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Lineage III Source Code Stolen?
Shack News and the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo are reporting that sourcecode for the MMOG Lineage III may have been stolen. As the third Massively Multiplayer game in a huge-selling South Korean series released by publisher NCSoft, over a billion dollars may be lost as a result of this theft. "The Seoul Metropolitan Police said Wednesday that seven former NCsoft employees are suspected of having sold the technology to a major Japanese game company. The seven left the Korean firm in February and allowed the Japanese company to review the software during a job interview. Police believe that the technology might have been copied during the demonstration."
How did NCSoft know about the leaks?
I don't think any company would publicize its interviews, and I doubt these former employees would sing about their code demonstration.
That means there might be a NCSoft mole inside the competitor.
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They lost over $1 billion because of the theft?
It's gotta suck only having one copy of the code. Now they gotta write it again from scratch, or hope the other company gives it back. They should've made backups.
Wait, what?
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The code was copied, not stolen. Talk about alarmist press. Even if one of their direct competitors got the code, what good is it going to do them? Players of lineage will continue to play lineage (cuz lineage people are obsessed, I think). It's not like someone's gonna be able to plop the code on some server farm in a couple weeks and make a competing mmo.
It would definitely be less confusing for everyone involved.
Peace sells, but who's buying?
Now Japan is copying Korean technology? Talk about turnabout...
This sounds like sour grapes because they got their team poached.
Now they're on a fishing expedition. Sorry but anyone who thinks you need to steal code to write an MMORG when you just poached a team that wrote one, or that the owner of code loase money because someone else sees it, OR that interviews are conducted by reviewing your previous employer's code, is a complete idiot.
The biggest component of an MMORPG is content and design, not actually the code. Sure there's server load ballancing and client pagine etc, but that is all tractible. Art (masses of it) and game design are king for MMORG, you don't need to steal code (and I am a programmer and have been a game programmer).
If someone showed up for an interview with code the last thing you'd do is hire them.
"The code was copied, not stolen. "
Here WE go again, folks.
They made about a billion dollars so far. So presumably they expect to make the same amount again from their existing codebase. That's about the only part that seems not entirely unreasonable.
Somehow, now that this code has been "stolen", they are unable to make another penny from it. Anything they would have made will go to the new possessor of the code.
From the other comments, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks this makes no sense. For this to be worth that much, the code, and the code alone would have to be the sole reason people were playing the game. Marketting made no difference, content made no difference, game design made no difference. People were only interested in the game engine. And now that another company has it, people are going to choose the other company in preference.
Sure, the code isn't worthless. Knowing how a successful project works can save a lot of time, but the competitive advantage this gives isn't going to be anywhere near the order of magnitude suggested. We're talkng tens of thousands of dollars. Not a billion!
Yes and no. Mostly I think you haven't thought about it much. There are a couple of problems I can see there right away:
1. Rampant cheating. Think WoW Glider on steroids. If you have the source code, you can write a client which looks to the server 100% like a player at the keyboard on the official client. Write a client which drives a whole group of player characters on a farming or ganking spree from a single machine. Which _will_ screw up the game, and drive people away. (Especially in a game where _all_ there is to do is farm and PvP.) That's money lost.
Or you could delay the game and invest in changing the whole protocol, so the old code doesn't even work with the server any more. Which again is money lost. Both extra development time, and time in which you're not collecting the monthly fees. A single month delay, if you had, say, 1 million players, is 10 to 15 million dollars lost in fees alone.
But even if you do, someone saw all your weak points. Yes, most games do rely on security through obscurity, because noone has the funds, computing power and bandwidth, to do everything on the server securely. There's invariably a lot of functionality in the client, and you basically keep your fingers crossed. Maybe you code some "tripwires" on the server to detect if someone did something awfully wrong, but (A) it's still keeping your fingers crossed that noone will do something that you haven't checked, and (B) more importantly, whoever saw the code now also knows exactly what to avoid.
Basically, it's pretty much _the_ cheating nightmare scenario.
2. Whoever has that code will have a trivial job of making some "emulated" servers and stealing your subscribers that way. It's one thing to have a shabby half-way there alternative server available after a year, it's entirely another thing to maybe have a 100% perfect alternative right at the start.
And yes, that _is_ money lost, and not just profits lost. Most MMOs have far more content than a single-player RPG. (Even Oblivion is a spit in the bucket compared to the sheer size of WoW.) For most, basically the boxed copy is subsidized, and they're betting you'll stay there for more than 2-3 months to break even and start making a profit. That already doesn't leave you with that much pure profit, since the average player stays about 6 months on a MMO. If half your player base buys the boxed copy and buggers off to play on someone else's servers, you'll feel it. If you also over-estimated a little what population you'll get (and hence, how much can you spend on development), it can turn a moderately survivable game into a flop right there and then.
Yes, we all can look at WoW and see one big money printing license. They actually underestimated how many players they'll get. Most MMOs aren't WoW, though. Flops are more common than successes. Even big names like EQ2 or TSO have managed to get only a fraction of the player base they counted on. They may not have seen the plug pulled outright, but then again, others did. It doesn't take much of a shove to topple a game which already missed the mark.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
In general, movies and music are meant to be viewed or heard. That is, the owners or creators desire for such movies and music to be seen or heard by as many people as possible. Now, they may want to limit how such people obtain the movies or music (so as to reap financial gain), but the overall goal is for the movies or music to gain public exposure.
