All about GTA 6 leaks: what's in the footage, what's not, and what not to believe

On Thursday, August 27, Rockstar is set to show for the first time what Grand Theft Auto VI actually looks like in motion. The presentation titled An Extended Look will premiere on Netflix at 9:00 PM our time, appearing on YouTube and the game’s website six hours later. However, on August 18, two roughly minute-long clips from the game, along with images of the complete map, appeared online. Rockstar has thus lost control for the second time in four years over when and how it will reveal its most anticipated game.

A practical note right at the beginning: in this article, you will not find links to the leaked material or instructions on where to find it. Around every such wave, AI fakes, recycled footage from 2022, and accounts that will send you an executable file under the guise of an “exclusive leak” immediately swarm. If you are interested in what is in the footage, read on. If you want to see it with your own eyes, a moment of detective searching on Reddit or X will suffice.

Two clips, one map, and nine days until premiere

A group — or perhaps an individual, nobody knows yet — operating under the name Cyberleek claimed responsibility for the leak. It published two videos, in both of which the player controls Jason, one of the two main protagonists. In the first, Jason loiters around his dilapidated waterfront house, jumps over a railing, passes a jet ski, and plays basketball in the driveway. In the second, he drives down a road, crashes into a van, gets out, and beats the delivery driver with a wrench. Then the police arrive, and he speeds off towards a parked helicopter.

Ironically, this very banality is the strongest argument for authenticity. Neither clip looks like marketing material — it’s an ordinary test recording, the kind someone makes when fine-tuning a game. Such things are not put into trailers.

Six stars, a fuel gauge, and a devil icon at the edge of the screen

The community dissected both clips frame by frame and found more than Rockstar has shown in two trailers combined over three years. However, a crucial disclaimer applies to this entire section: none of this is confirmed, and the build is apparently at least a year old. Anything listed below could be different today, or entirely gone.

The most discussed feature is the wanted level, which now reaches six stars instead of five from GTA V. Additionally, the police identify the player by three categories — clothing, appearance, and vehicle — suggesting that changing clothes or repainting a car will have a real impact during a chase. During a fight, a gauge resembling stamina fills; when it reaches zero, the edges of the screen darken. A blue arrow also appears, indicating how close police are to detecting the player, similar to a stealth meter.

The car shows indicators for fuel and engine status, and the trunk offers “loadout” and “storage 0/4” items. The latter caught people’s attention the most — the car would thus serve a similar role to the horse in Red Dead Redemption 2, acting as an important equipment carrier. After a successful basket, Jason gains +2% to the Focus attribute, which is again precisely the character development system from RDR2. And the moment he starts beating an already incapacitated person, a little devil icon with a minus sign appears at the edge of the screen. Not before. Not at the start of the fight.

Within two hours, it was clear on social media: karma system confirmed. In reality, all we know is that one icon appeared in an old build. The difference between “it looks like a moral system” and “a moral system is confirmed” is fundamental and gets blurred in this community within about one retweet.

Among the minor details, two amounts in the corner of the screen are worth mentioning — 39 dollars in cash and 1,643 dollars next to a house icon — and the fictional brands the series has always built upon: Sea Shark, Scoop, Arrow, Fast Pass EMS. In the second clip, the song Impact by SG Lewis, Robyn, and Channel Tres plays, which is quite a humorous choice for a scene with a crashed car.

Regarding the map, the community doesn’t even trust itself

While there is broad consensus regarding the videos, the map images are on much thinner ice. The community’s GTA VI Mapping Project, which has been piecing together the appearance of Leonida from the trailer and 2022 material for years, has labeled them as fakes. Critics on Reddit argue that the drawing is too simplistic for Rockstar’s internal material.

Information on how Rockstar reacted to the map is also contradictory. Some media outlets state that takedown requests also applied to it, while other websites claim that posts with the map on X were not affected — unlike the videos. If the latter were true, it would be an indirect answer to the question of authenticity. For now, however, it only increases the number of unknowns.

