Rockstar Games confirms they were hacked by an outside party | Hacker News Reader

Rockstar Games confirms they were hacked by an outside party

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217 pointsrazin151 comments

I don't play multiplayer games, but GTA single player are some of my favorite games. As long as there is a good single player campaign in GTA VI I'll buy it pretty much immediately when it's available for PC, as I'm sure plenty of others will as well. I doubt this leak will affect the sales, although I can understand why the developers would prefer to not have their half finished work leaked like that.

According to the thread on gtaforums it was allegedly the same hacker that recently hacked Uber. Will be interesting to read more about this when there's more info out, I assume they have something in common and that more companies are vulnerable.

IIRC Uber was hacked via human weakness in multi-factor authentication. It’s actually something a ton of companies are vulnerable to so I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it replicated here.

Yes it was replicated here the same way as the uber hack. Using social engineering.

Is this what zero trust is supposed to protect against? It's weird to let everyone have free reign over critical infrastructure and data once you gain access to the network.

Are there any network security that uses AI to automatically detect and flag unusual behavior? For example, a regular developer doesn't need to port scan the entire network, the receptionist's computer doesn't need to log in to admin resources, support personnel doesn't need to access source code, etc. This should be possible to flag and let a human verify.

Zero trust doesn’t mean 0 network segmentation. Zero trust is supposed to be the opposite of walled gardens

"Zero trust" is a buzzword with no real meaning, IMO.

Yes, - the tech is called UBA (user behaviour analytics.. or something) - over time it builds a baseline of what a user does in a typical day/ week/ month as part of their role, and if they deviate from that base pattern then an alert can be triggered on different thresholds - for example, why is a member of support downloading the entire production database (not that they should have access there, but you get my point)

That was the initial attack vector. But it looks like there has been a lot of lateral movement in that hack. I don't think a single user account would have had access to that much information and if it did that's part of the reason for the hack too, not just the initial breach method.

Rockstar Games is coming for you in the sense that the even the map will be on DLCs

Soooo trueeee

The story lines have been getting more and more shallow. Simple cooperative heists, killings, theft, etc, with very predictable gang assertion themes.

They are investing far more time and effort into "online" - the leaks confirmed this. "Open worlds" lend themselves to shallow micro-stories.

Maybe I'm being a grumpy old man, but in video game history, the best games were those that had complex character development, and novel worlds that supported a deep and thoughtful plot - something that would make the player have some emotional investment in.

I don't see any evidence of that in recent GTA games.

I played the GTA5 campaign twice it was brilliant. RDR2 had a brilliant campaign.

I'm not giving up on Rockstar delivering a superlative campaign and multiplayer

Rockstar has a jaw-droppingly great track record, and I can understand giving them the benefit of the doubt and having super high expectations. They're one of the few entities that has earned that respect.

However with some of the trends in the gaming industry, as well as the heavier focus on multiplayer and transactions that nickel-and-dime customers, I'd personally temper my expectations about any future titles to avoid disappointment.

In general, pre-ordering isn’t a great idea. Money is worth more now than in the future, and the quality and price of the game does not change significantly between the last day to preorder and the first day reviews drop.

You’re absolutely right, I’m done preordering games. I didn’t do it much anyway, but nowadays it’s just not worth it. The most recent and egregious example that comes to my mind was the latest Battlefield. My goodness was that a turd, and lots of people felt rightfully burned after preordering that game and essentially getting a totally unfinished product.

This is what happens when game companies basically set their revenue targets based on preorders, and games as a product are non-refundable.

It's very easy to imagine a bean counter saying "we hit our preorder target, let's cut back our development budget now, release it, and we've already basically maximized our profits on this.

The state of the game industry at large is pretty gross as a result of a lot of the money incentives not lining up around building great games.

The problem is TakeTwo is a shit house on fire just like Ubisoft, EA, and Activision so it feels like the entrenched leadership at Rockstar has been beating back the TakeTwo culture but it's always a losing battle so when does it finally break. (See Blizzard and Bioware)

It's all about financial incentives and this far down the pipeline it ain't happening. GTA Online is a multibillion dollar business, GTA V Singleplayer not so much.

Games that followed these incentives to the end of the line joined the hegemonial blob though, becoming indistinct and uninteresting in the long run. Jack of all Trades, Master of None, but people will buy masters only in the longrun. And take for example minecraft, which proofed that the whole market is willing to dissappear for years on end to into a simulation were the player can tell its own singleplayer story, uninterested in any content any company has to sell.

