GTA 6's Leak Saga Just Escalated: Early Footage, $169K Ads, and a Vote to Spoil Lucia
CyberLeek's GTA 6 leak campaign escalates with six-figure ad slots, early Discord leaks, a live poll to spoil Lucia's prologue, and former dev Obbe Vermeij's dismissal.
Okay so. Third one of these now. And honestly? Favorite one to write, not gonna lie — this saga keeps handing me stuff I couldn’t make up if I tried. Nudist towns. Six-figure ad slots. A guy dressed as a leek. It’s a mess. Let’s get into it.
Quick disclaimer up front, because the next section leans on evidence to build toward things that haven’t happened yet — none of that is confirmed, it’s reasoned-out probability based on what’s actually documented. Keep that distinction in your head as you read, I’ll try to keep flagging it too.
GTA 6’s Leak Just Got A Backstory — And A Live Threat To Spoil The Actual Story
Here’s something that didn’t exist in the last piece: we now know how the first leak actually got out into the world, and it’s messier than “CyberLeek posted it to Dread.”
A guy on GTAForums — goes by videotech — dug through Discord history and found a chatter called “stayonthegrindd” who tried to post the basketball clip in an unofficial GTA 6 server on August 18th. Before it went public. Got banned for it almost immediately, servers have rules against leaks, but he didn’t stop — he started DMing people instead. One guy in a mapping server says he got shown the gas station clip through a direct message, five full days before that same clip hit social media and everyone lost their minds over it.
So. Is stayonthegrindd CyberLeek? Probably not, actually — most people who’ve looked at the account (it’s from 2025, uses some Dutch rapper’s photo as an avatar, nothing else interesting) think he’s more likely an associate. Someone who got early access some other way and started shopping it around before the “official” campaign kicked off. Which, if true, means there might be more than one person who’s had this build sitting around. That’s not nothing. That’s a completely different shape of leak than “one guy did this alone,” and it’s exactly the kind of thread a Discord subpoena is built to pull on.
Oh Also — He’s Charging Money For This
Forgot to mention this earlier and it’s kind of the whole point: CyberLeek isn’t just running a token pump. There’s a direct paywall too. Fans have reportedly paid up to $80 for early access to specific clips. And — this is the part that made me actually laugh — there’s a private “ad channel” being sold for something like $169,000 to anyone who wants their product advertised inside the next leak video.
Sit with that for a second. A hundred and sixty-nine thousand dollars. To advertise your brand. Inside a stolen video. Of a game that hasn’t come out yet.
Whatever this started as, it is currently a full media business. Manifesto and all.
And Now — The Actual Scary Part
Right, this is the bit that matters more than everything above it combined.
Eleven leaks in, CyberLeek dropped a clip nicknamed “Nudist Town” — exactly what it sounds like, full nudity, a shooting, the works — and buried in the watermark was a message asking the community whether they want to see Lucia leaked. And — quick aside — if you’re three articles deep into GTA 6 leak coverage and you need me to explain who Lucia is, I genuinely don’t know how you found this page, or any GTA 6 news at all, without already knowing who Jason and Lucia are. Not doing the “as in the protagonist” bit. You know. Moving on.
The message, more or less: “CL has been evading spoilers. CL just cannot make that decision, so a poll is required” — plus a demand that ten people show up outside Rockstar or Take-Two’s offices dressed as leeks holding physical game discs, because of course there is.
There’s a live poll up right now on CyberLeek’s site. Yes or no. Do you want the Lucia prologue leaked.
Every leak before this one has been Jason driving around, robbing a gas station, punching NPCs — filler, basically, dressed up as huge news. This is different. A prologue leak isn’t gameplay texture, it’s story. It’s how the game actually starts. And CyberLeek saying flat-out that they’ve been avoiding this on purpose kind of confirms the quiet part: they’ve had the ability to spoil the story this whole time and chose not to, until now, when a poll can do the choosing for them and take the blame off their hands.
If that vote goes the way you’d expect an internet poll about seeing something you’re not supposed to see to go — and it will, it always does — we are one clip away from this stopping being an annoying week of gameplay snippets and becoming an actual spoiled game, days before the Netflix reveal is even supposed to happen.
