Marvel Rivals director warns datamining is impossible to stop and risks disappointing fans

Marvel Rivals game director Thaddeus Sasser has been crafting games for upwards of 30 years. From early Call of Duty to Battlefield Hardline, the veteran game developer is now the game director of NetEase’s upcoming hero shooter Marvel Rivals.

In an interview on an upcoming episode of the New VideoGamer Podcast, Sasser discussed the issues with datamining and leaks in the current era of games. Huge features for live service games—such as Helldivers 2’s Clans system—get leaked early by dataminers hunting for new information but, as Sasser explains, sometimes these leaks only lead to disappointment.

Marvel Rivals leaks will lead to disappointment

In the interview with VideoGamer, Sasser explained that datamining will always happen as soon as a version of a game is available online. By the time this build is live, developers will know exactly what content will leak, and that’s a huge pain for developers.

“It’s a really big deal,” Sasser explained. “Think about it this way: would you rather find out about an uncertain leak you’re not sure about and then it gets confirmed weeks later and then ends up in the game in three months? Or would you rather have something that drops as a beat that tells you: ‘Hey, your favourite new character’s coming and it’s available tomorrow’? I know which one I’d prefer.”

“[There’s] another potential risk you might be getting hyped up for something that doesn’t make it.”

MARVEL RIVALS GAME DIRECTOR THADDEUS SASSER ON DATAMINING

Datamining is an incredibly popular way for so-called “leakers” to reveal potentially upcoming content. For example, one recent datamine of a Halo Infinite update revealed a potential new weapon, but older datamines revealed tonnes of scrapped content that never released. As Sasser explained, game development is “iterative”, so not every weapon, character, map or ability references in a file will release.

“We iterate all the time and sometimes, things we iterate, they don’t go into the game,” they explained. “You iterate, you go ‘this wasn’t good enough’, it gets cut. And so that’s another potential risk you might be getting hyped up for something that doesn’t make it.”

The Cleaners

As Sasser explains, scrubbing references away from dataminers is now an important task for any live-service game. Part of the QA service, a team of developers are tasked with removing references to upcoming features, maps and even characters, the latter being of utmost importance for a game playing with the Marvel license.

“Anytime you work with an IP as big as Marvel there’s going to be things that nobody should know right,” the game director said. “There’s going to be stuff that is important that you shouldn’t know and so, of course, we’ll go through and scrub everything from the game about any of those possible references and remove those from the actual content we put out because when we put it out there somebody will find it… they’ll go through the files and datamine it so we’re very, very diligent about going through all of the content all the data and making sure anything released only has the things that are approved to be released.

“It is a lot of work because, as you can imagine, it’s a huge game, and there’s a lot of people working on it so that content content needs to be swept constantly.”

Marvel Rivals is set to be released on Windows and MacOS on December 6, 2024 as a free-to-play title. The game is also set for a console release sometime in the future.