Prior to announcing Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 a few days ago, a torrent of leaks about the upcoming game surfaced all over the internet. If you missed those, then here is some reading to catch you up:
Modern Warfare 3 release date and artwork
First Modern Warfare 3 screenshot leaked
Modern Warfare 3 – Details unearthed
Modern Warfare 3 perks, weapons, maps leaked
First Modern Warfare 3 details emerge
In an interesting turn, a further leak has emerged, this time detailing Activision’s response to the previous leaks. GiantBomb staff managed to get their hands on an internal memo circulated at Activision headquarters.
“Hey gang,” opens the email candidly, with Activision’s publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg addressing all Activision employees.
“I wanted to reach out to you today and address the Call of Duty intellectual property leak that occurred last Friday. Of course, Activision takes very seriously any abuse of our intellectual property – the event is under investigation and we’re confident it will be resolved quickly.”
“What I want to tell you about is how we handled the event internally,” he continued. “We were lucky in that we were very close to our scheduled reveal date, and therefore, we had a number of assets that had not yet been released, but were ready to go.”
“When it came to light that we had suffered a significant security breach, it became clear that a leak of this size had the potential to throw our launch off of its schedule, or worse, blunt its momentum,” he wrote. “As a company, we needed to look both backwards and forwards simultaneously. Of course we needed to immediately begin finding the source of the leak. But we also needed to deal with the fact that, like it or not, our launch had just begun.”
“Our leadership team and key members of the Call of Duty team met to discuss strategy,” he said. “I, for one, was incredibly proud of the team’s performance in that critical meeting. Instead of panicking, we took the fire of interest that had been started by the leak, and poured gasoline on it. Through Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, we released our four teasers (which were not scheduled to launch for another week) onto the web. With equal agility, our worldwide sales organizations managed to put both the retail and .com presale programs and assets into launch mode in no-time flat. Everybody involved delivered under pressure.”
In terms of the results of the leak, the numbers speak for themselves:
“We had over 4.8 million hits on the various Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 teasers over those first 48 hours. To put that in perspective, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops had 61,000 and 89,000 hits, respectively, in their first two days. Pre-sales for MW3 are off to an amazing start. Perhaps, most importantly, we migrated the dialogue from one that was between our players and the leakers, to one between our players and us.”
“Very few companies could have woken up with a crisis of this magnitude, and gone to bed with an undeniable win.”
Modern Warfare 3 is expected to be released on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 in November 2011.
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