Rockstar's Two GTA 6 Statements: One Says Sorry

本文另有中文版：Rockstar 兩份 GTA 6 洩漏聲明：2022 年沒道歉，2026 年道歉的是讓玩家等太久

On August 26, 2026, Rockstar Games posted a statement to X and Instagram — the same text on both. It opens with “Dear all”, calls the situation “heartbreaking”, and closes “Sincerely, Rockstar Games.” That is the shape of an apology letter.

IGN’s report on the statement noted something else happening at the same time: a fifteenth leaked clip went online within minutes of the statement going up. One document was addressed to players; the leaking it was responding to had not stopped.

Rockstar had written a statement about this before. On September 19, 2022, the same company, about the same game, published something with no “Dear all”, no “sorry”, and four paragraphs of legal language instead. The two statements are 1,437 days apart, and they are both about the same underlying event repeating itself — early footage of Grand Theft Auto VI getting out before Rockstar wanted it to. What follows lines the two statements up side by side, along with what the company’s own filings and the court record say that the statements themselves do not.

The 2022 statement ran four paragraphs, and its only emotion word was “extremely disappointed”

The leak happened over the weekend of September 17–18, 2022, and the footage was posted to a fan forum. Eurogamer’s report the next day put the total at nearly an hour of video and gave no clip count. Rockstar posted its response to Twitter on September 19, as an image titled “A Message from Rockstar Games”. The full text read:

“We recently suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorised third-party illegally accessed and downloaded confidential information from our systems, including early development footage for the next Grand Theft Auto.

“At this time we do not anticipate any disruption to our live game services, nor any long-term effect on the development of our ongoing projects.

“We are extremely disappointed to have any details of our next game shared with you all in this way. Our work on the next Grand Theft Auto game will continue as planned and we remain as committed as ever to delivering an experinece [sic] to you, our players, that truly exceeds your expectations.

“We will update everyone again soon and, of course, will properly introduce you to this next game when it is ready. We want to thank everyone for their ongoing support through this situation.”

There is no “sorry” and no “apologize” anywhere in it. The only emotion word is “extremely disappointed”. There is no salutation and no signature.

The same day, Take-Two filed an 8-K with the SEC. Item 8.01 runs almost the same text, with one line the public statement does not have: “We have already taken steps to isolate and contain this incident.” That is a step taken, not a step finished — the filing does not say whether containment was complete, or how long it took. Eurogamer’s report that day cited Reuters saying Take-Two’s shares had fallen six percent in premarket trading in response to the breach; Eurogamer did not report where the stock closed that day.

The 10-Q for the quarter ending September 30, 2022 carries a section titled “Cybersecurity Incident”: “Rockstar Games did not experience and does not anticipate any disruption to its current services nor any long-term effect on its development timelines as a result of this incident. […] we have incurred certain immaterial incremental one-time costs related to consultants, experts and data recovery efforts and expect to incur additional costs related to cybersecurity protections in the future.” The word is “immaterial”. No dollar figure appears anywhere in the filing. On the earnings call on November 8, 2022, Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick told analysts: “it was terribly unfortunate, and we take those sorts of incidents very seriously indeed. There’s no evidence that any material assets were taken, which is a good thing. And certainly, the leak won’t have any influence on development or anything of the sort. But it is terribly disappointing and causes us to be ever more vigilant on matters relating to cybersecurity.”

Across all four documents — the statement, the 8-K, the 10-Q, and the earnings call — none of them contains the word “sorry”. What they do contain is “intrusion”, “unauthorized”, “immaterial”, and “disappointed”.

Two developers spoke up for Rockstar that week. Naughty Dog co-president Neil Druckmann posted on Twitter: “To my fellow devs out there affected by the latest leak, know that while it feels overwhelming right now, it’ll pass […] Keep pushing. Keep making art.” Eurogamer’s report named one other, God of War creative director Cory Barlog, without quoting him directly.

The 2026 statement opens with “Dear all”, closes with “Sincerely”, and never names the leaker

Four years later, the format is different. Engadget’s transcript of the full 253-word statement reads:

“Dear all,

We know that many of you have been waiting to hear from us regarding the events of the past week. It would be an understatement to say that having videos of Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay leak in this way has been heartbreaking for our team, and this is obviously not how we intended for you to see the game after all this time. We are very sorry that everything has taken as long as it has — from getting the game finished (nearly there!) to sharing more details and official gameplay, and providing the community with everything you want to know.

