NEWS
by Mark Barley
Activision Responds To Modern Warfare 3 Info Leak
Activision's Eric Hirshberg has commented on last week's massive information leak regarding the firm's upcoming title, Modern Warfare 3.
Speaking with Joystiq, Hirshberg stated that the firm could have gone a multiple different directions regarding the information leak.
“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, and that’s what we tried to do on Friday,” he said.
“It would be really easy to just obsess over the event, which was the leak, and obsess over how it happened, and that’s only looking backwards,a nd in the meantime, your launch just started. And 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. That’s actually one of the things that separates good marketing from great marketing today.”
Hirshberg then stated that the company's big wigs had a meeting over what should be done in the wake of the leak, ultimately deciding to turn the leak into a "marketing win" for Activision. “It would be really easy to just obsess over the event, which was the leak, and obsess over how it happened, and that’s only looking backwards,a nd in the meantime, your launch just started. And 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. 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,” he 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.
“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. 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.’”
Hirshberg stated that when the first teaser for Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops were released they received 61,000 and 89,000 views respectively. When the firm released the teaser trailers for Modern Warfare 3 last week views for it were in the hundreds of thousands, eventually on their way to garnering millions of views. “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. 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.’”
“We kept coming back to the fans, to the people who love this game; who are just waiting; for whom that day was just a really cool day. All that interest for us we knew was harnessable in a positive way. The other thing we wanted to do was, if there’s gonna be a dialogue about our game, we want it to be between us and our fans and not between the leakers and our fans.
“You don’t want to spoil the surprises that the game has to offer. Leaks are not positive things, even though we might have used it as a way to amplify our initial viewership.”
Hirshberg ended his conversation by stating that whoever Kotaku (the original site that reported the leaked information) received the information from had deep access from within Activision and the Modern Warfare 3 team but not all of the leaked information was accurate. “You don’t want to spoil the surprises that the game has to offer. Leaks are not positive things, even though we might have used it as a way to amplify our initial viewership.”
Modern Warfare 3 is out on November 8.