How one library became a “confirmed fact”

The best illustration of how gaming misinformation arises, however, was offered by the debate about the age of the footage. Someone ran the basketball clip through analysis and found that it was encoded using FFmpeg 6.1, a version released in November 2023. Within a few hours, it was circulating on social media that the game build was from 2023 and the footage was three years old.

But that’s nonsense. The version of the encoding library only indicates the earliest time a file could have been created in that format — not when the image within it was created. An old FFmpeg merely means that the file passed through old software. Furthermore, re-encoding erased the original metadata that could have revealed something about the actual recording date.

So where are we? Leaker NateTheHate, who has a decent track record in this area, estimates the age to be more than a year and rules out any connection to the upcoming presentation. No one has a more precise date. And frankly — if this is the game from a year and a half ago, it’s more an argument for Rockstar than against it.

Three commandments and one cryptocurrency

Cyberleek released a manifesto with the leak, explaining that it’s not about entertainment or money. It formulates three demands for Rockstar, Take-Two, and indeed the entire gaming industry: an end to digital pre-orders, an end to content sold as DLC even though it’s on the disc from the start, and a mandatory offline mode. It refers to Ubisoft’s game The Crew, which turned into an unlaunchable icon due to shut-down servers, and to the Stop Killing Games campaign. The manifesto concludes with a threat to other publishers: behave yourselves, or you’re next.

But here’s the joke. The group, which claims to be fighting against players being merely a source of income for publishers, included its own memecoin with the manifesto. There’s a call to purchase it in the map images and videos. The text, however, states that it’s not about quick money and that funds are being raised for an unspecified secret project, the details of which cannot be revealed so that corporations don’t have time to prepare.

Yet, these demands are not foolish. Most players would sign them. The problem is that digital ownership has been factually discussed for years in petitions, consumer initiatives, and European institutions — and now every publisher who wanted to ignore it all has been given a free opportunity to point fingers and say that thieves with cryptocurrency are behind this agenda. Cyberleek has done that cause a disservice.

Rockstar doesn’t comment. It just deletes

Neither Rockstar nor Take-Two have officially commented on the leak. Instead, within a few hours, takedown notices under American copyright law began to hit X, video hosting service Streamable, and Reddit. And this very speed is ironically the strongest indirect proof that the material is genuine — a legal department wouldn’t react this way to a fake.

However, it’s not absolute certainty. Take-Two has dealt with AI fakes in the past, so deletion alone doesn’t prove anything one hundred percent. And that’s actually an unpleasant realization in itself: in the age of generated video, there is no simple test of authenticity anymore. Neither the content nor the company’s reaction is enough.

Four years, four leaks

This is not a new experience for Rockstar. In September 2022, approximately 90 videos from an early version of the game appeared on GTAForums — then seventeen-year-old Arion Kurtaj from the Lapsus$ group gained access to internal Slack via stolen employee login credentials, using a mobile phone and a Fire Stick connected to a hotel TV. Rockstar estimated the damages in court at approximately 5 million dollars and thousands of hours of employee work.

In December 2023, the first trailer leaked a day before its scheduled premiere, and Rockstar chose to release it earlier so people could see it in proper quality. Shortly thereafter, the source code for GTA V, including information about canceled projects, made its way online.

And for the third irony: Kurtaj was placed in a secure institution in 2023 due to being unfit to stand trial, but this year he was moved to a regular prison and awaits a new trial. The date? November 2026 — the month when GTA 6 will finally be released.

In nine days, this text will be obsolete

And that’s the most absurd thing about the whole situation. Rockstar was silent for three years, then announced a twenty-minute presentation, and nine days before it, exactly what they feared happened. Part of the community is disappointed that “it looks like GTA V with better lighting” — but judging an old test recording as a finished game is like judging a house by its scaffolding.

In nine days, we will see official material, from which we will know what version it comes from and what it looks like after two delays. Until then, the only reasonable recommendation is: treat everything as unconfirmed, do not download strange files from strangers, and remember that an icon is not a mechanic.

Did you watch the leaked footage, or will you wait for the official presentation?

Source: Rockstar Games, PC Gamer, Kotaku, GamesRadar, Insider Gaming, Engadget