If you’ve ever wondered how video game studios determine who reveals their massive secrets, here’s a novel Bloomberg An interview with former Bungie general counsel Don McGowan provides some very fascinating details about how it’s done.
“We had a situation with a content creator,” McGowan said. “We had a community day where we invited a bunch of community content creators and we opened up the stream. One of them took pictures of his computer and posted them, for profit. Not under his own name, he just leaked them to gain influence on the websites he was leaking them to.”
McGowan explained that there were 12 streamers in the leaked conversation, so Bungie started looking at all of them more closely. “One of them had two computers, and he was streaming from his other computer one day,” he said. “We saw that the icons at the bottom of his screen were exactly the same as one of the pictures. Okay, that’s our guy. So we started a conversation with him.”
The streamer in question denied being responsible for the leak, saying his roommate must have secretly taken a photo of his screen. Bungie dismissed the claim on two grounds, according to McGowan: “One, we don’t care. Two, and more importantly, my friend, no, that was not true.
“Because if you look at the angle of the camera, you can tell that the camera was held in the photographer’s right hand. We can see the room you’re in now. Your door is on the left. So either your roommate came in, walked behind you on the right and took the picture and you didn’t notice — or you took the picture yourself.”
McGowan didn’t name the streamer in question, but shortly after the interview was published, Twitch streamer Ekuegan effectively confirmed that he was the leaker. Ekuegan was banned from Destiny 2 in 2023 following what Bungie called “indisputable evidence” that he was behind multiple Community Summit leaks; Ekuegan vehemently denied wrongdoing at the time and continued to do so in a message released today.
“I will die on this hill, I never took any pictures and I never sent anything to anyone,” Ekuegan said he tweeted“The only thing I did wrong was I recorded the last 45 minutes because it was done quickly. I watched it and got rid of it right away.
“Sat down with @JojoDaFoxx and we found out my computer was compromised. Someone was on my system without me knowing, I sent it to @Bungie as evidence. It’s not cool to smear someone’s name with something that won’t hold up in court.”
McGowan said his approach to dealing with leakers varies depending on the nature of the leaks. In cases where someone leaks a story about sexual harassment at a studio, for example, he said he will try to track down the source “to find out if what they’re saying is true” and who is responsible for the abuse.
He also told a story from his time at the Pokémon Company where a kid discovered how to extract images from the Pokémon trading card game and started sharing them.
“So I called his mom and said, ‘Listen, I wanted to tell you what Andrew’s doing on the computer,’” McGowan said. “She says, ‘So you’re saying he hacked your game.’ And I hear in the background, ‘I didn’t hack anything!’ I start describing it in more technical terms. She says, ‘Is that a problem?’ I say, ‘Hacking software is a federal crime, but I don’t want that to be the topic of conversation. Why don’t we make it a conversation about the good and bad things he can do with a computer?’”
It’s a fun interview, but it also offers an fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how massive companies enforce their will — and a reminder that no matter how careful you are, you may not be covering your tracks as well as you think. Read the full story at Bloomberg.
