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Hellgate London Code Stolen?
The Gamers With Jobs Press Pass is reporting on a rumour that the code for Hellgate:London has been stolen. 'Reliable sources' indicate that Flagship Studios' servers have been taken down (and hopefully secured) in the wake of the incident. From the article: "My source indicates that the virtual break-in was conducted by a Chinese individual who is currently attempting to sell the code from a personal website. For those of you who don't know, Hellgate: London is the first project by ex-Blizzard developer Bill Roper and his new studio, the game has been at the last two E3's and looks to be shaping up very nicely."
I fear a theft will cause a huge release delay. The game is slated to have a major multiplayer aspect with massively multiplayer staging areas and instanced group mission areas. If the code was stolen there is a significant risk of cheaters ruining the game for everyone. To be fair, this has happened in pretty much every Bill Roper game since he makes earning stats so tantilizing, but in the past it was (presumably) done without access to the source.
The big variables here are whether games will be served by the company or by players, what the pricing scheme will be (thus the urgency to fix the game), and, of course, how complete the stolen code was. For reference, the code to every single id Software game was leaked before release, and those games did just fine technically and commercially. No one could reuse stolen code commercially without getting caught, and the publisher could instate whatever crazy engine licensing agreement they want in that case.
Regardless, I adore Roper's games and I can't wait for the release of Hellgate: London. I hope I don't have to wait much longer to play it!
When it happened to Valve with Half Life 2 the attack was pretty well executed. The code was never put on a live server but it got stolen just the same.
Gabe Newell noticed one day that his computer was acting slowly. He scanned for viruses but found nothing so he formatted and reinstalled. A few days later an admin noticed that someone had accessed Gabe's email, and further investigation revealed that the code tree had been accessed and large portions had been copied. The attacker somehow got a keylogger and backdoor tunnel installed on Valve's internal machines which provided a relay to the internal-only servers.
You don't have to do anything activily to have copyrights. It's something you attain when you produce it, not by filling in an application. applications (not computer) are for trademarks and patents.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Speaking as a game developer, I must say that there is almost no fear of giving away your expensively paid-for code to your competition . Why? Because it's useless to others. Most games I have worked on were without documentation, without a sane amount of comments - and having looked at the hl-2 leaked code, no difference there - a huge mess.
What can you steal?
-> You can't steal the technology ( because it's unreleased and probably buggy, written in haste and therefore uncomprehensible ) - it would be faster to implement the technology yourself.
-> You can't just use it and make your own game around it. Even a script-kiddie could find out that you used a "popular" engine by comparing strings in the executable/dlls.
-> You can't steal the assets ( batteries not included )
So you stole yourself some worthless pile of source-code. Wow. Beats me. I'ld place a bet that this "source-leaking" is a PR gig of some sort.