REACTION - Xbox were the architects of their own leak, but it still sucks
Clouds in the sky.
By Jonathan Garrett
19/09/23
Despite initial speculation that the FTC or the courts made some kind of gargantuan screw up, it turns out that today’s mega ton nuke of an Xbox leak was in fact a major oversight from a Microsoft employee responsible for uploading documents relevant to the ongoing Activision buyout litigation. Even though we know it was of their own making, we can’t help but feel for Team Xbox.
It’s one thing to have game announcements or release windows sneak out ahead of time, but this is a vision roadmap with specific details of upcoming hardware, first party exclusives, budget spends, and a big picture look at where Xbox is heading. It’s the kind of thing reserved for executive meets, and then presented to the public with a targeted campaign, not via a series of PowerPoint slides.
It robs hundreds of devs and producers from the chance to share their work on their own terms. It just sucks. Although there’s a sort of perverse fascination in understanding the behind the scenes machinations of Xbox’s priorities, it’s basically impossible to find silver linings from Microsoft’s perspective. Spencer did the right thing by acknowledging it today, and reiterating that plans do evolve. There’s probably a lot of truth in there, and comparing the differences between this info dump and what ultimately ends up releasing will be an ongoing story.
TARPS?
At the bottom of some of our articles, you’ll see a series of absurd looking images (with equally stupid, in joke laden names). These are the TARP badges, which represent our ‘Totally Accurate Rating Platform’. They allow us to identify specific things, recognise positive or negative aspects of a games design, and generally indulge our consistent silliness with some visual tomfoolery.
