18-year old Arion Kurtaj from Oxford, UK, was a key member of the international hacking gang Lapsus$, which, among several cases of cyber crime against tech giants, has been behind the recent leak of the Grand Theft Auto VI video clips, ahead of the official trailer by Rockstar Games. Over the years, Lapsus$ hit big tech companies, including Rockstar Games, NVIDIA, and Uber, with their exploits assessed to have caused these companies about $10 million in losses. In an interesting twist to the case, the Kurtaj was deemed by doctors unfit to stand trial as he is severely autistic, and so the jury in the case was asked to determine only whether or not he committed the acts of cyber crime, and not if he did so with criminal intent.

The judge hearing the case said Kurtaj's skills and desire to commit cyber crime meant he remained a high risk to the public. While on bail from his previous arrest for hacking NVIDIA and UK telecommunication giants EE and BT, and in police protection in a hotel, Kurtaj pulled off his most daring hack of breaching Rockstar Games, using only an Amazon Firestick, his hotel's TV, and a mobile phone. He stole 90 clips of unreleased footage from gameplay of Grand Theft Auto VI. He also broke into Rockstar's internal Slack channel, threatening to leak the game's source code if the studio didn't contact him within 24 hours. He was immediately re-arrested and in lock-up until his trial. Rockstar Games told the court that it cost the company $5 million to recover from the hack, in staff billable hours.

Rockstar Games has officially released a Grand Theft Auto 6 (or VI) trailer that brings together millions of GTA series fans. However, the game will remain exclusive for gaming consoles at launch. On the landing page for GTA 6, there is a note that says, "Grand Theft Auto VI heads to the state of Leonida, home to the neon-soaked streets of Vice City and beyond in the biggest, most immersive evolution of the Grand Theft Auto series yet. Coming 2025 to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S." While the first trailer showed this, we now have written confirmation that GTA 6 is a console exclusive at launch, whenever it happens in 2025.

If long-time GTA gamers remember, the situation was very much the same with the launch of the fifth installment in the GTA series, GTA V, which got a PC port almost two years after the initial release. The GTA V was released in September 2013 for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 consoles and got an upgrade to a new console cycle in November 2014 for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Only in April 2015 was the game released for Windows-based PCs, as Rockstar took its time to polish the port and make it work with PC gamers' various hardware choices. While we hope to avoid seeing such a big cadence from console to PC port, it will surely take Rockstar some extra time to make a PC version run smoothly.

Grand Theft Auto VI (GTA 6) could go down in history as the most expensive game production ever, with Rockstar Games pooling in anywhere between $1-2 billion. The open-world crime RPG is said to have the biggest map ever in the history of the franchise, with the most content (missions), and room for a vast multiplayer experience teetering on MMORPG. It is said to take gamers back to Vice City, the iconic setting that made GTA globally popular. The big budget could also mean Rockstar could rope in triple-A Hollywood actors to play key characters in the single-player campaign, as well as be playable characters in the multiplayer. Rockstar could also target nearly every gaming platform out there, spanning Windows PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and possibly even handhelds.

The Grand Theft Auto (GTA) series is one of the most popular game franchises ever created, with the latest version V (five), perhaps the most popular installment. However, GTA V was released back in September of 2013, and it is almost a nine-year-old game at this point. Without any regard to its Online part, fans of GTA need new content to keep them satisfied. For a while, we have been collecting rumors about the existence of GTA 6, a successor to the famous GTA V edition. Today, we got the information "straight from the horse's mouth," the game developer Rockstar Games, that the release of GTA 6 is "well underway."

Rockstar GamesWith the unprecedented longevity of GTAV, we know many of you have been asking us about a new entry in the Grand Theft Auto series. With every new project we embark on, our goal is always to significantly move beyond what we have previously delivered — and we are pleased to confirm that active development for the next entry in the Grand Theft Auto series is well underway. We look forward to sharing more as soon as we are ready, so please stay tuned to the Rockstar Newswire for official details.