In mid-May 2011, pieces of Modern Warfare 3 were leaked out ahead of Activision's schedule. This resulted in some accelerated plans and caught Activision publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg off-guard.
"It wasn't on our timetable; we didn't instigate it,” said Hirshberg to AdAge. “But it's out there, and we can't pull it back in. We weren't ready for this, but we had to deal with it."
Hirshberg called an emergency meeting where he emphasized, "Our job today is to complete this sentence: 'If this leak had never happened, we would have never been able to do *blank* .' And if we could complete that sentence, then we could go to bed tonight having turned a crisis into an opportunity."
He noted that while the information was only leaked to a small number of Call of Duty fans, he wanted to follow up on it immediately and released assets that day. Essentially, the PR plans that were in place were moved up four weeks and the company managed to make a positive out of the situation.
