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."

Comments

Re:Yes and no

[Moraelin]

Methinks you're still underestimating it, or maybe I haven't explained it well enough:

A) Just having a number of players in Lineage 2 doesn't mean you'll have the same audience in Lineage 3. Ask Turbine about Asheron's Call 2, which flopped abysmally. Just being the sequel to AC1 didn't say much. Or ask Sony about Everquest 2. They went from EQ1 being the #1 MMO to EQ2 being a niche game. So what makes you think that Lineage III has already hit the mark, when it's not even released yet?

B) You don't seem to understand how those "emulated" servers work. We're not talking something that just looks vaguely similar, we're talking stuff that's:

- played with the official client, hence it looks exactly the same

- quite often has the exact same maps, quests, etc, since enough information usually exists in the client. E.g., don't think that when you play WoW it transfers the landscape from the server. Your client CD already has those files. You'd be surprised what else is on a client CD. For starters all the quest texts and rewards.

That's the way it worked ever since the first free servers were made for UO. The "emulated server" would be just an executable, maybe also some tools, and it would require an installed client or a client CD to get the rest of the game from. E.g., the whole Britannia map and all the creatures.

And it's pretty hard to sue them, since:

1. They're not distributing any copyrighted material. They don't distribute a copy of your map or meshes or textures, they tell people to go buy a boxed copy of the game for those. You can't easily forbid people from just making an exe that incidentally reads your files, or MS would stop OOo from working with Office files.

2. It's hard to even take the DMCA route (which I don't think Korea has anyway), since they're not gaining or providing any unauthorized access to your servers. Quite the contrary, they let your client connect to their server, if anyone wants to. It's also not circumventing any copy-protection mechanisms, since a MMO isn't copy-protected anyway, and they're not telling people to copy anything.

Now having a source theft is a different thing, but even there you'll first have to prove that they've actually used your files. It can take some time.

At any rate, we're talking about something which is an exact clone of the official game at launch. We're not talking about asking people to switch to a similar game, but about asking them to play on a free server from the start. Having something like that from the start, when people don't have social networks keeping them on the official servers, can be very damaging.

I din't know if it will actually happen to Lineage III, but it is a possibility.