Big upcoming video games often leak, but not quite the way it’s been happening to Rockstar Games’ Grand Theft Auto VI for the past several days.
Earlier this week, a person or group going by the online handle CyberLeek posted two gameplay clips from the game. That was just the start:
Tuesday: The first two clips, each about a minute long, showing co-protagonist Jason Duval driving on a highway and tossing a basketball into a hoop
Wednesday: Two more clips leak
Thursday morning: Another leak, this one ending with Jason shooting bullet holes into a wall to spell out the word “LEEK”— strongly suggesting the leaker has access to a build of the game
Friday: And another
The leaked footage was overlaid with links and messages, including a solicitation for people to buy a memecoin and a threat to conduct similar hacks and leaks against video game companies that didn’t follow a set of “commandments.” Those demands: offer offline modes for online games, refrain from “fake single-player DLC” and don’t solicit digital pre-orders for games “before release and independent review,” according to a Kotaku run-down of the manifesto.
If those demands are at all meant earnestly—and not simply leaking for profits and thrills—it’s the last one which would apply to GTA VI. Take Two and Rockstar released trailers and started pre-orders for the game without showing any gameplay, nor previewing the game to the press (which they’d done for prior big Rockstar games by this point). The company still hasn’t shown any gameplay, as its November 19 release date approaches.
Regardless, some of the very parties that would sympathize with the manifesto’s goals condemned then leaks. On Tuesday night, the head of the Stop Killing Games movement, wrote on Reddit that the leaks were wrong:
“Using illegal means to make a point is unacceptable to us and does nothing to protect our right to keep using what we paid for. No matter how strongly you disagree with the decisions of upper management at these companies, there are still thousands of developers who worked hard on this project, and they’re the ones being hit the hardest.”
GTA publisher Take Two quickly moved to wipe the footage from the internet, but copies of the videos have persisted and lengthy descriptions have been posted online as each new one has appeared.
Common takeaways are that the game looks impressive, though also what you’d envision a modern GTA set in virtual Florida to look like. Some fans are debating the possible need for gas in cars, which some of the leaked clips appear to indicate. Among the unknowns about the leaks are whether they’re from a recent build of the game and therefore whether details seen in the clips are even still in the game.
There have been signs of a crackdown. Website URLs included in the leaked clips stopped working by mid-week.
On Thursday, Take Two asked a court in New York to subpoena Discord and Microsoft to try to get details on accounts the company believes are associated with the leaks.
On Friday, a judge gave the go-ahead for the subpoenas. About an hour before the judge’s order regarding the Microsoft request hit the case’s official docket, Xbox CTO Scott Van Vliet posted to X: “We are working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games to support efforts to protect creative works and intellectual property.”
(Take Two has ample experience dealing with game leaks, among them a prior 90-video GTA VI breach in 2022 that resulted in an arrest and a pending retrial, as well as a set of Borderlands 3 leaks that led it to send investigators to a YouTuber’s house.)
Rockstar and Take Two reps did not reply to requests for comment about the leaks nor the age of the footage shown in them.
Rockstar will premiere an official “extended look” of GTA VI on Netflix next Thursday.
Item 2: In brief…
🇺🇸 Spending in the U.S. on video game content, hardware and accessories totaled $4.5 billion in July, down 10% from a year ago, according to sales tracker Circana.
The top-charting game was an updated version of Call of Duty: Black Ops II, with EA Sports College Football 27 second (but college football would take the top slot if an “MVP” bundle with the then-upcoming Madden were counted.)
Console sales had their worst July since 2020.
Physical game sales update: While game content sales in the U.S. totaled $4.1 billion in July, just $85 million was spent on new physical copies of games, an all-time low back to when Circana first tracked such data in 1995. The firm noted that, year-to-date, 63% of spending on physical games happened on Nintendo platforms, 32% on the soon-to-be-disc-ditching PlayStation (and 4% for Xbox).
🚫 Riot Games says it is discontinuing active development for fighting game 2XKO in December. The free-to-play game will remain available to play online and offline.
The League of Legends maker cited a failure to gain traction with the broader fighting game fanbase.
After years of development and months of early access on PC, 2XKO officially launched on PC and console in January of this year. Like Riot’s other games it was meant to be sustained through regular content updates. But by February, Riot announced via a “difficult update” that it was reducing the size of the game’s development team.
