Take-Two CEO reveals the impact of the GTA 6 leaks

Take-Two’s CEO Strauss Zelnick has spoken about the impact of the GTA 6 leaks on the business and, more importantly, its team. 

While the GTA 6 leaks seemed quite significant at first, as various videos and images were shown of the unfinished title, the CEO of Take-Two says that it hadn’t affected the business in any negative way. 

“As a business matter, we’re not affected,” Zelnick told IGN (opens in new tab). “But as a personal matter and an emotional matter, our teams are affected.” While it’s a good thing that the business wasn’t damaged by these unexpected leaks, they were still “really frustrating and upsetting to the team,” Zelnick said. 

Stubborn leak 

There’s a lot of excitement surrounding GTA 6 as many fans have already waited ten years for the next installment in the Grand Theft Auto series since Rockstar released GTA 5 in 2013. According to a report (opens in new tab) by Bloomberg, developers working on GTA 6 suggest a 2024 or 2025 release window, which is still a long way off – what am I going to play in the meantime? The Saints Row reboot?

While we knew the game was in development, Rockstar had been classically stoic about its progress and what would be on show in the new game. The first concrete details about the game came from the 90 leaked videos and screenshots from the early alpha build still in development. 

While there had been previous rumors about the next GTA title, such as the possibility of a female protagonist or the fact that the series could return to Vice City, these leaks were the first substantial piece of content that fans could dig their teeth into. But unfortunately, this just seemed to make things worse for those who had waited so long for the next GTA game. 

One more ruined  

Leaks can ruin a good game, no matter how excited I am for a title’s release. As an avid Pokémon fan, when Nintendo announces a new title, I find myself unplugging the wifi and barricading my door to protect myself from unwanted information. 

In my opinion, most leaks either spoil information about a game I would want to find out for myself or make fans worried about something they have little to no control over. 

After GTA 6 was leaked, I saw a flurry of confused and angry posts on Twitter about how disappointing the graphics of this highly anticipated game looked. It got so bad that some users came out in defense of the devs. In a Twitter post (opens in new tab), user Tom Henderson described how GTA 6 was far enough away from its potential release window not to need good graphics.  

At the end of the day, while these leaks gave some a better idea of what to expect from the game, the biggest impact I saw was simply making people frustrated or worried about the future of GTA. 

No developer wants its game to start with that kind of rhetoric. So no matter what happens in the future, I’ll be closing my eyes and ears until the devs feel ready enough to give out more information on GTA 6, no matter how excited I am for this game to release.