The Real Impact Of The Grand Theft Auto And Diablo Leaks.

The hack was real. The following day, Rockstar confirmed that it “suffered a network intrusion in which an unauthorized third party illegally downloaded confidential information from our system.” This included early footage of its upcoming game, leaving parent company Take-Two scrambling to remove the videos posted on platforms like YouTube and Twitter as soon as possible. (Rockstar did not respond to requests for comment.) The Grand Theft Auto leak is one of, if not the, biggest leak ever to hit the gaming industry. The range of what the hacker managed to steal, from videos to possibly GTA V and GTA VI source code – the building blocks that allow developers to uniquely build their games – is staggering. However, despite suffering a massive breach, Rockstar Games isn’t alone. This week, a Reddit user posted 43 minutes of beta footage of Blizzard’s upcoming Diablo IV. Earlier this month, news about Ubisoft’s next Assassin’s Creed, Assassin’s Creed Mirage, hit the web ahead of the company’s dramatic announcement. A YouTuber has since come forward to claim responsibility for the leak after breaking an embargo. In the past, hackers have targeted prominent developers like Naughty Dog by releasing unreleased information about The Last of Us Part II. Immediately after the GTA VI leak, Take-Two’s stock fell, and the company assured investors that it had “taken steps to isolate and contain this incident.” But the real impact may not be felt for some time. Content leaks are a development nightmare. Gamemakers spoke to WIRED to describe it as a disheartening, even discouraging incident. “You work for years on a project and then a partially finished version of it is online,” says longtime creative director Alex Hutchinson, whose projects include Assassin’s Creed III and Far Cry 4. “And you get endless negative feedback about it, which you can’t defend because then you’re just giving oxygen to a bad moment.” And the dangerous results can be even worse. Players have already criticized the leaked version of Grand Theft Auto VI and how the game looks—still in progress. A lot of this is due to a misunderstanding of how development works and how the games will look when finished. Think Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. On Twitter, Naughty Dog developer Kurt Margenau posted an early build of a car chase with hero Nathan Drake driving a jeep down what looks like a 3D-graphic, square-lined road past buildings that could be they are made of children’s building blocks. “Its goal is to recreate the gaming experience as closely as possible,” he tweeted. “Then repeat.” The video ends with a look at the finished version, a shiny city full of color. The leaks, the developers say, distort the public’s perception of the game, giving players the impression that the version they buy will be… well, garbage. “If you watched a Marvel movie full of green screens and no special effects, you would have a completely tarnished impression of the finished quality, and if you never saw the finished film, then that would be your lasting impression,” Hutchinson says. The results are more than skin deep. It can create barriers between developers and their community and create increased security and secrecy around projects. These effects go further, sometimes creating a trust gap for the departments believed to be the source of the leak. In some cases, it can lead to excessive tingling. “Leaks usually mean delays,” says former Activision Blizzard developer Jessica Gonzalez if companies put resources into investigating and preventing more leaks. (Rockstar said it doesn’t currently expect “any long-term impact on the development of our ongoing projects.”) If a hacker does have GTA VI’s source code, Rockstar’s woes could get even worse — because, Gonzalez notes, that code “shows how we write the game.” Another developer with more than 20 years of experience on AAA titles, who requested anonymity to speak freely, tells WIRED that “it’s bad but it’s also pretty complicated.” Here, he says, leaks do real damage. “Source code is fluid,” he says, “so it’s a snapshot of a particular place and time that’s not really set up to navigate without a lot of time and effort, but it could be extremely damaging to a team if they have proprietary or licensed code there .” In games, developers are often portrayed as overly secretive about their work, and there are often calls to share more about their process to promote development literacy and demystify the work that goes into making a game. Some developers, like those behind Quake, choose to release the source code for people to play and build their own features. But there’s a difference between creators choosing to release their code and stealing from them. “Leakage, like anything else, makes companies less likely to get involved, even if the leak had nothing to do with the community at large,” says the AAA developer. “If your house gets robbed, you start putting locks and bars and cameras and not trusting your neighbors as much, and that sucks for everybody.”