Sony's Confidential PlayStation Secrets Just Spilled Because of a Sharpie (theverge.com) 35
Sony highly confidential information about its PlayStation business has just been revealed by mistake. As part of the FTC v. Microsoft hearing, Sony supplied a document from PlayStation chief Jim Ryan that includes redacted details on the margins Sony shares with publishers, its Call of Duty revenues, and even the cost of developing some of its games. From a report: It looks like someone redacted the documents with a black Sharpie -- but when you scan them in, it's easy to see some of the redactions. Oops. The court has scrambled to remove the document, but the damage is done; reporters and Sony's competition have already downloaded all the documents while they were in the public domain. Among other things, the document shows that Horizon Forbidden West apparently cost $212 million over five years with 300 employees, and The Last of Us Part II cost $220 million with around 200 employees.
It's not just how much games cost to make that's been revealed here, either. Sony says 1 million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty. My colleague Sean Hollister has analyzed the document, and it appears to show: "In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise."
It's not just how much games cost to make that's been revealed here, either. Sony says 1 million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty. My colleague Sean Hollister has analyzed the document, and it appears to show: "In 2021, over [14?] million users (by device) spent 30 percent or more of their time playing Call of Duty, over 6 million users spent more than 70% of their time on Call of Duty, and about 1 million users spent 100% of their gaming time on Call of Duty. In 2021, Call of Duty players spent an average of [116?] hours per year playing Call of Duty. Call of Duty players spending more than 70 percent of their time on Call of Duty spent an average of 296 hours on the franchise."
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Give them a break, they're playing with console controllers. If they didn't have auto-aiming their average hit rate would hover around 0.1%.
Heck, the reason virtually no FPS games allow cross-platform multiplayer with PC gamers is that, even with the console players having aim assistance, the PC players will still reliably curb-stomp them. And nothing pisses of a leet gamer like getting curb-stomped by a noob who's using vastly superior controls.
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Heck, the reason virtually no FPS games allow cross-platform multiplayer with PC gamers
Literally every major shooter out right now is cross platform. You been under a rock the last 5 years?
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These morons are still around? (Score:3)
One would assume that there have been enough redacting disasters by now for everybody to know, but apparently not.
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Exactly. At this point there are two options. First, lay a physical piece of black paper over whatever it is you don't want to get out and make a copy of the document. You can't see through that part, as in this case, and you can't use software to undo an electronic redaction.
Alternatively, use some type of redaction software, then print out that copy. Again, no way to undo what was done.
This is the 21st century, folks. This isn't that difficult to accomplish. Or shouldn't be. Especially for a multi-bill
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The most important step is that you have somebody with actual data security insight look at what you did.
Also, black paper may well not be enough. Cut the sections you want removed _out_ or convert the whole thing to ASCII (no metadata in there), replace parts to be redacted with "---" in a pure ASCII editor like Notepad++, VI or Emacs, and then re-import. Otherwise you are only masking the parts to be removed and that has a pretty high possibility to fail. Only things that are not there cannot leak through
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We have redaction software that can automate redaction according to user specified policies. Electronic originals or scanned documents, it doesn't matter. Redaction software can even scrub metadata.
The most important part? It's very low effort. Software can do in seconds what it would take your team of unfortunate people armed with razor blades weeks or months to accomplish. Human factors matter. It doesn't matter how good the method you made up is if no one will actually use it.
You also don't want to
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Don't "redact".
Literally take the document, remove that information, replace it with a square box, then export to a format that does NOT preserve document version history (e.g. PDF).
Then load it up and try to search for the redaction, try to look for the redactions, try to do what people would do.
Would take an intern about 10-20 minutes per document once the necessary redactions were given to them, and then someone to double-check before it goes live.
Anything else is just dumb.
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Indeed. And for extra care (like in the story), print it, physically cut out the places to redact and scan that in. At that point any educated person can judge the effectiveness. Or just type the remaining text manually (!) into a new document.
