Let's get this out of the way first, because it matters: there is no defending the latest GTA 6 leak. Rockstar's work has been stolen, unfinished material has been dumped online, and whatever argument the hackers are trying to make about the future of the games industry, this isn't a legitimate way to make it. Developers have spent years working on GTA 6, and they shouldn't have to see unfinished work ripped from internal systems and spread around the internet.
What the story does leave me thinking about is something slightly bigger, particularly now we're moving towards a games industry where owning a game and owning a copy of a game are becoming two very different things. It’s a trend that's been slowly creeping up on us ever since the PS3 era, when digital stores emerged, post-game DLC became popular, and digital releases were a neat way to explore new indie and small-budget games, like Sony’s own Tokyo Jungle and Flower. But that’s a far cry from where we are now, with games releasing digitally only and the possibility of art and design history locked behind licensing as time winds on.
GTA 6 is a pretty good example. Even if you buy the physical edition, the game itself is increasingly becoming a digital product, with Rockstar's plans putting more emphasis on downloads and online access. That's a funny thing to get your head around when we're talking about something that will probably become one of the most important pieces of popular culture of the decade. What exactly are you buying? How can you collect it? Can you keep playing it 20 years from now?
Why retro gaming matters
I still like having games on a shelf. Maybe that's partly nostalgia, but I don't think it's only that. Pick up an old PS3 game – I still have my PS3, luckily – and there's something reassuring about it, whether it’s the disc, the case, the artwork, the little booklet if you're lucky, and the knowledge that you own this particular thing. You can put it away for ten years, forget about it, find it again and, assuming the hardware still works, play it. There isn't a storefront involved, there isn't a subscription to worry about, and nobody can decide that the game you've bought should disappear from your library.
I think retro gaming has become such a big thing again for this reason. People are hunting down old PS3 and PS2 games, collecting cartridges, buying old handhelds and generally rediscovering the joy of having games that exist somewhere outside a digital storefront.
Digital games are obviously brilliant in plenty of ways. I don't want to go back to swapping discs every time I want to play something; being able to download a huge game, get patches automatically, and jump straight in is incredibly convenient, especially if you want to play instantly and not wait for deliveries or travel to the store. GTA 6 would be an absolute nightmare to distribute if we insisted on everything being frozen onto a disc from day one, particularly when Rockstar will presumably want to keep improving and expanding the game after launch, but also logistically, as I'm not sure anyone can make GTA 6 discs as fast as they'll sell.
The problem comes later, when you start thinking about what happens to those games once the companies and platforms that support them move on. Games change. Patches replace textures, fix bugs, alter balance and sometimes fundamentally change how a game looks and plays. Music disappears when licences expire. Online modes eventually shut down (or entire games, like Sony’s Concord). Storefronts disappear. Hardware stops being supported. A game you bought ten years ago can become surprisingly difficult to access, even though the thing itself hasn't gone anywhere.
That's where I think the GTA 6 leak becomes interesting from a creative perspective, without excusing the leak itself. Think about the amount of work going into this game. Character design, concept art, environments, animation, VFX, lighting, sound, writing, UI, all of it produced by hundreds (even thousands) of people over more than ten years. It's an enormous piece of digital art, and one that will almost certainly be studied and picked apart for years after release.
The more games become digital products, the more ownership starts to mean access rather than possession. For the artists who made and worked on a game, like GTA 6, that creates another problem. Their work can be sitting inside a game for millions of people to see today and become inaccessible tomorrow, not because the art has disappeared, but because the systems needed to reach it have. A concept artist's work, an animator's character, an environment team's painstakingly built beachfront block all become part of a digital object whose future is largely outside their control.
That's why preservation matters. Not because every game needs to remain frozen forever, but because games are becoming an increasingly important part of our cultural history. We preserve paintings, films, books, photography and physical design because we understand that the objects themselves tell us something about the time in which they were made, and I think games deserve the same consideration.
The GTA 6 leak shouldn't be confused with preservation, and it certainly shouldn't be used to justify stealing unfinished work. If anything, it highlights how much creative history exists behind a game and how vulnerable that history becomes when almost everything is locked inside a company's digital infrastructure. That's why the retro game revival is so popular. People aren't buying old PS3 discs and SNES games, collecting Evercade cartridges or picking up hardware like Sinclair GamerCard simply because old games are fashionable again; it's because these are things they can keep. Many gamers want a piece of gaming history that doesn't depend entirely on somebody else's server continuing to exist.
GTA 6 will eventually become one of the biggest games ever made. We'll play it, talk about it, watch its world evolve and spend years looking at the work that went into creating it. But if the industry keeps moving towards games that exist entirely under the control of publishers and platforms, we need to start asking a much harder question than whether we can download them.
Can digital games be art?
Publishers aren't necessarily thinking about games as museums, because they have a thing to sell and a budget to claw back; in GTA 6's example, it's rumoured to be $1 billion. Instead, publishers think about products, updates, licences, servers, storefronts and the next release, which makes perfect business sense, but games are also creative works, ones that have a habit of outliving the systems that created them. If we really want to view games as ‘art’ and not simply as commercial products, then digital-only releases don’t quite fit that view, unless we’re defending NFTs now.
That's perhaps why the retro games console revival feels more significant than simple nostalgia. People want old games because they're fun, obviously, but they're also collecting a bit of gaming history. We love looking at the box art, the cartridge, the disc, enjoying the old hardware design. There's something appealing about being able to pull a game from a shelf decades later and know that, for the most part, the object hasn't changed and you can plug it in and play it how you remember. Also, no one’s queuing up for a midnight launch of GTA 6 as we did for Vice City, Halo 3 or any number of big physical game launches, which in itself feels like the community aspect of gaming is waning.
GTA 6 will arrive, and millions of us will download it, install it, play it and probably spend years talking about it. Rockstar will update it, expand it and presumably support it for a very long time – and arguably for the better. That's great for the game as a living piece of entertainment, but preservation asks a different question. What happens when the servers eventually go, the storefront changes, the hardware disappears, music licenses are replaced, textures and even characters removed or updated, side-stories locked, a revamped PS6 Edition releases, and the version of GTA 6 we remember at launch is no longer the version anyone can actually access?
The games industry has become very good at making enormous digital worlds and selling games in easy ways, but I'm less convinced there’s much love for preserving the artistic intent of those worlds.
Do you think games like GTA 6 should still be physical?
