MultiVersus director says dataminers do ‘a disservice to the players’

The director of MultiVersus says dataminers do “a disservice to the players” by revealing characters and stages before they’re officially announced.

During the game’s original run, most of its upcoming characters were revealed by dataminers, who trawled the game’s code for placeholder data and newly added assets.

For example, voice lines for the Joker, recorded by Mark Hamill, were found in the game’s data back in September 2022 – the character was only just officially announced earlier this month, for the game’s return on May 28.

In a recent interview with VGC, we asked MultiVersus director Tony Huynh how he felt about datamining, and whether any measures had been put in place to avoid it happening this time around.

“A lot of things,” Huynh replied. “It is an arms race, so it’ll be constant protections against new and creative ways to datamine. At the end of the day, we’ve done a lot, we’ve learned a lot, but again, it is an arms race.

“I can’t promise that there won’t ever be leaks or anything like that. But on our end, we’ve done, I think, above and beyond what industry standards and protections there are.

“That being said, everyone’s very creative and they’re… they’re just very, very smart. We’re reacting, and we put a lot of stuff in place, but I’m just continuously impressed by their level of ability to get through things.”

When we suggested that the studio may see the efforts of dataminers as both impressive and depressing, Huynh agreed.

“That’s right,” he said. “I mean, yeah, I think it’s a disservice to the players, honestly, that these things are ruined, and it’s deflating for the team as well.

“But more importantly, it’s – I wouldn’t use the word ‘depressing’ – it’s just unfortunate for the players. They don’t get the grand reveal that we have planned, and a lot of the air is sucked out of the room.

“But these things happen, so we’re trying to prevent them from occurring in the future.”

Further reading

‘We want to deliver’: Multiversus’ director on its road to redemption

We played next week's re-release, but does it add enough new features to have a fighting chance?

MultiVersus returns on May 28, with three new playable fighters – The Joker from DC Comics, Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th and Banana Guard from Adventure Time.

A fourth character, Agent Smith from The Matrix, will be added to the game later in its first season.