Rockstar owner issues takedowns after Grand Theft Auto VI leak

theguardian.com:

More than 90 videos and images of Grand Theft Auto VI, the long-awaited follow-up to 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V, one of the best-selling video games of all time – leaked online over the weekend, in one of the biggest confidential data breaches in gaming history.

The footage was posted to the GTAForums website by a user going by the name teapotuberhacker, who claimed to have accessed it by hacking Rockstar’s internal company Slack feed and gaining access to their servers.

The original post has since been taken down, but not before the images and video proliferated across social media. Rockstar Games’ parent company, Take-Two Interactive, has been issuing takedowns to remove the footage from YouTube and Twitter.

The hacker has also threatened to leak the source code for Grand Theft Auto V and the in-development version of Grand Theft Auto VI, inviting Rockstar Games to negotiate a deal.

Rockstar Games and Take-Two have yet to comment on the leak, but sources close to Rockstar have indicated to the Guardian and Bloomberg that it is genuine, and represents an early-in-development build of the game that is already a year old.

The footage shows animation tests, level layouts and gameplay tests, including some fully voiced conversations between characters. The footage shows a female protagonist in a fictionalised modern-day Miami, Vice City, also the setting of 2002’s Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

The videos clearly show an in-progress version of the game, with debug commands and other technical information overlaid. Rockstar confirmed that GTA 6 was in “active development” earlier this year, though early work on the game probably began in 2014.

Leaks are damaging to video game developers not just because of the confidential information