We are very excited for everyone to see the extended look tomorrow. It has taken longer than we wanted to get it ready, but as with everything we do, we know we need to exceed your expectations, and we are determined to deliver at the level you expect and deserve. While it is unfortunate that the intended game experience may now be impacted by some spoilers, we hope that everyone will wait a bit longer to experience the game for themselves on November 19.

We want to thank everyone in the community who has reached out with messages of support this past week — your words have meant more to this team than you can imagine. Ultimately, we are making this game for you, and without you, we would not have had the privilege of making games.

We look forward to sharing more with you soon.

Sincerely, Rockstar Games.”

Four outlets reprinted this statement, and their versions do not all agree. IGN’s reprint capitalizes the phrase as “the Extended Look tomorrow” and appears to contain two retyping errors elsewhere in the body. Shacknews’s version drops the word “now” before “impacted” and drops “for themselves” before “on November 19”, misspells “Ultimately”, and has no “Sincerely” line at all. Engadget’s is the only one of the four that keeps both the “Dear all” opening and the “Sincerely” signature.

What is missing from the text is as informative as what is in it. The words CyberLeek, leaker, hack, intrusion, legal, subpoena, crypto, physical, disc, and pre-order do not appear once. Neither does the 2022 statement’s “continue as planned”, nor its “live services”. Tom’s Hardware’s headline on its August 26 report about the statement put it directly: the post “avoids mentioning leaker’s demands”.

The statement’s one sentence with “sorry” in it is worth reading for its object: “We are very sorry that everything has taken as long as it has”. The things that have “taken as long as it has” are then listed — getting the game finished, sharing more details and official gameplay, giving the community everything it wants to know. The apology is for the wait. It is not for the leak, and it says nothing about how the leak happened or who is behind it.

Side by side: the two statements compared, row by row

Both statements use the same phrase — “exceed(s) your expectations” — in their second-to-last paragraph, but they close differently: the 2022 statement ends on “thank everyone for their ongoing support”, the 2026 statement on “We look forward to sharing more with you soon. Sincerely, Rockstar Games.”

Three changes stand out. First, the naming disappears: 2022 gave the event a legal description — network intrusion, illegally accessed — while 2026 calls it only “videos of Grand Theft Auto VI gameplay leak in this way”, with no subject doing the leaking. Second, operational reassurance is replaced by two calendar dates: instead of promising no disruption and no delay, the 2026 statement points to August 27 and November 19. Third, gratitude narrows: 2022 thanked “everyone”; 2026 thanks specifically “everyone in the community who has reached out with messages of support”.

Take-Two’s August 20 court filings cover ground both statements leave out

The legal activity that neither statement mentions was already under way that week. On August 20, 2026, Take-Two’s law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, filed two Section 512(h) DMCA subpoena petitions with the US District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The first, case number 1:26-mc-421, “In re DMCA Subpoena to Microsoft Corporation”, targets Microsoft in its capacity as GitHub’s service provider; the infringing material named is a GitHub repository at github.com/zyrexdz/cyberleek-leak-research. The second, case number 1:26-mc-422, “In re DMCA Subpoena to Discord, inc.” [sic], targets a Discord server reachable by invite link, naming the accounts CYBERLEEK (User ID 532773089466122241), CINEMATICROCKSTAR, and Surfer24k, plus two community servers, discord.gg/darkviperau and discord.gg/odyssey. Both petitions carry the same sworn declaration: “Take-Two, through its counsel of record, has submitted a sworn declaration confirming that the purpose for which the DMCA subpoena is sought is to obtain the identity of an alleged infringer or infringers, and that such information will only be used for the purpose of protecting Take-Two’s rights under Title 17 U.S.C. §§ 100, et. seq.”

The procedure behind a Section 512(h) subpoena is worth spelling out. It is requested from the court clerk, not a judge, and it does not require a lawsuit to already be filed. The petitioner submits three things — a copy of the takedown notice already sent, a proposed subpoena and order, and the sworn declaration — and then asks the clerk to “expeditiously issue and sign” it. No judge reviews the scope beforehand.

