Thirteen Years, Two Delays, and the Part Rockstar Did Not Answer

Rockstar broke a week of silence yesterday. The letter is short, it is signed “Sincerely, Rockstar Games,” and it says the leaks have been heartbreaking for our team. It apologises — genuinely, I think — for how long all of this has taken. It asks us to hold on a little longer and see the game properly on 19 November.

It is a well-written letter. It answers almost nothing.

Start with the arithmetic

Grand Theft Auto V came out on 17 September 2013. If Grand Theft Auto VI ships on 19 November as promised, the gap between them will be thirteen years and two months.

Thirteen years. There are people who will buy this game who were not born when the last one came out. There are people who bought GTA V on a PlayStation 3 and have since bought it again on two more consoles.

And in that stretch we were moved twice:

• Announced December 2023, targeting a 2025 window.
• Moved to 26 May 2026 — the first actual date the studio ever committed to.
• Moved again to 19 November 2026.

Two delays, roughly eighteen months of public slippage, and a release date that has now been a moving target for longer than some studios take to make an entire game. The letter apologises for that. Fine. Accepted.

Now the part the letter leaves out

The person behind this calls themselves Cyberleek. Not a typo. They sprayed the word “leek” onto a wall in-game, with bullets, and put it in the footage. That is a man enjoying himself.

And Cyberleek did not do this for laughs, or not only for laughs. There is a manifesto, and it makes three specific demands:

• No digital pre-orders. Physical pre-orders stay allowed. The argument: pre-orders were never invented for players, they were invented because pressing discs had manufacturing limits. Strip out the discs and what is left is asking people to pay before release and before a single independent review exists.
• No fake “single-player-ready” game data — no shipping a box that still needs the internet before it will let you play alone.
• Mandatory offline fallback states for single-player games, so a single-player game you paid for keeps working when the servers do not.

Cyberleek says they will not stop until Rockstar issues a public statement, an apology, and a concrete commitment to do better. Their words: “Words are not enough; restitution is mandatory.”

So Rockstar issued a public statement. And an apology. And the statement does not contain the words pre-order, digital, refund, or consumer. It apologises for the delay and for the manner in which we saw the game. It does not touch the actual complaint, not in one clause, not once.

You can call that discipline. Legal will have been all over that letter, and there are good reasons a company under active attack does not negotiate in public. But let us not pretend a question was answered. Somebody said “stop taking money for things people cannot see yet,” and the reply was “we are very excited for everyone to see the extended look tomorrow.”

And about that extended look

The first real gameplay showcase — after thirteen years, two delays and two cinematic trailers — goes live today at 3pm Eastern, exclusively on Netflix. It reaches YouTube, where everyone can watch it for free, six hours later.

Read that again with Cyberleek’s first commandment in your hand.

I am not saying the two things are equivalent. A six-hour streaming window is not fraud. But it is the same instinct: the thing you have waited thirteen years for arrives first for the people inside a subscription, and everybody else queues. Whatever you make of the man with the leek, he did not have to invent the pattern he is complaining about. It was right there, scheduled, in the same letter.

We have been here before, and it is worse than you remember

September 2022. Around ninety videos of an early GTA VI build hit the internet. The culprit turned out to be Arion Kurtaj, seventeen years old, of the Lapsus$ group. He did it from a hotel room, using a phone, a hotel television and an Amazon Fire TV Stick — while on bail for previous offences and under police protection.

Rockstar’s statement then said the company was “extremely disappointed.” Kurtaj was later sentenced to an indefinite hospital order. He was released in July of this year. His retrial is listed for November — the same month the game finally comes out.

Four years apart, two leaks, two carefully worded letters. The second letter is warmer than the first. That is the only thing that changed.

The part I am not going to pretend about

Cyberleek is not a folk hero and I am not going to write him up as one.

There is a meme coin watermarked onto the leaked footage, raising money for what is described as a “secret project.” Whatever the manifesto says about consumer rights, somebody attached a token launch to another company’s stolen work and pointed an audience at it. That is not activism. That is a revenue stream wearing activism as a coat.

Hundreds of people spent years building this thing. The artists and engineers who made it did not set the pre-order policy, and having your work dumped online unfinished, out of order, without context, is a real thing to be sick about. “Heartbreaking for our team” is the one line in that letter I take completely at face value.

I am also not linking to any of it, and I am not telling you where to look. That is not coyness. It is just not mine to hand out.

So where does that leave me

Thirteen years. Two delays. A game sold on pre-order before anyone outside the building has played a minute of it, and a first gameplay reveal that goes behind a streaming subscription for six hours.

Rockstar’s position is that we should wait a bit longer and experience it properly. And my honest reaction, the one I actually had reading that letter, is that the request is unreasonable. Not immoral. Not evil. Just unreasonable, from a company that has had thirteen years and moved the date twice, to an audience it has asked to be patient roughly the entire time.

They will get their reveal today. It will look extraordinary and I will watch it like everyone else. On 19 November I will almost certainly buy the game, and I will enjoy it, and none of what is above will stop me.

But I am not going to stand here and perform disappointment about the leaks.

I am delighted. Thirteen years is long enough. Good on the leeks.