GTA 6 Leak and Wolverine Rage Are Symptoms of Gaming’s Summer of Hate

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It has always been like this. For decades, the game industry has more or less shut down — or reduced itself to a small hum of subsistence — between the noisy previews of E3/Summer Game Fest in early June, and the noisy previews of Gamescom in late August. People go on vacation, players spend more time outside, and there are few big games released. Then Gamescom fires the starting gun on the busiest release period of the year.

It’s never been quite like this, though. This year, releases slowed down but the news cycle didn’t. We had the Xbox layoffs, Sony killed physical games. Everyone was hot and angry. The gulf between the number of exciting new games to play and talk about and the number of enraging topics to consume the discourse just kept growing. The algorithms must be fed, after all, even if it’s only with bitter gruel. This week, gaming’s summer stumbled to an exhausted climax with the Grand Theft Auto 6 leaks, which started out fun and, like everything else, quickly turned awful.

Yuck. Not that anyone should really expect a hacker to be a moral paragon. This is theft, after all. The leaker began by channelling gamers’ anger at Rockstar over the lack of a physical edition of GTA 6. Meanwhile, they have also generated an equal amount of sympathy for a studio — however monolithic — that is just trying to finish its magnum opus and having its hard work spoiled by bland videos of an out-of-date build.

Rockstar will be fine, of course, as I pointed out in my analysis above. But the whole thing leaves a bad taste in the mouth. The leaker exploited the lull in the gaming calendar, and they exploited Rockstar’s iron grip on GTA 6‘s PR, which has offered barely the tiniest morsels of information on the most anticipated game of all time. Mostly, though, they exploited us; our boredom, our doomscrolling, the way we feed on third-hand glimpses of culture like a ravenous school of piranhas.

GTA 6 wasn’t the only victim of this tendency in the past week. Insomniac Games rolled out hands-on previews of Marvel’s Wolverine — a studio and game that had themselves been the victims of a devastating leak three years ago. It should have been a proud, hard-earned unveiling of the real thing, but instead, the internet quickly set about demolishing a game the vast majority of people haven’t actually played.

The reasons for this tedious, wrongheaded controversy are multifaceted, as Gio explored in detail (not that there aren’t questions to be answered about the game — I had a few in my preview). But I do think a big part of it is this summer lull. We just don’t have enough actual new stuff to think and talk about. There might be more game releases than ever, but there hasn’t been anything genuinely big and new since late May, give or take a Halo or Assassin’s Creed remake; even the big franchises are feeding on themselves.

The good news is that we’re about to be back. Next week is Gamescom, which usually generates a fair bit of news and a torrent of hands-on impressions of actual, playable code; and, on Thursday, Rockstar will set the record straight with the first official GTA 6 gameplay, which will probably wipe the leak from all our memories.

And after that, we’re really off to the races. From the start of September, the industry begins a mad sprint to release a whole Q4’s worth of games in six weeks, as it falls over itself to get out of GTA 6‘s way. The Blood of Dawnwalker, Orbitals, Onimusha, Wolverine, Fire Emblem, Control Resonant, Silent Hill, Gears of War, Star Wars: Galactic Racer, Switch Sports, Call of Duty, Phantom Blade 0.

Sure, it’s a lot to keep up with, and we could have used some of these games during these arid summer months. But it will certainly keep us occupied. And it’ll be, you know, what’s that thing video games are supposed to be? Fun.

Plus this: