Join The Club
A day ahead of its self-imposed April 14 ransom deadline, ShinyHunters, the group that breached Rockstar Games last week and made off with an undisclosed trove of data, has released that data to the public. Members of the GTA Forums (via Kotaku) are now tearing through it, and it looks like anyone hoping for significant insights into Grand Theft Auto 6—or any relevant information at all, really—are going to be disappointed.
Rockstar said in the wake of the hack that "a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed," and that does appear to be the case. Which isn't to say there's nothing to see here, but it's primarily sales and financials, revealing that Rockstar makes a lot of money through its online offerings.
Article continues below
Also notable, and I think surprising, is how GTA Online breaks down by platform. PC comes in a distant, dead last, pulling in a small fraction of both weekly active users and weekly bookings that come in via console. The PlayStation 5 dominates the scene, with a little under 3.5 million monthly active users and $4.5 million in weekly bookings; PC weekly active users is a relatively paltry 894,621, and weekly bookings of $264,273.
Even the Xbox One is beating us! Maybe this is why we're still waiting for an official GTA 6 PC announcement.
Another interesting metric: Three-quarters of that whopping GTA Online income is earned through the sale of Shark Cards, which are essentially bundles of in-game cash.
The data also seems to confirm what we already knew about successful free-to-play games: That flood of cash GTA Online is earning comes from just 4% of its users.
It's interesting stuff, like I said, although it's also largely just a confirmation of what we already knew: Rockstar makes huge bank on GTAO, Red Dead is probably just dead dead, and the free-to-play business lives and dies on the whims of its whales. But it is, ultimately, just a look back—for looking ahead to what's next, it doesn't seem that there's much to see here.
That's good news for Rockstar, but not so much for the hackers: Full credit for the effort in trying to get $200,000 for this, I suppose, but they're coming away from it with potentially serious consequences hanging over them, no money, and not even anything juicy about GTA 6. If I was in charge I think I'd just stop talking about it completely and wait for it all to blow over.
oh i misunderstood you. someone was lying and saying theyre selling the data.but ya idk what they tried extorting rockstar for lol but this isnt worth 200k lmfao, this is worth like $6 and a slice of pizzaApril 13, 2026
Rockstar declined to comment on the data reveal.
You must confirm your public display name before commenting
Please logout and then login again, you will then be prompted to enter your display name.