One more longterm succesfull open-source sim of that kind without online shop and half the industry is forever gone.

Minecraft can be used as digital Legos, making it just as much of a toy as a game.

I think you're overestimating what's necessary for online to be successful. GTA V is almost 10 years old and still raking in cash from online. The focus does not need to be on online play for it to be successful, they have billions of dollars in evidence that confirms that.

I would say that GTAV is focused on online play. A lot of the content is only accessible that way, ESPECIALLY the content added after launch. If you look through the list of new missions/locations/vehicles added to the game[1], they're almost exclusively only in GTAO

[1]: For example here: https://www.gtaboom.com/gta-online-update-dlc-history/

I have to admit that I got GTA V for free. But still even if I had paid the full price I would have been entirely happy with the single player story line.

I will likely buy next GTA on launch if it launches at same time on PC as consoles.

The basic decision to make the heists a focal point of the game - drawing on the reaction to "Three Leaf Clover" from GTA IV - was a good one, yet it did make the overall experience feel shorter. A series of three short stories as opposed to one long arc.

Whereas in GTA IV, by the time you confront Dimitri on the island, I felt as if something was really accomplished and it was about revenge for what had taken place, over many years, not the just the handful of slights by a person whom the main characters got screwed by.

I wonder if they will be able to maintain a bad boy story line in a world where you are supposed to not offend anyone. I think they will be successful if they do, but I fear they won't and gta6 will be insipid.

I think that’s more of a right wing meme than reality. Plenty of TV shows and movies revel in “bad boy” storylines. I think what’s changed is that people expect some actual depth in explaining the motivations of “bad” characters, but I don’t think Rockstar has ever really struggled with that, their last few offerings have had relatively well rounded narratives.

You're very free to offend anyone in the real world. "The world" is bigger than the environment curated by big tech from SV and US-media.

Treat yourself to some GTA V radio shows (you'll find them on youtube), Rockstar plays the cultural meta game better than other company, they do legit art playing with the dominant political stereotypes. Rockstar are not in the market of appealing to cowards, their entire brand identity revolves around the exact opposite.

GTA V came out in 2013. "The world" has changed considerably.

I can only assume you would be surprised by the contents of the aforementioned radio shows (and lots of the scripted conversations in game), because they dealt with this exact topic in 2013 - in depth and par excellence. GTAs audience explicitly wants an over the top explicit, non-politically correct product.

In the last game, a main character (Trevor) was introduced by stomping an npcs brain into the ground before finding rests of it on his shoe. There is nothing pc about GTA, it takes place in a cynic take on reality that doesn’t respect the common sentimental denominator of marketing departments in the real world.

I'm fairly certain the person you're replying to is prognosticating about the potential sanitization of the next game. I don't think the content of the older games really impacts that.

I think the person you are replying to is pointing out that the content of the older games, for the most part, aged very well and is more relevant than ever. And this wasn't a coincidence, because if you were paying attention 20+ years ago, you saw the future we were building. Rockstar's writers were paying attention. I expect the content of gta6 to be more prescient than ever.

>In the last game, a main character (Trevor) was introduced by stomping an npcs brain into the ground before finding rests of it on his shoe.

I disagree, and I think this section from paul graham (http://www.paulgraham.com/say.html) captures the dynamic perfectly.

>Of course, we're not just looking for things we can't say. We're looking for things we can't say that are true, or at least have enough chance of being true that the question should remain open. But many of the things people get in trouble for saying probably do make it over this second, lower threshold. No one gets in trouble for saying that 2 + 2 is 5, or that people in Pittsburgh are ten feet tall. Such obviously false statements might be treated as jokes, or at worst as evidence of insanity, but they are not likely to make anyone mad. The statements that make people mad are the ones they worry might be believed. I suspect the statements that make people maddest are those they worry might be true.

In the context of GTA, I think themes like drugs, violence, and sex is probably safe, but culture war topics like reproductive rights, race (eg. CRT or affirmative action), LGBT rights, or immigration are not.

> culture war topics like reproductive rights, race (eg. CRT or affirmative action), LGBT rights, or immigration are not.

those are exactly the topics GTA has previously touched on/which I recommended to check out the radio shows for, the anecdote wrt Trevor was probably misleading.

Correction: your world changed considerably as existing problems became more visible.

