Rockstar Games has responded to the Grand Theft Auto VI leak, sort of, and it's doing it by opening its wallet and buying ads for the upcoming Netflix premiere.
Over the past few days, paid promotions for Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, the official reveal premiering on Netflix on August 27, have started turning up across multiple social media platforms. Rockstar never really needed to confirm the event was still happening since everyone from their grandma to the United States government knew what was coming anyway, and even if pre-planned way before the leaks happened, cancelling the ad rollout would would be rudimentary.
Instead, the developers let them roll out, basically telling Grand Theft Auto fans that everything is under control and the show is proceeding exactly as planned.
Of course, Rockstar's public silence isn't complete indifference. Behind this facade is Take-Two Interactive going to work. It has gone full Rambo on the footage stolen and dumped this week with copyright takedowns, pulling clips off platforms as fast as they go up. The words, or the lack thereof, are a strategy, because of how little damage the leak actually does the company. If anything, any reply only feeds it.
The instant Rockstar comments, it hands the leaker's manifesto a stage, and turns a bad weekend into a week of headlines. Silence starves the whole thing and running ads for the Extended Look on top of that redirects the attention. It's a subtle way of telling everyone not to watch the scam-wrapped, older-build basketball clip someone stole, and to watch the real thing, in high quality, in context, six days from now, instead.
How Rockstar is really handling the leak
Front | What Rockstar is doing |
|---|---|
Public statements | Total silence, no comment, and skipped its usual weekly posts |
Behind the scenes | Rapid copyright takedowns pulling the footage back down |
Marketing | Paid ads pushing the official Extended Look on August 27 |
Silence out front, aggression in private, business as usual on the billboard.
After doing it once before, Rockstar must have realized the best rebuttal to a fresh leak was not a press release. Rather, it was to double down on what it was planning to do anyway. In the meantime, it's business as usual for Rockstar, with the takedowns flowing, the ads running, and the promise of the upcoming reveal enough to make the stolen clips instantly worthless.
Keep your expectations honest, though. The Extended Look is not going to show everything.
With that said, one question still hangs over the dead silence. Will Rockstar eventually acknowledge the incident, or will it ride this out for a while, at least until closer to the November 19 launch, or maybe never? For now, it is letting a paid ad campaign do the only talking it is willing to do.