Oh phooey. You may view this as petty or just me being a grouch. That’s fine. I just need to vent a titch. A scant few moments ago, I saw a breach of an NDA. It wasn’t a massive preview or smorgasbord of screenshots. Nothing that over the top. Just a simple tweet by a lucky gamer that got into the first Defiance beta, which kicked off earlier this morning.
@PaulFawcett2 dropped a short thumbs up on Defiance. “LOVING the game so far. Nice Job!” That’s it.
What’s got me annoyed is that the official Defiance Twitter account turned around and retweeted this breach of the Non-Disclosure Agreement. The agreement, in short, specified the limits of conversation we early players could have (emphasis by Trion Worlds).
* PLEASE NOTE – If you agree to the NDA you are NOT ALLOWED to discuss the game or your experience in public.
Digging a tad deeper, this wasn’t the only RT that @DefianceGame. The account has highlighted a trio of other positive tweets, even one that called out competitor FireFall.
The point is this. Trion Worlds, if you’re going to make people sign off on an NDA to help you develop the game you have one of two options. One, take the good with the bad. Allow your beta testers to talk openly and honestly, including us bloggers and journalist, and respond in kind. Or two, create and NDA to muzzle your players and police it to a reasonable degree.
Doing option #2 and then selectively retweeting those that break your NDA in your favor – even in the 140 character method – is bad form.