I Spoke To Rockstar Employees About The New Grand Theft Auto VI Leak

Hello, OneTakeShrier here. Grand Theft Auto 6 has leaked yet again for the second time in the last 4 years. Early footage from the next Grand Theft Auto has been plastered across the internet against Rockstar Games, the developer behind it, against their wishes. I spoke to people at Rockstar Games to try to get a sense of the mood within the company and what they are doing about it for a Bloomberg story that you can read in the show notes, but first let's go back in time. It's September 2022. GTA 6 has not yet been officially announced, although I think by this point everybody knows that it's what Rockstar is working on next thanks to various reports and rumors and leaks and hints from the company even. People know that it's coming, but it is not yet announced when suddenly a massive trove of videos and footage and images from the next Grand Theft Auto is posted across the internet. Um, it this leak

has widespread repercussions on Rockstar, on the people behind it. The guy behind it, a teenager in the UK, is caught and eventually winds up being found unfit to serve at trial and is sentenced indefinitely to a hospital stay and the leak Rockstar addresses the leak online. They say that unfortunately footage from the next Grand Theft Auto has been leaked and we hope we're we're very frustrated by this and we hope to show you a proper look at what we're making next time. It would be another year or so before Rockstar officially revealed the game, Grand Theft Auto 6, and as most people know it was then delayed after being in development for a very long time. It was delayed twice more after that. It was announced in the fall of 2023, September of 2023 or end of 2023. Um, first announced for uh, end of 2025 and then delayed to

spring of 2026 and now November 19th, 2026, which which is where it has landed. But, there are repercussions within Rockstar Games as a result of this leak. Namely, a couple years after it happened in the beginning of 2024, Rockstar implemented a new policy that it is, uh, that that staff across the company are going to have to go back into the office five days a week. Um, which this was kind of, uh, a big change from hybrid policies that they had been adopting previously and it caused some grumbling. But, there was another part of that that actually led to even more frustration for people at Rockstar Games, which is that not only did they have to go back in five days a week, they also for the most part could not access any work tools from home or from any sort of remote location. In order to access the various kind of communication devices and tools and servers and builds that you would need to actually work on the game, you needed to be in the office. And Rockstar said that was

because of security, they wanted to prevent a leak like this from happening again. But, from a practical point of view, that can be a little bit frustrating because if you want to, say, take your kid to a midday doctor's appointment and then go home with them and finish the rest of your work day at home, that became impossible. You would have to take PTO. You would have to take an off day in order to do stuff like that, which if you have a more flexible workplace, a lot of people are able to do. Particularly challenging, by the way, if you have kids where you need to kind of, uh, rearrange your life around various pickups and drop-offs and appointments and snow days and vacation days and holidays and whatnot. So, this was really frustrating for a lot of people. The five days of work, five days back to the office part, that was one thing, but the not lack of remote work, that was quite another. But, hey, it was in the service of preventing further leaks, which is why it's even more frustrating to see what happened this week for some of those people. All of

that All those new protocols, all of that new security, all of that diligence, and yet the game has leaked again. So, what happened this week? Starting on Tuesday, a an internet hacking group or individual going by the name Cyberleak has started posting videos. I believe there are are six clips as of right now from a more recent build of GTA 6. Because unlike the one that happened in 2022 when the game was in pretty early development, this is a much more recent build from, I don't know, the last year or so. I'm not sure exactly when it's from. Um there was footage of Jason Duval, the main character, playing basketball, driving around Miami, flying a propeller plane around Miami, which is um pretty astonishing to look at, I've got to say. Uh shooting a gun, getting into a knife fight. We saw a little bit of the gameplay uh mechanics that they have. And uh for the most part, it looked like a Grand

