This year, no one had a worse Christmas than Rockstar Games. The company greeted the 25th December with a massive leak of the GTA V source code, made available to anyone who was interested in downloading it. More details are now being made available, apparently the source code was bought for a mere couple thousand dollars and was leaked "out of spite".
According to industry insider Dyllie on X, the GTA5 source code was - allegedly - bought for $2000 USD by a group in the modding community. One of the members of said group buy, Kieron Austin (also known as TMP, among other names), who did not contribute to the purchase, tried to resell the code.
At first, he was asking for $6000, but while also trying to scam another individual, he couldn't close the sale. Then, he tried to sell the source code at lower prices, ranging in the hundreds of dollars, to several users on Discord. But that still, apparently, did not work out.
In the end, frustrated with being unable to make a profit, even though he allegedly did not contribute any money to the initial $2k, TMP decided to leak the GTA V source code merely "out of spite". Basically, he made sure that no one else could make a profit on it.
Some users on X are also commenting that the leaked source code was of an outdated build. Apparently, this data was already circulating among a group of users and TMP just wanted to make some money out of it. But again, this is mere speculation, so take all this information with a grain of salt.
We will see if Rockstar Games will address the situation in any way in the following weeks. But surely, the amount of leaks coming from the company in the last couple of years has been nothing short of worrying. Might be time for Rockstar to hire a plumber to fix those leaky pipes.