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I feel real bad for Rockstar. So many people have put so much work into this for so many years only for it to leak out in this form is a real shame.

I guess their only recourse is to get a trailer out asap to show the game how it was intended to be seen.

Leaker claims to be the same guy that hacked Uber.



I don't see how it's a shame. How does it ruin anything at all? I think it's extremely weird how we're so deferential to the PR departments of these billion dollar companies. It's not like the video puts it in a bad light either. It's just footage of development, which is the type of stuff that never gets out after a game is released and is important for historical preservation. Honestly, I'm tired of companies being so tight-lipped about game development in general, so seeing something like this is awesome.


Also the main commercial reason to keep secrecy is to not cannibalise your existing products by creating an expectation that if the customer holds on a little more on a purchase..., but gta5 is almost 10 years old now.

As for the environment, the videos I looked at don't reveal much anyway.


Bungie had some of their staff doxxed and threatened, so I kind of understand why they just decide to not share stuff ahead of time:

https://www.polygon.com/23282211/bungie-destiny-2-communicat...


People on twitter are already sharing Linkedin profiles of employees connected to the recorded videos, asking for more or acting like they found the leaker. Which is absolutely idiotic since the video were stolen from Slack and the people who recorded them have nothing to do with the leak.


Might take a few months of dev time just dealing with the legal and security issues from the source code getting hacked, games use a ton of middleware from many different companies.

>The guy with the data/source code for that game is just on forums taking requests like a reddit AMA, searching the source code then pulling up what people ask for. One guy just asked him to send him some code related to an ongoing court case vs TTI, and he just did it.

>Turns out the guy asking him to scour the source code is one of the GTA5 cheat makers R*/TTI is suing lmao.

https://twitter.com/APZonerunner/status/1571411248390242307

>I don't see how it's a shame. How does it ruin anything at all?


My thoughts too.



A leak?!? Oh my! Butler, fetch me my fainting couch post haste -- I do think I am becoming overwhelmed with a case of the vapours!

The original Star Wars wouldn't be Star Wars without all the behind-the-scenes photos and film they "leaked". As I a kid, and still now, I cherish that stuff, and it makes the franchise so much more valuable.

https://www.empireonline.com/movies/features/star-wars-behin...


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Feel free to disagree but imo she's right.

GTA makes billions yes, but it's people working on those games, they want their work to be seen the best way possible not because someone got into their systems and decided to leak it. Specially with games like this with years of development.


I don't think she's right; she says leaks are awful for excited fans but I'm an excited fan and it's not awful for me. She's speaking in sweeping generalities, speaking for people who aren't her. This video didn't give me any expectations for GTA VI that weren't already obvious; e.g. it will be a 3rd person game where I can commit crimes.


do you genuinely think that coders for gta VI are going to care that their work got seen before it was finished? how vain do you think these people are?


Of course they care, this is bad for the devs and the company:

https://twitter.com/jasonschreier/status/1571489679534608384


you seem to have an odd habit of posting twitter threads as justifications for arguments


Why? This is what all work-in-progress game development looks like, there's absolutely nothing to be ashamed of.

IMHO there should be much more WIP material like this in the public, published by the game developers themselves. Too many people think that games just spring into existance, without a clear idea how game development actually works.


In my (gamedev) experience, a huge part of the appeal of games is the illusion there's more than meets the eye. Most gamers want to suspend their disbelief and let their imagination run rampant; they can react very poorly to seeing behind the curtain.


This is an issue that the industry itself has caused. It's a self-inflicted wound. Companies never show footage like this, so gamers don't know what games look like during development. Then they get disappointed by footage like this or early looks that don't look absolutely mindblowing. If companies were more open about development, this wouldn't be a problem.

> a huge part of the appeal of games is the illusion there's more than meets the eye. Most gamers want to suspend their disbelief and let their imagination run rampant

This is complete nonsense.


I don't think this is how people view games anymore. Look how at phrases like "t-pose" and "hitbox" and "clipping through" are used among regular (non-nerd) kids/teens. There are certain things about games that everyone understands now.


I felt a similar way after playing and tweaking lots of Mario 64 and OoT mods. Obviously I still love the games with all my heart, but getting to play it at so many different levels of polish and playability definitely allows the 'Wow - Perfection' feeling to fade a bit. I think playing an alpha version or poorly modded copy of a game like Amnesia: Dark Descent would totally kill the atmospheric creepiness which made the game so well received.

I guess it's a bit like watching the BTS of something like the LotR trilogy. When you get to see all the orcs in full makeup just goofing around with the rest of the film crew, it means when you see them later in the real movie, you can't help but be reminded they're just people in great makeup. Keeping up that illusion in game dev must be enormously important.


