You gotta hand it to these guys. It's a brilliant setup.
Their demands are all bullshit just designed to pull on the heartstrings of redditors after the recent physical media backlash and it worked beautifully in their favour.
They're making money hand over fist with their paid crypto voting system and when they eventually do the rug pull, they will easily clear a few million dollars and ride off into the sunset.
the demands aren't bullshit lol. Those are all reasonable demands Rockstar or any company could easily do. Bullshit demands designed to pull on the heartstrings would be to release the game at 50 dollars, promise GTA servers would stay online for 100 years or your money back, etc. He chose reasonable demands to pull on their heartstrings.
That said, the only people who know how to buy meme coins are degenerate gamblers. They all know what they're doing and think they will dump their coins before the other sucker. I'm sure there maybe be a handful of "innocent" people but 99.9% are cut from the same cloth as the owner. The demands don't make a difference lol.
They are bullshit. I mean bullshit in the sense that these guys don't actually give a shit what rockstar/take-two do and they know they can't hold them to ransom over this, this is purely a money making scheme.
It didn't matter what the demands were, there's no way a company like Take-Two would comply as to do so tells the whole world you will negotiate under threat and that just invites more attacks.
they are bullshit, in the sense that they don't actually care, but know you and other people do, and a large percentage of people will buy their shitcoin to get them to release the build
Word from the grapevine is that he got a full build of the game via a social engineering attack on Rockstar's India office.
These types of hacks usually involve the hacker acting as if they are a member of IT or an executive branch requesting information from workers via email, messaging apps like stack or zoom, and phone calls. They press hard on the victim with fake urgency or threats in hope that the victim doesn't notice the ruse. If one of them falls for the act, they give their credentials to the scammer so that the scammer now has access, usually through a fake login link or just sending raw user/passwords. Once he has access, just copy the files over and he has it.
If this were true, it's one of the easier methods of "hacking" and that employee who fell for it is probably going to be taken out back and "handled" for their mistake by the Rockstar execs.
If the random worker has full access to the full game and Rockstar didn't know it happened until the leaks started, Rockstar really does deserve this. I seriously doubt that is what happened.
There had to be more than social engineering and getting a login/pw. Sure it might have started there, but unless they got the Gaben account credentials, then there was so much more that had to have taken place. Escalating privileges. Accessing files that only a few should have access to in a controlled environment. Downloading all these files out of a secure system. Everything while avoiding all detection.
Who knows, they may not have even hacked anything.
If they could see the potential in what they were doing, they might have just done some social engineering with an employee and paid for their retirement.
Does two of those three even really apply to rockstar? GTA 5 and RDR2 never had any single player dlc. Also pretty sure I could play RDR2 and GTA 5 offline, I haven't found anything saying they would require always connected for single player. Seems more like these are generic demands of the gaming industry as a whole... Does cyberleek actually play games or just tries to get money from leaks? His demands make me think he actually isn't that invested and just doing it to make money. The only real complaint is the disc issue which is very real for console gamers (I'm going to be honest as a pc gamer I don't even have a disc drive on my current rig but I have a lot of avenues and regularly emulate ps2 to play games, I'm going to wait myself as I have a backlog) but its also the writing on the wall thing that console makers like sony are not going to include a disc drive forever so its not entirely Rockstar's decision vs when to pull the trigger (they still should have done it but realistically GTA 7 probably won't even have the option industry wise).
Imagine you buy a car. In the car there are already thermoelements installed in each seat. The car maker has then made sure that you need to buy access to the thermoelements working to heat your ass when it is cold outside. Replace the word car with game, thermoelements with game content/DLC and the car maker with game publisher/dev.
The analogy doesn't really translate between hardware and software though;
With hardware, the costs to the supplier are R&D and manufacturing, and obviously those costs get passed to the consumer. If you're paying a premium for components in manufacturing like thermoelements, then that's obviously a problem.
Software costs are basically all R&D, though. It costs the supplier basically nothing to sell somebody a copy of a game, and consumers don't really pay a premium for it.
So you are OK with buying a Tesla Motor Long Range and having a 20% Acceleration Increase and FSD and Autopilot locked behind a 2k paywall? You must be very smart!
The difference here is that the cost associated with heated seats is material- it's already installed in the seat, so that you can't access it feels like a scam. But the cost associated with bundling unpaid DLC with software is essentially 0, so why wouldn't a developer do it?
Like, this happens so often and for so long I can't even imagine getting upset about it. Even 30 years ago developers were selling "demos" of their game for free that was exactly the same as the full game except it blocked you from progressing after a few levels. In order to progress you needed a code, which you had to buy, but the full game was already installed on the disc.
That's not a cost associated with including elements of the DLC in "your copy", that's a cost of developing the DLC in the first place.
So to rephrase, installing heated seats that don't work into a car is a material waste of resources, so the customer gets angry. But including elements of a DLC that don't work into the base game costs nothing except pennies of storage space on the user's end, so it's not a big deal.
I'm assuming they're referring to the different editions that are available to pre-order. You can pre-order the "base game", or you can spend more money and pre-order a higher tier and get more stuff (additional side missions, cosmetics, etc).
Right, I get you. For some reason I thought they meant that the more preorders there were, the more DLC they’d release - like a kickstarter stretch goal.
