Valve
There was a video game journalism dust-up yesterday when The Verge reported a lengthy story on the current test for Deadlock, the unannounced, in-production 6v6 hero shooter from Valve, when the game asked them nicely not to.
This led to a firestorm of anger against The Verge and its writers, asking the question, “Why would you publish this when they said not to?”
But stepping back, the real question is:
“Why is Valve letting 23,000 concurrent players into its unannounced, very unfinished shooter with an open invite system, including giving codes straight to journalists, not requiring any NDAs or even asking them to agree to an embargo?”
Deadlock
Granted I know that Valve does not release games often at all, but this is either A) an oversight, imagining tens of thousands of players and potentially hundreds of journalists and creators would abide by a simple “please don’t share” prompt, or B) they knew this would leak and were ready not to care about that happening. Though they did ban The Verge from the test as soon as their story went up.
It is beyond common practice for developers to let players play their games early to test them outside of the company, but for “normal” players that is almost always covered by a very strict NDA that if broken, can result in actual legal consequences. Such NDAs have been issued for Bungie’s Marathon tests recently, for example.
Marathon
In the journalism industry, companies can request you abide by embargoes, which may not be legally binding, but if you start breaking them left and right you’ll end up on a lot of blacklists and severely limit your reach.
In this case it was just a simple check box about not sharing, one that you didn’t even have to click on. And a game with tens of thousands of active players that you can even track on Steam charts really does not have a right to demand it remain a total secret with absolutely zero means of enforcing that.
You can think what you want about The Verge or its decision to preview the game, but much of this is on Valve and is nothing very standard NDAs for a super early test like this would not have solved. It is unclear why they did not even take the most basic steps to secure information about the game, as it has of course leaked across a number of lower profile outlets and creators already. It’s ultimately on them for choosing to roll things out like this.
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