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As gamers around the world await any official news on Rockstar’s mega-project GTA 6, the Xbox platform has turned into an arena of controversy after a fake screenshot claiming that the game will require a whopping 676.7GB of storage space on the Xbox Store went viral.
The image, which was professionally designed and used official materials from the game, achieved more than 8.8 million views and nearly 80,000 likes within a few hours, a clear indication of the thirst for information in the gamer community in light of the almost complete absence of any new official details about the game.
Despite the quality of the design, the image contained a glaring technical error that was quickly debunked by more experienced followers, as it indicated that the game supports the Xbox One platform, while Rockstar previously confirmed that GTA 6 will be released exclusively on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S without any version for the previous generation.
Later, the original poster, TheCanadianGTR, whose post was reposted by Kiwi Talkz before it was deleted, admitted that the image was a joke meant to drive traffic to his YouTube channel, but the damage had already been done.
The success of this rumor was not random, as the absence of official communication from Rockstar created an information vacuum that made the public an easy prey for fake content, whether out of humor or looking for interaction, and the 676GB figure, although exaggerated, touched a real obsession for gamers with the inflated sizes of modern games and support for 4K resolution and high-quality graphical assets.
However, technical analysis alone is enough to refute the claim, as the full storage capacity of the PlayStation 5 is 825GB, while the actual space available for download does not exceed 667GB, so an alleged size of 676GB means that the game cannot be installed at all on the device with its default capacity, which is an illogical scenario that Rockstar is unlikely to do.
This incident is not the first of its kind and will not be the last, as it was preceded by numerous fake images, clips and fake news about GTA 6, but it reflects a greater challenge for social media platforms in dealing with misinformation related to entertainment products with budgets comparable to Hollywood movies.
In the future, such incidents may prompt major companies to change their media strategies and intensify official communication to minimize the information chaos that precedes the launch of titles such as GTA 6.
