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July 19, 2004 Link to this post
A comment about leaks
Many of you probably saw threads on various Halo or Xbox forums this weekend about leaked beta screenshots. Bungie has yet to make a public announcement about this (it's unlikely that they ever will, actually), but there are many clues that suggest that these aren't fakes; that they did, in fact, come from a beta version of Halo 2. I wanted to take a moment to state our official policy on leaks like this, and to explain why I think they're a problem. We will NOT allow links to these pictures to be posted to our forum - as we find them, we'll remove them, and if people persist, they'll be banned. As one of our admins posted last night, if you can't find them for yourself, that's YOUR problem. Many folks are asking what the big deal is - they're just screenshots, and not even very exciting ones... who cares? Putting aside the legal issues (which aren't actually minor), there's a really good reason to keep pics like this away from the public... many casual gamers don't realize that a beta version is NOT a final version. Often, there are elements that have been added specifically for beta testers - debugging information, or extra on-screen displays, so that testers can provide useful feedback to the creation team. (Beta testing isn't a game; that should have been made clear from the recent Bungie.net article. It's pretty serious business.) When beta shots hit the public, though, many people are oblivious to the fact that they're looking at a test image. We've already had folks griping on our forum about how cluttered the HUD looks, and how disappointed they are in Bungie for putting so much crap onscreen. Others read these comments, maybe without even looking at the pictures themselves, and the ideas spread... and before too long, there's buzz about how crappy the interface of Halo 2 is. Only... it's NOT the interface of Halo 2 - it's the interface for BETA TESTERS. Boiled down: the final product can NOT be judged by the appearance of an early beta - but because many people can't make distinctions like that, pictures of early betas do NOT belong in the public eye. (Louis Wu 11:20:13 UTC)
