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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."
So... The source code for an FPS that isn't even close enough to release to set a release date was stolen.
Why not just download Quake's source and be done?? An engine with no data is nearly useless in today's FPS scene. The only possible use it could have would be to crack the game before it even comes out, but as it is so unfinished, even that is pointless.
"Ten out of ten for style, but minus several million for good thinking."
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Really we're probably looking at something under the Trade secrets area of IP law...
"We wouldn't have this problem! People wouldn't steal, they could just download the code."
Well, I guess you've got a point. I mean, if murder was made legal, crime would go down.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If the code was stolen there is a significant risk of cheaters ruining the game for everyone.
Hacking into servers is bad, but it always irritates me that people think multiplayer games cannot be secure if the source code is open.
If more eyes are looking at the code, then more people can help fix them or point them out to developers. The problem with most small programming houses and MMOG live teams is that those guys are usually swamped with bug fixes and can't look at the code.
Sure, there will always people that will exploit the source code, but if you have a good community, you will get a greater benefit by allowing people to help the live team fix bugs.
Even without the source code the bugs remain and still have the potential to be found by an exploiter. The more eyes... The faster they will be fixed.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Who even assumes this is true. This is a big news story for a game most people would ignore.
PR 101.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Give away the engine, sell content.
Sometimes the engine is the most important part of the content. It can be the result of untold thousands of hours of work, and recouping that investment is essential - because if you can't, then you can't risk employing all of those people to build it in the first place.
If made-by-volunteers/hobbyists engines were even close to as viable as those that get millions of dollars of focused investment, we'd see them out there being better than the professionally built ones. But we don't, because they're not. There is no free lunch, and there especially is no free high-end rendering engine, physics engine, driver integration, etc. Once a company is comfortable that their risk and investment has paid off, they might very well consider getting more people into their camp by making their now-established system more open or freely licensable... but they've got to pay the bills, and enabling other (competing) content developers to use a newly built (and paid for) engine for free just doesn't path the math test.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Gabe Newell used this excuse when Half-Life 2 slipped behind schedule
Put down the tinfoil-covered keyboard/mouse, and step away.
Gabe got his desktop hacked. Simple (and dumb) as that. But when you're not planning on giving away your expensively paid-for code to your competition, you don't really think of it as an OSS project - so comparing the two is completely pointless, and you pretending there were no vulnerabilities to sweat under the circumstances just shows how ignorant you are.
Speaking of which, why do you care? You obviously have great contempt for Valve, and wouldn't pay for their products, so why do you care whether they're later than they'd like (or why they are) in delivering their own product? Delivering it is how they repay their investors and write paychecks to their staff - and if you dislike the company so much, you should be pleased that they had a harder time generating the game's revenue than they would have preferred.
Or maybe you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
That's what the developer's *other* computer is for.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
you missed the important part of all that,
Their not FPS.
Sure the RPG, Magic & Demon elements of the game are going to rock hard but what have they done that is FPS?
I'm not knocking the game or the developers in anyway (I am looking forward to the game) but I've seen this happen one to many times. A Major person that is responcable for a killer franchise leaves the company that owns it, starts his own and takes a couple of the people with him (for whatever reason)
They promise the greatest game ever in a genre they never made a game for, naturally it isn't the greatest thing ever but it's not a horrible peice of garbage either, it's just not what people were expecting.
Each game you listed was a point and click dungeon crawler & an RTS, those are harder to do then an FPS but that doesn't mean they can make the worlds best FPS on their first try.