Cyberleek’s offer is priced above its peak

On 10 October the account calling itself Cyberleek posted a short statement on its own website under the title The Offer. It is short enough to hold in full: the token reaching a $30m market capitalisation releases “full story mode, played to the end, credits and all”, while Take-Two has “one way out: physical disks and a public apology”, which it “can take at any moment”. This site has read the statement as reproduced by IGN, PC Gamer and Rock Paper Shotgun rather than at the address it was posted to, and not one of those three prints that address. Nothing in the document comes from Rockstar or Take-Two, and neither company has commented on it.

The half of the offer that asks for no money is the half with a record against it. Rockstar stated in June that the retail box would carry a download code rather than a disc, and the physical stock goes on sale on 12 November, seven days before launch. So the branch a company could actually accept is a request to reverse a decision taken three and a half months ago, with packaging and freight already committed for a date six weeks out, and it is addressed to a publisher that has never once answered this account in public. The other branch is a sum of money paid to the person making the threat. An offer whose stated exit is an act therefore has one operative price, and it is not the apology. Rock Paper Shotgun arrived at the same place from the other end, asking why a demand for discs needs anyone to buy a coin at all.

That price is one number with two reference points, and which one an outlet picks decides whether the offer reads as far away or nearly met. PC Gamer measures it as the coin needing to go “up another $26 million or so”, which is the gap from the level it was trading at. Inven Global, the only report this site found that compares the target with the token’s own history, notes that $30m is higher than the coin’s peak market capitalisation of roughly $25m, recorded on 23 August. Both are arithmetic on the same figure and both are correct. Against the day’s price the condition is 7.9 times away; against the coin’s own record it is 1.2 times, or a fifth above a level the market has already printed once. Neither report gives the reader both denominators.

The tiered part of the same document is what settles which reading the seller intends. Inven Global reports that clips tied to Lucia are released at $2m, $4m and $6m; IGN carries the $2m and $4m rungs, with a bikini at the lower and a “fully naked” clip at the upper; a third relay adds a $3m rung and gives the $6m step to 4K close-ups. Every one of those levels sits well inside a market capitalisation this token reached on 23 August. One document therefore prices clips at levels the coin has already cleared and prices the game at the single level it has never touched. Conditional means two different things inside the same paragraph, and the difference is not about the content: the ladder is set where the money has been, the headline where it has not.

The day of publication supplies the test of that ladder. IGN records the coin at $3.8m at the time of writing, having spiked to $5.7m earlier on 10 October as reports of the message spread on social media. Under the two-rung reading that spike clears the top announced threshold and a clip is owed; under the versions with a $6m rung it does not. So the same day’s coverage implies two different sets of rewards already unlocked, from a page none of it will link. Rock Paper Shotgun and Insider Gaming each state that they are withholding the address, on the grounds that the site may carry malware, which leaves a reader with no way to check a price list except by visiting the thing the price list is selling. What the reports agree on are the two ends of the ladder; what moves between them is the middle, and what each step buys.

For anyone buying on 19 November, nothing here moves. The release date, the two editions at $79.99 and $99.99, the 12 November pre-load and the code-in-a-box retail edition are unchanged. The detail worth noticing is the missing deadline. The statement says Take-Two can accept the terms “at any moment” and never mentions 19 November, which is the one date that would make the material worthless, so the condition is a standing appeal rather than a countdown. The other unresolved thing is scope, and it is the one that decides whether any of this matters: the August material was reported as an incomplete debug build that needs Rockstar’s own authentication server to run, and a build that will not launch is a pile of spoilers rather than a game. What to watch is not a reply from Take-Two, which has not come, but whether a clip appears for a rung the coin has already crossed.