Very cool. Coming from the web dev world, the gaming world seems very protective of everything about development. This makes sense coming from the AAA studios, but it sadly extends to many indie devs as well. Hopefully there will be more embracing of the open source model in the future.
Yeah. Even around announcements and reveals there's a lot of scares going around. The industry has historically relied very heavily on a big launch hit, so the marketing around that had to be very carefully massaged, and release of information controlled as a consequence.
I'm personally sceptical that it's healthy to be this caged about things, but I don't have any numbers to back this up -- though I suspect nobody else does either, given how marketing is always just a crapshoot.