Even though I pay attention to these things for a living, I almost didn’t realize that Fortnite Chapter 7 Season 3 was coming up so quickly. It’s just two weeks away now, with Season 3 slated to launch on June 6, and we really don’t know anything about it. And that’s because there haven’t been any leaks about it.
Not a single. Dang. One. No stray strings of text or banner icons in the files indicating a new collab, or sketchy-sounding Twitter rumors about gameplay changes, or anything. It’s dead out there.
It’s a strange place to be for Fortnite fans, since we usually expect pretty much everything to leak. This is, after all, the game that leaked its entire 2024 roadmap and revealed nine months of collabs in advance. Fortnite leaks happen so frequently that it’s not uncommon to see folks online complain that they never get to experience a proper cycle of hype with new seasons because they always find out about things too early.
And now, here we are. Those folks are probably feeling pretty good right now, because they seem to have gotten what they wanted with this leak drought ahead of Chapter 7 Season 3. I don’t have any preference on that one way or another–I’m too old to worry about which Twitter account first revealed a new Fortnite skin–but I don’t think this situation is an accident. Epic actually already pulled off a similar trick in April with Fortnite Festival’s current season, when it managed to reveal Laufey as the new headlining artist without there ever being any leaks or rumors about her.
So what happened? Well, AdiraFNInfo happened. In January of this year, a new leaker came out of nowhere with a whole pile of original leaks that all proved to be accurate. Then, at the beginning of March, Adira’s Twitter account suddenly disappeared, and Epic revealed that they were actually a former contractor named Hayden Cohen, who they were suing for allegedly breaking a non-disclosure agreement tied to his gig with the company. Adira’s time as a leaker was over after two months.
Since then, more of Adira’s leaks have come true–the Overwatch, Game of Thrones, Peak, and Ben 10 collabs were all first leaked by Adira before the spigot was shut off. There are actually still three more left (Masters of the Universe, Minecraft, and Kingdom Hearts), so maybe we’ll see those in Season 3.
Ever since the Adira situation blew up, though, significant new leaks have been few and far between. It’s impossible for us, looking in from the outside, to say for sure what exactly happened. What happened with Adira would have spooked other insiders and made Epic more vigilant about that type of thing, possibly making it more difficult for leakers to get info from them. Epic could have gotten better about securing the game files so that dataminers can’t glean anything useful from new updates. Maybe Epic pressured the usual leakers, all of whom are Epic partners who have Support-a-Creator codes for the Fortnite item shop, into being quiet for a little while.
Since we don’t know what the cause actually is, it remains to be seen whether this leakless reality is going to be the new status quo for Fortnite. Fortunately, it doesn’t really matter too much, because Epic’s marketing campaigns aren’t what make Fortnite fun to play.
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