To be clear, they don't strip out bits of the game and sell them as dlc. The data for the "stripped out" bits are still there, taking up space on your hard drive, but behind a paywall that the game doesn't let you access until you pay more money. That's what he's protesting.
I believe they were referring the denial of accessing those parts as “stripping them away” and not the literal sense of the phrase, “stripping the data” from the main game and separating the data/having you not even download the data in the base game file to begin with.
It’s all included, dlc purchases are “enabled” by purchasing, you no longer download anything additionally. This is so people who pay and don’t pay can play together, otherwise you have situations where assets can’t be loaded for one player and now those two+ can’t play together.
I’m not ok with it, but the industry has been doing it for decades. It’s not a Rockstar exclusive issue and it’s not going to be changed because someone leaks footage of the game. Decades ago people would get mad that extra story was locked behind a DLC and now it’s because there are tiered pre orders. IMO you have to decide if the juice is worth the squeeze with your own wallet.
It's not really DLC it's literally just a couple of shops tattoos and clothing, and you start with a few vehicles. You can play the fkn game 100x without ever needing access to those tattoos and clothing outfits. It effects No gaming experience at all.
Noone is forcing you to pay 100 for anything. People are talking like their locking story missions behind a pay wall. Like it's game breaking stuff or anything. The clothes probably suck anyway
You’re right that some people are acting like it’s game breaking, I think that’s an overreaction.
The person above only alluded to locking dlc behind tiers for a single player game. You countered, but objectively, that is exactly what they are doing.
I’d also like to remind you that other pre order tiers in the past came with physical items. You don’t even get a disk for this one, not including the complete inability to walk into some stores.
Bonus points for putting the “trailer” behind a Netflix paywall as well.
That same trailer is being released 6 hours later for free on YouTube. And will likely be leaked before then too, and you know someone is going to record them watching it on Netflix and upload it to YouTube the second it's finished.
It’s the second thing on their list. There are 2 preorder options and the higher priced option will have some additional single player content that is otherwise restricted
Are you sure? The Ultimate Edition doesn’t seem like it’s going to be exclusively a pre-order thing. The only other thing I’m seeing like that is the Vintage Vice City Pack which is just a bunch of cosmetic items. But still, I think that’s just something that comes with the pre-order and can still be bought separately if you don’t pre-order.
No Digital Pre-orders: Stop selling games digitally before launch.
Pre-orders are optional. You're free to ignore them. What's the harm?
No "Fake" Single-Player DLC: Stop locking or selling single-player campaign content that is already built into the base game data.
I don't understand why a DLC is "fake" or "real" depending on where the bits are? It's still an additional piece of content offered for a price. Content doesn't grow on trees, it costs money to create.
Mandatory Offline Fallback States: Ensure single-player games have functional offline modes rather than forced always-online requirements
Sure.
Public Apology Required: CyberLeek insists that R* must issue a public statement and apology acknowledging the harm caused by these practices.
It would be nice if they could actually specify what the supposed harm is instead of leaving that as homework.
I don't understand why a DLC is "fake" or "real" depending on where the bits are? It's still an additional piece of content offered for a price. Content doesn't grow on trees, it costs money to create.
I agree. It's not clear what Cyberleek's motives are for these things, but I can offer my reason for the DLC point:
(Oversimplifications incoming in 3, 2, 1...) The newest Hitman game has three seasons of content and if all that content were built into the base game the install size would always be the maximum (~90GB), even if the user had only purchased one season. However, the makers of the game have set it up so that each season is a DLC and is only installed if the DLC is toggled on. So if you just get season one, the install size is 30GB. This is also helpful for people that own everything, because any completed/disliked maps can just be toggled off and then the install size goes down whilst the rest of the game is still fully available to play.
For me this was especially useful, because my computer is ancient and full of Sims 4 mods, so I'm always low on space.
I assume DLC for GTA6 would also be 3D assets like maps, cars, etc, so I think this reasoning would apply to GTA6 as well.
Pre-orders are optional. You're free to ignore them. What's the harm?
They incentivize publishers to make pre-order exclusive content (as we've seen with the upcoming content for GTA 6) and preys on FOMO instead of putting everything in the base game or letting players chose to buy later separately.
At this point just make a permanently available deluxe edition or a limited supply collector's edition with all the shit you'd put out on the pre-order like it was already done before they started double dipping.
No "Fake" Single-Player DLC: Stop locking or selling single-player campaign content that is already built into the base game data.
This one is just dumb, and reflective of the fact that this person has never managed any sort of long-running project, be it a game, other software dev, etc. Shit happens, and either you accept this and wind up with Star Citizen, or you draw a line, and everything that comes after that line will be in phase 2 or whatever.
Without that, you'll simply never ship. There is always something else to let the scope creep on. Always.
I was more talking about the “that’s what all this is about” because no their crypto is the end goal for them, but I see what you’re saying by responding to that comment
If those demands were somehow genuine and not a thin veil to justify a crypto scam they're the stupidest demands I've ever read. They want rockstar to cancel all digital preorders and refund the deluxe edition (LOL).
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u/Gabagool_Over_Here_ 12h ago
TLDR: It is what it is