Slashdot Mirror
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."
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_.