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."

Comments

Useless?

[Aladrin]

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."

Re:If all games were open source...

[ScentCone]

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.