Take-Two Shuts Down The GTA 6 Leak But It's Too Late
The massive "Grand Theft Auto 6" leak has taken the video games industry by storm. The leak first surfaced on the GTA Forums and revealed some key details about "GTA 6," such as a female character, new vehicle mechanics, and the return of a Zuckerberg parody among others. However, developer Rockstar and parent company Take-Two have finally entered damage control mode and are actively trying to get the leaked material pulled down from the internet.
Tech journalist Tom Warren tweeted a screenshot of a community post from the GTA Forums admins, claiming that Take-Two reached out to them with takedown requests covering copyrighted material. In the wake of the request, all the content posted in the thread by the bad actor has been pulled. "All copyrighted/sensitive media, code and links have been removed and this topic has been locked," says the updated post. The thread was locked temporarily but has since been opened to public comments.
Moreover, the GTA Forums home page now shows a banner at the top asking community members to refrain from sharing leaked media. According to a report from The Guardian, the affected parties have started issuing takedown notices to remove the leaked material from Twitter and YouTube. A couple of active Telegram accounts were also created by the hacker going by the username @teapotuberhacker, complete with cloud links and shareable ZIP files of the alleged "GTA 6" material.
Saving a sinking boat
Games journalist Tom Henderson has been keeping a tab on the content takedown situation in Twitter thread. Henderson also shared purported logs of YouTube content takedown requests issued in the name of Take 2 Interactive. The content removal strategy is a natural course of action to mitigate further damage, but it would be impossible to curtail the leaked videos in its entirety as much of it has also been locally downloaded to an unknown extent by users across the globe. Moreover, the media erasure requests only confirm that the leaked material was indeed legitimate.
Apparently, the leaskter openly shared a communication request, asking a Take-Two employee to get in touch and negotiate financial terms. To recall, the bad actor originally posted on the GTA Forums that they have access to the source code of both "GTA 5" and "GTA 6." Moreover, the malicious party was unwilling to settle for a ransom of less than "five figures" in remuneration.
At this point in time, it is hard to predict how much of an impact the leak will have on "GTA 6's" development and whether the highly-anticipated title is now at the risk of being delayed. But going by the leaked clips, the game appears to be almost ready. Experts also note that the leak might change the work-from-home culture dynamics of the video games industry to avoid any such high-profile leaks in the future.