and other titles is warning that GTA 6's physical release could be pushed back. GTA 6 is set to finally launch on November 19, 2026, but fans hoping to get their hands on a physical copy could be stuck waiting even longer.

According to a report from Polish site PPE, insider Graczdari says Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two, isn't planning to release a physical edition of GTA 6 at launch. "We are getting more and more information that the box version will not be released simultaneously with the digital version to prevent leaks," the report says.
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GTA 6's Physical Release Could Be Delayed To 2027 Because of Leaks

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  • But this is the sort of thing timelock encryption is quite good for
    • How does that work? You distribute encrypted and keep the decrypt key super-safe until go time?
      • Re:hate to say it (Score:5, Informative)

        by jhoegl ( 638955 ) on Monday January 26, 2026 @04:48PM (#65950834)
        No, because a terrible solution distracts from the fact that they fired 30 developers [gamespot.com] in a union busting effort.
      • Basically, yes.

        For example, the way Nintendo did it for the 3DS was that the "VUK" (Not the real term but the equivalent from AACS) , was encrypted in such a way that a portion of the data needed to decrypt it was held on Nintendo's eshop server until release. The system got a ticket to install the game data upon preorder. Then the system would check during launch of the game if it had the needed data or not. If it didn't, it would contact the eshop server and ask for the missing data. That allowed the us
        • by wed128 ( 722152 )

          If your profitability strategy involves withholding information from the public until the literal last second before release, then you're actively trying to deceive the public about what you're actually selling them.

          Why? I'm selling a license to play game X on date Y, and the promise that you'll have the materials necessary to do so on date Y. Am i being deceptive by not providing those materials before I'm contractually obligated to? Seems to me that this strategy follows exactly what they're selling -- I don't see how they're being deceptive.

          • It's deceptive because the content is sight unseen until that release date, and "gameplay footage NOT final" is often used as an excuse to explain why desired content was cut during development without any notice being given to the public. (Let alone a refund if the content loss was a deal breaker for the player.)

            Many studios keep that stuff under wraps hoping you'll blow past the 2 hour play time refund window before learning about it, thus making the unavailability of information and intentional mandato
            • by wed128 ( 722152 )
              If seeing the content before purchasing is important to you, just wait, i dunno, 3 days for reviews to flood in. This seems like such a non-problem.
    • Only if you are willing to accept specific drawbacks.

      If you are just doing it to save bandwidth the concept of shipping encrypted data in bulk and delivering a tiny private key over the network is viable; but that does mean making the physical release literally useless without a network-connected install (potentially a full size one, depending on whether your encryption interferes with layout/seek optimization on the disk and what the console's support for partial disk/partial install setups is); which i
      • It's not news that the release version normally gets a more or less massive patch covering all the changes made while it was being mastered and duplicated;

        Yet another broken thing about gaming. Unusable products shipped as 1.0. At least back in the early days, the game had to work, (despite the bugs), from start to finish out of the box. Today, many games are so broken on disc that they should be considered "tech demos" at best....

        'timelock', specifically, also addresses a questionably useful niche: there are cases where the ability to keep a secret for an extended but defined period of time is useful; but if you are a game publisher developing a game with hundreds(probably thousands if you count various support studios and support staff) of people across multiple sites it would be an...atypical...IT situation if you were somehow buttoned up enough to avoid leaks during development; but not buttoned up enough to hang on to a single private key that needs to be used once and kept secret for less than a month. It would, presumably, work; but it's not a situation where the security assurances really line up with the threat model all that well.

        The purpose of DRM has always been control. Not secrecy. It's impossible to keep something a secret when you have an expectation of selling the secret to whoever pays the entry fee. It's not about preventing the data from "leaking

  • Empty Discs (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TwistedGreen ( 80055 ) on Monday January 26, 2026 @03:38PM (#65950678)

    Don't most "physical copies" nowadays just come with an essentially empty disc? For example, the physical release of Doom: The Dark Ages had no data on disc, just a stub so it could validate you own the game and let you download it. Pretty shady, but you'd have had to download a 100GB day-zero patch anyways so why put anything on the disc at all?

    • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Don't most "physical copies" nowadays just come with an essentially empty disc? For example, the physical release of Doom: The Dark Ages had no data on disc, just a stub so it could validate you own the game and let you download it. Pretty shady, but you'd have had to download a 100GB day-zero patch anyways so why put anything on the disc at all?

      Yeah, everyone complaining about Nintendo Key cards fail to realize most other consoles already have been doing the same thing. Nintendo at least labels the games t

      • they usually download the game off the servers anyways

        Define "they". Not everyone has blazing fast internet speeds that can download 20-250 GBs of data faster than a cartridge can read the bits from flash locally.

        everyone complaining about Nintendo Key cards fail to realize

        Nope. They can realize just fine that it's an anti-consumer move that Nintendo has chosen to replicate from others. They can also realize that just because others do something doesn't mean it's justified, and that some weirdos love playing white knight to gaslight everyone into accepting bad practices / abuse.

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )

      Don't most "physical copies" nowadays just come with an essentially empty disc?

      There are examples for both. I recently bought the pretty new game "Mafia IV", and it could be installed and played from the disc without any Internet connection.

  • Could someone please elaborate on the entire point of releasing a digital version and a "boxed" version at different times? The hell is the difference and why are fans excited about that concept? Do I get trading cards and limited edition stickers in the landfill version, with the added bonus of waiting weeks longer for it?

    I'm guessing this is a move buried in pointless capitalistic greed driven by bullshit hype that executives hope will still work on an audience who didn't exactly wait around to make Duk

    • Some people like to collect physical objects. That includes a box, even if it's empty. There's still a market for it, so they'll sell it. The days of being able to play a game offline entirely from the disc are long gone, though.

      • Some people like to collect physical objects. That includes a box, even if it's empty. There's still a market for it, so they'll sell it. The days of being able to play a game offline entirely from the disc are long gone, though.

        "We are getting more and more information that the box version will not be released simultaneously with the digital version"

        If the digital version gets released on time (I say that loosely) why exactly are we writing articles sounding the alarm for nerds who collect empty boxes again? Is this a story for game players or art collectors?

        • Because it's another landing on the slippery slope toward no physical release at all, and the bottom is approaching rapidly as you've already pointed out.
    • Because you need to print and have the physical copies ahead of time ready for launch day. Anyone in the supply chain can snatch a copy early. now how they activate and get the game going is beyond me.
      • Because you need to print and have the physical copies ahead of time...

        Using the word "need" here, is a bit laughable in the 21st Century that has already distributed digital-only games.

    • by EvilSS ( 557649 )
      The answer to your question is literally in the title.
    • Offering a box is in no way anti-consumer vs having download only.
      • Offering an effectively empty box at a big markup is definitely anti consumer. But that's true of literally any software sale where you don't get media you can install from without a network connection. A digital download that you can install from later without approval from a server is better than a disc where you can't, let alone no disc.

        • Is that really so common to not even have the game on it to avoid the big initial download? I googled the game mentioned above and they did do that, but didn't make it sounds like a regular practice, and people were angry.

          Granted you aren't saving much more than some bandwidth if you still have to log on to a server to play.

          • Not only is it very common but it's frequently irrelevant.

            Take Half Life 2 for example. That was a long time ago, right? It was so long ago I was still using a modem, because I lived in the back of bumfuck.

            So you put in the disc and you find out the first thing you have to do is install Steam. So Steam installs, then it detects and update and downloads that update. The "update" is actually all of Steam again, and Steam includes a bunch of shit that I have on my system already since it includes a web browser

    • by ruddk ( 5153113 )

      One could hope you got a version on a disc that you could run when their auth servers are long gone but that is probably not going to happen

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )

      Could someone please elaborate on the entire point of releasing a digital version and a "boxed" version at different times?