Sharpie? No. (Score:5, Informative)
Can I stop laughing? That is *not* a Sharpie.
Maybe that's some Adobe Acrobat Highlighter partial-opacity, but any assertion that's a physical Sharpie is just plain wrong.
Re:Sharpie? No. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sharpie? No. (Score:5, Informative)
If it is a Sharpie, it's the most perfectly accurate use of one I've ever seen that starts and stops exactly on word boundaries, with astonishingly uniform shape. It also seems to xor when drawn over itself.
The scans in TFA have been lightened to reveal shadow detail. I suspect someone used a PDF editor with a highlighting feature that normally sets the background to a specific color like bright yellow or blue, but had set the background color to black. That black was very slightly different than the black of the text.
Pro tip: when you want to redact a document, use a physical marker on a printed version, scan the document, and then bring it into photo manipulating software to check that the redacted text cannot be extracted by adjusting brightness and contrast.
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Honestly, as often as this problem crops up I'm surprised PDF editors don't just offer a redaction mode that will at the very least be truly opaque, and preferably actually delete the redacted text in case anyone gets their hands on the PDF itself rather than just a printout of it.
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Because the assumption are that IF you are the author, you could instead edit the source material to remove data. But that isn't how mastering is done for text based documents.
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Except the point of redacting is to remove sensitive information from an existing, otherwise unedited document.
Not to mention the people doing the redacting are very frequently NOT the people who created or supplied the documents.
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They do. Adobe Acrobat has redaction features that are simple and easy to use. Foxit PDF Editor Pro also has real redaction features.
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The real question is why PDF editors don't detect this and inform the user about the editor's redaction features. It's not the first time we've seen a story about someone trying to "redact" a document with their editor's highlight tool.
Hard to believe this was accidental (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they just dumped some very important internal numbers that are very useful for showing that the Activision-Microsoft merger could be devastating for competition while maintaining plausible deniability that they intended to reveal some damaging internal data.
I think these numbers make it very clear that Call of Duty is too valuable of a franchise right now to belong to any platform except, hypothetically, Steam.
Re: Hard to believe this was accidental (Score:2)
And while no one likes to have detailed financial information exposed in public, it is not as if it was going to hurt them significantly in the long run. Now if the source code of Horizon or The Last of Us had been leaked, it would be another storyâ¦
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Because they just dumped some very important internal numbers that are very useful for showing that the Activision-Microsoft merger could be devastating for competition while maintaining plausible deniability that they intended to reveal some damaging internal data.
They were literally giving this information unredacted in court. It provides them no benefit to have it leaked outside of the courtroom.
I think these numbers make it very clear that Call of Duty is too valuable of a franchise right now to belong to any platform
Except you're under the impression that simply being owned means it's automatically restricted. That is what Sony and Nintendo do, not what Microsoft does. Microsoft has several very broadly used IPs that are available on multiple platforms (including Playstation), and it would make no sense to purchase Activision and then kill off their main product (no financial or busine
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not what Microsoft does
Tell me which Halo games, specifically, that I can play on non-Microsoft platforms. Or how about anything by Rare in the last twenty years?
Microsoft has two principle differences from the other console manufacturers: first they don't just care about their console, they also care about Windows. This means that ports to Windows are okay in their eyes, and this in turn allows playing those games on other platforms via WINE. That's good for me, but it doesn't mean that Microsoft is being magnanimous.
The s
Planting false number under pretense of obfuscati (Score:2)
As previous posters said, this is clearly not a "sharpie" or manual blackout, and it's hard to think it's accidental.
It could be planted numbers, in the pretense of being "obfuscated" so they can be denied either way,
but the real numbers and text can be something else entirely.
Nice spindoctoring.
Annie are you OK? (Score:2)
They weren't even smooth criminal. The first thing I think when looking at the images is "The fuck is that?" It's like a bad photoshop of a bad sharpie job.
They could have at least hid it in the undo buffer of a Word document, or put a removable black box over the top or something. That's something at least your average secretary would look at and say "That works!"
