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”.