On 1 January 2025, in the opening hours of the year that Take-Two Interactive had publicly promised would deliver Grand Theft Auto VI, a small but unusual leak began circulating on Reddit and X (formerly Twitter). The material consisted of a single in-game screenshot of what appeared to be Lucia, one of GTA VI's two confirmed protagonists, together with a handful of grainy photographs and a short, shaky video captured inside what was alleged to be a Rockstar Games office. Most notably, one of the photographs prominently featured a PlayStation 5 development kit (the distinctive V-shaped console used internally by first- and second-party studios) sitting on a desk next to a developer workstation. The post originated on the r/GamingLeaksAndRumours subreddit as a "reupload" of older material, and quickly spread via the X account GTAVInewz (Cosmic Book News, 2025; Twisted Voxel, 2025).
Although the leak was framed as fresh New Year's Day news, both the imagery and the surrounding metadata strongly indicated that the footage had actually been captured in 2021, well before Rockstar's official December 2023 reveal trailer. This dating, combined with the very limited visual content, meant the leak was simultaneously historically interesting and practically uninformative — a curiosity rather than a meaningful information drop (The Gamer, 2025).
According to reporting by Twisted Voxel, the source material was originally extracted from a now-deleted Google Drive belonging to an individual described as a "janitor" or contractor with physical access to Rockstar's premises (Twisted Voxel, 2025). That person allegedly photographed a developer's monitor and the adjacent PS5 devkit, and recorded a brief clip of the same workstation. The files reappeared on 1 January 2025 in a Reddit thread titled along the lines of "Reupload of the guy's GTA 6 leaked photo/vids from Rockstar," posted to r/GamingLeaksAndRumours, before being amplified on X by accounts such as @GTAVInewz, @Raks54672917 and @TREVORTRAILER (The Gamer, 2025; Twisted Voxel, 2025).
The Reddit post and its mirrored X threads contained three principal artefacts: a low-resolution screenshot showing Lucia, viewed from behind in what looked like default clothing, standing near a wall in an interior environment; a wider photograph of the developer's desk, in which the PS5 devkit was clearly visible alongside a PC tower; and a short handheld video panning across the same room. The word "preview" was legible in the bottom-right corner of the on-screen image, consistent with an internal Rockstar build watermark (Android Headlines, 2025).
The PS5 devkit element was the aspect that gave the leak most of its identity. Unlike the retail PlayStation 5, Sony's DevKit (model DFI-D1000AA) has an unmistakable angular, V-shaped chassis with multiple fans and additional I/O, and it is normally only seen in tightly controlled studio environments. Its presence on a Rockstar desk in 2021 was unsurprising in itself — GTA VI has always been understood to be a current-generation console title — but it served as a visual anchor that lent the screenshot additional credibility. Twisted Voxel noted that the wider leak also referenced Xbox Series devkits and a range of PC GPUs used in the same office, including Nvidia GTX 1080, RTX 2080 Super and RTX 3080 cards, suggesting a heterogeneous internal test environment (Twisted Voxel, 2025).
Commentators quickly connected the January 2025 material to the much larger September 2022 Rockstar breach, in which a teenager affiliated with the Lapsus$ group exfiltrated roughly 90 work-in-progress videos and source code (The Gamer, 2025). Because the new footage appeared to have been captured in 2021, it almost certainly depicted the same internal build family as the 2022 dump. This explained why the visuals looked rough and unfinished, and why fans considered the leak essentially redundant: anything genuinely sensitive from that era had already been online for more than two years.
Reaction across r/GTA6, r/GamingLeaksAndRumours and gaming media was muted to dismissive. TheGamer's headline summarised the mood bluntly — "2025 Just Started And There's Already A New Grand Theft Auto 6 Leak" — while noting that the clip was "incredibly shaky" and that the screenshot showed "Lucia in what appears to be her default clothes standing around next to a wall" with no UI, no Vice City vistas and nothing meaningfully new (The Gamer, 2025). Android Headlines was slightly more generous, framing the screenshot as a potential "first (unofficial) look at actual gameplay outside of the trailer," but still cautioned readers to treat the material with scepticism since neither the studio nor the game could be definitively confirmed from the image alone (Android Headlines, 2025).
The dominant Reddit sentiment, captured in threads such as r/GTA6's "If that's true then lmao," was bemusement that anyone would have risked their employment to smuggle out footage so visually uninformative (The Gamer, 2025). The leak did not move pre-order behaviour, prompt a Rockstar response, or alter Take-Two's stated Fall 2025 release window, which the publisher reaffirmed during its Q2 FY2025 earnings call shortly afterwards (Twisted Voxel, 2025).
Despite its underwhelming content, the January 2025 PS5 devkit leak is historically notable for three reasons. First, it confirmed that fragments of the 2021–2022 internal Rockstar material were still in private circulation and could resurface at any time, complicating Rockstar's information control strategy in the run-up to launch. Second, it underscored the symbolic role of the PS5 devkit as a visual shorthand for "real, in-development" GTA VI footage in fan discourse. Third, it set the tone for a year in which leak fatigue would become a recurring theme — small, low-value drops generating large headlines purely on the strength of the GTA VI brand (Cosmic Book News, 2025; The Gamer, 2025).
Android Headlines (2025) GTA 6 screenshot allegedly spotted at Rockstar with a PS5 dev kit. Available at: https://www.androidheadlines.com/2025/01/gta-6-screenshot-allegedly-spotted-at-rockstar-with-a-ps5-dev-kit.html (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Cosmic Book News (2025) GTA 6 Leak Shows Off Lucia, PS5 Dev Kit. Available at: https://cosmicbook.news/gta-6-leak-lucia (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
The Gamer (2025) 2025 Just Started And There's Already A New Grand Theft Auto 6 Leak. Available at: https://www.thegamer.com/grand-theft-auto-gta-6-vi-new-leak-from-rockstar-offices-lucia-ps5-dev-kit-build-no-one-cares/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Twisted Voxel (2025) Rockstar Offices Leak Shows GTA VI On PS5 & Xbox Series Dev Kit. Available at: https://twistedvoxel.com/rockstar-leak-gta-vi-on-ps5-xbox-series-dev-kit/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).