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Halo 2 Available on the Net
syberanarchy writes "Gamespot reports that Halo 2 has already been leaked to the internet via French newsgroups and P2P networks, almost a month before release! Any chance this bombshell move could force MS/Bungie to push up the release date?" See also gamesindustry.biz and The Register.
...could be a way of increasing the pre-release hype?
Bureaucracy loves company.
Pirates will be pirates, law abiding citizens will be law abiding citizens. There is probably alot more to this release date, there is most likely alot of TV ads and magazine ads that are set to launch at the same time.
They've hyped November 9th too much. I just can't see Bungie changing their release date, no matter how many reasons there may be.
I don't even have an Xbox, but what is the hardware you would need to burn the Xbox ISO once you downloaded it off P2P? I'm merely curious.
CD burner? DVD burner? Xbox equipped with modchip or no?
- Yolego
I saw the torrent available. Not that I really care much about it since I have no xbox, and I prefer Halo on PC over the xbox. I just like the controls on PC since I was so used to those.
I submitted this something like five minutes before that IP story showed up. Then, I had that same thought.
/. within like ten minutes of being put on GS.
Weird how stuff like that works.
Honestly, I had thought this would have been on
I don't think anyone [sane] is suggesting that Bungie/MS leaked it themselves on purpose, but they might want to take the lemon and make lemonade out of it, by molding it into a huge PR gimmick.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
When I actually have something insightful to say about this topic. I forget my password, and hotmail isn't working.
Anyways: Back in the day, my friends used to work for a CD duplication plant. After a couple of the CDs have been duplicated, they give me some of the CDs (with no labels on them btw) and thats how I got most of my prerelease stuff 8)
<rant> Not to knock your game (I have no idea which one it is), but of the 18+ PS2 titles I have I would readily go back in time and stop myself from spending my hard earned $50 on most of them. I have been satisfied with a very few titles. My favorites that I still play were bought for $20 as "Greatest Hits" titles. I did buy a couple of games brand new that I feel as if I got my money's worth from them. So out of the games I bought maybe four or five were worth my hard earned money. Most of the games I played through partway and then just quite. I felt most games were simply wasting my time. If game developers made games that had some replay value then more people would buy them. The small percentage that pirated the game would be inconsequential due to sheer volume of sales. </rant>
Cheers,the_crowbar
Have you read the Moderator Guidelines
"Halo 1 did fine without it."
From my understanding, they plan to support LAN parties by allowing connected Xboxes to go on Live together as one "team". All they've been testing is multiplayer the last few months (see various GameSpot articles). There's also clan support and it'll be the introduction of "Xbox Live 3.0". I think they view it as pretty important.
The oft-misread quote, "information wants to be free," is interpreted as meaning that information has some kind of sense of its own needs. It's strange (or perhaps, in my pessimistic moments, not) that the foolishness of this notion prompts so many to ridicule it instead of thinking further and realizing that there is a second interpretation.
Information "wants" to be free in the same sense that liquids "want" to seek a neutral level in a resevior-and-tube construct. Information "wants" to obey its natural laws. Without human interference, information propagates in ways which modern physics is just now (as in over the last 50 years or so) coming to terms with. The laws of information are fundamentally tied to the laws of physics in term of all of the means of propagation; from simple kinetic interaction to quantum entagnlement.
When we try to impose our notions that "this information is useful" or "this information has value", we're imposing an artificial label, which other than the interesting fact that that label itself is information, is only a construct of our own making.
When we try to hide information, fundamentally we are trying to block is propagation. To acknowledge that information wants to be free is to acknowledge that that information will naturally propagate, and any attempt to constrain it requires the application of work.
Like damming a river, blocking information propagation is almost (perhaps entirely) impossible to do in absolute terms. There is a point of diminishing returns, and forces will naturally act against the restriction.
When applied to the macroscopic level, the situation changes, just as Newton's and Dirac's physics are very different. When we look at the propagation of information on a large scale (let's say the ROM image of this game), we must take into account the macroscopic forces acting on it, while accounting for the abstract realities of information propagation. When we do that, we see that a balance of force (e.g. crackers and warez distributors wanting to distribute the information and IP owners wanting to restrict it), the reality that "information wants to be free" acts to tip the balance in favor of the force acting to restrict it least. In other words, the reality that Feldman showed us in watermaking (that theory shows us that perfect watermarking is impossible) appears to be a universal phenomenon: placing restrictions on information is a fundamentally losing game.
