The other cost of the Halo: Reach leak

Halo: Reach has been leaked to BitTorrent, meaning anyone with the right type of Xbox 360 mod chip will be able to play it some three weeks before general release. This is the cost to Microsoft. There's another cost, and that's to the games media – and to publishers too.

As games move increasingly into a download age, games review systems have remained several years behind. There isn't a games reviewer alive without access to high-speed internet, able to grab several gigabytes of pre-release code over a secure connection within a matter of hours. Nonetheless the postage system remains the de facto mechanism for code distribution, adding days onto what's already a brief window of review time. It appears the risk of a sorting office tea-leaf or an enterprising cleaner swiping an unwatched disc is deemed lower than a hacker breaking into a private ftp address or Microsoft's Partnernet (debug 360s' closed-network replacement for Live).

Indies have rolled with the times – indies have even defined the times, as they so often do. Download codes are shared with reviewers casually, aware that public promotion is worth the sales potentially lost by an appearance on The Pirate Bay.

Larger publishers have been more resistant to the electronic present. In my time in consumer games journalism, I have jumped through the most awkward hoops, treated throughout as a criminal in waiting. USB dongles, IP addresses, layer upon layer of bespoke, PC-slowing DRM, server logs, 7-day time limits, PRs standing balefully over my shoulder throughout… It's stressful, time-consuming and burdened with opportunity for technical error.

It's not really about distrust of the reviewer, of course. It's about distrust of the world, of all the myriad factors that could lead to code deemed more precious than diamonds somehow reaching the public before the official date, outside of the careful marketing plan and guaranteed revenue streams. You can't blame them for caution. Caution can co-exist alongside internet distribution, however: untold amounts of private data successfully make it their intended destination without issue on a daily basis.

God bless Microsoft for giving it a go, for giving up the pretence that seven gigabytes of Halo sequel were necessarily chained to a plastic disc and providing Reach direct to reviewers instead of mucking around with the vaguaries of the postal system and the exhaustion of a poor staffer stuffing endless jiffy bags with burned DVDs.

Finally, one of the oldest of the old guard was embracing the present. Except it elected to do it publically; to stick Halo: Reach review code in its entirety onto Xbox Live Marketplace, and think that a $1250 pricetag and a special security code issued only to select reviewers would deter public interest. All it did was lay down a gauntlet. Of course someone was going to dedicate their every moment to trying to crack it. They did, the game's out in the wild, and there's a good chance Microsoft will be fearful to ever try this again.

There's also a good chance it'll further deter other publishers from digital distribution of review code; if it can happen to one of the biggest games of the year, with the full muscle of one of the world's biggest companies behind it, it can surely happen to anything.

We'll probably be back to MAC addresses and USB dongles and watchful PRs for years. A number of the larger publishers already have Risk Management departments who factor this kind of mishap into their protection strategies, and erect new hoops to jump through in response. In an era where there are too many games and too many brands fighting for the attention of time-starved consumers, promotion is vital. Promotion thus needs to be easy, and that requires internet distribution. It would be unwise to run away from that now.

Leaks will often happen regardless, especially once a disc-based game reaches mass production – an awful lot of people are involved in the process of creating and distributing a physical item. Internet distribution of code can be just as much, if not more, secure if the right measures are in place. The leak of Halo: Reach is not proof that online can't be trusted. It's simply proof that more care is needed.