The GTA 6 September leaks caused a massive uproar on the internet and a lot of people were excited to see something from the much-anticipated game. But experts call this event a 'nightmare', and for good reason.
It's rare that you see history play out live in front of you, but that's exactly what happened on September 18. GTA 6 was completely revealed, with over 90 videos and other material leaked online. We had never seen the game before, and suddenly we saw a lot of it in bits and pieces. Pretty exciting, right? Well, yeah, of course. We finally saw GTA 6, who wouldn't be excited about that? But experts call the leak a “nightmare”, not just for Rockstar Games. And rightfully so.
The GTA 6 Leaks Are Terrible For Everyone
It's obvious why the leaks are bad for developers at Rockstar Games. I mean, they kept one of the most-anticipated games of all time completely under wraps so far, and then it all gets leaked. This is not just a shitty thing to experience, it will also have dire consequences for the team. For one, GTA 6 will be delayed even further into the future, and that's unavoidable now. Valuable resources have to be used to deal with the attack, stolen and exposed assets need to be replaced with new work, and the whole situation has to be cleared up and dealt with internally. There's no chance they finish in time for the planned release date with all that extra work to be done.
Insider Jason Schreier, who revealed the first details on GTA 6 via Bloomberg, called the leak a 'nightmare' on Twitter. He described some of the most likely consequences of this leak and how it will set back operations at Rockstar Games and the development of the game.
To those who asked: There are several reasons this is a nightmare for Rockstar. One is that it'll disrupt work for a while. Another is that it may lead management to limit work-from-home flexibility. The repercussions of this leak might not be clear for quite a while
— Jason Schreier (@jasonschreier) September 18, 2022
Rockstar must be on fire right now. Their official response downplayed the situation somewhat, but we know from a statement by parent company Take-Two that they “have already taken steps to isolate and contain this incident”. According to Schreier, that seems to mean disabling “everyone's slack and other work accounts”, among other disruptions and radical changes in the work flow. A lot will have to change for Rockstar's team, and that will make developing the game even harder.
Check out everything we know about GTA 6 in this video:
But what about us fans? Leaks can be exciting, seeing something quicker than you thought you would is cool. In this case it was much quicker even. But what did we gain from the GTA 6 leaks? We saw disparate bits of an unfinished game, in such an early state that it prompted a lot of uninformed and negative comments on the internet.
Yes, the game doesn't look great in the leaked videos, that's because it's four to five years away from release. Seeing this raw footage didn't do our anticipation for the game any favors, neither did it do anything for the understanding of game development.
GTA 6 graphics could be mindblowing... once the game is done.
Rockstar is always big on surprising people with their reveals, and causing a big splash with effective marketing. My favorite example will always be the first Red Dead Redemption 2 tease just being an image of the Rockstar logo in red colors. Isn't that kind of clever marketing more exciting than seeing footage of a GTA character walking through a club and talking to untextured NPCs? That element of surprise is potentially completely gone: we know about the two protagonists, and we saw Vice City. What else could excite us during the first reveals?
Maybe this won't matter too much in the end, everyone will go out and buy GTA 6 anyway, and it will probably be a great game. But the end is even further away now, probably 2025 at this point. And the road to release has become even rockier, for everyone involved.
GTA 6 isn't the only highly-anticipated game by Rockstar: check out everything we know about Red Dead Redemption 3.