Zach Wilson

This is such typical shitty games industry behavior. At big companies most secrecy is more about feeling important than any real financial harm. The comments I've seen from gamer dudes applauding the punitive response make me want to have nothing more to do with games. https://twitter.com/BrendanSinclair/status/1011577475556507648 …

Crazy. What the guy did is shitty (I'd be upset if I was on the dev team and had been working on this surprise event) but making an example of some underpaid QA tester by crushing them to dust with the US legal system is unconscionable.

This. Plus it says contractor, so I’d expect work conditions to have been garbage through and through.

Also, if you're privileging low-paid temp workers with information you consider highly confidential, you're basically betting on the information leaking. Their incentives are too misaligned for anything else to happen in the long run.

All of that may be true, but it doesn't change the fact that he violated the terms of his contract. You can't disclose trade secrets under an NDA regardless of how silly the information is or how crappy your work environment is.

What’s legal and what’s moral and what’s right can be very different things. He’s not denying breaching his contract, but suing him with Tencent / Epic resources seems... overkill, to put it politely.

It's true that the balance of power between corporations and workers is grotesquely skewed in favor of corporations, and I doubt he told his friend this information for any other reason than he was excited and wanted to feel cool. But he knowingly took a risk telling this person.

It’s all about measure of consequences, right? Terminating him for breach of contract would be fair(ish). Going beyond that is kinda shitty. I’d also except those private NDA breaches to be super common. Shitty friends posting leaks less so.