Kotaku’s report on August 21 quoted the filing’s demand of Microsoft directly: the company was to produce, by September 4, “all internal Microsoft business records and investigative records associated with Microsoft’s internal investigation of the ‘cyberleek’ persona sufficient to identify the user(s), person(s) and/or entity/ies associated with that persona”. The same report separately describes a demand for identifying information — account IDs, registration emails, IP addresses, phone numbers, linked accounts, and device identifiers — on everyone who communicated on the named Discord servers from June 1, 2026 onward. Tom’s Hardware’s report the next day described an attachment requiring MachineGuid and Microsoft account device identifiers, covering all members of three Discord servers since June 1. The two outlets describe the Microsoft subpoena’s reach differently — Tom’s Hardware frames it as targeting Microsoft solely as GitHub’s service provider, while also describing device-identifier demands tied to Discord servers. What the court filings themselves name is two targets: the GitHub repository, and the Discord accounts and servers listed above.

A third and fourth subpoena target X and Google/YouTube, according to TorrentFreak’s August 23 report, filed by a separate law firm. The X subpoena names three accounts: @cyberleek_ar_io, @cyberleekario, and @MrCyberLeek. The watermark on the leaked videos themselves reads “CYBERLEEK DOES NOT HAVE TWITTER”, and fans had already flagged the three named accounts as impersonators reposting the leaks rather than the source. The filing does not say whether Take-Two treats them as the source or as reposters.

Two companies have responded publicly. Xbox chief technology officer Scott Van Vliet posted on X: “We are working closely with Take-Two and Rockstar Games to support efforts to protect creative works and intellectual property”. Discord marketing director Ryan K. Rigney posted on Monday, August 24: “I can share an update on this: Discord has not yet been served with a subpoena from Take-Two”. He added: “When we do, we’ll evaluate the validity and scope before responding.” Eurogamer’s report explained the distinction behind that wording — filing a subpoena with the court and formally serving it on a party are two separate steps, and a filing on August 20 does not mean Discord had received anything by August 24.

The privacy concern raised around the subpoenas centers on scope. A Eurogamer reporter estimated — the reporter’s own figure, not an official one — that the servers where the leaks circulated have hundreds of thousands of members, all potentially covered if the subpoena’s reach matches its stated date range. None of the outlets covering the case has quoted a legal scholar or an advocacy organization on it.

The 2022 case ended in a British courtroom in December 2023

The 2022 breach had its legal ending the following year. BBC’s report from August 23, 2023 described the attacker, Arion Kurtaj, as a member of Lapsus$ who leaked the unreleased footage while out on bail and staying at a Travelodge hotel; assessed as unfit to stand trial because of autism, he faced a jury that could only decide whether he had committed the acts alleged, not his intent.

The sentencing came on December 21, 2023, at Southwark Crown Court. 18-year-old Kurtaj received an indefinite hospital order. According to the BBC’s account, he had been placed under police protection at the Travelodge, on bail for earlier hacks against Nvidia and BT/EE, and after his laptop was confiscated he used an Amazon Firestick, the hotel room’s television, and a mobile phone to breach Rockstar’s systems anyway. A 17-year-old co-defendant received an 18-month Youth Rehabilitation Order.

The sentencing report also carries the source of a figure that circulates widely online: “Rockstar Games alone told the court that the hack cost it $5m to recover from” — a court statement, made by Rockstar in December 2023, about the 2022 breach, plus thousands of hours of staff time. It is not a number from a financial filing, and it is not about 2026.

The same set of court reports gives a clip count that Eurogamer’s day-of coverage did not: both the August 2023 and December 2023 reports put the figure at 90 clips of leaked footage, a number arrived at more than a year after the leak itself, when Eurogamer’s contemporary estimate had put the total at just under an hour of footage.

Three numbers keep circulating about the leaks, from three different kinds of sources

Three figures show up repeatedly in discussion of these leaks, and they come from three different kinds of sources.

The first is $5 million. As described above, this number has a clear origin — Rockstar’s own statement to a British court in December 2023, about the cost of recovering from the 2022 breach, plus thousands of staff hours. It is frequently misapplied to the 2026 leaks, or cited as though it came from a financial filing; both uses put it in the wrong year and attribute it to the wrong kind of document.

The second is a $2.83 billion drop in market value. That figure originates with games.gg’s own arithmetic on August 20, calculating the difference between a $248.13 and a $232.84 share price over August 18–20; bleap reused the same figures, and BeInCrypto ran with it on a Yahoo Finance content-syndication page, describing it as a figure reached “by one tally”. Reuters, CNBC, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, and MarketWatch have not used the number, and it appears nowhere in a Take-Two filing. Bloomberg’s newsletter from August 21, cited secondhand by other outlets, put the figure at roughly $2 billion instead — a different number. As it stands, $2.83 billion is a figure calculated by non-mainstream outlets from closing stock prices, unconfirmed by major financial media or by Take-Two itself.

