TGS ended, a shocking melon broke out in the game circle. A hacker hacked into R Star, obtained a large amount of source code and materials for the sequel "GTA 6", and even a considerable number of development and testing versions. As a threat, the hackers directly released 90 test video clips and a total of 10,000 lines of game code, and staged a real version of the GTA thief. The screen details of the beta version of
are already very complete
At present, it is confirmed that R Star is in contact with the hacker to discuss how to buy out this information and "redemption of hostages". Even so, it is likely that the existing code needs to be modified to a large extent to ensure the data security after the game is released.
Before this, the expectation of GTA's new works was only to make jokes. After all, the sales of GTA5 reached 170 million copies. In addition, the money-making ability of online in-app purchases finally brought revenue to a scale of 10 billion US dollars. R Star has almost unlimited budget and time to polish the next epoch-making super 3A game. After seeing the leaked content, most players joked that they were doing the new work, not "creating a new folder". In fact, in the financial report of Take-Two, the consortium behind R Star, it has long been confirmed that the development of GTA6 is in progress in an orderly manner, and the leak only makes the development progress a solid impact.
Hackers arrogantly said that R Star employees can no longer open the company's computer
In this sales plan, the total cost of GTA6 is expected to be US$500 million and revenue of US$1 billion in 24 hours. In addition, the game story is set in 2023, and we also have reason to guess the original release date will be within next year.
This shocking case has made gamers' attention focus on GTA6 like never before. Some people said that if I were R-star, I would like to have more hackers to increase exposure. This practice has been in the gaming industry. Capcom's marketing department once leaked an internal document, guiding the team to use the "leakage" incident to attract attention, and then quickly refute the rumors to confirm their popularity. The "Leakage Plan" was leaked, and Activision called it an expert.
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But when it comes to GTA6 this time, R Star did not dare to shoot such a seven-injury punch. Among the stolen files, not only the content in the development of the game, but also the source code of the game and the privacy information of employees, which is why R Star is afraid. The most direct consequences of the possible leakage of
source code are obtained by other companies and developed a copycat GTA. To be honest, this possibility is almost zero. The GTA series has passed the stage where it can be imitated and surpassed at will, and consumers are more paying for the added value on the brand and game IP. Secondly, the cost of copying a next-generation game is not a decimal, and even R-star itself is difficult to reproduce GTA's competitors. If R-star is unwilling to redeem, or the hacker is unwilling to keep his promise, the possibility of GTA source code being bargained as development materials is very low.
The second negative impact is that after the game is released, the development version and source code may be used by the pirated team to quickly crack the pirated game, affecting the first sales of the new game. If the pirated game's stealing date is earlier than the official release date, the economic losses to the game will be devastating. Furthermore, GTA6 will also have rich online content like the previous work. Through vulnerabilities in the source code, hackers can also develop private servers and cheat modifications of the game, which is also a huge hidden danger that threatens the entire life cycle of GTA6. Although GTA5 has not been leaked, it has also been filled with plug-ins, and has been seized by hackers in countless gray industries. Who knows what kind of hell will a naked GTA 6 Online look like?
Finally, employees' privacy information is a politically correct guarantee method. Even if R Star breaks the ball and wants to fight the hacker to the end, then the victimized employees are all united, and the outside world will attack because of R Star's stinginess. In March this year, a hacker organization hacked into Nvidia's database to obtain the privacy information of its 71,000 employees, and threatened to delete cryptocurrency mining restrictions from the RTX 30 series graphics card. In the incident, Lao Huang did not choose to surrender, and the employee information was really released on the homepage.
In recent years, hacking against game companies has become more and more frequent. In July, ,000 generations of were also visited by hackers, and the game release plan for the 2023 fiscal year was released. Among them, they saw a large number of game projects that were not publicly disclosed, such as " Armored Core ", "Digimon: Network Detective 2", " Elden Farring " DLC, "Legend" new work, and "Blood-Eating Code 2", which can be said to be a feast for players. The reason behind this may be that Bandai believes that the hacker has not obtained any negative information, so he let the punishment be.
In China, the security threat to game developers comes more from the network. Small and medium-sized developers who are rising popularity in the short term will be targeted by DDoS attackers and quickly squeeze the server's carrying traffic. This kind of incident will generally occur during the game server opening stage. The team does not want the server to be launched for several years to be wasted because of a hacker attack, so they can only pay the money. Or prepare for the future to buy DDoS high-defense services such as Tencent Cloud , Alibaba Cloud , but the price is only much higher than the threats of hackers.
Back to GTA6, this leak may become the largest hacker incident in the history of the game. Many game developers who have also encountered hacking attacks have come forward to support R Star. Paweł Sasko, mission director of Cyberpunk 2077, said: "I can't imagine what the R Star team has experienced now. Years of work are now crushed, torn, analyzed, misunderstood and taken out of context. The game industry is very clear about this vicious cycle. Please help them become better and not participate in leaks." Neil Druckmann, president of Naughty Dog , posted a message saying that "The Last of Us: The First Part" (the first generation remake) was also accidentally leaked. The game project was made public in advance, but everything will eventually pass, and artistic creation will not stop.
According to the previous management of R Star by the T2 consortium, buying the code and conservatively rewriting a copy is the most likely ending, which inevitably leads to the part that has been developed in the game requiring large-scale anti-work, which means that the game release date must be postponed. In addition, there are more than one criminal targeting R Star. Under such a large production scale, any mistakes may be exploited again.