Think people forget Rockstar's culture is British in origin, not American

If you actually want to know the answer to your question, go play rdr2.

But suffice it to say, there's a difference between being a rebel and being an asshole. No one likes an anti hero who's insecure and goes around kicking people while they're down, they like conflicted characters who know what it's like to be rejected by society and who stands up for others in the same boat.

It is yet to be seen how the writing will be affected. Let's just see whether or not civilians become a protected class and if prostitution is still a thing. We wont know until the game releases so my recommendation is to not preorder. Worst case, we will always have GTA5.

I don't disagree with you, a lot of the missions felt like more of the same. And the focus on online has been disappointing, but that just means I haven't played GTA in a few years. I also rarely play any games, so I'm not a very picky gamer, I just like the game mechanics in GTA and being able to roam a big world with interesting details and humor. Sometimes I played it for a few hours without even starting a mission.

I get what you're saying about character development, but at the same time some of my favorite games are Mario 64 and Mirror's Edge. Sometimes I just want to play a shallow game, not take part in a deep story. Most of the story in GTA happens as dialogue in the car when driving to the mission, and I'm usually too distracted to follow along anyway.

Personally I’m more nostalgic about games like NHL 95 and PlayStation era Madden. That’s just what my friends and I were playing. Maybe it’s easier for me to enjoy GTA for what it is because that’s more my genre.

I had to double check, because I couldn't remember any game coming out after GTAV. And it was the latest one. It came out in 2013.

wow almost 10 years...

> the best games were those that had complex character development, and novel worlds that supported a deep and thoughtful plot - something that would make the player have some emotional investment in.

I think you're confusing games and movies. Most games have no plot and almost no character development beyond art direction.

I think you're confusing movies and books. Most movies have no plot past the Hero's Journey and no character development that can't be translated by a computer into every language on earth.

Do you feel the same way about movies made from books?

Pretty much because its very difficult to fit long and complex storylines with more than a few characters in 2 to 3 hours.

You should play Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption and Red Dead Redemption 2. RDR2 is basically a choose-your-own-adventure movie. But so much better. I read a lot but I was more emotionally invested in these fictional video game characters than I’ve ever been in characters from a book or a movie.

That's one game, not 'most'. Lots of games don't even have characters at all, let alone character development. It's bizarre for someone to say "most games don't have character development" and someone else says "here is one game that does". This person said "the best games have in depth character development" when it's very rare even in the biggest and most popular games.

I read that as a simple recommendation, not any kind of attempt to disprove the thesis. I see no language indicating otherwise.

Open world games generally let the players enact their own stories. That's kind of their main draw.

I actually feel like they've gotten better in terms of story and character development with each iteration. Niko Bellic was one of my all time favorites, and I thought they did a good job balancing 3 characters in GTA V. They're all certainly... over the top, but given what you do in GTA, it makes sense.

> but given what you do in GTA, it makes sense.

This was my only issue with Niko. He was a great character but then the mission ends and I drive away at 100 mph and run over 5 pedestrians and he shouts "I hope you have insurance!" Sure you can play the open-world sections true to the character... But pacifism isn't what you do in GTA :P

The GTA 5 characters were designed better in that regard. Niko had the deeper/more complex story overall, but he's at odds with the gameplay.

In this context I learned of "Ludonarrative Dissonance". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludonarrative_dissonance

I've always been more emotionally invested in games where I make my own plot, which is the genre GTA is supposed to be. I haven't played since GTA 3 but maybe they're providing too much of a story which is unsatisfying? The really open plotless games are so much easier to lose yourself in than a well manicured plot. Like Sid Meier's Pirates back in the early 90's and Mount and Blade Warband

Try Cyberpunk 2077. ;)

> the best games were those that had complex character development

Very often it's mostly nostalgia and playing these games over again prove they were much worse than in our memory

Highly disagree. I still replay No One Lives Forever (hilarious game) and the Max Payne 1 & 2 every few years. These games had great stories, game play, and characters; last time I replayed them was during the pandemic in 2020.

Then I agree to disagree, playing my childhood games feel like trying to drive a horse cart after having used a 4wd electric car made in 2022. The characters and stories are ok at best but they only feel nice because the rest is absolute dog shit by modern standards

What games are these tho? Gotta give specifics in a thread of specifics. I mean you still see people on twitch playing “classics” all the time. You also have cliques that still routinely play games like mother and chronotrigger on a religious level.

