Too many leaks in the industry?

Close your windows, shut your eyes and for the love of god disconnect your internet and turn of your twitter feed and Email applications. Halo 4 has leaked and the internet is all in a buzz over it. As of yet the leak has not been nailed down, and 343 have preferred not to comment on the matter, as yet.
“If you’re interested in staying spoiler-free, we encourage you to exercise caution when visiting various websites, social networking services, and forums.” The creators add that “Going dark is a customary pre-launch tradition for many gamers, and now may be the time to do that. Thank you to those of you that are reporting the leaks, and we’ll see you Nov. 6.”
This is, of course not the first game to be leaked, nor will it be the last, but when it comes to big selling titles, you really are better of just setting up for a blackout and wait it out, I myself have had one spoilers dropped on me from other journalists throughout my career, and I would hate for the same thing to happen to you.
But this isn’t the only case of a leak this year. Not a month ago, we saw a leak that was of course related to Resident Evil 6. So this time Capcom were forced to blanket the media with as much coverage as they possibly could in an attempt to stop anyone from either making the leak a big deal.
“Capcom is currently undertaking a thorough investigation into reports that Resident Evil 6 is being sold ahead of its official October 2 release date,” said the company in a statement. “At this time, all we can add is that it would appear this unfortunate incident is limited to a small quantity of stolen copies of the German USK PlayStation 3 version of the game.”
So I find myself asking why do people leak games? If you stop and think about it, there is absolutely nothing to be gained from it. Even leaking game details and names is pointless, just plain daft. For example, someone actually leaked a list of the Steam Summer Sale listings for this year. Remember this?

• Adam’s Venture Complete Bundle Retail

• Anno 2070 Pack

• Batman Arkham Asylum, Batman Arkham City and Batman Gotham City Imposters Bundle

• Bethesda Collection (BRINK, Fallout New Vegas, Skyrim, Hunted)

• Bioshock Franchise Pack

• BIT.TRIP.BEAT Bundle

• BIT.TRIP.RUNNER Bundle

• Carpe Fulger Bundle (Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale, Chantelise, Fortune Summoners)

• Civilization Collection

• Command and Conquer Franchise

• Dawn of War Franchise Pack

• Dead Island Complete

• Duke Nukem Bundle

• Foreign Legion Bundle

• Kalypso Collection (Tropico, Jagged Alliance, Airline Tycoon, etc)

• Majesty Franchise

• Paradox Collection (Magicka + dlcs, Mount and Blade, etc)

• Pendulo Adventure Pack

• Railworks 3 – Summer Sale Collection

• Red Orchestra Franchise Pack (ROW)

• S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bundle

• Saints Row: The Third Franchise Pack

• Sniper Elite Franchise Pack

• Square Hit Collection (Hitman, Tomb Raider, Just Cause 2, Deus Ex, Deus Ex

• Human Revolution, Quantum Conundrum, Thief)

• Stardock Collection Pack

• Strategy First Complete Pack

• Sword of the Stars Franchise

• THQ Collection (Dawn of War, Warhammer, Stalker, Nexuiz, Darksiders, Metro 2033, etc)

• Total War: Shogun 2 Pack

• Victoria Franchise

• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine Pack

• Wings of Prey

Now for those of you who are aware (no doubt most of you) Steam is a monolithic supplier of downloadable games, that have recently expanded their online empire to include software as well. Now if you were to make a game, and hope that keeping your information, limited, slightly exaggerated and impressive sounding to boost your sales, well that’s perfectly alright, but what if someone leaked your game. That’s years worth of work, and over night you have lost a huge portion of  your sales. Sure the people who leak the game could argue that they were only potential sales, but the terminology is irrelevent, taking someones IP and leaking it, is legally considered theft. So it is by no means a small and insignificant part of the industry, the fact of the matter is that there are too many leaks in the industry nowadays.

How does this Benefit anyone? So after running a couple of numbers I found out that per 3 downloadable game releases, one of them is generally leaked, so I plan on turning this into  a long running piece in development. I will compile the games that are leaked, or which games receive leaks in regards to content, and around that I will build an article outlining the actual impact of leaking, hopefully with some developer quotes. So let’s see what this will become, who knows maybe leaks are good, within reason, or maybe they are just terrible things that happen to hard working dev teams. Either way, time will tell.