edgeofblade said:
But if Grand Moff Tarkin here wants to blow up a few planets with some "mass firings", be my guest. It's your game co.s funeral.
I don't know how much you know about business or law, Edge. Your profile is a blank slate and you are new here. I don't know if I'm talking to an adult with thirty years experience in the business world, or a teenager with no real clue on how things work. Forgive me, then, if what I say tends to assume you know jack squat about the way things work.
Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs) are contracts between two parties, where Party A is placing Party B in a position where Party B will be privy to confidential information which, if made public, could damage a Party A. By signing the NDA, Party B is agreeing that what they learn will be kept confidential, and should they fail in that, can be held accountable for whatever damages were specified in the NDA.
In layman's terms, that means you sign an agreement not to reveal confidential items, and if you break that contract, (depending on the wording of the NDA) you can be accountable for any lost profits, incurred expenses, or legal fees that arise from your breach in contract. By leaking a game you are being paid to work on, you can quite easily be responsible for compensating that company for the entire development cost and/or the expected sales volume of the product. That's no small potatoes there. All of that, is already in place and legally binding, and if any company finds someone breaching their NDA, they can and will do this to the offender.
The only radical aspect I suggested, is firing the team and canceling/shelving the project, if the culprit cannot be identified. From a business perspective, it's not exactly like blowing up Alderaan. You have a team of workers who are responsible for the creation and protection of a project worth millions of dollars. If someone on that team is working against the company, you MUST take action. If you can't figure out who, then it is (again, from a business perspective) safer and preferable to fire everyone who could have possibly caused the leak, than to risk leaving them in a position to do further damage. You can hire new programmers, you can't remove a torrent once seeded online.
If this were defense contractor projects, not video games, a breach of an NDA can be considered treason, and punishable by death. Programmers get off easy compared to this.
