Epic Games is suing Hayden Cohen, better known in the Fortnite community as the leaker AdiraFNInfo, for leaking a number of Fortnite collaborations in January and February. Unlike most Fortnite leakers, who typically datamine the game files for info, or receive info from a third party, Cohen was a contractor at Epic who signed a non-disclosure agreement.
Epic didn’t claim any specific amount in damages in the filing, which you can read here, but it claims that it experienced “harm to its partner relationships, diminished player engagement, lost profits, and costs incurred in investigating and responding to Defendant’s unauthorized disclosures.”
The situation with Cohen is very unusual. Upcoming Fortnite collaborations are leaked all the time, but it’s typically because a leaker will find something in the game files that Epic failed to properly hide, or because an insider passed them info. That gives public-facing leakers like Shiina and HypeX journalistic legal protections as long as they didn’t actively help their insider steal private data.
But Epic says that Cohen, by contrast, was both the source and the distributor of the info they leaked, so it’s unlikely that any such protections would apply.
AdiraFNInfo, as Cohen was known online, emerged in early January and leaked nearly a dozen collaborations that have already come to pass, starting with the South Park event. Then, in late February, their social accounts on Twitter and Discord suddenly disappeared without a trace–and this lawsuit from Epic is the first update we’ve gotten on Adira’s status since then.
Before their social presence was wipe from existence, Cohen dropped a half-dozen other leaks that haven’t been corroborated elsewhere:
- Minecraft
- Peak
- Ben 10
- Kingdom Hearts
- Game of Thrones
- Masters of the Universe
Given what we now know about the source of these leaks, it’s likely that all of them were real. But it could be that some of these collaborations were canceled because they leaked, which would be the harm to its partner relationships that Epic is claiming in the suit. So you can probably expect at least some of these properties to appear in Fortnite in the next few months.
