Yesterday we reported on the detailed reason as to why #BoycottBorderlands3 was trending heavily on Twitter, all having to do with Borderlands 3 publishing parent company Take-Two going after content creators following a leak they fascilitated, and now the company is confirming one of the parts of that story. The part where content creators are citing that they sent private investigators after them over thumbnails.
One YouTuber that goes by the name SupMatto mentioned in the video hyperlinked above that a few content creators were excited to reveal the Twitch extension on the official YouTube Borderlands channel that eventually lead into more gameplay, but the names of all of the testing accounts were exposed in the video. Since these testing accounts have a lot of early access, a ton of content creators looked up these public accounts that 2K offered these first looks, and found everything they wanted to know simply by looking up the names that the official YouTube video exposed.
Though not their content, 2K should have known that in this leak-heavy environment that people would easily be able to make that connection and soon those test accounts went viral on Reddit. In a recent interview with IGN, 2K admitted that they did send private investigators out – but not just because of this. Apparently, they have been investigating SupMatto for over two years now.
“Take Two and 2K take the security and confidentiality of trade secrets very seriously. The action we’ve taken is the result of a 10-month investigation and a history of this creator profiting from breaking our policies, leaking confidential information about our product, and infringing our copyright,” 2K said in their statement.
“The information he’s sharing about the situation [in his new video] is incomplete, and in some cases untrue. Not only were many of his actions illegal, but they were negatively impacting the experience of other content creators and our fans in anticipation for the game.”
The BoycottBorderlands3 tag was once more revived after SupMatto said that this investigation launched numerous copyright strikes in quick succession which caused his channel, Twitch, and Discord channels to be removed. At this time, the content creator has deleted all social media to “decompress.”
