Like a contemplative plumber, I've spent a lot of time thinking about leaks lately. The games industry has gotten noticeably leakier in the past few years and leak culture has become A Thing, with some people dedicating their entire personal (and sometimes professional) brands to it as others inexplicably cling to every speculative word and 140p video.
As the highest-profile game reveal of the year, GTA 6 is probably the best example of leaks in action. The release of the promising GTA 6 trailer has washed away groundless concerns that earlier leaked footage in some way indicated an ugly or dated final game. The game, at least according to this one trailer, looks great, looks being the key word here. But the fact that this even needs to be said – because a non-trivial amount of people were seriously, publicly disappointed by the GTA 6 leaks – goes to show how damaging leaks can be, and how pointless they often are.
The business of leaks
I'm not in the business of siding with devs or publishers, and I desperately wish this industry was more transparent and less of a black box. In an ideal world, a lot of leaked information wouldn't need to be leaked, but that's not going to happen as long as Complete Control of the hype cycle is sacred. I'm not one to defend trailers that are all graphics and no gameplay, either, nor do I actually care whether a game's marketing campaign goes off leak-free. My concern is only ever the reader's experience, and leaks like this can be harmful to it.
The way I see it, leaks like those that preceded the GTA 6 reveal are, at best, harmless, though the actual GTA 6 leaks were not harmless. But with the right context and understanding, they're taken as a primitive sign of things to come. As topics of news, they are entertainment-first, not information-first. They're spectacle. And entertainment-first news stories are all well and good – I enjoy reading them and I write a lot of them, just not about leaks – but there is a cost, or at least a risk, to making a spectacle of leaks. This GTA 6 thing helpfully illustrates it.
Don't get me wrong, leaks can be properly interesting and very valuable when they yield useful information we wouldn't have gotten otherwise. But whether you're a journalist or some crypto bro on Discord, leaking tomorrow's trailers or next week's press releases, or inconclusively gesturing at games we might see in four years but which will inevitably be totally different by the time they release – assuming they aren't canceled – is about the emptiest grab at page views or attention possible.
Leaks are very often inaccurate or outdated, and sharing them irresponsibly – that is, breaking leaks, not writing about leaks shared elsewhere, which journalists are obligated to do – can set readers up for disappointment while creating needless headaches for creators. That's the acid test, really. I'll very deliberately want to cause headaches for devs or publishers if they're up to some dumb shit. That's part of my job, and it's the part that necessitates an antagonistic relationship toward the industry.
But if a story has no value to readers and may well mislead them, it causing problems for creators is another reason to not run a story with that angle. Not that you need another reason, because again, it has no value to readers. Just as the GTA 6 leak told us next to nothing about the final game. Anything it did tell us was just an incomplete version of something we were going to learn soon anyway, and outside of situations far more urgent than the reveal of a video game, it's a disservice to readers to rush out patchy information.
Some people won't have the appropriate context or understanding to interpret a leak. When leaks like that in-progress GTA 6 build get cut up and spread around social media, viewers won't get the full picture, and a lot of people aren't willing to do the legwork to fill in the blanks before drawing conclusions. Some blanks can't be filled without final details – the kind of details that make for good, informative, practical news – and some stories will, deliberately or unwittingly, exclude important details that put leaks into perspective. This is exactly why some people genuinely criticized an unfinished GTA 6 for looking unfinished in videos that nobody was meant to see, and it's why this fixation on leaks boils my piss.
