The Real Impact of the Grand Theft Auto and Diablo Leaks
ON SEPTEMBER 17, a user called teapotuberhacker went to a Grand Theft Auto forum with what they claimed were 90 clips from Rockstar Games’ next big presumed hit, Grand Theft Auto VI. “[It’s] possible I could leak more data soon, GTA 5 and 6 source code and assets, GTA 6 testing build,” they wrote.
| The hack was real. The next day, Rockstar confirmed that it had “suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally downloaded confidential information from our system.” That included early footage from its upcoming game, leaving parent company Take-Two scrambling to get videos posted on platforms like YouTube and Twitter removed as quickly as possible. (Rockstar did not respond to requests for comment.) |
Grand Theft Auto’s leak is one of, if not the, biggest leaks to happen in the game industry. The scope of what the hacker managed to steal, from videos to, potentially, GTA V and GTA VI source code—the building blocks that allow developers to uniquely craft their games—is mind-boggling. Yet despite suffering a massive breach, Rockstar Games isn’t alone. This week, a Reddit user posted 43 minutes of beta footage from Blizzard’s upcoming Diablo IV. Earlier this month, news about Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, was outed online ahead of the company’s flashy announcement; a YouTuber has since come forward to confess responsibility for the leak after he broke an embargo. In the past, hackers have targeted prominent developers like Naughty Dog, posting unreleased information about The Last of Us Part II.
In the immediate aftermath of the GTA VI leak, Take-Two’s stock dipped and the company assured investors it had “taken steps to isolate and contain this incident.” But the real impact may not be felt for some time. Content leaks are a development nightmare. Gamemakers WIRED spoke to describe it as a demoralizing, even demotivating incident. “You work for years on a project and then a partially finished version of it is online,” says longtime creative director Alex Hutchinson, whose projects include Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4. “And you are getting endless negative comments about it, which you can’t defend because then you’re just giving oxygen to a bad moment.” And the knock-on effects can be even worse.
Players have already been critical of Grand Theft Auto VI’s leaked build and how the game—still in progress—looks. Much of this is driven by a misunderstanding of how development works, and how games will appear when they’re finished. Consider Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. On Twitter, Naughty Dog developer Kurt Margenau posted an early build of a car chase featuring hero Nathan Drake driving a jeep down what looks like a 3D graph, road neatly squared, past buildings that could be made of children’s building blocks. “Its goal is to represent the gameplay experience as closely as possible,” he tweeted. “Then iterate.” The video ends with a look at the final version, a glossy city brimming with color.
Leaks, developers say, skew the public perception of the game, imprinting on players that the version they’ll buy is going to be … well, trash. “If you watched a Marvel movie filled with green screens and no special effects, you would have a completely tarnished impression of the final quality, and if you never saw the final film then this would be your permanent impression,” Hutchinson says.
