Where does any of this come from?

Almost every disagreement about an unreleased game is really a disagreement about sourcing. Two sites print opposite things not because one did more research but because one of them counted an anonymous relay as evidence and the other did not. So the order is written down here, in public, and applied the same way whether the resulting claim is interesting or dull.

The order of precedence

8 tiers. Five of them can carry a claim as far as confirmed; one of them — aggregation and repetition — can carry a claim nowhere at all. The ceiling column is the highest grade a claim can reach on that source alone, not the grade it automatically gets, which still depends on whether the material actually settles the question being asked.

Two claims sourced identically get the same grade. That is the only way a ladder like this is worth publishing: the moment a claim is promoted because it is plausible, or held back because it is inconvenient, the ladder is decoration.

Grade the claim, not the source

The most common failure on this subject is transitive trust: a strong source says something real, a second sentence is inferred from it, and the inference inherits the strength of the source. The two have to be separated every time. The statement is first-party and is recorded as confirmed; the inference drawn from it is a separate claim, graded separately, and it inherits no strength at all.

Strauss Zelnick said Take-Two would support Switch 2 generally but decides platforms "on a case-by-case basis" and "would not necessarily bring every title to every platform". Confirmed. Forbes, 7 Feb 2025.

Claims that GTA VI is confirmed for Switch 2 are false. Debunked. GameSpot, 10 Nov 2025.

The first is first-party and is recorded as confirmed: he said it, on the record, on a date. The claim that a Switch 2 version therefore exists is a different claim, resting on an inference nobody first-party has made, and it is contradicted by Rockstar's own platform list, which names only PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. It fails. The same discipline applies in the opposite direction. Nothing has been announced for PC, and the absence of an announcement is a fact about announcements — not evidence that no PC version exists, and not evidence that one does.

What a citation has to record

Every source on this site carries four fields — a title, a publisher, a date and, where the material is public, a link — and all four travel into the plain-text mirror. Four rules govern them, and each exists because the field is routinely got wrong elsewhere:

• The title is the material's own title, not our description of it. A citation rewritten into a summary cannot be searched for once the link dies.
• The publisher is who published it, and where an outlet is relaying somebody else, the citation says so — "citing Digital Foundry", "via Gematsu". Otherwise a relay reads as original reporting.
• The date is the material's date, never the date we read it. A source dated by the reading is a source that appears to get fresher every time somebody checks it, which is the exact opposite of what a date is for.
• The note says what the source is cited FOR when that is not obvious. Several sources on this site are cited as the origin of a claim we grade rumoured — cited, that is, as evidence that the claim exists, not as evidence that it is true.

Where a claim's own note names a source, that note travels with the claim into the plain-text mirror and into the feed, because somebody reading this in a feed reader is exactly as entitled to the attribution as somebody on the page.

Material this site will not treat as a source

Leaked material is the hard case, and the policy has two halves that are easy to confuse. The existence of a leak, what was claimed about it, who claimed it and what the publisher did next are all reportable facts with ordinary sources, and they are reported here, with ordinary citations. The material itself is never hosted, reproduced, linked as a download, described frame-by-frame, or used as the evidence for a claim about the shipping game:

• stills, video or audio taken from leaked or stolen builds
• game assets, models, textures or source code from any breach
• reuploaded first-party trailers or artwork presented as our own
• AI-generated images passed off as official art or as real screenshots

There is a further reason beyond the legal one, and it holds even where a leak is genuine: a work-in-progress build from years before release is not a description of the game that ships. In 2022 the material was authenticated within a day — by the only thing that can authenticate it.

Rockstar confirmed a "network intrusion" on 19 September 2022 and said it did not anticipate long-term effects on development. Confirmed. Axios, 19 Sept 2022.

Take-Two has pursued DMCA takedowns and court filings seeking account records over the August 2026 leak. Confirmed. GameSpot, 18 Aug 2026.

Rockstar has issued no public statement about the August 2026 leak. Confirmed. Den of Geek, 20 Aug 2026.

Rockstar also said at the time that it was "extremely disappointed" that details of the game had been shared this way — which is a statement about the breach, and the only kind of statement that has ever authenticated anything here. The 2026 sequence has produced no equivalent: the reported deadlines for third parties to produce records fall in early September 2026, and legal filings are the whole of the response so far. In 2022 the intrusion was acknowledged within a day.

Takedown activity is a legal reflex. It is not a statement that the material is real, and reading it as one is how a rumour is promoted to a fact without anybody having learned anything. The August 2026 material therefore stays at rumoured, and the full sequence is set out on the leaks page.

Records that look official and are not

A database entry, a retailer placeholder and a certification listing all have the visual authority of a document and frequently none of the substance. They are recorded as what they are — an entry, on a date, in a system — and never as the publisher speaking.

An MA15+ entry for GTA VI on the Australian Classification database is disputed and probably an IARC self-assessment rather than a board decision. Rumoured. PCGamesN, 15 Jul 2026.

The ESRB has not published a rating listing for Grand Theft Auto VI. Not known. Open since 15 Jul 2026; statements to cite: none. Would settle it: a rating published in the ESRB's own database. PCGamesN.

Both of those are worth spelling out. Grand Theft Auto V holds an R18+ classification in Australia, which is what makes an MA15+ entry for VI implausible on its face. And a Mature 17+ rating from the ESRB is a near-certainty given the series — which is exactly why it is recorded as not known rather than as good as confirmed: it is not on record, and the rating that appeared through an IARC database entry is disputed.

The same applies to numbers that have detached from their origin. A figure repeated by everyone and published by no-one is a rumour with good posture, and this site carries several that are treated accordingly.

The often-quoted $1–2 billion development and marketing budget has never been confirmed by Take-Two. Rumoured. Wikipedia (Grand Theft Auto VI), 18 Aug 2026.

Analyst first-year forecasts range widely, including DFC Intelligence's $3.2 billion on 40 million copies and Niko Partners' $1.2 billion first-day figure. Rumoured. Wikipedia (Grand Theft Auto VI), 18 Aug 2026.

Take-Two does not break out per-title costs, so every development budget in circulation is an outside estimate, and the sales figures are third-party projections rather than company guidance. Neither is a leak and neither is a lie. They are simply somebody else's arithmetic, and they are graded as such.

Links, and what happens when they die

Sources are linked so that you can go and read the original rather than take our word for it. Links rot anyway — newswire posts get restructured, articles move behind registration, and a press release from 2022 is not guaranteed to survive a site redesign. Two things limit the damage: every citation carries enough detail to be found again without its URL, and a source that has become unreachable is not silently dropped, because a claim losing its source is a claim losing its right to be published.

Where a source disappears entirely and the claim cannot be re-sourced, the claim is withdrawn and the withdrawal is recorded on the changelog with the date and the reason.

What this site is not

It has no relationship with Rockstar Games or Take-Two, receives nothing from them, and has no access to anybody inside either company. It runs no advertising, takes no affiliate revenue from the pre-order links it describes, and has nothing to gain from a claim being exciting rather than accurate. Where a pre-order page or a storefront is named on this site, it is named because it is the source, and the link goes to the source.

It also does not cite itself. Not one claim on this site is sourced to this site: the pages link to each other constantly, but the evidence always terminates in material somebody else published. The grades those sources can support are on the four grades, and the correction process for when this goes wrong is on corrections. This page was last checked against its sources on 13 Sept 2026.