Modern Warfare 3 Leak Day Was "Cool", Says Activision CEO

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Last week, gaming blog Kotaku posted a ton of leaked information about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, which was unannounced when the information was leaked.  The Call of Duty games have always been a staple of Activision’s holiday game lineup and it looks like the publisher was preparing a grand unveiling of the next game at E3 (coming in about two weeks). So, with having those plans spoiled by bloggers and leakers might make folks upset, right? Not exactly. Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg told gaming blog Joystiq that last week Friday was “a really kind of cool day.” Wait, cool?

Christopher Grant of Joystiq nabbed an interview with Hirshberg, and the CEO spoke candidly about what happened last week. Hirshberg says that Activision wasn’t pleased when their game’s lid was blown without their approval (“No one wakes up and thinks, ‘I hope there’s been a leak and our timing gets all messed up,’”), but the company remained flexible and tried to (as Hirshberg put it), “be comfortable of those rapids in this day and age”.

According to Joystiq, before he was at Activision, Hirshberg was at the famed Deutsch, Inc. ad agency, where he helped worked on the “Kevin Butler” fictional VP character for Sony’s PlayStation brand. Kevin Butler has been a huge success among the gaming crowd, so Hirshberg knows something about how the gaming community reacts to things.

Hirshberg explains in the Joystiq piece that the company considered different reactions to the leak, ranging from just letting it blow over to going into “crazed lock-down mode”. We assume that later option would include Activision suing Gawker Media and trying to get the leaked stuff yanked down through DMCA requests. That would probably just cost Activision a ton in legal fees for little result, and just give the world’s #1 publisher negative press. Instead, Hirshberg and Activision tried to turn “a crisis into an opportunity.”

Just after the leak, Activision released four teaser trailers for Modern Warfare 3. They aren’t really explicit, but they do tease the game in a cryptic way. The trailers have been popular on YouTube – Hirshberg tells Joystiq that they’ve surprised 4 million views combined after 3 days. After 3 days, the Modern Warfare 2 and Black Ops trailers had about 70,000 hits, each.

In addition to Hirshberg’s comments, we recently reported about Infinity Ward’s Robert Bowling hinting that some of the leaked information wasn’t accurate. So, if you choose to indulge in reading the spoilers or leaked information, beware!

What do you think about Activision’s decision to release the teaser trailers in reaction to the MW3 leaks?