It really depends on the game. I agree with GP that those particular franchises are timeless. DOOM is also imminently replayable as-is. But there are plenty of games that aren't.

Vice City and San Andreas where the only 2 games I've played where I consistently enjoyed watching the cutscenes, and loved the dialogue.

Rockstar later decided dealing with big Hollywood egos was too much of a hassle, and it shows in later GTA iterations. The quality isn't there.

And aside from that, how many car chases can you get into before you've had enough? Been there done that. It was fun while it lasted.

Play another game like god of war or something.

Some would say "games are about fun" first and foremost, not to be interactive stories you press x to advance. If anything, the "theatrical" aspect of gaming for this old man has been one the things that has ruined gaming in general (that and hand holding), but thankfully, there are many games out there that hold the "fun" and "challenging" torch, they just often happen to not be triple A titles.

The neat thing about games is that they cover such a broad spectrum of experiences, from what you hold as good to what you casually dismiss (visual novels, walking sims, etc). I agree with you though—even if the biggest triple A game of the month doesn't appeal, there are countless other games out there that fly under the radar and are startlingly good. Unfortunately there are also countless games out there that are startlingly bad. The hard part is figuring out which ones are which :-).

If anything the recent GTA games have had MORE of all that stuff. Earlier GTA games were very much about open world and did not really have a crazy amount of story. The top down ones I do not remember having any story at all (could be wrong)

Huh I recently played GTA vice city and the storyline is MUCH less deep the GTA V.

Maybe I’m even grumpier and older. I often hold up Pac Man, Asteroids, and Scrambler as examples of good games to my kids.

For me, the best games were always those with close to zero story, but great game mechanics. That is mostly true for competitive online games, but stuff like Anno 1602 worked, too.

If I want a story, I read a book or watch a movie. Games don’t need stories and if they have some, the story is usually not interesting to me.

Depends on the genre.

Mass Effect would be unremarkable without a good story. And so would The Witcher series.

If we are talking about Quake, then we don't _need_ a story(Arena). We can have one though (later installments) and that's fun if you care about that.

They you have things like Dwarf Fortress, which has a unique story every world generation.

> Simple cooperative heists

Are you kidding? The heists in GTA V were amazing, easily the best in the series. And definitely not « simple », no matter your definition of the word

I agree with this. One of my favourite old classics is Baldur's Gate 2 (and the whole "trilogy" series) – it's both very much on-rails and very open at the same time, providing a huge world that you can interact with characters within and do basically anything within some guide rails. Zelda BOTW is another highlight and a fantastic example of video game design. Similarly with The Witcher.

Anything else "AAA" largely seems to be a let-down of micro-transactions or designed to push you into online services. Dragon Age Inquisition, for example, is a pale imitation of those other two. I'm not surprised GTA is going the other way.

So you're telling me GTA III had more character development than GTA V?

>As long as there is a good single player campaign in GTA VI I'll buy it pretty much immediately when it's available

Same here. I used to game a lot in high school and college, then I stopped. The only thing that ever gets me to fire up the console again is a new release of GTA and a new release of CoD (provided the story is good and not some futuristic crap).

Last time was when the Modern Warfare reboot was released in 2019. The 2nd part is coming this year, so it looks I will be playing it as soon as it is available. Same with GTA VI, although I guess that will be a lot longer from now, given this hack.

The common denominator is Slack, there is something fishy about Slack, some people might have breached them and are able to join what ever server they want

Hence how they managed to download the whole "leaked" content from Slack message history

Uber, now Rockstar, if i was wearing my conspiracy theorist hat, i would say it's that secretive group that operate Microsoft, either they want to force them to use azure, or, to spread FUD to facilitate a purchase, but that's too much for HN, i'll loose this account, again lol

The common denominator is hardware, there is something fishy about hardware, some people might have breached it and are able to join what ever hardware they want.

Sounds pretty silly to pick a random thing and say its the culprit huh?

Nothing can be more silly then a 16yo teenager from the UK leaking GTA 6 :)

There is more to it than these pseudo rumors

I don't disagree that slack is a common denominator, but slack is owned by Salesforce and Heroku was recently hacked via AWS. If anything here is fishy, it's Salesforce owned/operated services.

> I doubt this leak will affect the sales, although I can understand why the developers would prefer to not have their half finished work leaked like that.

