Why The Verge ignored Deadlock's quasi-embargo

Is it ok to ignore a polite request from a billion dollar company? What if the company says “pretty please?”

These questions consumed games media this week, when the tech news website The Verge published an article about Deadlock, a yet-unannounced game that is almost certainly being developed by Valve, the video game and hardware company behind Portal, Half-Life, and the video game marketplace Steam (among a small handful of other very famous and lucrative products). Normally, a tech blog covering a video game would hardly be news, but Deadlock is an exception. The game is in an invite-only beta; when launched, it presents players with a pop-up that reads: “Deadlock is still in early development, with a lot of temporary art and experimental gameplay. Do not share anything about the game with anyone.”

The Verge flouted that warning, publishing an article about their reporter’s time playing the game (titled: We played Valve’s secret new shooter, Deadlock). Shortly after publication, the reporter, Sean Hollister, was banned from the game’s multiplayer mode.

In the days that followed, some of my colleagues in games media criticized Valve’s response. “Was The Verge publishing this story a nice thing to do? Not really: Valve asked people with Deadlock access not to share about it, and it’s not very nice to ignore requests someone makes of you,” wrote my former editor Riley MacLeod in Aftermath. But, he added, “The news value of The Verge’s story is clear — Valve has been bizarrely secretive about Deadlock, a game thousands of people are currently playing. Readers are right to want to know more about it, and what it’s like to play, and Hollister can tell them that while still adhering to journalistic ethics: he didn’t get access illicitly, or misrepresent himself, or break any agreements.”¹

I think this is right! Still, I wanted to take the time to dig into some of the journalistic principles underpinning The Verge’s decision to publish. Journalism is, in some ways, a monastic profession, with all sorts of arcane rules and regulations developed and fine-tuned over decades that make sense to practitioners but not the outside world. It can be helpful to pause and demystify these things sometimes.

The Verge’s write-up includes a tell. The story’s second paragraph reads: “And I’m not under NDA. I have signed no contracts and made no verbal agreements; I haven’t even clicked through a EULA.” A photo caption right underneath, describing the aforementioned pop-up, adds: “This message does pop up when I launch Deadlock, but I didn’t click ‘OK’; instead, I hit the Escape key and watched it disappear.”

I have to imagine that if you’re a normal person, you look at this and go “…. Ok? They still told you not to say anything, right?” But to a member of the press, the paragraphs above form a recognizable symbol in journalistic thieves’ cant. Generally, journalists want to report on things that are newsworthy. (I take for granted that an upcoming game from a secretive major developer being tested out in the open and played by tens of thousands of people is newsworthy.) But it would be difficult for the press to function if all it took to stop the publication of a story was a subject saying “No, don’t.”² This is why there are tons of rules in place around what information journalists can and can’t share — and these rules are frequently agreed upon and enforced through embargoes and nondisclosure agreements.

In the context of video game coverage, you’ll mostly hear about embargoes and NDAs as they pertain to reviews and preview coverage. “In advance of a game’s release, media outlets are usually granted early access to the title alongside an embargo agreement, which, if agreed to, specifies when an outlet can publish its coverage,” I wrote in 2021³ in an essay about how the video game review process is broken. “Embargoes can also delineate what details are off limits; some developers, for example, will request that plot twists and endgame content be kept out of reviews.” Crucially, these agreements are just that — agreements. They aren’t imposed on journalists; the journalists have to, well, agree to them. If a journalist doesn’t agree, they can quibble with the PR person offering the embargo about specific terms, but if that doesn’t resolve things, the journalist may just… not get access.

This dynamic is relevant to a lot⁴ of journalistic work: Reporter gets X information from Y source, who agrees for the information to be publicized under Z conditions. Again: agreement, consent and consensus are crucial. When I start an interview, I generally outline out the conditions under which we’re having the conversation to my interlocutor, and prompt them for their consent. (For example, I recently had a conversation in which I told my source: “I’m not sure if this is a story yet, so let’s just chat really openly and I won’t record this conversation. None of what you say will make it into a potential article unless we chat again and agree to it.”) This goes both ways: If a source wants to share something off the record, the journalist they’re talking to has to agree to that. Similar to an embargo, off the record isn’t a state that can be imposed on a journalist. (Funny story about this in the footnote ➡️ ⁵ ).

