Nintendo also made a guy their serf for pirating their games

Gave Newell once had a German swat team raid a teenager’s house, full auto guns aimed at him, because he stole Half Life 2’s source code lol

Yes, but none of the developers leaked any substantial content. They hinted it in other games and accidentally left in assets but other than that, the only insider information revealed was to Schrier and it was about the map size and working conditions of the studio

i like that CHAOS strike strategy the airline unions have, you can say exactly what you're going to do and they still can't stop you.

True but think about journalists and their anonymous insider sources. I imagine it’s harder to leak tangible footage of gameplay due to watermark and software tracing, but the only insider information about the game itself came out years ago, and it was only about how the map will be medium sized

Like I said, it took 9 years for that leak to get out.

Yes, but it wasn’t leaked by the studio. Although there are theories that it was and that it was free publicity

Game devs are paid shit for the work they do already, and there are tons of potential devs in need of work so its comparatively easy to scale up a studio as long as its in the right place. Outsourcing is a function of big capitalists chasing larger labor pools and later of small capitalists trying to tag along onto already established pipelines to get the cheapest work they can. With gamedev you mostly just get the latter, with small outfits hiring a couple of contractors to do asset flips for next to nothing in the hope of scamming out some quick cash, but the big capitalists in the industry have all the easily exploitable highly skilled labor they could ask for right at home where there's no language barrier or time zone issues and their executives can be on site and having fun tormenting their employees personally.

sorry, but this is complete and obvious fucking bullshit. watch any of the credits of big triple A games and you'll find at least a handful of outsourced art studios situated somewhere in the southern hemisphere. RDR 2 alone has these 4 listed: "Technicolor", "Original Force", "3Lateral", "Mineloader Software" although that is still fairly few for a game that size. I'd be shocked if GTA VI won't have double that, if not much more.

Also just look at those websites. Some of these outsourcing studios have worked on basically every big game made from the last ten years or so. The only reason japanese studios have started to become competitive with the west again after the seventh gen is because all these outsourcing studios started popping up in singapore and china and india right next to their doorstep. That's also why we see so many remakes. Just have a tiny internal team coordinate the work and have everything else be outsourced. The Last Of Us Remake has 11 fucking "support" studios listed in their credits.