How to Smell a Fake Leak From a Mile Away
Here is the founding principle of this site, the reason the parent nav literally has a Leaks & Fakes section, and the flag we're planting on day one:
Receipts or it didn't happen.
The most-hyped game in history has the most-polluted information environment in gaming. Between now and November 19, you will see hundreds of "leaks." A tiny handful will be real reporting. The rest are engagement bait wearing a trench coat. This is the field guide.
The classic tells
Fabricated leaks are lazier than they look. The same patterns repeat because they work — each one exploits the gap between wanting something to be true and checking whether it is.
- The uncredited screenshot. A blurry image, no source, no origin, cropped just enough that reverse-searching is annoying. Real footage has a chain of custody. Fakes have a watermark someone scrubbed.
- The unverifiable insider. "A source close to the development" who is somehow close enough to know release plans but never close enough to be wrong on the record. If a claim can't be falsified, it can't be trusted.
- The countdown reset. An account that has "confirmed" a shadow-drop, a delay, and a surprise event — each with a countdown, each quietly deleted when the timer hits zero. Check the post history. Graveyards tell the truth.
- The too-specific fake. Real information leaks messy and partial. Fabrications arrive suspiciously complete — full feature lists, exact prices, tidy bullet points. Fiction has better formatting than reality.
- The screenshot of a screenshot. Each layer of re-posting strips away the metadata and the accountability. By the fourth repost, nobody in the chain ever saw a source.
The three-question checklist
Before anything gets amplified here — or by you — it answers three questions:
- Who reported it first? A named outlet or a named journalist with a track record, or an anonymous account created last month?
- Did Rockstar or a major outlet confirm it? Official channels, or credible reporting citing named sources. "Everyone is saying" is not a source; it's an echo.
- Can you click through to the origin? A real story links to its evidence. If every path dead-ends at a repost, the trail was never there.
Three yeses and it's a receipt. Anything less and it's a rumor — which can still be fun to talk about, as long as it's labeled as one. The sin isn't speculation. The sin is costume-wearing: speculation dressed up as fact.
Why bother?
Because the real stuff is good enough. The confirmed dates, the official trailers, the actual footage — the genuine article is more exciting than any fabrication, precisely because it's real. Every minute spent debunking a fake screenshot is a minute not spent enjoying the most anticipated launch in the history of the medium.
So that's the deal on this blog: we will hype harder than anyone, and we will never hand you a fake to do it. If you see it here, it either has a receipt attached or a big honest label that says opinion.
That's the signal. Everything else is noise.