Gives them free attention of a kind they could never buy no matter how many millions they'd throw at it. Perfectly complements the kind of attention they can buy. Difficult to imagine a company suffering less from a security breach.
This will disrupt development for some time, they need to figure out what has leaked (seems the hacker also took code from GTA V and VI), what changes they need to make to their systems to prevent this again.
This will probably delay the release date of the game.
Why should game programmers need to pause their development for the security investigation to proceed? It's not as though Rockstar's game programmers are also the private investigators; the people who investigate the leak won't be the programmers and artists who are making the game. I'm sure they'll get interviewed during the investigation, but that's no more than a few hours of their time wasted.
If this guy really has the source code of both 5 & 6 this obviously will add more development time. This one of the biggest games specially due to its online functionality, if bad actors have code related to that it’s no bueno.
I don't buy it. They're not going to re-engineer their netcode just because a development version of it got leaked. It will probably get rewritten anyway in the normal course of development. But if they were counting on an obscure protocol keeping hackers out of their game, they were always going to lose that advantage within hours to weeks of the official launch anyway.