The third is a “zero trust” security policy. No primary source or press report attributes that phrase to Rockstar in any context. What did happen, and is documented, is a change to remote-work policy: Kotaku reported on February 29, 2024 that Rockstar head of publishing Jenn Kolbe sent staff a memo requiring five days a week in the office starting in April. Kotaku’s own characterization of the memo’s stated reasoning was “productivity and security concerns, particularly following a huge breach in 2022” — that phrase is Kotaku’s paraphrase, not a sentence lifted from the memo itself. The one sentence Kotaku quoted directly from the memo reads: “Making these changes now puts us in the best position to deliver the next Grand Theft Auto at the level of quality and polish we know it requires, along with a publishing roadmap that matches the scale and ambition of the game”.

The Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain, or IWGB, issued a statement the same week opposing the change: “on the 15th of April they will be pulling the plug on their remote access technology […] citing security concerns and reduced productivity without providing employees with any supporting evidence.” The union’s objection was to the lack of supporting evidence for the decision, not to any specific policy called “zero trust”.

One more claim regularly gets folded into the 2026 story: that Take-Two chief executive Strauss Zelnick downplayed the current leaks on an earnings call. He has made no public comment on the 2026 leaks at all. What he did discuss, on the February 2024 earnings call, was the December 2023 trailer leak — a separate incident, in which Rockstar had posted to X, “Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube”, moving up the trailer’s release after it got out early.

From the first leak to the Extended Look: August 18 to 27, 2026

CyberLeek’s stated demands, as reported by GamesRadar, were three: end digital pre-orders, end DLC that requires extra purchases to unlock, and guarantee offline-playable versions of single-player content. Tom’s Hardware’s report on the group’s manifesto also described a call for physical media — pressed discs, printed boxes, sold on shelves, with revenue earned through physical production rather than downloads. That demand has a specific background: Eurogamer had already reported, as of August 19, that GTA 6’s physical edition ships as a download code in a box rather than a disc. Leaked videos also carried a watermark promoting a Solana-based token called $CYBERLEEK; Stop Killing Games’ statement pointed this out directly, describing it as promoting a memecoin. Eurogamer’s coverage noted that the group claimed to act in the name of “Gamers’ Rights”.

The DMCA takedowns themselves were cited as a kind of evidence. Stop Killing Games argued that “the speed of those strikes is itself a strong signal of authenticity” — the videos were being taken down fast enough that the removals suggested the footage was real.

FAQ

How many statements has Rockstar issued about GTA 6 leaks?

Two statements addressed leaks directly: one on September 19, 2022, after a Lapsus$ member breached Rockstar’s systems, and one on August 26, 2026, after a string of leaks attributed to a group calling itself CyberLeek. A third incident, the early leak of a trailer in December 2023, only got a single sentence posted to X, not a full statement.

Does the August 26, 2026 statement apologize, and for what?

Yes. It says, “We are very sorry that everything has taken as long as it has”, apologizing for how long players have had to wait — for the finished game, for details, and for official gameplay footage. It does not apologize for the leak itself, and it does not mention the leaker, their demands, or any legal action.

How did Take-Two get subpoenas without filing a lawsuit?

Take-Two used Section 512(h) of the US copyright law, which lets a copyright holder ask a court clerk to issue a DMCA subpoena without filing a lawsuit and without a judge reviewing the request first. The petitioner has to submit a copy of the takedown notice already sent, a proposed subpoena, and a sworn declaration. That a judge never reviews the scope in advance is part of what has made the subpoenas controversial.

How much did the GTA 6 leaks cost Rockstar?

The only figure with a documented source is $5 million plus thousands of staff hours, which Rockstar told a British court in December 2023 it had spent recovering from the 2022 breach — not the 2026 leaks. A separate, widely shared claim that GTA 6 leaks wiped $2.83 billion off Take-Two’s market value comes from non-mainstream outlets doing their own math on stock prices; no major financial outlet or Take-Two filing has used that number.

Two statements, four years apart, use one shared phrase and two different vocabularies: one names the intrusion and promises continuity, the other names a date and asks for patience. Between them sit an 8-K that says a step was taken rather than finished, a court record that puts a number on a different year’s damage, and a subpoena that a clerk can sign without a judge ever looking at its scope.