Activision CEO on 2011 MW3 Leaks

When Activision’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 had bunches of its details leaked by Kotaku in the summer of 2011, it definitely caused executives in Activision to start sweating. The company’s CEO, Eric Hirshberg, has recently discussed details with how he and his staff turned those leaky lemons into delicious, billions-of-dollars-generating lemonade.

After receiving the distressing news in his physical therapist’s office—he had just undergone back surgery—Hirshberg went into the office to discuss the leaks and their impact with his staff:

“”I came in [to this meeting] and everyone’s looking at me like, ‘What do we do?’ and I’m like, ‘I’m not sure I know, I’ve never been through this before,” he said during a talk at CES last week.

Soon after the initial reactions were out of the way, Hirshberg sent the security people on their way while he and the rest of the staff figured out how to make the leak work in Activision’s favor:

“Like it or not, our launch just started. It wasn’t on our timetable and we didn’t instigate it, but it’s out there, folks, and we can’t put it back in. And our fans didn’t do anything wrong today – they’re having a great day! They’re really interested in this game, they really want to know what happened, they’re poring over all of the details trying to figure out what’s true, what’s not, is it real, is it not – and we weren’t ready for this, but we’ve got to deal with it.

“And the wrong way to deal with it is to let the process of figuring out what happened with the leak be the public-facing sort of marketing message. That has to happen and that’s important work, but that’s not the dialogue you want to be having with your fans. Because you go into that silverback gorilla corporate lockdown mode and it’s not appealing, it’s not fun.”

By “leaning into” the leak, the team went and cut their teasers and promos for immediate release on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, building on the considerable buzz that the leak had already started to generate. Hirshberg and Activision’s actions illustrate the way that corporations actually benefit from overexcited fans doing things the company may not expect or want to happen.

“A little fire of interest about our game just got started today, and on most other days of the year we would come in and say, ‘Hey, everyone’s on the internet talking about us,’ and that would be a good thing, right? Why is it because we didn’t instigate it and we didn’t control it, why does that instantly make it a bad thing? It’s not.

“So what we did was we took the fire of interest that had been lit and we poured gasoline on it.”

Via Eurogamer

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