Activision Pres Vows to Track Down MW3 Leaker
An internal email sent out by Activision's CEO vows to hunt down the mole responsible for leaking Modern Warfare 3 assets early.
Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg reportedly sent out an internal email vowing to track down the parties responsible for leaking Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 details to the gaming press a few weeks ago. The news sets a different tone to Activision's view of the leak after Hirshberg said in an interview last week that obsessing over the event is "only looking backwards."
"No one wakes up and thinks, 'I hope there's been a leak and our timing gets all messed up,'" Hirshberg told Joystiq last week. "We woke up with a marketing crisis and wanted to go to bed with a marketing win. So what we did was we kind of took that exact conversation [about taking advantage of the leak] we were having in our conference room outside and had it publicly in social media."
"Through our various channels, through Robert Bowling at IW, through Facebook and through our YouTube channel, we reached out to our fans and we said, 'Look, we didn't schedule this,'" he added. "'This wasn't something we had planned. But everyone seems excited, so we're just going to roll with it. So here they are, a couple of assets that weren't scheduled to be out for another couple of weeks, we're going to release 'em to you today.'"
The term "excited" was defined by the total number of combined views of the leaked assets on YouTube alone: a whopping 4.5 million combined in just 48 hours. By comparison, the first Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops teasers attracted only 61,000 and 89,000 views, respectively, in their first two days of availability.
But even though the MW3 leak generated some high-volume pre-mature excitement, Hirshberg is seemingly intent on digging out the mole. "Activision takes very seriously any abuse of our intellectual property – the event is under investigation and we’re confident it will be resolved quickly," he wrote. Strangely enough, come of the verbiage used in the email was actually lifted from the Joystiq interview.
"With equal agility, our worldwide sales organizations managed to put both the retail and .com pre-sale programs and assets into launch mode in no-time flat," he said. "Everybody involved delivered under pressure."
Was this really a leak, or some type of promotional scheme to drum up over-charged anticipation for the upcoming game? If publishers and developers are willing to pose as regular gamers and boost the overall scores of their game by writing five-star reviews, who's to say they won't pretend to "leak" assets to see how the gamers will react to a new product?
"If members of the government and the military aren't safe from this stuff, it's a part of our world now," he said.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is slated to arrive on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and Windows PC on November 8, 2011. Eager fans can pre-order the game now by heading here.
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I'm looking more forward to BF3 anyways.
Who cares about a game that is using an updated gfx engine that is 4 years old.
Hey Activision- nobody cares about your new game anyway because they all know it's just going to be a rehash of the last games with no new innovations- maybe you should stop reusing the same engine over and over again and try something innovative, fresh, and ground-breaking (I'm partly talking about graphics here), oh and while you're at it- stop treating PC users like trash. We like to have incentives for paying more for our hardware than the average Joe who just buys the game for a console.
P.S. Your MW3 trailers were pathetic.
Well said 11796pcs
Why would any employee try to leak news of new games? What benefits to the mole? I really don't understand, and now they risk getting fired.
with MW2 multiplayer hacked and slashed I just dont have the passion to play this franchise anymore. But Battlefield 3 looks pretty darn good!
I am not going to lie, I will buy MW3 but BF3 is looking like that is where I will spend most of my time.
You guys who keep bashing activishion are all retarded. There is nothing wrong with the game engine being used. And guess what... Treyarch tried something new and look how that ended up. Have you ever heard the phrase "if it's not broke don't fix it."?
I'm not familiar with Battlefield 3. But would BF3 have One Man Army perks like MW2? OMA is the best!
fuck activision.
Anti-vision can kick rocks. Battlefield 3 is going to eat that P.O.S. alive.
Don't panic, it was your own team that leaked it... ages ago.. it was called MW2.
Seems from the posters here that I should be checking out Battlefield 3 before another iteration of CoD.
I don't care much for Activision or CoD:Generic Rehash Edition.
Sorry CoD, you have redone it too many times, and BF3 is gonna kick a$$
Who cares about a game that is using an updated gfx engine that is 4 years old.
outdated graphics engine. Fixed that. Same junk, different name each year.
Still play BF2 on 360 and 2142 for the PC online, game just out right kicks @ss. Im just a huge fan of the openess of the maps and not getting sniped with a shotgun from accross the map.
I would guess you leaked it out to get coverage.
