The Insomniac Hack Reveals The Ugly Truth Of Video Game Hype

This morning, hackers released a mega-dump of data from Insomniac Games, after parent company Sony declined to pay the group a ransom. According to reports, that data includes personal information about employees, as well as a ton of information about upcoming games, including a slate of Marvel games stretching into 2030.

There’s been a rise in hacks of big game companies in the past few years, with CDPR having a ransom attack in 2021 and Rockstar seeing GTA VI leaked after a hack in 2022. For the developers affected, these situations are surely a nightmare: alongside their unfinished work being tossed up online for hordes of people to dissect and criticize, there are very real and frightening safety concerns with personal and financial data falling into the hands of bad actors. 

Today, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Pawel Sasko tweeted, “I do remember how we felt when hackers stolen [sic] our data, amount of stress and paperwork it required to protect ourselves and families.” Firaxis writer Emma Kidwell tweeted, “My heart goes out to my friends at Insomniac. What happened isn’t only incredibly violating, but demoralizing and disgusting.” Yong Yea, a voice actor in Insomniac’s Spider-Man 2 among Yakuza and other games, tweeted, “No developer deserves what hackers are doing to Insomniac right now. Beyond the leaked materials for upcoming games like Wolverine, they're essentially doxing the employees by publicizing private & personal info, thereby endangering their lives, & all right before the Holidays.”

Beyond games industry workers expressing sympathy for peers who are experiencing a very, very bad day, games journalists and players are debating what to do about the hacked data itself. I’ve seen folks admonish journalists and creators not to report on or make content about the hacked information, and other journalists and creators vow not to cover it. It’s a complicated issue: there’s information people want to know, and you can do your job as a journalist by giving it to them. If your work exists in the ad-based space, there’s also value to the company you work for–and thus to you–to share information you know lots of people will click on. At the same time, that information has been made available by the hackers; curious fans can seek it out without your help. As Game Developer journalist Bryant Francis pointed out, “Whatever knowledge people gain about Sony's business or upcoming games comes with a high, high price for the people who make them.” If a journalist believes that price is too high, they can avoid it without feeling like they’re committing the cardinal journalistic sin of hiding true information, because they aren’t that information’s sole conduit.

That Insomniac’s hacked information was released today is morally unambiguous news; something unusual has happened that people would want to know about. But are the contents of the hack worth reporting? Upcoming games and what’s in them is news in the games beat because the games industry is fervently future-looking but obsessed with secrecy about that future. PR and marketing departments carefully control the flow of information, conditioning journalists and players alike toward hype. The future has value in this space, a fact the hackers were gambling on by hoping Sony would pay to keep control of that future. Many games journalists know the value of that future too, because they prop it up or benefit from it, even when it starts to muddy the waters between journalism and marketing. Some games journalists attend previews and accept embargoes because they know their readers want that information, or because they got the chance to see something cool and are excited to tell readers how cool it is. Other times, it doesn’t hurt that playing ball with PR can help their own bottom lines, or that they can make a whole career knowing, or insinuating they know, what games are coming before everyone else does. 

But on days like today, when information doesn’t follow the established channels of PR to journalists to readers, all of us find the artifice laid bare. If how an upcoming game looks is important and worth reporting on, then isn’t that true even when we’re not given permission to say so by PR departments? An outlet or creator taking that assumption to its logical end and producing stories and videos about “Every Upcoming Insomniac Marvel Game” is just doing the work that’s expected of them. You could see it as a bad look, as callous and mercenary, but it’s just a different form of something games journalism does every day. 

If all that feels gross, a games journalist can decide to turn their back on this particular gear of the hype machine today because they don’t think it’s worth the harm to developers. This has the power to put all that hype in context. Deciding I don’t have to pay attention to this exposes the flimsy foundations of the entire “preview” and “first look” ecosystem, which takes as a given that this stuff matters. It raises the question of when else it might not matter: Should we not rush to hit review embargoes when they mean long nights of playing and writing? Should we refuse previews when their purpose is just to put pre-order money in a company’s pockets? When else should we put people ahead of hype? When else could we step off this ride?  

It’s easy for me to pontificate about this from my position at Aftermath, where there’s no boss demanding pictures of future Spider-Men. I don’t envy my colleagues wrestling with conflicting demands. People–whether that’s developers, journalists, or players and readers–will always matter more than what’s in a video game and the coffers that information fattens, whether those coffers belong to hackers or corporations. If that’s true today, it can be true tomorrow too.