Leaks only marketing ?

@Bronsn Hey there! I guess I'm the "leaks guy" in the forum who follow most if not all the leaks for Apex. It's nice that we see future skins, modes, legends etc since it gets people (especially me) excited on what is to come but we should also respect people who want to get surprised and get teasers as well. To answer you question, NOPE THIS IS NOT MARKETING.

I will talk about this issue of the biggest leak in Apex history for the last time to avoid any mod getting too touchy with my posts. But first it's important to distinguish Datamined Leaks, Insider Leaks and the time where yes, it was marketing. 

Datamined Leaks

These leaks are from the files that we download in every update. Dataminers look into these files to look for skins that the skins team have "uploaded" to the files or other assets. These leaks are usually limited to what's coming in this season and the next since most of these assets are near final or complete. They're sort of in the gray area on whether they're illegal or not. 

Insider Leaks

Some people like ThordanSmash and Biast12 who know people who work for Respawn. They're very careful in giving out these information since they don't want their insider getting identified or fired by Respawn. These leaks go beyond what's in the files and are usually QA tester leaks as far as I know. 

BIGGEST LEAK IN APEX HISTORY (You will find the answer to your question here)

These new "Apex news channels" milking every bit of the recent leaks are based from an incident a month ago. The reason why I've said that the recent leaks are not marketing is that these leaks are from a hacker. I won't name the guy of course. This hacker hacked Respawn, got into their early testing builds, took videos, and spread it in reddit. He also put the name of one the real developers in his video and a respectable dataminer so that it would ruin their image/name. This hacker also makes cheats and sells them. So definitely not marketing.

Marketing Leaks

The only time Respawn used this to their advantage was the promotion for Forge in season 3 for the season 4 legend. They deliberately placed lines of code in the files for a new legend that's focused on melee abilities. Long time dataminers quickly realized that this was bait though but it was still a fun time back then when you're keeping up with these news.

Hope that makes things a bit clearer for everyone. Hope everyone has a nice weekend. 

RIP big guy