Speaking from experience: gamedev has a lot of things that get removed or rejigged. Leaks like these not only destroy the feel of the game as a finished product it also gives unrealistic promises.

Case in point: There was a Snowdrop tech demo that got leaked which included "the division" with stealth mechanics. Such mechanics were technically impossible (for a lot of reasons I don't want to get into); but that leak had people going nuts because it looked cool.

(to be perfectly fair to the hype-train: the division was oversold in an official E3 trailer in 2013 anyway; before Ubisoft had details of the next generation hardware specs, same year as watchdogs... oops.)

The commonality seems to be Slack. They either know some way to exploit Slack, or they have a setup to social engineer Slack in particular. (maybe both)

If I were one of the internal tools programmers, I wouldn't be "extremely disappointed" by this leak...

I'm seriously impressed by the quality of the internal tooling. All that effort only to be seen and used internally. And yet they still polish the UI!

Most of the internal tools where I work look terrible, unless they're web based where some framework can do the hand holding.

They are using imgui. It would be hard to find a game studio that doesn't.

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui

It's great that DearImgui is used in so many places! I immediately noticed it. It got me started on GUIs in C++ a few years ago when I was new to programming :)

Just dropping a note that the developers want it referred to as Dear ImGui.

https://github.com/ocornut/imgui/blob/master/docs/FAQ.md#q-w...

Such an awkward thing to be particular about.

Renaming the repo and binary to dimgui or something would be so much more impactful in this than running around correcting people for using the actual name of both the repo and binary when referring to the application.

If I was asked by Bram Moolenaar to start calling vim "dear vim" starting tomorrow I would kindly tell them to fork off (and do a proper rename in the process ;))

(I don't mean that you are "running around" but someone is)

If I understand correctly, the reason the developers are picky about it is because imgui has become common vernacular for a certain style of gui rendering. You have retained mode guis rmguis, and immediate mode guis, imguis.

It would be like if you initially named your project SQL before SQL was just a common name for any query language in a SQL-like syntax. Almost nobody actually means the SQL that IBM made when they say they use SQL, instead they usually mean they use SQLServer, or MySQL, or SQLite, or etc. Technically they are all SQL, but they all have slightly different functions and massively different internals. In the same way, there are several imgui libraries that all have similar APIs and architectures, but it's good to be specific about which specific library you're using.

I don't mind someone being particular about a name and wanting consistency. Although, yea, I'm not sure why they haven't renamed the repository.

Apart from the internal tooling that included plaintext passwords for their users, hence the hack.

The idea of polishing dev tools used to seem counter-intuitive to me, but I’ve come around on that. The last thing you want is to dread doing your job, and if you can make parts of your job joyful, then I think you’re likely to be more productive and do better work.

My understanding is that at places like big game studios, people developing developer tooling are doing so as their full time job.

"Tools programmer" is a legitimate job title: https://career.sharkmob.com/jobs/1553252-tools-programmer

>The idea of polishing dev tools used to seem counter-intuitive to me, but I’ve come around on that. The last thing you want is to dread doing your job, and if you can make parts of your job joyful, then I think you’re likely to be more productive and do better work.

hmm?

what's the difference between internal tools

and normal stuff like docker, compilers, ci/cd tools, package managers, etc?

it's the same shit

Have you seen any of the leaked footage? They have realtime debugging info appearing on the screen in a clear and easy to read way. It's not like a 20k line text dump of the logs you can grep through later. It looks a lot like the hacking/scanning UI from Watch Dogs except it provides debug info.

I meant that investing in UX is not weird just because those tools are internal

Yes, that's my point. Tools are tools, and there's benefit in making them good whether they're used by 1 person or 100 million people.

I was also blown away by the tooling shots. It almost looked like those self-driving tooling shots that get shown every now and then, which I suppose makes sense.

I wish more places would show off their internal tools and how they make things, but I guess they view those things as part of their edge.

Tesla hires a lot of game developers :)

Which part of the tooling impressed you? Most of it seemed fairly common I think.

One real issue I've seen on Reddit is people mistake the debugging tools as actually (unfinished) gameplay UI. There are lots of people angry that GTA is copying Watch Dogs, because Watch Dogs has a game mechanic that looks similar to how these debug elements look.

>There are lots of people angry that GTA is copying Watch Dogs, because Watch Dogs has a game mechanic that looks similar to how these debug elements look.

source? I looked at the footage and there's nothing there that could be attributed to be watch dogs, aside from basic stylistic elements like lines/wireframes that watch dogs uses as visual effects.

