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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.
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”.
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Abu Dhabi’s Robot Kitchen Is Serving Up Biryani, Not Burgers
Circus SE wants to put a tiny automated factory inside the buildings where Gulf residents live and work, bypassing part of last-mile delivery.
The most telling thing about a new autonomous kitchen now running in Abu Dhabi’s Marina Square is what it won’t cook:
“We don’t do fast food,” says Nikolas Bullwinkel, Founder and CEO of Circus SE. “We’ve actively decided not to build a machine that can only do burgers”.
Instead, the CA-1 system is built around pot-based cooking: curries, pastas, soups and rice dishes. After experimenting with highly personalized recipes, Circus deliberately leaned back toward recognizable food. “We’re going with a chicken biryani because you know it,” Bullwinkel says of the AED 40 dish.
The Germany-based robotics and food technology company operates across eight countries, and Abu Dhabi is its first deployment outside Europe. More locations are expected there and in Dubai.
In Germany, its units can be placed in supermarkets, gas stations, airports and hospitals. In the Gulf, Bullwinkel wants them inside residential and office buildings, replacing some of the complexity of last-mile delivery. “We’re basically bringing a very tiny factory a few square meters into your building,” he says. Catering company Royal Prestige supplies the ingredients and knowledge of local tastes.
The CA-1 manages up to 36 refrigerated ingredient silos alongside automated induction cooking, robotic plating and a self-cleaning dishwasher. Two robotic arms move ingredients through the system with minimal human intervention. It can produce up to 120 hot meals an hour, and a meal such as rice and curry can take around three to four minutes.
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Five cameras and multiple sensors monitor heat, temperature and consistency, an attempt to approximate what a chef perceives. “You can hear something gets burned, you can smell it, you can see it at some point,” Bullwinkel says. CircusOS, the company’s operating system, adjusts recipes in real time.
You might think of the platform as a threat to kitchen staff, but Bullwinkel frames Circus as a way for chefs to develop recipes and distribute them at scale. With that being said, rising labor costs and shortages are also part of his case for automation.
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