All right people just relax and try and save 50cents a day by then you'll be buying both games and please quit crying like a lil baby, we are all adults here, you people are just stupid coming in here and crying. What a bunch of regards..!
i don't care if there are no groundbreaking new tech involve in this game, i am for the smooth gameplay and consistent visual appearance. mw2 is very good enough, don't have yet black ops, i still enjoy replaying this game.
Don't panic, it was your own team that leaked it... ages ago.. it was called MW2.
+1 nice
No publicity is bad publicity. I guess Activision doesn't recognize that.
Either way, Call of Duty ended with 4.
70% of the views were people bashing each other.
MW3 looks like yet another sad let down in the CoD series.
You can thank consoles for that.
This just reeks of an intended leak by activision to draw attention away from BF3. Both are slated for release around the same time and they're trying to get an early start on promoting it. The sad thing is it will probably work. Activision has this model lately of milking franchises dry a la guitar hero. They killed that franchise off if I'm not mistaken, because people got sick of it and stopped buying. Wonder how many more COD/MW releases before people (console players) realize its just a different skin on the same game. Between MW2 and BO the storyline IMO is the only thing significantly different, and is NOT strong enough to warrant shelling out $60 a year.
I'm very sad to say this but I bet MW3 will beat BF3 in sales figures by a great deal, even though BF is a much better and more innovative franchise IMO.
ok lets run this down
1) the engine of mw3 takes advantage of consoles, where the game sells more, and to be honest, is graphically a damn good console engine. now i dont know what the pc side has, as in how the engine would run there, because i believe its just a port, so no real enhancements there.
2) activision is an crap company, well known for funning ips into the ground, and tring to ride the corpse a bit further even after the fact, thats not disputed.
now lets get onto this.
i will be able to play mw3, but not bf3 because i hate vista and 7. so i only get mw3
but i hate the mw series, and most of the cod games, so that doesnt matter.
i would bet bf3 if i could run it, but i refuse to play a fps on a console, just as much as i refuse to go to 7 due to its ui and unchangeable things i despise about it.
The thing about COD games is that you have to buy one every other year or every two years. Doing so will prevent you from feeling that it is too similar to the last one. It is a fun series, but when you get too much of it can easily become repetitive.
The only good COD games were the first one and Modern Warfare, world at war was meh, and everything else sucked. As a person that primarily games on a PC, I am tired of all this console ported trash and i am thoroughly excited about BF3(KARKAND WITH DESTRUCTIBLE ENVIRONMENT)
Wait ... there's going to be a THIRD Modern Warfare game? ... hmmm ... Yeah I don't care, sorry. I must reiterate what the majority has said: BF3 on PC is going to be one billion times better than MW3 could ever hope to be. Especially, since the guys who made MW1 and MW2 aren't involved at all with making this one.
"Who cares about a game that is using an updated gfx engine that is 4 years old."
It's more than that.
The Engine COD runs on is based on IDTech3.
Yes.
3.
And they've been using it since CoD2
If publishers and developers are willing to pose as regular gamers and boost the overall scores of their game by writing five-star reviews, who's to say they won't pretend to "leak" assets to see how the gamers will react to a new product?
Ofcourse they do, anyone who don't think this happens all the time is naive. What better way is it to get up the excitement than this? Maby two benefits come out of this for the publisher, point the fingers at some guy they want to get rid of and at the same time get the marketing for free! I wouldnt put that behind Activision with their management who even brag how they instil fear just to get some extra out of their employees!
who gives a _____. CoD is for brat ass kids now. Used to be the staple for a realistic shooter. now its no more realistic than an episode of seaseme street
The first 3 call of duty games were pretty good, and even the less than well-recieved world at war was decent. But modern weapons just make for a boring game. Sure, there was a flood of WW2 shooters when they decided to go for a modern setting, but there were so many WW2-based shooters because it's simply a more interesting setting. Modern weapons are just too powerful to make for interesting gameplay, except possibly at the RTS level. I'm disappointed they're sticking with a modern setting, call of duty and battlefield are both decent franchises and the market has shifted from being over-saturated with good WW2 based shooters to being over-saturated with bad modern shooters. A company the knows what it's doing could probably get a lot of success out of a shooter not based on current events or the distant future, as there simply aren't any good ones out there right now.
Activision has managed to release the same game over and over and over just by giving it a new name and skin. People seem to be ok with it. I've never liked the game.