(To emphasize: my opinion on this is basically worthless. But as someone on the outside who enjoys looking in, this incident has provided me with a lot of food for thought.)

The hot-button Discourse on social media in the wake of the Insomniac leaks has a lot of people knuckling down on black-and-white moral positions. I feel it does disservice to what are actually multiple truths that run counter to each other at first glance, but are all valid and are worth consideration.

I don't think games journalists should ever be beholden to the PR cycle of corporations and should not exist as hype mouthpieces. I believe pretending leaks should never be reported on, as some are suggesting, is ludicrous and plain irresponsible by way of omission. If there is content providing industry insight, I would hope games journalism should feel obligated to report its existence - regardless of the illegality by which it was obtained.

But they are also reporting on art, and I think we need to be mindful about situations in which the artist may be compromised, especially in scenarios where this art is extremely unfinished or easily misrepresented. Signal boosting that compromise in irresponsible ways really only exacerbates that harm.

To me, being mindful about this is not the same as "cozying up" or becoming a marketing stooge. These compromises have real impacts on the health and safety of individual artists. Boiling down arguments against reporting on leaks as people treating corporations as best friends - as I have seen some journalists doing - comes off as deeply reductive and boasting a moral superiority that seems kind of unearned, and the "what about meeting review embargoes and previews" or "what about previous XYZ leak" hand-wringing smokescreens the whole issue.

To me, outlets reporting such events at a high level is fine, even necessary. Selectively examining information in leaks, that have an impact on the creative landscape, actually fulfils the social responsibility of journalism.

However, breaking down the news into individual specific clickables with no function past "look what's coming!" as some outlets have openly done, just looks to me like access journalism enabled by theft. Even without showing the leaked content, low-effort articles about extremely unfinished work only increase the likelihood of bad actors searching for it themselves, and dogpiling employees already frustrated by having their art misrepresented.

Pretending that Just Doing Your Job absolves games media of this kind of responsibility is delusional. Game devs have regularly mentioned that the way leaked content is reported directly impacts the art itself and behaving like journalistic integrity exists in a vacuum, for an entertainment industry whose consumers regularly invent uniquely awful ways to abuse creatives, to me displays kind of a lack of empathy for the people that make up its lifeblood.