I don't blame major developers for not showing anything. If it looks unfinished (because it is), you get derision because the game "looks shit" and is "bad". If you show anything cool that you need to later scale back or cut you get dragged on release for "false promises". A place like Rockstar who a) has a giant audience, which exaggerates those effects and b) doesn't need the advertising bonus has good arguments for waiting until everything is mostly in place for release.

(Whereas small/solo indie devs often show in-development work, because having anything seen that might interest future players is much more important to them)

EDIT: case in point, even here we already have comments wondering what mistakes Rockstar made because this random development footage, likely years before release, doesn't look that much better than GTA V.


There is little WIP material released for blockbuster games like GTA because it’s useless for the studio. Rockstar doesn’t need to generate hype for the brand long before the game is ready to sell. They prefer a very large marketing push at release.

I can safely predict that this leak will have approximately zero impact on the actual sales of GTA VI however.


This is why I loved the Factorio blog. From 2013 until release in 2020 they would write a weekly blog about what was happening and all the interesting problems they ran into. Its really fascinating.

https://factorio.com/blog/


I agree with you, but leaks are not fun. It's theft of creative endeavor.


Why do you feel bad? How is a bit of footage of the game in development affect anything about the game at all? Does the success of the game depend on the public being ignorant about the fact that a game needs to be developed before it's launched? I'm really confused.


As far as I know, major swaths of the source code is now public


So? What do you think that actually changes?


Gives them free attention of a kind they could never buy no matter how many millions they'd throw at it. Perfectly complements the kind of attention they can buy. Difficult to imagine a company suffering less from a security breach.


I don't think that's entirely true.

This will disrupt development for some time, they need to figure out what has leaked (seems the hacker also took code from GTA V and VI), what changes they need to make to their systems to prevent this again.

This will probably delay the release date of the game.

edit: fixed typo.


Why should game programmers need to pause their development for the security investigation to proceed? It's not as though Rockstar's game programmers are also the private investigators; the people who investigate the leak won't be the programmers and artists who are making the game. I'm sure they'll get interviewed during the investigation, but that's no more than a few hours of their time wasted.


If this guy really has the source code of both 5 & 6 this obviously will add more development time. This one of the biggest games specially due to its online functionality, if bad actors have code related to that it’s no bueno.


I don't buy it. They're not going to re-engineer their netcode just because a development version of it got leaked. It will probably get rewritten anyway in the normal course of development. But if they were counting on an obscure protocol keeping hackers out of their game, they were always going to lose that advantage within hours to weeks of the official launch anyway.


I don't know how normal I am but this makes me excited. It shows me they weren't just leaning on remastering GTA5 yet again for the upcoming PS6 and Xbox Series One X. I hear new dialogue. I see new mechanics. GTA5 came out in 2013 and they've barely shipped updates to it and left bugs for years.

This gives me hope.


Something similar happened with Half Life 2 - and it went on to be a smash hit.

Yes, it's not nice to have your work revealed before its ready, but locking down and just keeping the pace of development up would be the more judicious use of time.


I'd agree, and also point out that Half Life 2 was far more damaging. This is a bunch of tech development demos and trials, there's little to no story spoilers. Whereas HL2's leak contained levels and story elements that appeared in the final game. It was unfinished/alpha, but really showed what HL2 would eventually be, whereas this just shows some of the technology that GTA VI may contain.

I don't even read too much into the diner scenario, since that's a great test-bed for interactive NPC behavior, object interactions, and general scenario creation tooling. It MIGHT be in the final game, but it may also not be, and it wouldn't be impactful either way.


This leak only makes me more stoked for the game, so I hope this doesn't cause any detrimental effect on development. If anything, it shows how hard the development is and what kind of details are being tested.


It doesn't detract from the value of the final game, and may even be a bit of unintentional viral marketing (I had no idea a new game was in development). Could be good for Rockstar?


They'll make billions regardless of the games quality on launch


The dev tools look really bad ass. It's inspiring, it shows the other Devs how the real pros do it.

What's the argument against them building in public like the rest of us?


> What's the argument against them building in public like the rest of us?

Who are these "the rest of us". Most game development happens behind closed door, the gameplay only to be seen as the game is ready to be released. In fact, most software in general is developed like this. Open/public development is not at all the norm for development.


It's just ImGui and line traces. i.e. What everyone does because it's quick and easy to build.


nothing special there, i remember similar thing in mgs3


What "rest of us" is showing off their internal tooling in public? (sure, there are companies that do, but this is not some universal thing that's unusual not to do)


> What's the argument against them building in public like the rest of us?

Not sure if you are aware of the protection of trade secrets and intellectual property for games and proprietary game engines that if leaked would be useful to hackers, cheaters and aim botters?


Sure, not like GTA Online on PC is overrun with hackers anyways. Also I'm not sure how the source code would help people using aimbots?


In an age of early access and pre-alphas, Rockstar could sell this as-is for $20. No shame here.


Presumably they could have done more to not get hacked.


Agreed, games should be seen at the state and shape their creators want, not with leaks.




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