Path of Exile‘s co-creator confessed he planted fake game assets for years just to watch dataminers chase ghosts.
Most studios treat dataminers as a threat to manage, not an audience to prank. Take-Two, for one, is currently demanding account data from over 100,000 Discord users just to unmask one GTA 6 leaker. But Chris Wilson, co-founder and former managing director of Grinding Gear Games, decided decades ago that messing with them sounded more fun.
In a video on his YouTube channel, Wilson admitted that he and the team once slipped fake assets into Path of Exile’s files purely to send dataminers chasing content that was never real.
He called the whole habit “very good for trolling,” and didn’t sound like he regretted the mischief one bit. Wilson also blamed years of digging through leaked builds for his grey stubble and joked that it aged him faster than running a studio ever could.
The trick wasn’t exactly efficient, though, as Wilson admitted the decoy files ate up time the team could have spent on the actual game, and called it a wasteful habit more than a real defense.
Grinding Gear also leaned on more practical tools, like scrubbing anything non-essential from patch files and hiding behind encryption before launch to combat dataminers, though encryption only buys time pre-release, since every file eventually has to be decrypted for players to actually run the game.
The scale of the game matters too, of course. Wilson pointed out that datamining can begin within minutes of a patch going live, so the bigger and more popular a live-service game gets, the harder that cat-and-mouse game becomes to manage.
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