Leaks suck, but dealing with them in a mature, responsible way shows a side to publishers that we rarely see. Case in point: the recent Modern Warfare 3 leaks, which Activision have – yesterday evening – responded to.
“Friday [the day of the leak] was a really interesting, a really kind of cool day,” said Activision’s CEO Eric Hirshberg. Planning out a marketing strategy for a game as big as MW3 takes months, and it’s meant to run on a carefully scripted schedule for equally as long.
“No one wakes up and thinks, ‘I hope there’s been a leak and our timing gets all messed up'” he said. “If members of the government and the military aren’t safe from this stuff, it’s a part of our world now.”
“While it’s definitely not cool to steal other people’s intellectual property, and while it’s definitely not cool to leak stuff that’s not yours, there are ways that you can respond that actually turn the lemons into lemonade,” he added. “And that’s what we tried to do on Friday.”
“You aren’t always in control of the schedule and the dialogue, and you need to be comfortable of those rapids in this day and age,” he continued. “That’s actually one of the things that separates good marketing from great marketing today.”
“We woke up with a marketing crisis and wanted to go to bed with a marketing win,” Hirshberg said.
“So what we did was we kind of took that exact conversation we were having in our conference room outside and had it publicly in social media. We reached out to our fans and we said, ‘Look, we didn’t schedule this. 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.'”
Those assets? The teaser trailers, which have been phenomenally successful. Three million views in just two days.
In our opinion, this is how you should deal with events like this – rather than just shove it under the carpet or try to get the content taken down, you follow up with the big guns, and there’s little bigger than a Modern Warfare teaser trailer. Let’s hope the full trailer, which is meant to air next Monday, is just as powerful.
Source: Joystiq.
tantalus_blank
Yes, Activision are hated because they are a big company. Everyone defends Bobby Kotick by saying he’s a great business man but a clueless gamer, which is what you need for running a big company. I respectfully disagree; I believe someone making that much money should have some kind of interest in the medium he’s in, or else we get faceless corporations who don’t give two hoots about their customers, making them so much more hatable than an indie publisher/developer like Mojjang.