source leaks damage things aside from profitability.

this will just serve as yet another feather in the cap for the exploit/hacking/modding community; and a lot of THOSE people make cash by selling exploits.

If rockstar cared about cheating ( they don't ) this would throw a big monkey wrench into that effort, obfuscation is half the battle in a game where book-keeping like an MMO would be performance prohibitive.

Free advertising, very well timed indeed.

If they cared about their customers they would pay to stop them (us) getting pwned with numerous 0-day vulnerabilities that no doubt exist in a 15 year old code base that had never seen the light of day.

1. The game still sells 10+ million copies a year.

2. GTA online brings at least half a billion a year in microtransactions.

The vast majority of those sales are for GTA online, which this leak doesn't inherently give you access to. I don't see this leak financially harming Rockstar more than the cost of the presumed ransom, people still have to pay to play GTA online.

Give it time and there will be private servers for the modded client

There are already private servers. There are whole communities built up around role playing in bootleg GTA 5 servers.

Rockstar bought the developers of the private server software out and integrated them into their teams, presumably for GTA 6.

For context, one of these is FiveM[0], which is very popular (and if anything, a lot better than the official Online in many ways.)

[0]: https://fivem.net/