Valve’s Deadlock pop-up is a textbook example of that kind of imposition. It’s not an embargo, and access wasn’t granted on the condition of adherence to any rules. So on the merits, as soon as The Verge decided Deadlock was a newsworthy subject, it was absolutely in the right in publishing its story. There was no NDA, no contract, no agreement, not even consent by “OK.” Hollister’s early disclaimer is a signal to attentive readers: I’m not just doing my job, I’m doing it by the book.

I have a few parting observations on this subject that are a bit more opinion-y and speculative than fact-y. First, I think you can derive two rough “profiles” of The Verge and Valve — their outlooks and how they comport themselves — out of this whole saga.

If I had to guess, Valve’s perspective on testing Deadlock out in the open is that getting into the beta implies a certain degree of online-ness and “😎”. It’s a clubhouse, and if you’re in, you’re going to be cool about it, right? Posting videos of Deadlock is against the rules, but it’s less cool of Valve to strike them down than it is for some random fan to post them. Meanwhile, a journalist “well actually”-ing about not signing an NDA is decidedly, unsurpassably uncool (to Valve and the fans who opted into the Deadlock omertà, at least).

There are also, I’d venture, generational gaps. Many of Valve’s founders and decision-makers reportedly subscribe to a very hands-off message-board-libertarianism forged on the prehistoric internet. In terms of behavior on their platforms, that translates to: “If you follow the rules, you’re good. If you don’t follow the rules, be cool. If you don’t follow the rules and you’re really annoying about it, fuck you and fuck off.” The Verge, meanwhile, is younger, highly skeptical of tech (and Valve is a giant tech company, no matter what you think of their output or position in the video game industry) and therefore highly disinclined to be deferential to paper-thin barriers to coverage. These two views do not jell.⁶

One last thought — and before I say this next piece, I want to issue a general disclaimer: You’ll never hear anything less than a full-throated defense of the right to report and publish from me.

Buuuuuuuuuuuuuut…

Why is this the article The Verge went out on a limb for?

I’m not trying to be rude. The piece achieves what it sets out to do, which is simply to competently describe Deadlock, a game that had not really been covered professionally until Wednesday, and hasn’t been since. It can be good to publish the obvious piece, to say here’s what this thing is. And yet, I can’t help but feel that this was a weak first swing. (Sorry!)

I’ve been playing Deadlock. I like it a lot. I want to keep playing it. And I want to read thoughtful writing about what that game is, the space it occupies in the landscape in 2024, Valve’s approach to testing it — a theory of the case, if you will. So I was a bit let down when the “We played this secret game” article —publication of which, in my view, obviously came with the risk of banishment — amounted to “We played a few hours and it is a 6v6 game with four lanes and heroes.”

I have two theories of my own on why that happened (they’re not mutually exclusive).

1. Hollister’s editor asked him what he was working on, and Hollister said, “Not much, but I played a few matches of the secret Valve game. Do you want me to write something about that for later today?” The editor said yes. This is just how digital media works sometimes.

2. The Verge felt that the mere fact of Hollister’s access to Deadlock — alongside the growing number of stories about the game’s player count — meant that that some enterprising reporter would eventually cover the game, so they moved quickly to avoid getting scooped on the “I played Deadlock” beat.

These aren’t value judgements, just possible explanations. Anyway, that’s all I’ve got. I hope Valve reinstates Hollister’s account and allows people to cover their(?) game without fear of reprisal. I want to read more about it.

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1. Deadlock’s player count hovered around 24,000 people as I was writing this story. There are also countless YouTube videos of Deadlock matches.

2. There are obvious instances in which a request like this would merit serious consideration: If a story’s publication credibly endangers someone, for example.

3. I am quoting myself here because candidly, I did not want to come up with a new way of explaining what an embargo is.

4. I say “a lot” because there are all sorts of caveats and exceptions, of course. Journalists can find information by observing something first-hand. They can file a FOIA request, scour a database, stumble upon a secret hiding in plain sight, and so on.

5. In 2018, Elon Musk emailed a BuzzFeed News reporter who was covering Musk’s feud with child-rescuing diver Vern Unsworth. “Off the record,” Musk wrote, “I suggest that you call people you know in Thailand, find out what’s actually going on and stop defending child rapists.” BuzzFeed published Musk’s email, deeming it newsworthy.

6. This newsletter was titled “The pedants versus the snobs” until the very last minute. It was too mean.