Rumor: Did Rockstar Take Action Against The GTA IV Beta Leak? And Why?

There’s a big update on the leaked GTA IV beta, but we don’t have all the details down just quite yet.

Videotechuk first broke the news on Twitter:

Rockstar has seemingly taken action against the recently leaked GTAIV 2007 beta files.

According to a few people in contact with the “Xbox 360 dev kit guy,” the Internet Archive has not notified him of any takedown but they usually don’t send the uploader anything. However, his account now shows zero uploads.

It currently appears to be DMCA related, which isn’t surprising. Rockstar is notoriously aggressive when it comes to internal leaks involving games outside their RenderWare era.

Interestingly enough, Rockstar has not taken action to lock or remove the GTAForums thread about the beta yet. User Glenni91 put forward a credible theory; they only objected to the Archive hosting a complete build.

Sure enough, modders have been updating fans that they managed to get the build working on Xbox 360 and on the emulator Xenia. Sharing a playable build may be crossing that line where it’s no longer harmless fun for the fans, and Rockstar has to defend their IP rights.