Take-Two lost $2.8 billion in market cap after GTA 6 leaks—but what’s more shocking to me is it probably barely felt it

One of the biggest stories this week has been of the enigmatic, self-described consumer hero Cyberleek, who’s also using this whole debacle as a way to advertise and pay for their cryptocurrency. Which is probably fine and normal and not at all a concerning spectre lingering around one of the biggest games of the year.

Anyway, you’d think Take-Two and Strauss Zelnick might be feeling hot under the collar about all of this, and you’d be partially right. As spotted by Insider Gaming, Take-Two’s market price (the price of one share) was around $248 before the leaks. Fast-forward a couple of days, and that same market price dropped to a low of $233.

This hit Take-Two’s market cap (share price, times the amount of shares) to the tune of billions—around $2.83 billion in two days. An astronomical amount of money by any stretch of the imagination, a huge devaluation that’s… actually not even much of a sweat, really.

See, Take-Two’s overall market cap was still over $43 billion and, by virtue of how stock markets tend to shift and fluctuate, not even that much of a rare occurrence. On August 6, the market price dropped to a measly $229, for instance, before spiking back up to $242 the next day.

And while the overall market price between August 18 and 20 does trend downwards, it’s already rising back up. At the time of writing, said market price has recovered to $241, with the market cap rising from that $43 billion total to almost $44.9 billion—just $1 billion within its previous number.

Look, while I don’t think anyone at Take-Two’s exactly happy to be losing a couple billion dollars in market cap to some guy peddling cryptocurrency with a full copy of their next big thing, what feels more noteworthy is the fact that a leak of this scale has mostly just pinged off the videogame giant’s armour.

It’s a humbling reminder of the sheer amount of money that gets poured into videogames at this scale—humbling or perhaps distressing, given the size of the industry tracks precious little to its security.