10 Embarrassing Accidental Video Game Leaks

Hack into Valve, steal their game, ask for a job. Profit?

assassins creed odyssey
Ubisoft

Nothing is sacred in the online world as far as juicy video game leaks go.

We just can't help ourselves, can we? As soon as something pertaining to an exciting upcoming title surfaces on the internet, we all pounce upon it, eager to soak up those exclusive, as yet unreleased details before the rest of the world.

This is, of course, heartbreaking for game developers. Spending years pouring your heart and soul into a project only to have it accidentally leaked - or worse, stolen - has to hurt. But sometimes developers can use this massive hype to their advantage, capitalizing on leaks to actually benefit the game's marketing.

Still you can't deny that sometimes people can get careless. We're only human, right?

From 'Oops we left the microphone on' to 'maybe we should have named our files more carefully', these are the industry's most embarrassing cases of video game leaks.

10. Starcraft II: Heart Of The Swarm

assassins creed odyssey
Blizzard / Eurogamer

Blizzard's StarCraft released in 1998 to go on to be labelled as the best real-time strategy game ever made. The game received a generously large expansion pack called StarCraft: Brood War later that same year.

When the hotly anticipated sequel, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty released in 2010, it was pretty safe to assume that at the first sign of initial success, Blizzard would start planning an expansion pack. Sure enough, Blizzard's storyboard team were already working on Heart of the Swarm in early 2010 while Wings of Liberty's gameplay was being refined.

What nobody predicted, however, was that the expansion's ending would appear online before the game even had a release date.

The clip in question appeared to be an ending to the game's campaign, showing early stages of character animation, often merging with storyboards and missing lipsync. However the inclusion of the voice acting led people to believe that this was a credible leak.

Blizzard decided not to comment on the speculation, but sure enough, when Heart of the Swarm finally released over 2 years later, fans were surprised to see that the cheesy ending from the leak was in fact the real ending.

Talk about spoilers.

Contributor
Contributor

Video Editor and recent addition to the madness of the Gaming team, when she's not chatting about games, thinking about games, or playing games, she's streaming them on twitch. Tweet her pictures of dogs @DontRachQuit