There's still profit to be made from building a good dam, just as long as you accept that you can never completely stop water from evaporating, running under-ground or blowing over the dam as spray and that when you try, you will end up spending increasingly large amounts of energy for increasingly small returns.
Eh. I've already got a copy preordered. As a result, if I decide to download this, I won't be losing much sleep over the moral ramifications.
I don't mean to downplay the damaging effects of piracy, but keep in mind that pirated xbox games can't be played on XBox Live. For a game like this, I think an early start to piracy won't do much to effect its blockbuster status.
Unfortunately, I now feel compelled to download it and wrestle with the french menus, if only so that I won't get massacred online on its release date.
No, see... what I will do is this.
I will probably end up D/Ling it. I will then purchase the game's special edition come release day.
I do not see what you, as a developer, lose from me plunking down 50 bucks for your game on a pre-order with EBgames.com, then deciding to play it a little earlier if that opportunity becomes avalible to me. This was the exactly the case with Doom 3, and I ended up with TWO legit copies when everything was said and done. Did ID lose money because I did this? Or was it more of an "emotional rape" kind of thing where they felt their collective penis shrink 2 inches because they didn't control the day and the date of my install?
I can understand if I seed or distribute once my download is done, you might have a case, because not everyone uses my honor system. But if you get paid, and I get the game, what does it matter to you if I play it a few days... or even a month... early?
If I download a game and buy it after giving it a trial run, how is that any different from renting, aside from cutting Blockbuster's 6 dollar late fees out of the picture?
Again, I realize most game pirates do it because they can. But I'll be honest with you - if I pirate a game, and I like it, I tend to buy the game retail. Especially when it has multiplayer. I may never actually USE the multiplayer, but knowing that I'm without it makes me feel like I'm missing half the game.
On the other hand, if I make a copy of a game, and it doesn't really draw me in, then it doesn't get any more play, and it just stays buried in a pile of garbage. These, I call coasters. Because that's all crappy games are good for.
So I don't mean to sound smug, I really don't. I'm trying to understand what you lose from folks like me doing what we do. If I did, perhaps I wouldn't do it.
I agree with you on the movie analogy - 50 dollars for a game like Halo 2 or GTA is a much better value than 2 hours for 25 bucks (with concessions factored in.) That's why I'm more likely to pirate a movie than a game - because the game industry hasn't gouged the consumer on a regular basis, just because they can... yet.
Finally, it needs to be said, and again, I'm not trying to be "omg well I deserve it for free" here - asking eager gamers with the means and the hardware to get Halo 2 early is like asking someone who finds a million bucks on the street to not spend it out of respect for the US Mint.
It's sweet, it's a cute lesson that ought to be in a citizenship/ethics textbook, but in real world terms, it just doesn't happen.
I must ask - why is it so frustrating and disappointing to see your game pirated? Did you expect anything else? You had to know this before going into production. The more popular a title is, the more widely avalible it is on p2p networks. If I were you, I'd be more worried if the pirates IGNORED your work.
I wish more companies would use p2p networks to build a new content distrubution platform. I'm not talking about things like iTunes, where an old business model is dragged kicking and screaming into cyberspace.
I'm talking about a model that takes advantage of the benefits of the medium, and passes those costs along to the consumer. Of course, that's a dirty no-no: even if there is no packaging cost, we must still charge the consumer for it... because we can.
I wonder if it has ever occured to anyone that the media could by all rights be free. Imagine the ad revenue from putting a Mountain Dew ad in the loading screen of Halo 2, and being able to get the game for 5 bucks or less. Imagine being able to walk into a theater for free if you get there in time to watch ads. This is where the future is heading, I think.
There are many generation 4 mod chips that allow you to play xbox live games with no problems.
Xenium ICE
SmartXX
etc...
Software is not able to be "performed".
-insert a witty something-
Hrm, I havent seen the download, but i'm wondering The xbox warez community has been working for a long time on cracking the xbox ISO, so that burned games will work on any xbox. I'm wondering right now if the release of this would in any way aid them. Also note, that I have two copies of halo preordered, so I will be waiting, and I will be found at my local EB at 9 PM EST on november 8th. There has been talk of the ISO crack project for a long time, I'm just sort of worried that if this occours, the release dates of many many future xbox games will be delayed while MS and developers scramble to secure thier hardware/software.