Summary
Nearly20,000 peopleare playingValve’snewest game and it hasn’t even been announced yet.Deadlockis currently in a semi-closed beta state, where any player with access to the game can invite other players to join them. It’s an odd way of running a playtest, but when has Valve ever played by the rules?
The problems arise with the secrecy surrounding the game. It’s already an open secret that the game exists, despite Valve’s lack of acknowledgement, and most people have a sense of how it plays thanks to leaks, rumours, and vague descriptions from those lucky few on the inside who are even sharing invites to each other via thededicated subreddit.But yesterday,The Verge published a report on the game, including a detailed review which included screenshots.
This has proved a controversial decision. Countless people have taken to social media to decry the article, from players, to other devs, to leakers who regularly unearth Valve’s secrets, and many have questioned the legality and ethics of The Verge’s reporting. But was the site right to publish a behind the scenes look at Valve’s first game in half a decade?
The main issue that people are bringing up about The Verge’s reporting is that the website has broken an NDA. It hasn’t. You don’t have to sign an NDA to play Deadlock, you don’t even have to agree to an embargo. What you do have to do is click ‘agree’ in a box that tells you to pinky promise not to share anything in the game. This is not a legally binding text box. It’s not even an official agreement between press and developer. It’s a gentleman’s handshake. The Verge decided to revoke that handshake, pulling their hand away at the last minute and shouting “too slow” with the glee of any good dad. Does that make the article illegal? No. Is it unethical? Also no. Is it what the devs wanted? You guessed it.
The author of The Verge’s article found that pressing ‘escape’ allowed him to bypass the agreement completely, which in his mind absolved him of any wrongdoing. That’s as silly an idea as believing the checkbox to be an NDA.
Here’s a quick breakdown of different types of agreements and the consequences of breaking them:
Valve has revoked the writer’s access to Deadlock at the time of writing, and The Verge is unlikely to be the first to hear about Half-Life 3, but no legally binding documents have been broken. I’ll reiterate one last time: there was no NDA.
More common than the NDA comments, however, are people upset that The Verge has “spoiled” the game, spoiled the devs' hard work by showing unfinished gameplay screenshots, and spoiled the fun for all the players yet to jump in. We’ll conveniently ignore all the Twitch streamers currently playing Deadlock for the following conversation.
What is the point of games journalism? Gamers seem to think that it’s to act as a PR mouthpiece, to parrot press releases exactly when their contacts in development studios tell them they’re allowed to. Don’t get me wrong, we work with PR people and we abide by embargoes in order to preserve relationships, but we don’t hold back on criticism for fear of losing access. It’s our job to report on crunch in our favourite studios, it’s our job to tell you if a hotly-anticipated upcoming game is a disappointment.
Any fool can rewrite a marketing blurb (see again: Twitch streamers), but how does that serve you, our readers? You can already read people saying unanimously good things about a game on the Steam description, in interviews published by internal interviewers, or from content creators paid to promote the game. Journalists don’t serve developers, they serve readers. So why should that stop with Deadlock?
Reporting on Deadlock isn’t going to change the industry. It doesn’t take the rigorous researching or delicate reporting of breaking a story about sexual misconduct from a prominent industry figure. But it’s reporting on a game that exists and people may want to know about. It might take a little steam out of Valve’s meticulously planned launch trailer, but that’s not a journalist’s problem. Pun very much intended, by the way.
It strikes me as odd that The Verge has come under such heavy fire for this one article when leakers are lauded as bastions of pro-game sentiment. How many people read the leaks about Insomniac’s Wolverine game? How many peopleplayedthe unfinished game? The double standard is clear to see.
The Verge isn’t clickbaiting you, it’s not violating an NDA for cheap sessions. It’s reporting. If you don’t want to know anything about Deadlock, don’t click the link. But I assure you that there are plenty of people who are interested, who are clamouring at the windows for a glimpse of a new Valve game, and that’s who the article is for.
It’s not for spoiler-averse Valve fanboys who have taken time out of their daily prayers at the altar of Gaben to send a vitriolic tweet to a journalist doing their job. It’s for people who understand that journalists aren’t a part of the games industry, they report on it. Even if sometimes that means messing up a marketing campaign and getting crossed off Gabe Newell’s Christmas card list.
