GTA 6 leaks: Forget what you think you know about game development

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Like many, my first thought upon seeing the GTA 6 leak was ‘fuck’. The second was a flashback to the protocols which had occurred when leaks or security breaches, no matter how minor, had happened when I was on the development side of the industry: usually, angry-faced men bursting into a room and demanding nobody touch anything. The third thought was what Rockstar, the king of image control and information flow, would do now. My mind ran to that sequence from The Bourne Identity, where an embattled CIA station chief demands the agency ‘get everybody up’. Everybody, in this instance, being a set of assassins, each with cool names and even colder intentions.

To my knowledge, Matt Damon is not involved, and Rockstar’s brass has not dispatched Clive Owen to have a gun-point philosophical chat with the person responsible for this leak, much as it perhaps would like to. It has, however, teamed with the FBI, so maybe I wasn’t that far off. Either way, the response will be swift and all-encompassing, like what happened with the closest thing I can think of to this, the Half-Life 2 leak. (And we all know what happened there.)

The reasons for such a response are obvious. There is a gigantic financial element in play here. There are security concerns regarding source code and other exposures which could well derail an entire project. And then there’s reputational damage, which has already occurred. Seconds after the leak, the internet was awash with people disappointed with how it looked. That it looked like shit. That if this was what it looks like, it would be a huge disappointment and, just quietly, what have the (lazy?) devs been up to all this time?

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