Rockstar hackers release their stolen data, reveal that Rockstar was right to not pay them anything for it

A day ahead of its self-imposed April 14 ransom deadline, ShinyHunters, the group that breached Rockstar Games last week and made off with an undisclosed trove of data, has released that data to the public. Members of the GTA Forums (via Kotaku) are now tearing through it, and it looks like anyone hoping for significant insights into Grand Theft Auto 6—or any relevant information at all, really—are going to be disappointed.

Rockstar said in the wake of the hack that “a limited amount of non-material company information was accessed,” and that does appear to be the case. Which isn’t to say there’s nothing to see here, but it’s primarily sales and financials, revealing that Rockstar makes a lot of money through its online offerings.

One of the most immediately notable data points reflects a massive imbalance between Red Dead Online and GTA Online: Based on a GTA Forums post by Lexiture and verified by Rockstar Games reporter Ben on X, RDO pulled in average weekly revenues of more than $500,000 per week between June 2024 and April 2026, resulting in an annualized estimate of roughly $26.4 million per year. Not bad!

GTA Online, though, earned $9.6 million per week from September 2025 to April 2026, delivering an annualized estimate of just under $500 million per year. Given that, is it any wonder that Rockstar put all its eggs in the GTAO basket, and left RDO to flounder? (It is not.)

Also notable, and I think surprising, is how GTA Online breaks down by platform. PC comes in a distant, dead last, pulling in a small fraction of both weekly active users and weekly bookings that come in via console. The PlayStation 5 dominates the scene, with a little under 3.5 million monthly active users and $4.5 million in weekly bookings; PC weekly active users is a relatively paltry 894,621, and weekly bookings of $264,273.

Even the Xbox One is beating us! Maybe this is why we’re still waiting for an official GTA 6 PC announcement.

Another interesting metric: Three-quarters of that whopping GTA Online income is earned through the sale of Shark Cards, which are essentially bundles of in-game cash.

The data also seems to confirm what we already knew about successful free-to-play games: That flood of cash GTA Online is earning comes from just 4% of its users.

It’s interesting stuff, like I said, although it’s also largely just a confirmation of what we already knew: Rockstar makes huge bank on GTAO, Red Dead is probably just dead dead, and the free-to-play business lives and dies on the whims of its whales. But it is, ultimately, just a look back—for looking ahead to what’s next, it doesn’t seem that there’s much to see here.

That’s good news for Rockstar, but not so much for the hackers: Full credit for the effort in trying to get $200,000 for this, I suppose, but they’re coming away from it with potentially serious consequences hanging over them, no money, and not even anything juicy about GTA 6. If I was in charge I think I’d just stop talking about it completely and wait for it all to blow over.

Rockstar declined to comment on the data reveal.