I hate that all video games news is rumours but I blame publishers – Reader’s Feature

As the Assassin’s Creed Black Flag remake earns the dubious title of most leaked game ever a reader is frustrated at publishers’ inability to keep a secret.

So this week we finally got the reveal of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynched, a game everyone has known about for three years already and which absolutely everything leaked out about beforehand. It was so bad new leaks were still happening just hours before the annoucement.

I’m reasonably interested in the remake, but I have to admit that, along with many others, I was sick of hearing about it this week. People complain that too much game news is just rumours but when it’s all true, I’m not sure what anyone is supposed to do about it.

If the information is out there, and it’s obviously real, what are websites meant to do? Pretend they don’t know? Let rivals get one over on them? Of course, not every rumour is real, but I feel GC and other more trusted websites do pretty well in only talking about the believable ones. But the problem is, that means there’s no longer any secrets.

You could say that once the information is out there it doesn’t really matter how you learn about it, but when something is revealed via a rumour it’s not a teaser trailer and a big presentation, like we used to get at E3. It usually starts with a developer is working on a new game, then you find out the game is part of a certain franchise, and then you start to get more specific leaks and so on and so on.

Everything is drip fed over such a long time it never has any impact. Leon being in Resident Evil Requiem was leaked years ago but there was back and forth on whether it was true or not and then how much he was actually in it and when he finally got officially announced… it wasn’t news anymore.

That was relatively unusual because it was a Japanese game, and they tend to be better at keeping secrets, but they’re getting increasingly worse. Now we have rumours that a new Star Fox game is going to be announced soon and while Nintendo are contrary enough to delay it, just to make the rumour not true, I expect the fact there is a new game is right.

But when you get to American companies… forget about it. Everything leaks like a sieve and nothing is ever a surprise. What gets me is why do these companies not try to stop it? If I knew my pay was going to be docked if a secret got out, I’d be very careful about not leaking it. Especially if the only benefit to me leaking it was making some rando on Reddit famous for five minutes.

It’s not just that sort of rumour though. Why is datamining a thing? Why do developers keep putting references, including images, of upcoming features in the code of their games? They know people are going to find it and yet there never seems to be any attempt to hide them or rename them or anything. And job ads! How many games have leaked information via job ads and yet it keeps happening.

A lot of people complain that companies don’t put the effort into showing of their games like they used to, and I agree. E3 is dead, there’s far less interviews nowadays (when was the last time we ever heard from anyone at Sony?), and even when there is a reveal it’s just a pre-recorded video, not really a livestream at all.

There’s a total lack of effort in trying to get people excited about games and on top of that a total lack of effort in trying to keep things secret. I don’t know how anyone can argue that the way games used to be revealed wasn’t much better and that constantly finding out about new games via a sentence or two rumour or a blurry image is infinitely less interesting.

My only hope is that Activision finally got sick of Call Of Duty leaks earlier this year and now they’ve completely stopped them. So apparently it is very easy to deal with if a company wants to. And it’s ironic too because there were so many Call Of Duty leaks, and they were so accurate, that a lot of people thought they were plants anyway.

I guess not though. We’ll see if not knowing about it in advance raises the excitement for this year’s Call Of Duty, but if it does I really hope that convinces publisher they should stop putting up with having no secrets.

By reader Grackle

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