      The same reason why Rockstar published PC versions of GTA V and RDR2 only significant time after the console version: To squeeze more money out of the impatient consumer zombies, who buy first one version to "not miss out", and later buy another copy (because it is better in some way).

  • Considering just how bad the single player game was for GTA 5, I'm taking a pass on this next one...so I really don't care about the release.

    • What was so bad about the single player game? It was fine, and a lot of fun. It didn't get all of the additions that online got over the years, but considering the stupid shit like flying motorcycles that was added, that isn't really a bad thing.

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      I enjoyed the single player GTA V, and never played the multiplayer version. Likewise, I'm considering buying GTA VI if reviews find it to work fine, but I will certainly only buy a physical disc that cannot be "switched off" remotely for some stupid corporate reason. And again, I only plan on playing the single player missions. I can honestly not understand why people are so keen on playing with just somebody from the Internet. If there still were LAN parties, and a few friends joined, then of course multi
      • Exactly this. I loved playing Unreal online with my actual friends (remember the Serpentine mod? So much fun.) I miss being able to do that. Start adding random strangers from the Internet and shit goes sour real fast. No thanks.

  • by jonwil ( 467024 ) on Monday January 26, 2026 @06:00PM (#65950986)

    We all know that any physical release of a game as big as GTA6 is going to need a day-one patch anyway. So make it that the game wont play until it's been patched.

    If disks leak early, they will be useless to anyone until release day anyway.

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 ) on Monday January 26, 2026 @08:11PM (#65951244)
      I think this whole "being concerned about leaks" nonsense is just pretense. The only reason why a company could lose significantly from leaks a few days or weeks before official release is if the game was real shitty, and they tried to trick people into buying blind before reviews are in. But it is highly unlikely that GTA VI could be that bad. The "concerns about leaks" are rather a pretense to establish some consumer unfriendly habits shaped to squeeze a little more money out of impatient consumers buying more than one copy.
  • I will not be surprised if the download clocks in at 250GB or more. I wonder how many people have that amount of space to even spare on a single game.

    Not that the physical media will help since it'll probably copy most of the files over to the SSD but at least users have a copy of it - at least for a little bit. Because the normal trend these days is to crap out a broken gold master and immediately drop a massive patch over the top.

    • by ffkom ( 3519199 )
      It's not like 99% of graphics data has to be changed for typical day-1-patches. Even if bugs in the code are fixed until the last second, loading most of the assets from the physical media could save customers quite some downloading time, at least where the net is not so fast.
      • It depends on how they've packaged the game. If they've got some weird middleware that dumps everything into a giant multi-gigabyte blob, (they probably do), then chances are most of the "day-1-patches" will be just the bytes already sent being moved around to accommodate a couple of KBs of actual changes that didn't line up on some existing chunk boundary.

        On the other hand, if they've got the individual files sitting bare on the filesystem, or have some sort of middleware that can transparently apply del
  • I've become really unexcited about Rockstar lately. Stupid, unnecessary game launcher. Overwhelming focus on multiplayer/shark cards, though it's a money-maker, so...hard to fault them from a business standpoint, but really hate it from a gamer standpoint. Lack of focus on PC.

    But I'm probably just not their target market anymore.

  • People need to understand that such a release is just a mundane necessity. Don't try to attach any emotional baggage to it, or make it out to be something more significant than it is. It just has to happen. Clean up after the fact if necessary and don't make a big deal out of it.

  • The headline is designed (authored?) as a click-bait - "delayed to 2027" seems like a large delay considering it is now January 2026. However, once you read the details, the original release date was supposed to be at the end of 2026 (Nov 19th, 2026), so if they release the physical version on Jan 1st, 2027, it will be under a month and half delay. Still silly though, as most physical releases nowadays are just downloaders which download the latest version of the game anyways, so why not just do that?

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