Okay Actually, Hold On — Let’s Talk About Obbe Vermeij
Give me a second. I don’t roast people often, I don’t really know what I’m about to do here, I can feel it happening though, so let’s just see where this goes.
Obbe Vermeij left Rockstar in 2009. Seventeen years ago. He was technical director, real job, worked on GTA III through GTA IV, nobody’s disputing the résumé. But he left before GTA V existed. Before Red Dead 2. Before this entire leak saga was so much as a Solana wallet. And this week he logged onto X — unprompted, nobody asked him, no interview, just vibes — to tell a company he hasn’t worked at in nearly two decades, and an internet full of people mid-panic, to “calm down” because “the leaks are a nothing burger.”
He is not in the building. He is not on the legal call. He is a guy with a good CV and a blue check yelling into a group chat he left before the iPad existed, and half the gaming press ran it like a dispatch from inside Rockstar HQ. It isn’t. It’s a guy tweeting.
And the actual argument — “90% of players don’t go hunting for leaked clips” — sure, fine, probably true, for gas station footage and a guy driving a hypercar. Nobody’s pre-ordering based on the hypercar clip. But he said that before there was a live public vote on whether to leak the game’s actual prologue. You can’t build your whole “nothing burger” take on “nobody cares about random gameplay snippets” and then have the ground shift under you the next day because the thing you dismissed turned into something else entirely. That’s not being wrong. That’s being wrong on a schedule, and getting quoted by six outlets before the schedule caught up to him.
The Hot Coffee comparison makes it worse, honestly. He’s using “well, this isn’t as bad as the time we accidentally shipped a sex minigame and got dragged in front of Congress” as his bar for calm. That’s not a high bar. That’s the floor. Hot Coffee was Rockstar getting caught with something they didn’t mean to leave in. This is Rockstar not being able to stop an outside party from letting the internet vote on what gets revealed before the company’s own marketing reveal even airs. Different problem. Worse problem, in some ways, because at least Hot Coffee was Rockstar’s mistake to own. This one, they don’t even get to control the timeline of.
So yeah — nothing burger. Sure, Obbe. Ask him again if that poll lands on yes.
The Part Everyone Already Knows, Compressed
Not re-explaining the whole subpoena thing again — Microsoft and Discord owe records by September 4, Take-Two’s added X to that list since, DarkViperAU’s still saying he knows nothing, the crypto token’s forensics still don’t trace back to whoever’s actually running this. All of that’s still true and still unresolved. Nothing new to report there, just: still happening, still hanging over everything.
So What Actually Changes Now
Look — the scenario breakdown from before still basically holds. Quiet resolution once the subpoena data lands, or a messier stalemate where Take-Two keeps squeezing the wrong people while the real leaker stays anonymous, or the full nightmare version where something spoils the whole game before launch.
What’s different is that the nightmare version isn’t hypothetical anymore. It’s a poll. Right now. That people are voting on.
If it lands on “yes” — and yeah, disclaimer again, this is a probability call, not a certainty — you’re looking at Rockstar’s own marketing reveal getting upstaged by spoilers of its own game, three days ahead of schedule, from a leak campaign a $43 billion company still hasn’t identified despite three separate subpoenas. That’s not a PR bruise anymore. That’s the story people remember instead of whatever Netflix airs on the 27th.
And if it lands on “no,” or CyberLeek just doesn’t follow through — which, given the track record of “dead man’s switch” and “second Xbox group” turning out to be nothing, is honestly the safer bet — then this whole saga quietly becomes exactly what Obbe Vermeij says it already is. A nothing burger with an unusually elaborate marketing campaign for a crypto coin nobody will remember by December.
Genuinely don’t know which way it breaks. Nobody does. That’s kind of the point of writing this now instead of waiting to be right about it later.
Sources: GTAForums (videotech investigation, Aug 25 2026), Notebookcheck (Aug 24–25, 2026), PC Gamer (Aug 24–25, 2026), Dexerto (Aug 24–25, 2026), GamesRadar+ (Aug 25, 2026), AOL (Aug 25, 2026), Sportskeeda (Aug 24, 2026), XiaomiToday (Aug 25, 2026), NME (Aug 25, 2026), Techloy (Aug 24, 2026), games.gg (Aug 23, 2026).