A few days out from the official GTA 6 showcase on Netflix, Rockstar Games has just suffered another massive leak. Several unseen gameplay videos have circulated online, showing among other things Jason Duval playing basketball, but also various sequences in Vice City, at the wheel of several vehicles or simply exploring.
Behind these images is an entity called Cyberleek, whose exact identity remains unknown. And rather than a simple leak meant to draw attention, the group decided to pair the release of the videos with a genuine manifesto aimed squarely at the video game industry.
A broadside against the video game industry
In its statement, Cyberleek accuses publishers of piling up practices it considers abusive: games sold as finished products when they are supposedly still incomplete, DLC already present in the game’s files, artificially locked content, and games disappearing even though players had bought them.
The group is calling in particular for three changes: an end to digital pre-orders, a ban on single-player DLC already present in the base game, and a requirement to provide an offline fallback mode for single-player games.
Cyberleek also says it intends to go after publishers that fail to respect these principles, until it obtains public apologies and concrete commitments.
The problem is that this anti-consumerist rhetoric comes with a rather surprising practice: the collective is trying to fund its activity through a memecoin-style cryptocurrency. The money raised would notably go towards funding its infrastructure and its security in the face of any retaliation from the companies targeted.
It is hard, then, not to see a certain contradiction between the message being defended and the way it is being funded.
Footage that may already be out of date
Another important point: the sequences released are probably not representative of the current version of GTA 6.
According to a source cited by Insider Gaming, one of the videos was reportedly encoded with FFmpeg 6.1, a version released in November 2023. That obviously doesn’t make it possible to determine with any certainty when the footage was recorded, but it does at least indicate that the file was processed with a tool available since that period.
The well-known leaker NateTheHate reckons for his part that the footage could be more than a year old, without being able to give a precise date. Other observers also point out that the use of an older FFmpeg version cannot, on its own, date the original capture.
In other words, even if the footage is genuine, it could be showing a GTA 6 that has moved on considerably since.
Rockstar keeps quiet
For now, Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive have made no official comment on this new leak. The videos have, however, quickly been the subject of numerous copyright infringement reports, which is a further clue as to their authenticity.
And the timing is particularly bad for Rockstar: these leaks come only a few days before the next official GTA 6 showcase.
The studio is due to unveil the first genuinely official gameplay footage on 27 August on Netflix, with the presentation going online a few hours later.
As for the real impact of these leaks on the game, it should be relatively limited. GTA 6 is one of the most eagerly awaited games in history and, even if some footage may temporarily disrupt Rockstar’s communications, it is hard to imagine it could really dent sales of Rockstar’s coming phenomenon.
All the more so if the footage in question does indeed come from a version of the game that is several years old.
