Q

Anonymous asked:

How do you expect MS and Nintendo to respond to the legal leaks of their future plans? What considerations are weighed when responding to any leak?

A

I expect them to deal with the leaks the same way the rest of us deal with leaks. We might acknowledge the leaks exist, but we don’t talk about the content of the leaks publicly and we adjust our planned information rollout to take the leaks into account. When it comes to leaks, the leaked information generally falls into one of two categories.

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The first category is “information that is not or no longer accurate” - things like cut content, proposals for gameplay that didn’t get the green light, prototypes we chose not to pursue, ideas we decided against, and so on. The playbook for the first category is pretty easy, we will never talk about it because it won’t ever happen. We might acknowledge that such things exist, but we won’t discuss them other than to say “We looked into it and decided to go another way.”

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The second category is “information that is still accurate”. Because it is still accurate, it is likely that we already had a plan and schedule in place for when, where, and how to reveal that information to the public. This is what the marketing teams work on - they plan out the what, when, and how of our reveals in order to drum up interest in our new products. In this case, the reveal schedule suddenly has a bunch of gaps in it where there should be new reveals. In a way not too different from rearranging a box of chocolates to hide the fact that some have been eaten, it is up to the marketing department to rearrange the reveal schedule to plug the holes with what we still have. That might mean coming up with new things to reveal, reshuffling the reveal schedule so that some previously-planned events now get nothing, or both.

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