Nine days before Rockstar Games was planning to show us Grand Theft Auto VI on its own terms, someone else did it first. A batch of leaked gameplay footage and a supposed full map of Leonida hit social media on Tuesday, August 18, and this time, unlike the last few scares, a lot of it, if not all of it, looks very likely to be real.
What's included in the latest Grand Theft Auto leak are short gameplay clips. In one, Jason is hanging around his oceanside house from the second trailer, and in another, he sideswipes a delivery truck, brawls with the furious driver, picks up a wrench, and pulls a two-star wanted level. On top of the clips, there is a high-resolution image going around that shows off the entirety of Leonida, naming counties and spots we haven't seen before.
Normally, we'd brush off leaks these this, but Take-Two Interactive didn't, which is telling.
Not more than an hour after the clips made their way to various social media platforms, Take-Two's legal team did their jobs and started hitting posts with copyright takedowns. As of this writing, Take-Two is trying to contain the entire situation and they are yet to release a statement. However, we fear that the cat is already out of the bag.
GTA 6 Leaked Contents
What surfaced | The read |
|---|---|
The gameplay clips (basketball, road rage) | Very likely genuine. Novel mechanics, trailer-matching visuals, RDR2-style animation, and multiple outlets treating it as real. Reportedly from an older build |
A "full map" of Leonida | Shakier. It closely matches long-running fan maps, so it could be real or a cleaned-up repackage of community work |
The DMCA takedowns | Not proof on their own. Take-Two strikes convincing fakes too. The un-fakeable detail is what sells it, not the strike |
How it is being spread | A red flag. The leaker is pushing crypto sites and QR codes, so treat the source as a likely scam |
The footage looks real, the map may be genuine, and the source is a potential malware attack.
The gameplay clips look genuine in a way that the 2022 leaks were. The amount of detail is ridiculous. AI can't replicate this. There's a ton of specific, novel, internally consistent stuff that would take an impossible amount of work to fake convincingly, and it lines up with the trailers and the pre-order screenshots we've gotten so far.
We won't go into much detail about what the leaks contained, but we will tell you that GTA 6 is definitely looking like it will meet all expectations, and then some.
Reports are also suggesting that the footage is from an older build, maybe as far back as 2023, which says a lot about how much better Vice City and the rest of GTA 6 will look, feel, and play come November.
Now, as for where the leaks are coming from, the account pushing all of this, posting as Cyberleek, is wrapping the footage in cryptocurrency promos, QR codes, and links to a crypto site, asking people to pay up for more. Even if every frame of the leak is real, the delivery is a scam waiting to happen. Do not fall for it.
When you show almost nothing for years, every a blurry, out-of-context, scam-adjacent clip feels like a revelation and the takedowns become synonymous with gospel. It's easy to argue Rockstar's silence created the same vacuum that let a fake Netflix listing spread two weeks ago, except this time the leak looks real. Even then, Take-Two strikes convincing fakes just as fast as it strikes actual leaks, so it might not even be true.
With that said, none of this needed to leak. We're days away from the next official GTA 6 showcase, which premieres on Netflix on August 27, in high quality, in context, with sound, and without a crypto scam bolted to it, ahead of the game's launch.
So if you ever feel tempted, try to fight it. You already waited this long. You can wait a few more days and skip the QR code while you are at it.