Theft Auto game. But what was different now is that this felt like real footage that is pretty close to if not exactly what will be playable in a couple of months. Fair to say it's not exact because uh the the game is still in development and is inevitably going to change in some way or another between now and November, even if it's just polish and bug fixing, but still, pretty close. Um that is a big deal. Uh that was a very frustrating to Rockstar employees. They were like, "We did all of the security protocol for what?" It was also frustrating to people who didn't get a proper reveal of their game. Undoubtedly frustrating for Netflix because uh what was supposed to happen was that Rockstar was supposed to first reveal the gameplay in a big premiere that is going to be on Netflix next week on August 27th and show off the game for the first time. This undercut that quite a bit. Um safe to say it's not going to have much of an impact, really any impact on the actual launch of the game. I don't think that leaking some early gameplay footage

that people were going to see anyway is going to make any difference when it comes to sales. Plus, you watch this footage, sure it just looks like a GTA game, but still um pretty big deal, I think, for the people involved. So, I spoke to people. I heard some frustration about the stuff I mentioned earlier about the security protocols and how they didn't seem to prevent this from happening. Um Rockstar, according to people I've spoken to, does not yet, as of the time I'm recording this video on uh Friday, August 21st in the afternoon, East Coast time, Rockstar does not know who the leaker is yet. They have not identified the parties responsible, and they have not identified how this happens. I've heard there are some theories floating around about which office it might have happened in, where the security breach originated, but as of right now, they have not figured out the answer to that question. But, they are putting, quote and quote, all hands on deck, according to a person familiar with the company's strategy, to try to figure out how it

happened, who it was, and why it happened. Um I think it's pretty obvious that this is a uh financial play because all of the footage is kind of marred with these big Cyber League logos that include a barcode and a meme coin advertisement um that uh will not really lead to the party involved making some sort of crypto money. Um so, I guess the why of it is is kind of answered. Uh Cyber League has also reportedly put up a manifesto of some sort demanding that this is basically hitting kind of like a a checklist of the gripes that gamers have about physical discs and games dying and all that other stuff as part of their kind of argument in favor of putting these leaks up. As for internally at the company, there have been some communications. One

top executive sent out an email saying, "Hey, this really sucks." Denounced the leaker responsible. Tried to buoy morale a little bit. Talked about how when people actually see the gameplay, they'll be super impressed. How much hard work everybody's put into it, yada yada. All the thousands of people around the globe who are working on this game. And by the way, it's still not finished. I think that important note here. It is August of 2026. The game is pretty close to being finished, but it is not finished. People are still working on it up until the last possible moment. November 19th is when the game actually comes out. And so, morale is a concern at this point because it can be frustrating to to see something like this happen. So, some sentiments I've heard from talking to people at Rockstar. I think there's a little bit of frustration about um Obviously having your work get shown in a kind of unofficial unofficial capacity sucks. But more than that, just having it been be shown by somebody who is like not

good at playing the game. And also, it's just kind of got these big ugly stamps, watermarks, Cyberpunk watermarks all over it. I think that can be frustrating for people who want their work to be shown in the best light possible. So, that's one thing. I think it definitely definitely could have been worse is a sentiment that I've heard. Frustration that this is happening again. Frustration that Rockstar is a constant target of this. It's interesting. There's kind of this paradoxical feeling that you have if you work at a place like Rockstar Games where um, you kind of you you have to you know that you're this target and it feels so unfair when you're a target of something like this, but at the same time you just have to kind of accept and that you're going to be a target when you work on what will be the biggest game in the world when it comes out in a few months and it's just kind of like the the um, the the kind of the negative lining that comes with the success, the other side

of the coin, the other kind of the the the gross warm side of the pillow to to take a to to go in all sorts of metaphorical directions here. Um, where where like when you're at the top, you're going to get fired at. Um, you're going to be the subject of stuff like this when you're working on one of the most high interest games. And Rockstar, there's a long history of people going after Rockstar in various capacities. Um, the hot coffee story and the story of people discovering within the code base of Rockstar sexually explicit stuff. That had a gigantic impact on the company and would impact it would would would affect it for many years after that came out back in the early 2000s. Um, so this is a company with a history of just kind of being the subject of these sorts of breaches and and hacks. People just kind of stealing discs from warehouses and trying to get leaked builds of the game online early and so on and so forth. Um, so that's certainly frustrating, I believe, for people there. Um,

there's I think people are just kind of like feeling exhausted. I mean, it was like it's it's a really bad time for this something like this to happen just as you're kind of heading in your final sprint and you want to see the game finished already. You want to get that work out there and get it out into the world and yeah, at the very top of Rockstar, people are just kind of holding all sorts of meetings and doing everything they can to hunt down who is responsible for this leak, the the quote-unquote cyber leak. TBD if it'll happen, but um I think again, like I said before, it's safe to say that this is not going to have a financial impact on Rockstar or Take-Two. By the way, I saw some headlines about how like this leak caused Take-Two to lose billions of dollars and it was some kind of gaming sites reporting on Take-Two's stock dropping a few percentage points as a result of this leak, which first of all, I mean uh with stock market volatility,

