PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox… where do all the leaks come from? All eyes are on the employees of this essential platform

Game news PS5, Nintendo Switch, Xbox… where do all the leaks come from? All eyes are on the employees of this essential platform

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Repeated leaks for a long time

If you have been following video game news for several years, you have surely noticed that there are more and more leaks concerning announcements of new video games. While many players wait patiently to discover the next releases in the rules of the art by following the official conferences, some people in search of buzz manage to find the information before it is revealed to the general public and spread it immediately on the Internet. Rather rare a few years ago, this phenomenon is becoming more and more common and publishers and players alike do not necessarily know how to deal with it. However, a pattern seems to emerge among the most major leak cases.

In 2017, for example, it was Nintendo which bore the brunt of this type of practice. While they had not yet officially spoken about this game, the existence of Yoshi’s Crafted World had leaked on the web, notably via a Reddit post on which we could see a video thumbnail as well as the title “Yoshi for Nintendo Switch – Official Game Trailer – Nintendo E3 2017“. Today, thanks to a 404 Media reportwe learn that this leak was originated by a Google employee. And this may well be the case for many others.

You probably remember it, but one of the most recent cases of this type of leak was certainly that of the first official trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI. While Rockstar had planned to unveil it on a specific date and everyone was already starting to get impatient, the trailer in question was released on YouTube in the middle of the night, several hours before the scheduled period. An act which forced the developers to pull the rug out from under the person responsible for the leak by releasing the trailer themselves immediately, causing a real tidal wave in the press and among players. What do they have in common with Yoshi’s escape? Both videos were already uploaded to YouTube and were just waiting to be broadcast at the scheduled time.

Much more recently, it is the State of Play from the night of May 30 to 31, 2024 who could have suffered exactly the same fate. Highly anticipated by PlayStation fans, this first conference on the sidelines of Summer Game Fest took place in the form of a video also uploaded in advance, and the journalist Tom Henderson ofInsiderGaming claims to have received the complete list of games that were going to be presented from four different people, 18 hours before the broadcast of the State of Play. According to him, all these leaks have exactly the same origin: certain employees of the YouTube branch of Google.

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The employees of this platform in the viewfinder

Based on the same 404 Media report mentioned above, we can determine thatone and the same Google employee is behind several leaks of Nintendo announcements. But according to Tom Henderson’s sources, this case is far from isolated and would in fact be a simple sample of a real internal security problem at YouTube and Google.

The American firm has also carried out at least two internal investigations to try to resolve the problem. The second and most recent was made after the leak of the GTA 6 trailer (even if it had no clear conclusion regarding its origin), but the first took place following a very specific event surrounding the content creator KSI. In case you don’t know him, this British influencer is particularly popular internationally and regularly makes videos on YouTube, including a concept called “Try not to make me laugh”. Once a week, he published a video in which he presented himself in front of other funny videos, and he revealed an Amazon gift card that became more and more expensive the more he got bored. Small problem: each of the gift cards were already used even before the video was published. At the request of KSI, an investigation was therefore carried out internally at YouTube and the conclusion was clear: some employees had watched the video in advance and helped themselves.

According to Tom Henderson’s internal sources, “your videos aren’t just viewed to approve monetization. Employees watch these videos all the time”. We then understand that any video uploaded to the platform can therefore be viewed by several YouTube employees and they do not hesitate to do so, even without a desire for moderation behind it. This obviously includes videos from any user or videographer, but especially all those from video game publishers who plan to unveil new features shortly. All it takes is for an employee to be aware of the gold mine they have before their eyes and not to have many principles for a leak to appear on the web.

Unfortunately, this type of problem is not likely to be solved overnight. Indeed, it is absolutely impossible for publishers to do without preventive uploading on the platform, if only to ensure that the encoding has time to be done in the best possible quality or for reasons related to marketing. However, one could quite imagine that Google ensures that reliable employees take care of this kind of videos, failing to find another system. In any case, now you know where some of the recent leaks are coming from, although obviously not all of them are YouTube’s fault.