Pokemon developer Game Freak responds to the ongoing hack

Key insights

Last night, Pokemon developer Game Freak was hit by a massive data breach.
However, the company seems to have been prepared for this as it released a statement a few days before the leaks began.
Game Freak apologized to employees affected by the hack and said it was working to prevent it from happening again.

Pokemon developer Game Freak has released a statement regarding a recent data breach that resulted in a number of unannounced projects and development files being leaked.

The last few years have been a difficult time for developers as a whole due to seemingly endless job losses and crises, but recently a new problem has emerged: data breaches. In 2022, Rockstar was hit by a massive hack that exposed the first footage of GTA 6, while Insomniac Games’ entire pipeline was exposed late last year due to a similarly massive data breach.

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The Insomniac hack was such a big and infamous thing that one could have hoped that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, that’s not the case, as Pokemon developer Game Freak also recently suffered a data breach that resulted in a number of unannounced Pokemon games and development files being leaked.

Game Freak issues statement on Pokemon hack

While the hack was quite a surprise to almost everyone, Game Freak seems to have been aware of it for some time and was even prepared for last night’s leaks. As pointed out by Twitter user LewchubeThe studio released an official statement on its website earlier this week, three days before the leaks were released.

Twitter user OatmealDome translated the statementwhich confirms that the “unauthorized access to our servers” actually took place some time ago in August of this year. The statement apologizes to all employees affected by the hack and doesn’t really focus on the content that has been shared since it was published before the leaks began.

“Due to unauthorized access to our servers in August 2024, personal data of our employees was leaked. We apologize to those affected.”

In response to the hack, Game Freak said it had contacted all employees whose personal information was involved in the data breach and confirmed that the company had “rebuilt and re-verified” its servers to prevent something like this from happening happen again in the future. Considering how much Pokemon content has been shared as a result of the leak, it’s likely we’ll get another statement sometime next week.