👀 Sony is rebooting development of Horizon: Hunters Gathering, a multiplayer game set in the typically single-player futuristic franchise, following poor player feedback during private player tests, Bloomberg reports.
🇸🇦 The Esports Nations Cup, a competitive gaming event set to be held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia in November will be postponed until November 2027, organizers at the Saudi government-backed Esports Foundation said this week.
The group cited “uncertainty created by the wider regional situation,” (which is code for: The U.S.-Iran war) but added that “Saudi Arabia remains fully capable of hosting events, with major sporting and entertainment events continuing as planned.”
🎮 Compulsion Games (South of Midnight) is fully independent, having completed its management buyout from Microsoft, according to a Gamesbeat interview with studio CEO Guillaume Provost.
Provost, who acknowledged that some workers had left the studio earlier this year as a threat of closure loomed, predicted a healthy future for the studio: “I’m fairly confident we can get to that place if the team’s heart and priorities are aligned with running a profitable business.”
🎮 DoubleFine (Keeper, Psychonauts, Broken Age), having completed its management buyout from Microsoft, is launching a crowd-funding campaign at the end of the month for a game jam that will produce a new game, along with a documentary that will film the process.
All of these elements—a Kickstarter, an Amnesia Fortnight game jam, a behind-the-scenes doc made by 2 Player Productions—went very well for the studio in the past.
💡 Harvey Smith (Deus Ex, Dishonored, Redfall), an award-winning specialist in the immersive sim genre of video games, has announced a new studio, Black Pony Immersive, with the hope to make a new game in the genre:
“…there’s just so much bad news and it’s shocking, the state of the world, beyond video games. So, it feels like to do something optimistic in the face of that is to be a dark horse. We’re going to fall back on what we love. We’re going to work with the people we love. We’re going to have fun doing it.
“So, Black Pony Immersive is tongue-in-cheek for that, but also ‘immersive’ is right there in the title. We want to make immersive sims. We want to make single player, narrative driven, first person games where you explore and solve problems creatively. Think Deus Ex, think Dishonored, that’s what we’re doing.”
💡 Warren Spector (Deus Ex, System Shock, Epic Mickey), a pioneer of the immersive sim genre of video games—look it up on Wikipedia and you get a photo of Spector—has announced his retirement from game development, after 40+ years making tabletop and digital games:
“I definitely have mixed feelings about this. I mean there are three games in particular I’d still like to make. (One is very big... one is very small... and one I don’t know how to make which scares me.) But the game business has changed and it’s just not as much fun for me anymore. Plus there’s a new generation of developers coming up who deserve their time in the sun.
“To all of you reading this I want you to remember that games are not a solved problem yet -- there is, I hope, plenty of experimentation and innovation to come. And to all you young developers out there, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, your job is to make people forget people like me ever existed.”
Item 3: The week ahead
Monday, August 24
Game release: Combolands (PC) is a roguelite city builder from one of the makers of the terrific reverse-Sim-City game Terra Nil (I really enjoyed Combolands’ demo).
Tuesday, August 25
Event: At 2pm ET, Opening Night Live, a livestreamed event featuring game announcements, kicks off the massive Gamescom public gaming show in Cologne, Germany.
Wednesday, August 26
Game releases: 1666: Amsterdam (PC, early access) is the first new game from Panache Digital and lead Assassin’s Creed creator Patrice Désilets in six years (Read my recent chat with Désilets); Blood Dungeon (PC, console) is a 2D platform survival game from the makers of Nidhogg; Sokogram (PC) is a puzzle game that combines block-pushing Sokoban with Picross-style Nonogram logic grids (another demo I really enjoyed)
Thursday, August 27
Event: An extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI—the game’s first official preview, basically—premieres on Netflix at 3pm ET and then will be on Rockstar’s YouTube channel six hours later.
Game releases: Star Wars Zero Company (PC, PS5, Xbox) is an XCOM-style tactics game set during Star Wars’ Clone Wars; Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy (PC, PS5, Xbox) is a prequel to the well-regarded action-adventure series; Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2 (PC, console) features 2008’s Metal Gear Solid 4 and 2010’s Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker. Suddenly I’m thinking about frying eggs.