Rockstar Games Calls Employees for Full-Time Office Return - GTA 6 Security Measures?
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The rumors and speculations surrounding Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) continue to flood in, as we are now a year closer to the game’s highly anticipated release on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S. Fans eagerly await any tidbits of information that revolve around GTA 6 with excitement, as the title is nearing its final stages of development.
Considering the massive leaks suffered by Rockstar Games, the studio is proactively implementing security measures way ahead of the game’s launch, asking its workers to return to their offices five days a week, beginning in April. Let’s delve into it and see what the fuss is all about.
Rockstar Games Asks Employees to Return to Office Five Days a Week From April
As per Bloomberg’s report, an email was sent to staff members on Wednesday by Rockstar Games’ Head of Publishing Jennifer Kolbe, citing security reasons and productivity as one of the main reasons behind this decision. This comes as no surprise, considering that the studio suffered one of the biggest leaks in gaming history, back in September 2022.
For those unaware, GTA 6’s source code and 90 clips of gameplay and development footage were leaked by hacker Arion Kurtaj, a member of the international hacking group Lapsus$, which had previously attacked major corporations like Microsoft, Nvidia, Samsung, etc. The hacker has since then been indefinitely imprisoned in a secure hospital, but the damage had already been done, resulting in the loss of thousands of hours of staff time for Rockstar.
Unfortunately, the data breaches continued until the game’s first trailer, which had to be released earlier than planned, due to clips and images of the game’s official logo and character information appearing online. Kolbe also mentions that the company has observed tangible benefits from working in person at the office, particularly in terms of increased productivity.
She wrote, “Making these changes now puts us in the best position to deliver the next Grand Theft Auto at the level of quality and polish we know it requires, along with a publishing roadmap that matches the scale and ambition of the game,”.
As reported by IGN, this is not the first time that employees in gaming studios have been issued return-to-office mandates, as Ubisoft Montreal carried out this protocol last September, asking 4,000 of its workers to return to their office in Montreal’s Mile End. Moreover, this practice seems to be widespread across several industries, regardless of studies finding little evidence that remote work harms productivity.