Didn't a sharpie break Sony's DRM a while back? (Score:3)
I vaguely remember a Sharpie used to break DRM in Sony CDs or something like that.
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Why Game Developers should unionize or revolt! (Score:3, Insightful)
Here is some math, using only Horizon Forbidden West as an example, showing only one thing...
The employees who build these games getting royally screwed while executives are lining their pockets (because I'll bet you my next 10 year's salary that if the game developers for these companies either unionized or created their own company through an exodus...they could continue developing games (doing something they love) while getting paid dramatically more for their time (valued). /// GROSS REVENUE CALCULATIONS /// DEVELOPMENT TEAM COSTS //// NET REVENUE CALCULATIONS // algorithm --> (gross revenue - development cost = net revenue) // algorithm --> (revenue - cost) / revenue /// NET PROFIT CALCULATIONS
Total Units Sold to Date = 8,400,000
Per Unit Price (MSRP) = $69.99
Gross Sales = $587,916,000.00 (does not include sales tax)
[According to (conflicting information, see NOTE BELOW) data available on https://www.salary.com/researc... [salary.com] ]
# Employees = 300
# Years to Build = 5
Avg. Salary per Employee at Guerilla Games ~= $125,000.00 (used tabular data to calculate average, excluding executives, not prose/copy at beginning...it is incorrect)
Total Estimated Game Development Cost ~= (5 years * 300 staff * $125,000 per year on average) = $187,500,000
Net Revenue ~= $400,416,000.00
Sales Margin ~= 68.11%
Assuming Sony makes 20% of (Gross Sales) as part of agreement to distribute ~== $117,583,200
Assuming marketing costs an additional 50% of build cost ~== $93,750,000
Assuming operational (server ) setup costs are ~== $2,500,000
Assuming 1st year operating costs of $5,000,000
NOT INCLUDING EXECUTIVE PAY, DIVIDENDS, DEPRECIATION, and INTEREST INTENTIONALLY FOR SIMPLICITY
TOTAL EST. 1st Year NON-DEVELOPMENT COST ~== $218,833,200
TOTAL EST. 1st YEAR COSTS !== $406,333,200 (DEV COST + NON-DEV COST)
EST. 1st YEAR TAXABLE INCOME ~== $181,582,800 (GROSS REVENUE - TOTAL 1st YEAR COSTS)
EST. 1st YEAR TAX ~== $38,132,388
1st YEAR NET PROFIT ~== $143,450,412
Est. NET PROFIT for just this one title ~== $143,450,412 (almost enough to fund 100% cost for development of a net-new title, or fund an ACTUAL PENSION for these people to incentivize them to stay on and be loyal to the company until they retire)!!!
Of course, we all know, that net profit is NOT benefitting the people who built the game, but rather...it is going into executive pay, bonuses to executives, kickbacks to board members and where applicable dividends to investors.
Wouldn't the world be a better place for everyone, if instead, that net profit was divided equally across the game development staff??
FOR EXAMPLE: If, for just this one title, Guerilla Games gave that net profit to the people that built the game, that would be ~== $478,168 (per employee), an amount that has the potential to dramatically change the lives of each of those three hundred (300) people forever for the positive!!!
Is this a problem for Sony? (Score:2)
>>Sony says 1 million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty
I'm wondering if this is a big problem for Sony? The console hardware is basically sold at cost with the intention of making most of the money on games. But if a lot of people are only playing one game, Sony isn't making much money. Kind of like how the Wii was one of the best selling consoles of all time, but Nintendo didn't make much money off it because a lot of users just played Wii Sports.
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I'm wondering if this is a big problem for Sony?
Depends on how many whales they have, what the average number of games the remaining non-COD only players are willing to purchase is, etc.
Further, we must remember that this is internal data produced by a court's subpoena to provide evidence in an Anti-Trust case. Although we must assume that Sony has provided the data in good faith, at the same time we cannot assume that about redacted information. For all we the public know, we could be dealing with cooked books to make Sony's argument more compelling