In the leaked video of the diner heist, the GUI that appears whenever an NPC changes state, like "HOSTAGE_COMPLY_FEMALE." People are comparing that to the "hacker view" you get in Watch Dogs where you can see info about any NPC you scan.

That's hilarious. I rewatched the video, and the text labels like "HOSTAGE_COMPLY_FEMALE" seem to correspond to placeholders for what the NPCs would say, rather than describing their state. Although to be fair, the whole point of voiceovers (and many other gameplay features) is to convey the game state to the player. That said, that's not even remotely close to what was in watch dogs, which more akin to random factoids about a NPC (eg. "has dog as a pet")

I'm a completely casual game in the sense that: basically the only games I've ever really played and enjoyed that much are GTA and Skyrim. I have an Xbox and a gaming PC, because people talk about video games as if they're really fun, but I have just never actually been able to materialize that for myself.

I figured the next GTA was never coming out, and that they would just keep milking the current one until the end of time.

This leak showed that not only are they working on it, but it looks really cool.

I have a tough time seeing how anybody would see this leak as a negative. The game looks great.

GTA 6 was officially announced Feb 4, 2022

At the bottom of this blog post, under "What's next"

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/ak73k92o47ko7...

> This leak showed that not only are they working on it, but it looks really cool.

I think it's simply a matter of being in control of your own product.

It ain't cool that people can just hack your servers and dump your stuff that's a work in progress for the world to critique and make memes about.

Any press is good press — I'm not a gamer but can someone explain all the negativity? I assume it wasn't a surprise that another version is in the making.

A) It taints the perception of the game beforehand. People look at an incredibly raw bit of gameplay footage and go "wow, this looks like trash!"

B) The guy who did the leaking apparently tried to sell the source code, which is just scummy and would likely result in significant retooling from the devs' side, which means time and effort wasted.

C) While I personally don't subscribe to the glamour and glitz, there is something nice about a clean rollout for something anticipated or a surprise release. I remember seeing the first trailer for Peele's Nope and being incredibly excited because I heard nothing about the movie prior to that. If it was leaked or the screenplay was floating around with spoilers, I'd be somewhat less enthused.

> It taints the perception of the game beforehand. People look at an incredibly raw bit of gameplay footage and go "wow, this looks like trash!"

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I have to say I'm surprised that people would think this. Looking by analogy at big Hollywood movies, movie studios often release their own "behind the scenes" video clips, and as far as I can tell, these clips aren't generally considered to detract from the finished movie in anyway (and I personally find them, and this GTA leaked video, fascinating)

> Looking by analogy at big Hollywood movies, movie studios often release their own "behind the scenes" video clips

More apt analogy would be a workprint of a movie being leaked. This happened with "X-Men Origins: Wolverine" where lots of the special effects were still in progress so the workprint looked really cheap in some parts.

But the people likely to watch a workprint and then form their opinion on that is incredibly small.

Hmm, perhaps. But the GTA leak had a bunch of debug overlays and developer tools on the screen. It was very clearly not a finished product. A workprint for a movie doesn't generally have the same types of visual clues to indicate what a viewer is looking at. So I'm not sure that a movie workprint is the right comparison here.

> Looking by analogy at big Hollywood movies, movie studios often release their own "behind the scenes" video clips

And Rockstar releases those too [0]. The difference is those are all clips they vetted and chose to release. Hollywood also gets very upset about unapproved leaks. Even something as simple as an actor posting an Instagram selfie on a set they weren't supposed to photograph.

[0] https://youtu.be/qquffawsUMw

Why would they need to retool? I don't understand why a source code leak means they have to reprogram the game.

With the source out there, it's easier to hack.

Hack what? Multiplayer?

About half of GTA 5's overall revenue has come from purchases of the multiplayer currency. Multiplayer is a big deal for them.

And? Most of the security is server side, I’d imagine/hope.

So they just re-write all the server stuff from scratch because there may be vulnerabilities in the code that got leaked? And somehow the new code they replace it with won't have vulnerabilities? That doesn't seem rational.

GTA 5 is already so hilariously hackable that I don't think security is on their radar.

The game industry used to believe that any press is good press, but not any more. These days, studios want to control what people see before a game comes out. If they show off some feature, it might change radically or even get dropped before launch, and then you have a bunch of people asking why it’s missing.

