GTA 6 may be censored in Australia and other regions, dataminer suggests

Parts of Grand Theft Auto 6 may be censored in Australia and other countries, a dataminer has suggested.

Rockstar announced last week that pre-loading for the game was starting on November 10 at midnight (the night of November 9) in each region.

Now that this has passed in New Zealand and parts of Australia, and that some users have now started pre-loading it, some dataminers have already started analysing the data.

X user TexFunz2 listed all the PlayGo content for the PS5 version earlier today. PlayGo is Sony‘s asset management and delivery system, allowing consoles to only download the files it needs. This is similar to Xbox‘s Smart Delivery, which can (for example) choose to download assets for the Xbox Series X or Xbox One versions of some games depending on which system is downloading it.

Listing the 32 separate ‘chunks’ that make up the game’s data, TexFunz2 showed that the game is split into story, mini-game and core sections, as well as separate chunks for animations, textures, audio and such.

They also noted two chunks called core_restofworld (which is around 1.28 GB) and another called core_restofworld001 (which is around 704 KB).

Referring to the larger chunk, they suggested: “‘Rest of World’ is content censored from some regional versions, likely the Japanese version in this case.”

They later confirmed, however, that the version of the game being distributed in Australia and New Zealand is missing the core_restofworld001 chunk.

Given that the chunk is less than a megabyte in size, it would appear that whatever is missing from the Australia and New Zealand version is minor, but it may be a texture, image or some other piece of content that had to be removed for some reason.

A number of games have been released as modified versions in Australia in the past, including Grand Theft Auto 3 and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, which had content relating to prostitutes removed.

More recently, Halloween: The Game was refused classification entirely in Australia because players can smoke weed to get an advantage in the game.