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Crysis 2 Leaked Over a Month Before Launch
iviv66 writes with this excerpt from Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"According to a thread on the Facepunch forums, a developer build of Crysis 2 containing the full game, multiplayer and the master key for the online authentication has been leaked, and is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites. This sounds like it might be a serious tragedy for Crytek. Crysis 2 was scheduled for release on the 22nd of March, so the leaked build could be dangerously close to finished."
EA and Crytek have responded to the leak, saying that the illicit copy is incomplete and unfinished, and that "Piracy continues to damage the PC packaged goods market and the PC development community."
"...is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites." So these websites aren't just illegal, they're *astonishingly* illegal! This changes damn near everything about my view of the story!
The HL2 leak was of a build that was nowhere near ready. If I remember, Valve was somewhat guilty of having pretty heavily exaggerated how close HL2 was to being finished at the time. This doesn't in any way justify the leak, but it does explain why the game changed substantially and for the better - it wasn't really much to do with the leak at all. Crysis 2, on the other hand, has a release date that's not much more than a month and a half away. There's not much that can be done.
There isn't really an upside to this one. The only way there could be would be if whoever in the supply chain is responsible for this leak were to say, trip up and fall out of a third floor window into a skip full of broken glass and dogshit.
"Incomplete" almost certainly doesn't mean "the last two levels aren't in there". Not when the game is this close to release. Games development doesn't work that way any more. What it probably means is that "the final 20% of the serious bugs that we needed to eliminate before launch are still in there". In other words, if this differs from the version that gets submitted as gold master, any differences will be a pronounced negative and will be the kind of annoyance that will just put people off from buying anyway (and create the worst sort of pre-release publicity).
Bill Bryson wrote (and I'm paraphrasing here) in his book "At Home" that often times aristocrats held unreasonable expectations of their servants because they had never preformed the work that the servants did.
I'm reference this because people who wrap themselves up in the ideology of "internet freedom fighters" probably don't understand the process of creating something and how debilitating it is to have that work released before it is ready. Especially after years of hard work and personal sacrifice went into it.
I don't expect you to understand because I'm not talking about laws and rights and the inherit freedom of digital bits - I'm talking about what it takes to be a good neighbor.