It seems that Microsoft hasn’t been pleased with the occurrences of information leaks prior to the official announcement of the Xbox 360 Elite. According to the GameScore Blog’s recent transcript of a podcast, Michael Wolf, Microsoft’s public relations manager, said the info leaks have only added confusion to the Elite’s product specifications. "The reason why it’s bad is because then you lose all the context. You lose all the facts that back it up, so that people hear the story once, understand it, and move forward, as opposed to hearing things bit by bit, piece by piece."
John Porcaro, Senior Group Manager for Microsoft’s online community, speculated that some of the leaks probably came from employees inadvertently letting the cat out of the bag. "I think it’s an employee that tells somebody they trust, who then tells somebody they trust, and it’s probably second generation… Every now and then we see something pop up that only 30 people know about or should know about, and we have people looking into that too."
Porcaro resigned himself to the fact that leaks in the game industry will always occur and that there’s nothing that can really be done about it. "With the way that Internet works we’re just going to have to deal with it to some degree, but on the other hand, it’s almost like there’s so much information out there… you could say any publicity is good publicity, sort of play devil’s advocate there a little bit."
