Video games are clearly not an environment spared from leaks, far from it. While some insiders are able to provide information ahead of time thanks to their sources, others proceed differently. In fact, new revelations have surfaced regarding leaks linked to Youtube.
Youtube employees responsible for leaks
404 Media claims to have obtained an internal Google database tracing six years of potential privacy and security issues. We thus find information about an employee who would have been at the origin of numerous leaks regarding Nintendo announcements.
For his part, InsiderGaming confides that this is in reality only “the tip of the iceberg in this new culture of Google/YouTube leaks”. Indeed, the report obtained by 404 Media is only based on information dating from 2013 to 2018, but the same problems persist today.
Tom Henderson said last week that to his knowledge, Youtube had “investigated twice […] on cases where employees had violated their contractual agreements by accessing backend data.
Indeed, at the end of 2022, the video “One Of The Funniest Try Not To Laughs Ever” by “JJ Olatunji” was supposed to allow viewers to win $1,000 Amazon gift cards whenever he laughed. However, all cards were reportedly exchanged before the video was even made public!
Pressure from JJ Olatunji and his team would have pushed Google to carry out an investigation within YouTube, thus leading to “the dismissal of certain people, even those who were not aware of the scandal”.
One of Insider Gaming's sources said:
Your videos aren't just watched for monetization approval. They are constantly watched by employees.
Problems that persist
Still according to Insider Gaming, a second internal investigation was carried out within YouTube following the leak of GTA 6 last December. Tom Henderson, however, is unable to confirm whether the investigation was actually linked to what happened with Rockstar's game, as it was already “common knowledge in the industry that numerous leaks of video games come from unlisted, scheduled or private YouTube videos.
Regarding last week's State of Play, only 18 hours after the event was scheduled on YouTube, 4 people sent Tom Henderson the complete list of games present.
Some game names were slightly different from others, probably due to the different regions and the rush to write everything down to be first, but they were all generally accurate. One even told me that the information was sold to an unidentified person for a three-figure sum, who then asked him to distribute it to other people to ensure its validity.
This must obviously be a particularly delicate situation for publishers and developers, who certainly do not want their announcements to leak before their time.