Whether you believe “any press is good press”, it’s clear the game industry doesn’t believe that.

How true is this? Cyberpunk 2077 and Dying Light 2 have both been successful despite not coming anywhere close to what was marketed

It was announced already, but I think the issue is that the leaked footage was very rough. I’ve seen a lot of comments from gamers saying they expected it to be further along and more polished, but it’s likely that either the footage is older or they’re not focusing on in engine visuals yet.

Either way, I think the issue from Rockstars perspective is that it’s not a good indication of the game and might contain character, features, and gameplay which won’t end up in the final game. They likely want to control what goes out much more to avoid too much hype or expectations too early on.

Gamers expecting it to be more polished have never worked in games. Things tend to look awful up until close to the end.

This is true. Games generally look like trash up until everything gets put together for actual release, which can be as late as half/one year before it's supposed to hit the proverbial shelves.

Intuitively this makes the most sense to me, because "looking like trash" can mean textures, model fixing, physics, etc. which adds to the immersion but is purely throwaway work if the game mechanic, area, or storyline is changed.

Most people don’t know how most things work. PR is still a thing.

While very true, that's why marketing departments don't like uncontrolled leaks.

On top of it looking unfinished, many locations or features might get cut from the final game. And you don't want a big percentage of your buyers hyped for a feature you never officially confirmed.

> I’ve seen a lot of comments from gamers saying they expected it to be further along and more polished, but it’s likely that either the footage is older or they’re not focusing on in engine visuals yet.

From what I was seeing yesterday, it was pretty agreed upon most of the footage was from 2019. So rather old at this point.

It was. It has become a meme that GTA6 will come out (similar to HL3). There were rumors but nothing official.

A proper reveal would have generated massive hype, now it's mixed with "hack".

But as the ol' saying goes: never let a good crisis go to waste. Although I think they're in a tough spot since it's probably too early in the development stage to put a spin or reveal anything.

Rockstar had already announced that they were working on it back in February.

https://www.rockstargames.com/newswire/article/ak73k92o47ko7...

Near the bottom

Don't see why the downvotes, this is a good question.

I have a slightly tangential one, too. I don't understand why this leak (of the source code) is such a big deal. I genuinely don't understand. What exactly can people do with the (the best case) a half-baked game? To exaggerate a bit, these days we get even 'finished' games in such a 'raw' state, people barely want them for free.

As for the negativity. I suppose, one could dig some pieces of the main story lines from the source files, and try to predict how the new story is going to be told. But that would be nothing but a speculation. It is impossible to tell what Rockstar are going to do with the game until we see a finished product. And, to state the obvious again, the game is far from finished.

Drawing conclusions from that early (to say the least) build is ridiculous. Do people on reddit have some extrapolated opinions on GTA 7, too?

One thought is that access to the source code (AIUI the source for GTA V was leaked as well as VI) will make it easier to develop hacks, to the detriment of the online experience for the player.

Or, more cynically, to the detriment of the bottom line for R*, as the hacks may give people a way to progress without buying shark cards.

On the upside, maybe it'll lead to some enterprising source divers to repeat that "fixed the insane loading times" feat of a while back.

IP issues aside, the only negative to the game itself is that, since it will likely have an online component that Rockstar is presumably intending to make a very solid profit on, source code availability means it's easier to find vulnerabilities, exploits, mod opportunities, and ways to circumvent their monetisation.

Short answer? Source available = no security by obscurity.

Source code leak means AlterIWNet v2. People being able to pirate a multiplayer game, unlock all microtransactions for free, and mod the game without limits. Obviously great for the game's longevity, but bad for profits.

There are plenty of games with reverse engineered private servers whose source was never leaked.

Code leak is never good, video leak is ok'ish code leak is very bad.

Tens of millions of people have been waiting for years for GTA VI to release and i am pretty sure that despite this leak people will be extremly for it to launch.

I was wondering the same. I think GTA is so know that it might have a positive effect instead of the super picky fan base. For my side I have not touched a game for 5 years but I was excited to see GTA6. For me it was good news.

But am I a target audience? I am not sure I would buy it (slow PC, no time).

Most of the videos are still available on the hacker's twitter: https://twitter.com/Jinxintel

It seems he's outside of the US if asking for some type of monetary reward / bribe. Either way it appears Rockstar is taking this (rightly) extremely seriously, and hopefully it won't delay the game much more, as they are one of the few remaining major development shops that don't bend their game's quality to market timelines.

