GTA 6 leaks ‘far less consequential’ than Hot Coffee sex scandal, claims former Rockstar developer

A former Grand Theft Auto developer has played down the impact of this month’s big GTA6 leaks, claiming that the online footage is “far less consequential” to the company than the infamous ‘Hot Coffee’ scandal of the early 2000s.

Last week, a mysterious group known as ‘Cyberleek’ began posting what appears to be authentic gameplay clips from Grand Theft Auto 6, days before an official Netflix reveal planned for later this month.

Rockstar parent Take-Two Interactive has scrambled to put a stop to the short clips with DMCA strikes and subpoenas petitioning Microsoft and Discord for information that could lead to the leaker, but so far this does not appear to have stopped the leaks.

Obbe Vermeij, who was technical director at Rockstar for the development of GTA 3, Vice City, San Andreas, and GTA 4, suggested on social media that this month’s leaks will be affecting management more than GTA 6’s development team, arguing that most of GTA 6’s potential audience won’t even know they exist.

“Calm down everybody. The leaks are a nothing burger,” he wrote. “As a marketing strategy R* is trying to keep the game under wraps longer than other publishers. All that has happened is that some footage has escaped. Slightly ahead of the Netflix thing next week.

“90% of future players don’t spend their time on the internet looking for video snippets. They don’t have the time and don’t want spoilers. I imagine the teams are a little annoyed about it but not more than that.”

Former Rockstar dev doubts GTA 6 build will leak

Vermeij argued that the leaks were no way near as consequential for Rockstar as ‘Hot Coffee’, an infamous sex mini-game uncovered in the code of GTA San Andreas after its 2004 release, which resulted in intense legal backlash and a warning from the FTC.

“I was there during Hot Coffee,” the developer wrote. “It was a nightmare for management (R*NewYork) but didn’t affect us (R*North) much. The current leaks are far less consequential than HC was.

“It looks like GTA 6 will be phenomenal and sell for the next 15 years or so. The leaks are just a tiny blip.”

Although the scope of the GTA 6 leaks has so far been limited to short gameplay clips, it has been speculated that Cyberleaks could eventually threaten to leak a build of the game, since the videos suggest it has playable access.

However, Vermeij speculated that the build would likely require a dev kit or access dongle, since that was standard practice during his time at Rockstar.

“If that is the case, it probably only runs on a devkit,” he wrote. “Devkits have more memory. There probably isn’t a build in existence that would run on a retail ps5 at the moment.”

He added: “I guess that’s possible [that it’s an early PC build]. I would have thought the PC build would be years behind. Also, It used to be standard practice to require a dongle to run a game during development. R* probably uses something like that.”