Intel Labels and Sourcing
Every claim we publish about Rockstar, Take-Two and their games carries one of four labels. This page explains what each label means, how we decide which one applies, and what happens when the evidence changes.
Why we label at all
Rumour coverage around Rockstar is a mess. A Reddit post gets quoted by a YouTuber, the YouTuber gets quoted by a news site, and by the third hop a guess has turned into a “report”. We want readers to know, at a glance, whether something came from Rockstar’s own mouth or from an anonymous account with a 50 percent hit rate.
So we attach a label to every claim, and we show our reasoning next to it. If we cannot say where a claim came from, we do not publish it.
The four labels
| Label | What it means | What qualifies | What does not qualify |
|---|---|---|---|
| CONFIRMED | An official source said it. | Rockstar Games, Take-Two Interactive, an official storefront (PlayStation Store, Xbox Store, Steam, Epic Games Store, Rockstar Store), or a rating board (ESRB, PEGI, ACB, CERO, USK). Includes trailers, Newswire posts, earnings calls, SEC filings and official social accounts. | Screenshots of official pages that we cannot load ourselves. Quotes from “a Rockstar source”. Anything a retailer prints without Rockstar’s sign-off. |
| RUMOR | Someone with partial or unproven access says it. | A named leaker, journalist or insider with a track record we can describe. Datamined files from a real build. Retailer listings, domain registrations, trademark filings and job adverts. | Anonymous posts with no history. Claims the original poster has deleted. “I have a friend at Rockstar.” |
| DEBUNKED | Official information or hard evidence shows it is false. | A direct contradiction from Rockstar or Take-Two. A release date that passed with nothing. Proof the “leaked” asset came from another game, a fan project or an image generator. | A different leaker disagreeing. Silence from Rockstar. Our own opinion that it sounds unlikely. |
| NOT ANNOUNCED | Nobody official has said anything, and no credible leak exists. | Fan theories, wishlists, “it would make sense if” speculation, and questions readers ask us that have no answer yet. | Nothing. This is the default state for anything that has not met the bar for the other three. |
A claim can only hold one label at a time. If part of a report is confirmed and part is not, we split it into separate claims and label each one.
How we judge a rumour’s credibility
Every RUMOR entry names the source and gives our read on how reliable they are. We look at four things:
Track record. Has this person been right before, specifically about Rockstar or Take-Two? Being right about Nintendo does not transfer. We count hits and misses, and we weight recent calls more heavily than ones from years ago.
Specificity. “GTA 6 will have a big map” is not a leak, it is a safe guess. A claim with concrete details that could be proven wrong is worth more than a vague one that can never be tested.
Independence. Two reporters citing the same leak are one source, not two. We check whether later reports add new information or just repeat the first one.
Motive and timing. A leak dropped the day before an earnings call, by an account that also sells stock tips, gets treated with more suspicion than a datamined file pulled from a public build.
We put this reasoning in plain language under the claim. If we say a source is “usually reliable on Rockstar casting, weak on dates”, that is because we checked their past calls on both.
Datamines and documents
Files pulled from a legitimately purchased build, a public patch, or a published trailer count as evidence. We will say which build, which version number, and who did the extraction. Unused strings and placeholder assets get labelled RUMOR, never CONFIRMED, because cut content is common and a string in a file is not a promise.
Trademark filings, domain registrations, rating board entries and job listings get the same treatment. A rating board listing for a specific platform is strong evidence and often upgrades a claim to CONFIRMED once the board has published it. A job advert for “an open world project” is weak and stays RUMOR.
Labels change, and we say when
Evidence moves. A rumour gets confirmed in a trailer. A confirmed date gets delayed. A debunked claim turns out to have been half right.
When a label changes, we do not quietly edit the page. The entry keeps a short changelog with the date, the old label, the new label, and the reason. Readers who saw the original version can see exactly what moved and why. We would rather show a visible correction than pretend we were never wrong.
What we will not publish
Some material we refuse to touch regardless of how newsworthy it is:
- Stolen builds and source code. If something was taken from Rockstar’s internal systems without authorisation, we report that a breach happened and what Rockstar or Take-Two has said about it. We do not host, link to, embed, describe frame by frame, or mine the stolen material for details.
- Personal data. Names, home addresses, phone numbers, internal email addresses, employee photos and private messages of Rockstar or Take-Two staff are off limits. This includes “doxxed” leakers and the people accused of leaking.
- Material under an active court order or takedown. If a claim depends entirely on content that has been legally removed, we treat the underlying facts as unverifiable and label accordingly.
- Content we cannot see ourselves. A screenshot of a deleted tweet is not a source. We need to have seen the original, or we say plainly that we are relying on a second-hand copy.
We would rather miss a story than build one on something taken from a hacked machine.
How we handle official sources
Official does not mean infallible. Rockstar has shifted release windows before, storefront pages sometimes go up with placeholder dates, and rating boards occasionally list things early. When we mark something CONFIRMED we quote the exact wording and note where it appeared. If the wording is hedged (“targeting”, “planned for”, “currently expected”), we keep the hedge in our summary rather than flattening it into a certainty.
Earnings calls get special care. A Take-Two executive saying a title is “on track” for a fiscal quarter is a confirmation of that quarter and nothing narrower. We do not translate fiscal years into calendar dates without saying that the translation is ours.
Sending a correction
If you think a label is wrong, a source is misattributed, or a claim has been overtaken by new evidence, tell us through the contact form on this site. Useful corrections include:
- A link to or description of the original source, not a repost.
- The date you saw it.
- What you think the correct label should be and why.
We read everything that comes in. Corrections that check out get applied with a changelog entry crediting the tip if you want credit. Ones we disagree with get a reply explaining our reasoning, and if enough readers push back on the same point we revisit it publicly.
We are a small, independent site with no relationship to Rockstar or Take-Two. That means no inside line and no pressure to spin, but it also means we depend on readers to catch what we miss.