Most of the news you see on gaming websites is aggregated from elsewhere. Few reporters are regularly pursuing scoops and cultivating developer sources, which is why these conversations so often center around us at Kotaku.
So! When is it OK to post about leaks? The easy answer is always. A reporters job is to get information to readers, so when information comes that reporters way, its their responsibility to verify and report it, right?
Of course, things arent always that simple, and there are sometimes legitimate reasons not to report on something, especially if its something that people will find out about anyway. There are a lot of factors to consider. Who is this information going to serve? Who is it going to hurt? Does the news value justify reporting this?
News value thats the somewhat vague rubric we often use at Kotaku to determine whether we should report on something we hear about. Is it newsworthy that EA is releasing a new Madden this year? Probably not. Was it newsworthy when we reported, back in 2013, that despite the Fallout 4 hoax, Bethesda was indeed working on Fallout 4? Absolutely. Is the story of Destinys troubled development newsworthy? 100%.
But there are plenty of cases where the answer to that question is no, and in those cases often we choose not to report things we hear. I had a conversation with someone from Ubisoft earlier this year and I told them that Id heard bits and pieces about For Honor (aka Hero) before it was announced at E3 2015, but that we chose not to report that stuff because it didnt seem newsworthy enough. The Ubisoft dev told me that getting to show off the trailer and surprise people, unspoiled by leaks, was one of the best moments of their career. That had an effect on me, believe it or not. Its one of the reasons we havent reported on Ubisofts next new IP, which Ive also heard a bit about.
Now back to No Mans Sky. When we asked ourselves whether it was newsworthy that this ambitious, crazy-hyped game had been delayed, the answer we arrived at was always yes. I first heard about this from a single (very reliable) source a few weeks ago, keep in mind, so when a second source showed me GameStop marketing materials that corroborated it, I knew it was for real. At that point I wouldnt have been doing my job if I chose not to report it. Its news.