Leaked Activision Memo Regarding Modern Warfare 3
With Modern Warfare 3‘s existence leaked, it disrupted Activision’s carefully planned announcement, but the publisher managed to turn what could have been a PR disaster into a marketing win. Activision spoke internally about the leak and how they aimed to catch the source – this email has now been leaked.
Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg – who used to work for the PR team that created Kevin Butler – sent an email to the publisher’s employees which was obtained by GiantBomb. The email started off with:
Hey gang. 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.
The email, however, does not give any indication on where the leak may have came from.
What I want to tell you about is how we handled the event internally. 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.
The assets Hirshberg is referring to is the official Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 teasers – all three of them. The email continued:
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. 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. 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.
He then went on to explain the result of the above:
The result? 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.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is currently scheduled for a release on November 8th, 2011, and the game will be fully unveiled tonight during the NBA Western Conference Finals at around 6pm PST. Amazon has the third installment in the series up for pre-order.
13 Responses to “Leaked Activision Memo Regarding Modern Warfare 3”
I wonder if the found a file with the name Wiki-leaks on it.. or Anonymous. Or their spawn child that wants to create his own Legion. They have been very active on trying to get at Sony and PlayStation especially.
I’m not sure if this is just a joke, but leak means internally so they know it was somebody that works for them. My guess is that if nobody’s been fired they don’t actually know who, but discovered potentially how.
The MW3 trailer is on youtube right now and its looking good, and of course you got the jackasses in the comments talking about battlefield 3
Of course they are, it is going to be the games direct “competition”. I had to put it in quotes because I don’t think it will be possible for BF3 to beat CoD(sales wise) since CoD is mainstream.
However I think mainly hardcore gamers(myself included) are excited about BF3 because it is doing something that feels new. (since BF2/2142 were like 5 years ago)
I will definitely rent CoD for the single player because I enjoy the blockbuster action and they always have great production value, but the MP is played out and I doubt they could add anything that could keep me interested for that long.
even the memo sounds childish
activision is such a lame company
like it or hate it , mw3 is going to be one of the top selling games this year , if not the top selling game , ppl just need to move on with there life and enjoy the games they like , and stop crying about games they don’t like. like the person before calling them childish then going on to say there a lame company acting like a child them sefs?
I think it’s more that COD gets more credit as “the greatest franchise of all time” than it really deserves that really bothers people…the sales figures don’t match the quality of the game. Games like Uncharted, inFamous, Killzone, etc. deserve the sales that COD gets and I think that is why people hate it. It’s not based on the merits of the actual game itself at all…but yes you are right. The only time MW3 talk bothers me is when people actually believe they are the greatest games of all time…I should just let it be, but when a game is basically re-released 3 times, just by taking the campaign that could fit into one game and splitting it up to fit into 3 and making slightly different maps, it just bothers me.
I feel that Final Fantasy is the greatest game of all time. The original one. To be clear.
See now what your doing is putting Final Fantasy in the firing range, if COD’s main weakness is releasing too many titles too soon of each other then Final Fantasy is way beyond Milking and into some kind of fourth dimension.
How many are there now? 14 and then there’s the spin-offs. You can like Final Fantasy but (in my opinion) apart from looking quite pretty they haven’t really done anything new either.
Well it gets this title as being one of the best games on the market without doing much in terms of innovention or originality. Fair enough if they just want to be on the borderline of mediocre, it’s not like there’s no other title like Call Of Duty on the market but it gets on my nerves when people talk like it’s never been done before.
If people want to just enjoy their games I’m fine with that, I agree that you shouldn’t call out people simply for liking a certain game but when you get all this hype about these games being the best game on the market, it’s like saying despite all the efforts anyone else ever makes it won’t matter because Infinity Ward can just release another COD and dominate everyone. They did the same with Halo 3, I think one reviewer even called it “The game of the decade”
does anyone else have a hard time taking this seriously?? I think it’s just a publicity stunt.
There was a leak but fortunately it happened late enough that everything was in place already? I call bull.
What are you to do when you’re releasing a game as big as COD but don’t have the genius behind it anymore? Create controversy that will get everyone talking about the game. Because if they’re thinking about it then they’ll consider checking it out which means for many of us that we’ll be buying it new. And who cares if it’s sold? Because Activision will already have the cash.
Creating controversy isn’t even a new or original idea. EA did it with Dante’s Inferno, Kevin Smith did it with Dogma, and GreenPeace did it when they let a Japanese whaler run over their multi-million dollar cigar boat.
I question the original leak, especially as it seems the email regarding the original leak that says “Hey! We’re doing good.” got leaked.
It must really suck being a game developer/company because you want to surprise your fans with a big announcement and then someone leaks your announcement and your big surprise announcement just goes out of the window. I’m glad Activision was able to take advantage of the surprise leak of Modern Warfare 3.