The hacker responsible for spewing tons of GTA 6 footage has been sentenced. Arion Kurtaj, now 18 years old was a member of the international hacking group Lapsus$ which launched a flurry of cyberattacks on tech companies including EE, Nvidia, and Uber.
Kurtaj who suffers from acute autism has been placed in a secure hospital by a British judge. The GTA 6 hacker was convicted alongside a 17-year-old male who could not be named because of his age. According to Bloomberg reports, they were found guilty of serious computer misuse, fraud, and blackmail after a 7-week long criminal trial.
Handing down the sentence, Judge Patricia Lees said Kurtaj posed “a high risk of serious harm to the public through skill in gaining unfettered access to computers”. Kurtaj will continue to stay in the secure hospital until a mental tribunal decides he is no longer a threat to others.
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The unnamed teenager was also sentenced to a youth rehabilitation order with 18 months of supervision. The September 2022 hack leaked over an hour of development footage of GTA 6 online. It gave players a first look at the next installment in the GTA franchise. Features like protagonists and settings were revealed in the process.
GTA 6 will take place partly in Vice City, a fictional Miami city that was the setting of the fourth main installment in the franchise. It will feature a pair of protagonists, Jason and Lucia. This also makes it the first time that a female would be a protagonist in the series.
Earlier this month, Rockstar released the first official GTA 6 trailer. The trailer has raked in over 155 million views at the time of writing this post. It smashed the record set by GTA 5 first trailer in 24 hours. GTA 6 is expected to be released in 2025 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Why GTA 6 will not have a PC port at launch
When GTA 6 launches in 2025, PC players will have to wait a little longer to lay their hands on the game. Mike York, a former Rockstar developer who worked on projects like GTA 5 and Red Dead Redemption 2 said it was a matter of priority as published on Gamespot.
“They want to prioritize what sells,” York said in a recent video. “Most of the time, especially in the past, PlayStation was the big seller. PlayStation was the console to have. It sold more copies than any other console, for the most part, everybody is playing PlayStation.”
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Consequently, the PlayStation version of the game became the priority version York opined. While working on GTA 5, York noted that developers spent more time on the PS3 version to make sure it was the best it could be, while also working on the Xbox 360 version at the same time.
“The PC version is kind of the version that’s in the background, that is running the two versions building them,” said York. “There’s always a PC version of the game, but it’s not polished and it’s just kind of feeding the other games and making them work.”
As soon as the PlayStation version of the game is perfected to their taste, the developers then turn their eyes to the PC version which presents the developers the opportunity to push the games in different ways that aren’t possible on consoles. According to York, the PC port will take a little longer because of the different PC variations that the developers have to account for.
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“On a PlayStation and an Xbox, each one of those has one graphics card, and it’s the same graphics card, it’s the same architecture inside the box as every single PlayStation that has shipped to millions of people,” York said. “When it comes to PC, every single person has a different PC. They are running it differently, they have different hardware in there, they have different kinds of CPUs and GPUs.”
It took two years after GTA 5 was released on consoles for it to come to PC. According to York, the developers often don’t have enough personnel to test the different PC versions which leads to the delay in release on PC.
