How is possible that games like ES6 and GTA VI are being developed with hundreds or thousands of people but they can still keep it a secret?
In: Technology
Bethesda don’t even have NDA’s! If you leak anything, Todd Howard just comes over, sits in your cubicle with his dreamy puppy dog eyes, and says how incredibly disappointed he is in you. A single tear might roll down his immaculate cheek as he does so.
Things leak, but a leak doesn’t necessarily mean it goes on the internet and becomes common knowledge.
Anyone who doesn’t have to know what they’re exactly doing or what the project is, they just don’t tell them they’re working on GTA or anything. They just tell them to make a car animated and make a model for a gun. Sometimes they don’t even know they’re working for Rockstar, just that they need to do some things to get paid for it. These people are distant from the projects so they’re kept in the dark unless absolutely necessary.
It’s a legal thing where anyone working close with the project has to sign an NDA, or “Non Disclosure Agreement” which basically means they promise not to tell anyone or they’ll get in trouble. Also if people find out they did this, nobody would want to hire them because they are now a risk for major projects.
As someone in the industry, when working on a project that is in stealth there is really no desire to leak anything. Legally you are under NDA so there is a lawsuit risk, but the real reason is why would you spill confidential information to begin with?
You would not gain anything by leaking, you’d just be shitting on your colleagues, especially the ones in the marketing department. Most of the time when an NDA is breached it is a journalist who got their dates wrong and published an article early or an employee updating their portfolio (and in both cases they will know they screwed up within minutes of doing so). And there is a difference between “keeping a secret” and “keeping it confidential”.
Confidentiality and non-disclosure clauses. The excitement of being able to share your work prior to the company’s wish for that knowledge to be made public is curbed by serious professional and economic consequences if you blab your mouth.
edit: compartmentalization too! As someone else ITT mentioned, it’s not necessarily clear what the final product will look like or be like if you’re just working on a small portion of the finished work
Non-disclosure agreements work wonders. Essentially this is a pinky promise made between you and the contractor (company) basically saying you cannot speak about this to anybody. If you do, you’ll be in heaps of trouble and nobody from the industry will ever look at you. You’ll become a disgrace and bring shame upon us all.
So nobody speaks about them because they wanna keep making games.
Is there any chance GTA VI will be more like IV or San Andrea’s that it will be like GTA V?
I’m sure people will be mad at me, but I didn’t really like GTA V…
Secret? We’re talking about it here so how secret is it really?
There is not enough incentive to leak. Somebody might pay you half a months salary, but not really more than that. Or you’re just going to feel cool?
These are not good enough reasons to justify losing your job over.
I worked on lots of games. We kept secrets because, more than anything we wanted to, it’s the strong most secretive culture I’ve ever worked in. Sure there were NDA’s, worries of getting caught and not being able to get a gig when your publisher pulled your funding, fear that whomever was making the “other” FPS would “steal” your secrets and all of that, but in my opinion, it’s just a part of the culture and people want to be in the know.
Latest Answers