EA Motive's long-awaited Iron Man game was hit by an unplanned leak of early gameplay footage this week, but rather than trying to bury the incident, EA turned it into a marketing win. The developer set up a new official account and posted a self-deprecating message acknowledging the leak, which won over Marvel fans and generated an outpouring of goodwill for a project that had gone quiet for years and was rumoured to have stalled.

The leaked footage, showing Tony Stark flying between skyscrapers and battling enemies on a S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier, is the most substantial look at the game so far. EA's tongue-in-cheek post — "Well, that didn't go as planned… but now you know, and we've got a lot more to show you" — had racked up 14.8 million views and 198,000 likes at time of writing. Concerns about the game's status had grown since Motive was reassigned to support Battlefield 6 in 2024, with the Iron Man project having had few updates in the nearly four years since it was announced.