A plan to stop video game industry leaks, with the help of AI

At GDC, I watched some demonstrations that might give leakers second thoughts

Photo of the video game Subnautica, projected on a screen during a GDC talk. The game was running with an alpha blend over it. The nearly-imperceptible effect uniquely marks this copy of the game, according to EchoMark. Photo: Game File

“You probably don’t like us,” Troy Batterberry said to me in a reasonable tone, when I introduced myself a couple of weeks ago at GDC.

I had identified myself as a member of the media, as someone from the other side of the kind of situations he’d spent the last half hour talking about: leaks.

I told him there were no hard feelings. I was just interested in people doing interesting things.

Batterberry’s session had been one of my most-anticipated of GDC. I’d been looking forward to it for weeks, since I’d combed through the show schedule and found, predictably, dozens of talks about the wonders of AI. My eyes had been drawn to a more surprising talk—his—that was about how AI could somehow help video game companies with “stopping insider leaks.”

We’ve all seen some insider leaks: memos from gaming CEOs announcing policy changes or layoffs, trailers and screenshots for unannounced games, official fact sheets for games not yet made official.

Was AI coming for some of my peers’ sources? And for some of mine?

The jury is still out on whether AI can speed up a game studio’s workflow, illustrate useful concept art, help code a game effectively, lower online toxicity, and recommend good games for people to try.

But could it also create a new era of gaming in which a publisher or studio can confidently keep the news of a new Blast Corps to itself, until it is good and ready to market that news? Could AI eradicate the phenomenon of the leaked corporate memo? Could AI be so good at stopping internal leaks that attorneys for Cognosphere, Epic and other leak-minded video game legal teams would soon be bored?

By the time Batterberry was showing GDC attendees that his company, EchoMark, was developing what he called “a whole other level of watermarking,” I knew I’d chosen the right talk to attend.