There are always leaks in the games industry, but the reactions are different – from silence to police action.
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Leaks, leaks, leaks – wherever you look, secret information from the gaming industry is dripping. About GTA 6, about Diablo 4, about Assassin’s Creed. Why is that, what does it do to developers – and how do we deal with it at GameStar?
Michael Graf and Heiko Klinge talk about this in the podcast with Fabian Döhla, who, as a PR manager for Sega and CD Projekt, has experienced numerous leaks and previously leaked something himself as a journalist.
Namely the design of the first Xbox – live on giga tv. This not only had serious consequences for Fabian himself, but also for Future Verlag, for which he worked at the time.
As CD Projekt’s PR manager, he witnessed how cybercriminals stole a lot of data from the company’s servers in 2021 – allegedly including the source codes of Cyberpunk 2077, Gwent and The Witcher 3 as well as sensitive personal and account data. The hackers tried to blackmail CD Projekt and threatened to release the data if they didn’t get money.
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As with GTA 6, such cyber attacks are much more serious than smaller leaks that happen almost every day – sometimes in an adventurous form. Halo 4, for example, was leaked on a VCR (!) in a barn (!!), while the new Assassin’s Creed was leaked twice on a plane.
Fabian can explain how development studios are reacting to this – and what damage larger leaks cause behind the scenes. When unfinished material is made public, there is sometimes a real hangover in the studios – for example with the story leak for The Witcher 3 and when important story twists from The Last of Us became known in advance.
Of course, the question arises as to whether the games industry is tripping itself up here with its method of communication: if years after an announcement there is still no further information about a game, leakers may feel “spurred” to publish something.
Conversely, there is always the suspicion that some leaks happen on purpose – for example, to fuel the anticipation of an announcement. Is that really true?
Fabian has a clear answer to that.
You can read more about how we deal with leaks in Heiko’s column:
more on the subject
GTA 6 and Diablo 4: The leak dilemma and how GameStar deals with it
And here, of course, is the video of Fabian’s Xbox leak:
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