Sunday Thoughts: Leaking E3 And Ethical Debates

E3 is just around the corner and the usual weight of expectation is settling firmly on the big players in the industry. It’s this time of year that the biggest leaks happen. We saw the PSPGo just before its unveiling and we saw the Xbox 360 S before Microsoft wanted us to as well.

This year, we’ve seen several mentions of new consoles and potential services coming to the existing ones. The Wii U, of course, ensures at least one big hardware-focussed conference but even though we know about it already, Nintendo’s console has probably been the source of this E3’s biggest leak so far.

Last week, a QA tester for Traveller’s Tales tweeted an image of the Wii U’s tablet controller. He was probably just excited to have one close at hand and wanted to make all his gamer followers (including a lot of journalists and critics) a little bit jealous. It worked, I was filled with envy, as I always am when I see unavailable tech in someone else’s hands. But that tweet got picked up and run as a news story because the tablet controller in the image was different to the one we’d seen before. It had analogue sticks and new buttons.

[drop]The tweeter had, presumably, signed a hefty NDA promising not to disclose anything he sees in the course of his work. His employers, I assume, had signed an even heftier NDA prohibiting exactly this sort of leak.

Nintendo wouldn’t want their hardware leaked and although third party support is going to be more critical with their next machine, they don’t want those new, stronger relationships to be the source for leaks. I don’t know if the QA tester at TT managed to hold on to his job. I hope so.

During the course of our daily scouring for videogame news here on TSA, we often uncover things like this. Recently, we discovered the mention of PlayStation 4 on an audio engineer’s LinkedIn profile. We saw it hours before anyone else found it and we had a story written up and ready to post.

But we talked about it beforehand. We discussed what it would mean for us to break the news (interesting for our readers, a little bump in traffic before one of the big sites reposted it and didn’t bother sourcing us) and we discussed what it might mean for the guy who wrote it on his profile.

We worried that uncovering his mistake, while beneficial to us, would expose him for making that error and put his livelihood at risk.

A couple of hours later, Supererogatory found the same profile, tweeted about it and the news found its way out anyway. Official PlayStation Magazine posted it on their website, complete with the guy’s full name, a site and publication given a constant helping hand by Sony. We posted about it too, once it had hit the news cycle, there’s no point in one relatively small outlet like us holding off after that.

Now, I’ve seen the argument that because these people sign NDAs and because it’s their own mistakes, we should just go ahead and break the news. That’s the job of a journalist, after all. But I don’t consider myself to be a journalist and I don’t think much of what we do on TSA is really journalism. We’re commentators, critics. Creative writers, even, on occasion. We do relatively little interviewing, investigating or chasing of stories – although we do far more than many people who do claim to be “games journalists” but that just demonstrates how cheaply the title is claimed and how little it means.

[drop2]When we do have interviews, we don’t engineer questions in an effort to extract shocking answers, we don’t misrepresent soundbites and we don’t splash quotes around to grab sensational headlines. We post the interview and let you read it. When we post stories based on LinkedIn profiles and throwaway tweets, it’s because we find it interesting and want to see what you guys think. We want the discussion more than we want the traffic. Maybe that’s why we’re still so poor.

I admit it’s frustrating to see outlets who engage in this kind of stuff, as well as those that break their NDAs and embargoes, getting away with it. I’ve known sites to break agreements one week and have exclusives from the same publisher the next week. It’s almost like they’re rewarded for dishonesty, rather than punished for it. But that’s the shape of the industry.

People – developers, publishers, writers and readers – complain about certain behaviours, certain outlets and then they very quickly endorse them. As the owner of a small site that barely makes enough of an income to keep it going, who works incredibly hard to keep it prominent and relevant, that’s a kick in the guts every time it happens.

We’re not perfect, of course. We do occasionally get carried away with our headlines and we sometimes comment on stories that are frivolous or founded on shaky ground. We do watch our analytics and try to gauge what’s popular and then we follow up those areas in an attempt to get more popular content and become more well known.

We try not to do any of these things to the extent that they annoy our core community (I’ve repeatedly turned down lucrative forms of advertising for similar reasons) and we try to keep it all relevant and interesting, rather than spurious and baiting. Again, perhaps that’s just an indication of the ways in which TSA isn’t as good at this business as many other sites.

Of course, E3 is just around the corner and we’re all busy speculating on what might be there. But we’re also being very careful not to mention the things we know are going to be there but we’ve promised not to tell you about. I wonder if everyone will keep their word. Exciting, isn’t it?