After Rockstar Games’ data and files obtained from a security breach were shared online yesterday, many likely expected it could have led to some negative ramifications for the studio and its parent company, Take-Two Interactive. Instead, the rich get richer as the publisher’s stock had one of its best days in months.
On Monday, online hacking group ShinyHunters released confidential data about Grand Theft Auto Online and Red Dead Online’s revenue and player numbers. The group grabbed the data as part of a digital breach involving cloud servers and metrics software. After Rockstar confirmed the breach had happened and then refused to pay the group’s ransom, ShinyHunters released the allegedly stolen assets onto the dark web, and fans dug into them.
There wasn’t any GTA 6 news or source code, though. Instead, what fans found, and what Kotaku was able to verify with those who have seen the data, is a lot of numbers that show just how profitable GTA Online is in 2026. And that’s led to an odd thing: Rockstar’s parent company saw its stock price go up the morning following what many expected to be bad news for the company.
When the stock market opened this morning, Take-Two’s stock price was sitting at around $202 a share. Once the market was open, as spotted by Insider Gaming, it shot up to $207 a share. That’s a roughly one billion dollar increase in Take-Two’s market cap.
Everything has since settled back down to around $205.77 a share as of 1:05 p.m. EST, but that’s still a big increase for the company’s stock considering it didn’t really do anything other than suffer a small data breach and leak. And that’s usually the kind of news that brings a stock price down. But I guess potential investors heard about GTA Online making around a million dollars a day and went, “Yeah, I’ll have a bit of that, thank you very much.”
I imagine the folks at ShinyHunters weren’t expecting this outcome when it taunted Rockstar on its website, when it asked how it “feels to be the headline now?” Feels pretty good, I bet.
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