"Friday was a really interesting, a really kind of cool day," said Activision Publishing CEO Eric Hirshberg, as he reflected on last week's massive Modern War 3 leak and the company's response. "Cool" was a word I was not expecting out of the man in charge of shepherding an enormous marketing campaign that had just been knocked off of its horse.

"No one wakes up and thinks, 'I hope there's been a leak and our timing gets all messed up,'" Hirshberg mused as he and I discussed the incident this week at a pre-E3 meeting, but "if members of the government and the military aren't safe from this stuff, it's a part of our world now."

"And while it's definitely not cool to steal other people's intellectual property, and while it's definitely not cool to leak stuff that's not yours, there are ways that you can respond that actually turn the lemons into lemonade," he added. "And that's what we tried to do on Friday."