Can Game Leaks Become Harmful?

Can Game Leaks Become Harmful?

Gaming leaks can be a curse and a blessing. If somebody were to leak out the game, people will be pleasantly surprised while being spoiled by the real reveal that the company wanted to provide. Well recently a major leak from the game Borderlands 3 shows us that leaking game information can be more than just fun and games and can result in complete strangers visiting your house asking how you leaked it. Are leaks still okay after this? Or are game publishers crazy for sending in people to other’s houses trying to get more information about it? We’ll tell you what we think about this.

What Happened?

SupMatto is a Youtuber who is a really big Borderlands fan who loves to talk about the game. In fact he’s always been making videos about the games and even recently, been making videos talking about leaks for the upcoming Borderlands 3. In short this resulted in Take 2 sending two private investigators to his house and asked him very politely where he got all of this information from. This then resulted in SupMatto getting around 7 pending strikes on his youtube page and taking down his Twitter account, and discord server was taken down. He took down his own Twitter Account and got his discord deleted for basically sharing the info in that server as well.

How did he get the info?

How SupMatto actually got the information about these leaks are a bit loose and almost fair game, but is a bit sketchy at best. SupMatto got access to some confidential Twitch streams through a simple bug. He was able to find a link to these dev Twitch accounts supposedly though one of the game’s trailers, and basically saw several thumbnails from the streams themselves in order to view the information about the game such as character skills, and some new game locations.

This all comes from a bug that simply lets you view stream thumbnails from a mobile device for Twitch. It auto-generates screenshots from the streams in order to make thumbnails for whatever it is you’re recording.

Problem with this?

There are some real problems regarding all of these leaks and definitely on how he got them. For one thing, he’s definitely not supposed to view these private streams. The streams are supposed to be private and therefore is technically breaking terms of service on Twitch. So in theory, Take Two and 2K games had a pretty good reason to investigate this, they don’t want a big hacker to leak all of their stuff. Also it’s pretty unforeseeable for someone to use a bug in order to get major information about the game, in fact it’s kind of a problem that the company didn’t foresee this as they had to hire two private eyes in order to get more information about this.

Sending People to someone’s house?

So Take two interactive sent two private investigators to someone’s house to investigate this. Now honestly, there are better ways to go about asking SupMatto or anybody else how somebody was able to leak very private information. They could’ve sent an email to him or something similar. Well according to Take Two and 2K games, they didn’t really want to confront somebody who was known to be a super fan of the games or accuse them of something that they didn’t do. It’s also given that SupMatto is trying to cover his tracks, like not mentioning that people that paid to join his channel had exclusive access to the discord in which he simply drops the info into.

Though does that mean that a big company should hire private investigators from now on and should just confront people in front of their own homes? Probably not, but SupMatto could’ve easily just shut up when they appeared. It’s not every day that someone just shows up to your place to ask you questions and since he didn’t really know who they were, he could’ve just waited for a lawyer or just call the police on them. Luckily, things went down well and SupMatto was able to inform the investigators on how he was able to leak out the info.

For a side note, I would probably suggest that big companies don’t send people to others’ houses, even if they did do something wrong. It obviously comes off as a bit, thuggish, and just showing off how much power a company has and how much they will be willing to go in order for an investigation to go down smoothly.

Other Leaks

Now let’s look at other examples of game leaks. During E3 2019, several game leaks came to light. One of which was Ninja Theory’s new unannounced title, Bleeding Edge. It was leaked weeks before the game was supposed to be announced on the E3 2019 stage. It wasn’t like the entire game was leaked, just the trailer which shows off the characters along with a technical alpha coming up for the game. With that being said, the entire game, at the moment was released, possibly drying up the surprise they had for those showing up for E3 2019.

Also, announcements of other titles that were to be announced during E3 2019 were leaked weeks before hand, this includes the Switch version of Dragon Quest XI. The leak of Elden Ring happened during Namco’s data breach in which several games were leaked from the company. This also includes a remastered version of Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch and Tales of Arise. As far as we know, Namco hasn’t gone to the public on how these leaks happened and additionally, they haven’t sent any private investigators to anyone’s house. In fact, I think that they just rolled with it, though with some heavy repercussions of the games themselves being revealed earlier than expected.

Can Game Leaks Become Harmful?

Well in a way if the people who were sent to SupMatto’s house were actually thugs, there could be some real problems. As for the leaks themselves being harmful, they can definitely hurt a company’s marketing as they probably have a good plan to give fans the information that they need in the given times. In fact, I already feel spoiled for Borderlands 3 from all of these trailers Gearbox is sending out for the game so I definitely want to save as much information as I can for when the game actually comes out. So in the meantime, don’t use dumb exploits to leak games, don’t send goons to people’s houses, and definitely don’t keep leaked information hidden behind a paywall, or else some serious legal repercussions will definitely come to get you.

For more information about Boderlands 3, check us out here.

To check out the opening to Borderlands 3, check it out here.

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