News

Former Rockstar Director Dismisses GTA 6 Leaks As “Nothing Burger”

Most future players aren’t hunting leaked clips, says Obbe Vermeij. Though signs the hacker holds a playable build could complicate matters.

Published

5 days ago

August 24, 2026

Nour Nasir

former rockstar director dismisses gta 6 leaks as nothing burger

Rockstar Games

For the past week, a hacker known as Cyberleek has been drip-feeding footage from Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) onto the internet, reportedly to promote a crypto scheme and pressure Rockstar Games into protecting players’ digital rights. Parent company Take-Two is treating the breach seriously, and has launched legal proceedings against Microsoft-owned site GitHub and chat app Discord in a bid to uncover details of accounts allegedly sharing copyrighted material.

But one Rockstar veteran, Obbe Vermeij, technical director on games including GTA 4, has urged fans to relax. “Calm down everybody,” he tweeted. “The leaks are a nothing burger”.

His argument rests on how Rockstar markets its biggest franchise. The studio has kept GTA 6 under wraps “longer than other publishers” as a deliberate hype-generating strategy. In his view “all that has happened is that some footage has escaped”. Had the game already gone through a conventional campaign of gameplay trailers, the two-minute clips would reveal little.

More importantly, Vermeij argues, the audience that matters isn’t watching. “90% of future players don’t spend their time on the internet looking for video snippets,” he wrote. “They don’t have the time and don’t want spoilers. I imagine the teams are a little annoyed about it but not more than that”.

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Vermeij has seen worse. He was at Rockstar during the Hot Coffee scandal, when a sex mini-game was accidentally left inside GTA San Andreas. “It was a nightmare for management [Rockstar’s New York offices] but didn’t affect us [Rockstar North] much. The current leaks are far less consequential than [Hot Coffee] was. It looks like GTA 6 will be phenomenal and sell for the next 15 years or so. The leaks are just a tiny blip”.

There is one wrinkle. Days ago, Cyberleek posted footage implying they hold an actual playable build, which would be a much bigger problem if it were ever dumped online. Vermeij is unmoved: “it probably only runs on a devkit,” since development kits carry far more memory than consoles or standard PCs. “There probably isn’t a build in existence that would run on a retail PS5 at the moment”.

Related Topics:Gaming GTA 6 Rockstar Games

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Visa’s Return To Syria Starts With A Test And A Bank In Lebanon

Foreign visitors will be the first users to benefit, but whether Syria’s own banks and cardholders follow is still an open question.

Published

2 days ago

August 27, 2026

Dana Saadeh

visa's return to syria starts with a test and a bank in lebanon

Visa is returning to Syria. Its first live international card transaction in the country was a test rather than a launch, and the milestone event ran through a Lebanese bank.

The acquirer (the bank on the merchant’s side of a card payment) was Fransabank Lebanon, with Paymera as the other named partner. Nadim Moujaes, who heads a Fransabank Group subsidiary, describes the test as both the culmination of “longstanding efforts to link Syria back to international payment networks” and “the first step in a larger path”.

Syrian President Ahmed Al-Sharaa makes the first electronic payment in Syria using a @Visa card at a store in Damascus, following the lifting of US sanctions on Syria. pic.twitter.com/lpAN7nQ6Fc

— Tech Magazine (@TechMGZN) August 27, 2026

“We are excited to have successfully tested live transactions today as we plan to enable international visitors to use their Visa cards while in Syria,” says Leila Serhan, Visa’s senior vice president and group country manager for the North Africa, Levant and Pakistan region. Although a significant first step, that plan doesn’t come with a hard date for when a visitor’s card will work normally.

Mohammed Safwat Raslan, governor of the Central Bank of Syria, says the test paves the way for international card acceptance in Syria and that maintaining strong compliance, risk management and operational controls will remain essential. Serhan likewise stresses that Visa has worked within applicable legal, regulatory and compliance requirements. For a test transaction, it seems there was a great deal of attention paid to the rules, with the entire operation being carefully managed.

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The test is the latest step in a sequence that began in December 2025, when Visa announced a strategic roadmap to support Syria’s integration into the global digital economy. In February 2026 it hosted its first industry gathering of banks, ecosystem partners and policymakers in Damascus and, the same month, signed an agreement with Syria’s Ministry of Communications and Information Technology in San Francisco.

Michel Kattouah, Paymera’s CEO, called the test “the return of international card acceptance,” but while that’s positive news, there’s no word yet on when a Syrian bank will issue a Visa card to a Syrian customer.