I feel for the engineers and artists at Rockstar right now..

I don't think people realize how devastating this can be to them. Imagine you are working really hard on a creative project, coming up with different designs, prototypes, and solutions but then all of it gets leaked to the public without your consent.

After this leak, _all_ the mystery is gone.. we underestimate the rush of dopamine designers get from the validation of unveiling something beautiful and perfect to the public. Short of completely reworking major parts of this project, all they can do now is to improve the existing assets and build upon it.

Further, the executives might put more pressure on the teams since people are expecting a release, marketing has to crank up unexpectedly, PR needs to shift gear, security has to be tightened and so on. This is not a fun situation for anyone.

I hope the person responsible for this gets prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

I think this is overhyped as damaging and negative. In fact, GTA VI seemed to be on the path to becoming the “new Duke Nukem Forever,” which is no longer the case. Everything I’ve seen from the leak indicates this will be a really great game with the same cinematic qualities and cultural relevance that remains somewhat unique to this franchise.

It’s not great from a creative standpoint to have parts of your narrative out there for inspection and criticism, true, but from a commercial perspective the timing of this leak (weekend of Tokyo Game Show) could not be better. More people are talking about this than whatever announcements took place at TGS.

Duke Nukem Forever was such a disappointment.

One of the things that made Duke Nukem 3D such a smash hit was its shock value. It was probably the first mainstream game to include strippers.

But DNF was delayed so long that by the time it came out, Duke's schtick was just cringe-worthy. It wasn't shocking or fun, it just felt like your 50 year old uncle telling the same sexist jokes from 20 years ago.

DNF was a lot worse than 3d. If it had matched the level of distasteful / edgy humor, it'd have been a much better game. Tired, dated, yes. But better than what we got for sure.

There was a lot of naked women raped and pregnant by aliens getting torn apart. I don't recall anything that bad in 3d. (Searching around for discussions on 3d, I can't find any reference to anything either)

> In fact, GTA VI seemed to be on the path to becoming the “new Duke Nukem Forever,”

How did you get this perception? There was nothing to indicate that really and rdr2 was especially great single player experience.

“Industry analysts anticipate that the next Grand Theft Auto will be out sometime in Take-Two’s 2024 fiscal year, which runs from April 2023 through March 2024, but developers are skeptical. The game has been in development in some form since 2014. Although there are loose schedules in place, people interviewed for this article said they didn’t know of any firm release date and that they expect the game to be at least two years away. Earlier this year, a group of designers quit Rockstar’s Edinburgh office, telling colleagues they were sick of the lack of progress.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-27/gta-6-rel...

> "We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you in this way."

Granted, it could happen to anyone, but this is the kind of messaging I would expect if someone had accidentally emailed screenshots to IGN, not as the result of a breach.

I am not a huge fps gamer, but every time a new GTA comes out I tend to buy a new console. I am worried this time that there might be shortages when GTA6 comes out, and as such will already order one for xmas as a preemptive measure. As for this hack, I have mixed feelings. On the one hand I am thrilled to see some gameplay, on the other I also respect Rockstar enough to not look at it. Still doubting.

Great that there is some information about the game now. They are extremely bad at generating excitement despite the huge amounts of money they make from these and the loyal fan base.

Only thing I was bummed about was it looks like the have the same punch animation they have been using forever... But otherwise it looked like a pretty decent game in progress.

It’s likely they were using placeholder animations at such an early stage of the game’s production. I think we’ll see all-new animations for VI.

He should have just replaced the code with vice city one. This way we will be sure we get the most awesome game possible.

Vice City is by far my favorite GTA game and every few years I spin it up for a bit on my old PS2. They've moved the series more towards some kind of realism since then, but I love the arcade like qualities of Vice City and GTA 3. The whole city is a great parody of Miami, with constant parties and vibrant colors, seedy clubs and funny radio shows, etc. The general action and driving quality is more cartoonish and video game like to me than the newer versions. GTA5 by comparison feels so much more stiff (and the GTA 6 leak video looked to be following directly in GTA5's footsteps).

it would be a lot rmore interesting if they were hacked by an inside party.

Social engineering attacks are destructive not just because of the data that is compromised but also because it makes us paranoid of interacting with others and forces us to adopt increasingly anti-social practices.

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