Rockstar Games released its Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer a day early, after it got leaked. In some ways, leaks have become part of GTA 6’s story.
With just over 24 hours left before Rockstar Games was set to debut its first Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer, a grainy video started circulating online: The GTA 6 trailer, but marked with a massive bitcoin watermark. About 30 minutes later Rockstar did the corporate equivalent of saying “Fuck it,” uploading the trailer and pointing to it in a terse post on X: “Our trailer has leaked so please watch the real thing on YouTube.”
It’s unusual for a company like Rockstar to disregard its original, announced schedule and just post the thing, but it’s not the first time it’s happened. When The Last of Us Part 2’s PlayStation 5 remaster was leaked early on the PlayStation Store by data miners looking for new information, hours later, an official trailer popped up on YouTube, with several prominent Naughty Dog developers declaring that “leaks really suck.” (In Naughty Dog’s case, however, timing for The Last of Us Part 2’s remaster wasn’t announced, and it’s possible the YouTube release was its planned time.)
Typically, in the event of a leak, a company starts issuing takedown requests as quickly as possible — which Rockstar did, of course — and waits it out until the planned debut. (We’ve seen this plenty of times when Pokémon games leak early; Nintendo and The Pokémon Company try to take things down, but don’t acknowledge leaks head-on.) In the case of GTA 6, the early launch of the trailer hasn’t diluted the hype, with the GTA 6 trailer reaching more than 85 million views by Tuesday morning. It’s quickly gaining on Rockstar’s debut Grand Theft Auto 5 trailer, which was published on Nov. 2, 2011, and has more than 99 million views.
Several Rockstar employees have expressed their upset feelings about the leak: “This fucking sucks,” one developer posted to X. (The post, and the developer’s X account, have since been deleted.) The GTA 6 trailer wasn’t the first video game trailer to be leaked, and it definitely won’t be the last in an internet landscape where everyone from fans to brands is always fighting for eyeballs.
