The MultiVersus director said that data miners are “doing a disservice to players” by revealing characters and stages before the official announcement.
During the game's initial run, most of the upcoming characters were revealed by data miners who combed through the game's code for placeholder data and newly added assets.
For example, lines recorded by Mark Hamill for the Joker were discovered in game data in September 2022. The character was only officially announced earlier this month for his return to the game on May 28.
In a recent interview with VGC, we asked MultiVersus director Tony Huynh how he feels about data mining and whether anything is being done to prevent it from happening this time around.
“There are a number of things,” Huynh replied, “It's an arms race, and you always need to defend against new and ingenious ways to mine data. At the end of the day, we've accomplished a lot and learned a lot, but again, it's an arms race.”
“I can't promise you that a data breach or anything like that will never happen, but I think we've gone above and beyond industry standards and protection standards.”
“That being said, they're all so creative and just so smart. We're adapting and preparing things, but I'm always impressed with their ability to get things done.”
When we suggested that studios might be both impressed and depressed by the data miners' efforts, Huynh agreed.
“That's true,” he said. “I mean, I think it's a disservice to the players to have something like this messed up, to be honest with you, and it's depressing for the team.”
“But more importantly, it's just — I don't want to use the word disappointing — disappointing for the players. They didn't get the big reveal that we had planned and it left the atmosphere pretty depressed.”
“But these things happen, and we're trying to make sure this doesn't happen in the future.”
MultiVersus returns on May 28th with three new playable fighters: the Joker from DC Comics, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th, and the Banana Guard from Adventure Time.
A fourth character, Agent Smith from The Matrix, is scheduled to be added to the game later in Season 1.
