Stuff thats full of leaks: Sieves, Collins Class Submarines, Dykes (the non bike kind), and the video games industry.

It seems that the ability to keep a secret is getting harder and harder to achieve. Not surprising really. As development teams get larger and larger to create the fancy schmancy that we have come to expect from games these days, the chances of keeping things mum dwindle to near zero. Get a big enough team and the secrets will be out faster than Lindsay Lohan from a rehab clinic. There’s probably an awesome mathematical formula for working it out, but I don’t know it. It would be great, too, I bet. Things over things, other things as a power of something else. With an “n” in there. And probably even a square root. He he… square root.

Anyway, leaks are prevalent, and problematical. As gamers we're always happy to get the shiny new information on our favourite games, systems, etc. And as writers about games, we’re always happy to get news we can put up and make ou...

Stuff thats full of leaks: Sieves, Collins Class Submarines, Dykes (the non bike kind), and the video games industry.

It seems that the ability to keep a secret is getting harder and harder to achieve. Not surprising really. As development teams get larger and larger to create the fancy schmancy that we have come to expect from games these days, the chances of keeping things mum dwindle to near zero. Get a big enough team and the secrets will be out faster than Lindsay Lohan from a rehab clinic. There’s probably an awesome mathematical formula for working it out, but I don’t know it. It would be great, too, I bet. Things over things, other things as a power of something else. With an “n” in there. And probably even a square root. He he… square root.

Anyway, leaks are prevalent, and problematical. As gamers we're always happy to get the shiny new information on our favourite games, systems, etc. And as writers about games, we’re always happy to get news we can put up and make ourselves look like we're more on the ball.

But those little nuggets of information often come at a cost for someone. As gamers, readers and journalists (sort of) we don’t tend to notice this, because we don’t see the fall-out from the leaks. We don’t see what happens to the people who leak the information, or the internal witch hunts to find said person. We don’t see the publishers getting angry with the developers, or the producers ranting at the journalists. We don’t see that NDAs are being broken, leaving individuals open to civil suits.

All we see is a “sneak peek” of information, a week before it was going to be announced anyway, etc.

There have been some pretty big leaks in recent years. All of us remember the infamous source code leak that delayed Half Life 2. This one we know because it actually affected us personally. It delayed the game we were so eagerly anticipating.

A more recent example was the Naughty Dog game, previously know to us as “That Naughty Dog Game What Was On the PS3 Videos”, and we now know by the catchier “Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune”. This information and several screenshots were released when one of the background and environmental modellers kept his online resume a wee bit TOO up to date.

But the biggest leak of recent weeks is the leak of the entire story of Halo 3, including the final thrilling conclusion to the story. You can view the leaked ending here, but don’t blame us for spoilers.

Kotaku have also covered the leak a bit here showing pretty clearly one major problem with leaks.

What’s the difference between a probable leak and a steaming pile of fanboy created bullshit? If it’s a genuine leak then it’s true information, but it’s almost always unverifiable. In fact, it’s almost always only able to be verified when the company behind it makes the announcement they were going to make anyway.

When the Xbox 360 styling was pre-leaked from phone cameras we weren’t really ever sure that they were genuine until MS actually showed us the damned 360. In which case, what was the benefit of the leaked info in the first place? It was just a breach of NDA for no benefit at all.

With such a lot of speculation about upcoming games (such as Halo 3) there will always be a healthy blend of rumour, lies, and genuine information, but it’s hard to sift one thing from another. But when this information is from inside the company and does not go through the correct channels there is often a real person whose job is on the line.

Will Australian Gamer print these leaks and this information? Probably. We’re just as interested as you in when the next big game or console is available. We want to see the information ourselves, and we want to bring it to you. That’s our responsibility. But we do have other responsibilities. To protect our sources, and in many cases our friends, and make the choice not to bring you information that we occasionally are entrusted with.

Long story short – We’ll report leaks and leaked sneaky information. But we’ll never create it.