GTA 6‘s preload arrived lighter in Japan and Australia than everywhere else, and fans quickly started asking what got cut.
Rockstar flung open preloads on November 10, nine days before launch, and players have since been toiling through a download of roughly 210GB that has even slowed home internet in parts of the UK.
Given a file of that size, a few megabytes would slip by unnoticed. A full gigabyte, however, gets people talking.
GTA 6 is over 1GB smaller in Japan, and Australia’s build is missing a file
Japanese outlet Game*Spark spotted the gap first, finding that the PS5 version weighed 208.725GB in Japan against 209.913GB elsewhere, while the Xbox build shrank from 209.86GB to 208.74GB.
Automaton then noticed that GTA 6’s Japanese age rating, CERO Z, came without a sexual content warning, even though its US and European ratings both flagged strong sexual content.
Image via GameSparkAustralia and New Zealand’s copy came up short too, though only by around 700KB. Dataminer Tex2 confirmed that build was missing a chunk named “core_restofworld001,” and suggested the much larger “core_restofworld” chunk held content cut from certain regions, with Japan the likeliest target.
In the replies, it was theorized that “everyone downloads a censored version of the game,” with regional packs adding the cut material back everywhere except Australia and New Zealand.
That theory didn’t take long to stick. Cokymoky, who first pulled the Xbox sizes from Microsoft’s catalog, had already labeled the Japanese build “-1.2 GB cuts,” and fans dredged up GTA 5, which launched in Japan with a torture scene removed, alongside Resident Evil releases that blacked out dismembered limbs to satisfy CERO.
Others started eyeing their own regions, as one player under Cokymoky’s original post vowed to cancel their pre-order and buy on a US account if the Middle East build turned out censored, while another joked about grabbing the Japanese version “to save space and download faster.”
Australia’s situation is murkier. One reply under Tex2’s post insisted “it’s going to have removed gambling,” and the theory has legs, because the country rated GTA 6 R18+ with sex scenes listed in its warnings while taking a tough stance on simulated gambling. Either way, the files stay encrypted until launch on November 19, and Take-Two hasn’t explained the differences.
If gambling turns out to be the reason, Australian players have seen this before, since GTA Online’s casino games went dark for them in July after seven years of spinning the Lucky Wheel.
I’m Abhishek Sharma, an author at TigerJek.com. I enjoy exploring games, testing different strategies, and turning what I learn into clear, useful guides. My goal is to help players understand the game better and improve without the usual confusion.