However, that is not the case with closed-source, proprietary software. The company developing such software does not wish for the software's source code to be viewed by, or available to, anyone besides the present employees of that company. So while the source code itself wasn't theifed, it was the secrecy that was essentially stolen. That is, it was a finite aspect of the source code that was solely limited to the developer, but due to the actions of these former employees, the developer no longer possesses that secrecy. There is an actual deprivation taking place.
Leaked source code hurts a company not because they no longer have a copy of the code, but because the thousands of man hours that went into writing have been partially wasted. The code now needs to be rewritten to protect it from potential hackers and cheaters who will have a much easier time now that they know the inner workings of the code (remember the hl2 source leak?) Not to mention a rival company has acquired for free all your hard work and could effectively release a game very similar to lineage iii (it'd probably have to be free to avoid legal action.. IANAL) and hurt your potential sales. But there are many other reasons as well, but it boils down to: theft of intellectual property is indeed a loss despite what whoever modded parent insightful thinks.
So please, mod parent funny.. but not insightful.
They protect their other product (Lineage II) with Themida and Gameguard, yet they let a little unauthorized third party program walk right through, as well as not drop the botfarmers of the server(who have ruined the economy despite what some minority may say otherwise)
I have no real sympathy for NCSoft in this case. Maybe if they dropped all the bots for good, stripped out the ineffective Gameguard / Themida, and supplanted the non-automated parts of L2Walker, they'd have a leg to stand on.
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Just imagine being the programmer who got that one in his in-tray.
"Good morning John Doe!
Can you just review this source code and give us the low down!
Cheers!
Your boss!"
Talk about workload... I hate reviewing source code. Now imagine having to wade through the whole or parts of the source for a MMO. Brrr!
"However, if they need to rewrite the source code when someone malicious has seen it... well then it already needed to be rewritten, because all it had was "security through obscurity"."
And in true slashdot fashion you get modded insightful. One you don't know if "security through obscurity" was the only means they had. Second "security through obscurity" is indeed a valid method. Just not all by itself.
They should have written it in perl. ;).
:).
Seriously though, what's the big deal? Even when people tried to emulate Blizzard's stuff legitimately they still got shut down.
It's an MMOG, the number of useful "gems" in the code are probably really low. You'd probably be able to come up with those "gems" independently anyway.
Also you could just get them to boast about their great new features to the media way before their release and a smart person in your company could figure out how to do it in 5 minutes. You don't have such smart people in your company? Too bad then.
If you left your company you'd probably want to be be writing the _interesting_ nonboilerplate, nonlib[1] stuff from scratch. After all you should be doing things much better plus take advantage of the latest advances in hardware and software the next time round right? Bonus if you don't have to be drop-in backward compatible with the previous crap you wrote
Just look at John Carmack. He gives everyone access to his old game engines. Even if someone copied his _latest_ game engine right off his PC, so what? They don't have him.
If the Lineage III source code really is worth 1 billion, then if you can "buy" John Carmack's coding+designing services for 5 years for <= 500 million you've got yourself a great deal eh? No? Why not?
Code doesn't make money just sitting there. There's a LOT of other equally important stuff required. You could have two different MMOGs with the same engines and they can be VERY VERY different with different resulting net profit. Different artwork, sound, music, story, game play, game balance, community management, availability+reliability, etc.
Anyone think millions of people play WoW because the game engine is so good? Doh.
Imagine someone stealing the windows source AND trying to use it to make money without using the windows noncode stuff. The only viable way would probably be for finding security bugs faster.
[1] While the company can have sole rights to what you make for them, I don't recommend you let companies own sole rights to your libraries - that's like a carpenter allowing a company to own his tools just because he tweaked them while making stuff for the company. They can _copy_ my libs if they want, but it is wrong for them to say it's now theirs alone to use just because I changed or even added stuff while I happened to be working for them. If they do that then that really is _theft_.
This is the usual Korea vs. Japan nationalist bickering I see all over the net. And the source is notorious for these stupid articles, for example, their stories about the "unfair" labeling of the Sea of Japan which according to them should be called the East Sea. I would be more surprised if there were NOT accusations against the Japanese, since the Koreans had contact with them. But there's no proof the code was stolen, just unproven accusations. If there are any economic losses, it would be more the fault of the disbanding of the coding team, not from code theft. But in Korea, the Japanese are always handy when you need to blame someone.
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I wonder if the code that was stolen was for the client or for the server? I know with L2 the big worry (beyond farmers / botters) was all the private servers that popped up on the net that people would use for free. As it stands most MMO's you can simply download the game client and after selling your soul and letting them have your CC number get to play using their servers. Is the lost money projections of lost subscription fees on account of people playing on free public servers instead of the farmer / bot infested offical ones?
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NC Soft (Korea, not North America) is a horrible company and their bad karma just bit them where it counts. Look at Lineage 2 - so much potential yet they cater to chinese farmers instead of their audience. You can look on the corporate web site, North America & Europe provide half the revenue for Lineage 2 that Korea does, but are given no input on fundamental game mechanics. Consequently, what could have been the best MMORPG in its niche, for pvp, has devolved into rampant corruption, botting, farming, etc. The Lineage 2 team in North America has no power because they are just puppets to NC Soft Korea. Take Guild Wars, City of Heroes, etc, those are all run wonderfully. Then again, they have community staff who have the power to make decisions and answer questions. Them having the source code stolen is just indicative of their entire mentality at NC Soft, they screw their customers and now they get screwed.