you never know exactly why a stock is dropping. I guess it could have been cuz of the leak, could have also been because the market was falling that day, could have also been because of the war in Iran, it could have been a million different factors. But also, uh Take-Two, just a little a little bit of financial literacy here, is that Take-Two does not lose billions of dollars when its stock drops. Take-Two has what's called a Take-Two, by the way, is the parent company of Rockstar Games, of course. Take-Two has what's called a market cap, and the market cap is essentially the number you get when you take the share price and you multiply it by the number of shares that are on the market um to kind of get a sense of what the total valuation of that company is, however many billions of dollars it's worth, and that drops or raises every time the stock moves up or down, but that is not something that, unless you're a day trader, that is not something that is particularly relevant. What is relevant on the stock market is sustained paths. Um the volatility of of hourly trading or day-to-day trading is is really relevant to most people and certainly irrelevant to uh Take-Two

executives for the most part, and they certainly did not lose billions of dollars as a result of this. So, uh put put those headlines out of your mind if you saw them. Um but anyway, yeah, this is not going to have a major impact on the financial success or critical success of the game, it's safe to say. We'll see what happens with Netfli- Netflix's premiere next week, and we'll also see what happens as cyber leak continues um since they have not yet been caught or traced down. We'll see how much more gets released, what else they choose to do. Um, it is still a lot of kind of open questions. Um, but for the people who are still working at Rockstar, who are still working on the game, they just have to kind of keep on keeping on through all this, and I think they they've been through a lot already. People at Rockstar have been through a lot. It's It's interesting. You get to work on the biggest game in the world, but you also have a lot of emotional highs and lows, especially when this sort of thing happens to you, not just once, but twice over the course of

development. And I would argue that this one is is even worse, because it's so much closer to the real date. I think the 2022 leaks and, uh, I I saw some of that footage when it was circulating on the internet back then, so much of it is so early and so unfinished, so clearly unfinished, and so not representative of what the final game would look like, that it almost feels like an abstraction. Like it's almost like you're getting a peek into behind-the-scenes on game development, rather than a full-on leak of what is about to hit. Whereas, this current leak feels more like, "Oh, we are seeing gameplay." And like I said before, the good news is that so far what we've seen from cyber leak is pretty much just kind of standard Grand Theft Auto gameplay. You're driving, you're flying. It also looks pretty good. So, it's possible that people online are seeing these leaks and even more inclined to buy the game, cuz they think it looks good. Or maybe they're not going to buy the game, because they think, "Oh, it's just a GTA. It's not actually this, uh, the the the uh prince that was promised, the revolution in in video games that we're

going to see. It's just another very pretty GTA game with some cool ideas and hopefully a pretty good story." So, as of right now, Rockstar is still trying to figure out who did this, how it happened. Um, we will see what kind of new security measures they take as a result of this breach, after we saw what happened the first time around. And we'll see if people have some hard conversations about whether or not they still have to keep going through the stringent security measures that they took the last time around, whether they can whether the company will for moving forward be more flexible when it comes to remote work and being able to do your work that outside of the office now that the game is leaking either way. So yeah, there will be much more to say about GTA 6 in the coming weeks or months. I'm excited to talk about it, excited to do more reporting on it, to talk to more folks at Rockstar, and do some reporting about the development of this game. I am really excited to break that down and talk a little bit more

about what just has been going on at Rockstar over the last seven, eight years that this game since Red Dead 2 came out cuz I think that's a fascinating story. I also want to talk a little bit more. I've talked I've reported some in the past in 2022 I did a Bloomberg story about how Rockstar's culture had changed over the years, how they had tried to pursue better work-life balance, and kind of eliminate some of the grosser aspects of their previous culture, the bro culture aspects of it, the frat boy like aspects of it, the the the company events where people would be drinking so much that they vomited all over each other, that sort of stuff, not to mention the physical aggression, and other issues like that. So I will be talking a little bit more about that and how it's changed. There's lots more to get into when it comes to Grand Theft Auto 6. So look forward to that at Bloomberg and on this channel. In the meantime, check out the show notes for my Bloomberg story today, and I will see you all next time.