I mean with the recent GTA 6 like most of the time i saw hype about any news at all but at the same time it said to be a disaster for rockstar games so why is that a bad thing now?
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It’s mixed. There is the ‘no such thing as bad publicity’ school of thought and there are those in marketing who can’t handle the loss of control over the image of the game they are trying to sell.
Because people don’t really take the “unfinished” part into account properly. Why would they share footage of their game being buggy, laggy and with features that may be changed? That’s bad marketing.
Also, if they implement a feature that they then have to remove, people who liked the feature may get mad and “demand” the feature to be re-implemented even though the company has decided it’s not a good idea for whatever reason.
And then there’s the security “concerns”. If you show a bunch of bugs and/or how the game is built, it will be easier to cheat and whatnot. Though I would argue that keeping your code open-source would help more than it would hurt.
Imagine you want to go see a movie coming out in a few months. Your really exited and just want to see what happens. So one day your scrolling through reddit when somebody is posting about this movie and what happens in it. So now you know what happens your not sure if you want to spend your money on seeing the movie anymore, now that mystery surrounding this movie is gone.
Because unfinished things don’t represent the finished product and often look bad which leads to bad impressions and general negativity around the product.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a game, prototype for a product, design for an outfit etc.
To those saying it’s a legal issue for place holder art, someone leaking it would relieve them of fault as long as some from the company didn’t release it.
As I understand it the biggest concern is security. When a program is released (unless it is open source) the code isn’t readable by people who download it. It’s effectively encrypted. That means that anybody wanting to find an exploit or security vulnerability in the program is working at a fairly large disadvantage. The fact that 10000 lines of pure code have been leaked is a huge issue for this reason – it’s much easier for someone seeking to exploit or abuse vulnerabilities to do so if they know exactly how the code is written.
An analogy I saw was the difference between giving someone a gun and telling them to hit a target, and doing the same thing but putting a blindfold on them and spinning them until they are dizzy first.
The commentator I saw talking about this speculated that, depending on what code was leaked, this could be severe enough to force them to redevelop from the ground up. Obviously this would delay the game and cost a lot of money.
It’s not because everyone knows it’s an unfinished leak. It’s actually really positive because of the attention it’s getting.
Something no one mentioned is that a massive leak like this will 100% be investigated. The company must hunt down the leaker before they can leak more stuff like the full source code or other proprietary items.
That means that every single person who touches this game is going to be up under scrutiny which is stressful as fuck. Also, a leak like this can cause a company to clamp down on things like work from home, being able to take laptops in.
Hell, when we had a leak in the Canadian Government, there was a order that employees were no longer allowed to connect ANY unauthorized device to their workstation ever again.
Need a new mouse, put in a IT ticket.
Normally listen to music? Too bad, no headphones connected to your computer. Also no phones at your workstation etc etc.
There is a well trodden formula for creating peak hype and maximising sales. If people start talking about your game too early and you don’t have increasingly cool breadcrumbs to keep feeding the media to get more and more people excited about your game just as launch day hits, then you’re going to miss out on a lot of sales. If people figure out all the cool features they were trying to put into the game now and they don’t release for another 2 years, then people are unlikely to be that excited by it.
I worked on games that sold over 10 million copies and my boss was an absolute control freak about this stuff. We had a couple of pictures leak from a dev build, he got the security team to spend a lot of time tracking down who it was and then he found him, he fired him and ended his career by letting everyone in the industry know this guy was a leaker.
If it’s early and there isn’t much to leak then the game probably looks like shit, probably is not fun to play and a lot of people who get a first impression that your game is shit will tune out and stop looking at future updates, so again it hurts sales.
It can be a bit like seeing an Instagram model with no filters. Even if you see other pics that look great after, often the magic is gone once you’ve seen through the illusion.
The other side is that I saw people requesting source hashes and stuff from the hacker and the f*ckstick providing them, this will allow crackers to make illegal copies of the game. They’ll probably change it for GTA6 but likely they’ve been using those codes for a while, so people might crack their back catalogue and again hurt sales there.
Another problem for a hugely popular game like GTA is that people might now have enough to assets / code to make it easy for people to create their own GTA clones / mods or if other games companies were wondering how rockstar did open world so well they can check out all their algorithms.
They spend hundreds of millions making GTA, so all of these things could impact their ability to keep investing that much in making new GTAs and could lower the value of the company significantly.
Nb: There is a lot of could here, it could also have very little effect but the could is why it’s a big deal
It has more to do with the fact that this being a product of a hack, allegedly at least, there’s a question of what else the hacker got his hands on, possibly data that could be disastrous for the company. Also when a leak like that happens the dev team are the first suspects. Sure someone has claimed responsibility but that doesn’t mean all the devs will be left alone. People could lose their job over stuff like this.
Lastly nobody wants to be held accountable for their unfinished work. The game is not in a presentable state but when it eventually comes out, and this could go for any game with early alpha leaks, people could start making questions about stuff that was in the alpha footage but not present in the final release. Why and how content and features get scrapped is a complicated matter so devs generally tend to leave some stuff on the cutting room floor and not tell the public about them.
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