A manifesto shared yesterday by the people responsible for the big Grand Theft Auto 6 leak contains a lot of language that will be familiar to anyone following the Stop Killing Games campaign, most notably a demand that any game with singleplayer content have an “offline fallback state” ensuring that games remain playable when their external server support has ended. In response, Stop Killing Games has now issued a statement disavowing the whole thing and urging its followers to “not participate or engage with these kinds of actions.”
Stop Killing Games said the leaks appear genuine, noting the speed with which GTA publisher Take-Two Interactive has been issuing copyright strikes against them. Be that as it may, it also pointed out that the leaker is using the leak to promote a memecoin, “attaching crypto links and QR codes to the footage and asking people to pay for more.”
“Do not send these people your money, no matter how much sympathy you may feel for their actions,” Stop Killing Games said in a statement posted on Reddit. “This is illegal, and frankly, we feel for everyone at Rockstar having to go through this ordeal again, especially just over a week before Rockstar’s own official ‘Extended Look’ premieres.
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“Using illegal means to make a point is unacceptable to us and does nothing to protect our right to keep using what we paid for. No matter how strongly you disagree with the decisions of upper management at these companies, there are still thousands of developers who worked hard on this project, and they’re the ones being hit the hardest.”
That’s the tipping point for a lot of people, myself included I love a good leak, but there’s a world of difference between, say, Sony accidentally blasting an entire Destiny 2 expansion all over the internet days before it was meant to, and someone making an effort to acquire and share unreleased information.
How the leakers came across these GTA 6 clips, whether it was an actual ‘hack’ or just someone egregiously violating an NDA (which, despite the prevalence of Hackerman drama in popular media, is so often the case), isn’t currently known, but it’s also immaterial here: This is the kind of leak that will be aggressively pursued and punished by Rockstar, Take-Two, and the US government, and it’s entirely unsurprising that Stop Killing Games, which has built up significant political momentum over the past couple years, would want to distance itself as much as possible.
SKG also noted the likelihood of a bad outcome for the GTA 6 leaker, writing in its statement that “the last person who did this to Rockstar, back in 2022, ended up with an indefinite hospital order.” (That person, Arion Kurtaj, is now out of hospital and in prison, awaiting a retrial for his role in a 2022 hack that revealed GTA 6 to the world more than a year ahead of its official announcement.) It urged followers to channel their frustration into “something constructive” instead, adding that leaks like this “risks tarnishing the reputation of our communities and our chances to make change.”
“We are expecting for this to go on, and it is already being mentioned in our discussions with lawmakers, negatively. Do not participate or engage with these kinds of actions.’
The leaks have indeed continued: At least two more purported GTA 6 videos have surfaced today. The official GTA 6 reveal is set to take place on August 27, initially on Netflix and then six hours later for everyone else.
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