Xbox executive Aaron Greenberg has spoken about leaks in the games industry, saying they're the "nature of the beast".
"Leaks are something that sort of just happens in technology, right? iPhones leak, new TV models leak, and games leak," Greenberg during the latest Inner Circle podcast. "It's just the nature of the business. It happens. We don't plan for it. It's usually unexpected."
"With the Internet and with so many people trying to guess what you're doing or speculate on what you're doing, quite often a lot of the things that appear as leaks either are not true at all or a lot of the information is wrong, but some of it might be right," he added. "Then there's stuff that's just 100 percent right. It's out of our control."
"We don't get too distracted by it," Greenberg continued. "Our general philosophy is we don't comment on any of them. Whether it's the many, many things that aren't right or things that, 'Wow, they really got almost all of it wrong, but they did get something right,' we just don't comment. We generally tend to like to unveil things the way that we plan to."
Microsoft is certainly familair with leaks, in January of last year an anonymous NeoGAF member said the company would release Halo 2: Anniversary and a white Xbox One in 2014 with Halo 5 and Fable Legends coming in 2015. So far the tipster has been right.
Xbox spends a lot of time on its announcements, making sure they're pitched just right to fans. Leaks can disrupt those plans and show games in a bad light. While he's not a fan of leaks, he says they're part of being in the game industry and every publisher has had to deal with leaks, "It keeps us on our toes. It's the nature of the beast. It's definitely not going to change or go away. There's no silver bullet for it."
