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Enlisting Game Hackers Instead of Fighting Them
CVG recently spoke with Christofer Sundberg, co-founder of Avalanche Studios, the company behind Just Cause and its sequel. Sundberg expressed his disdain for both DRM and poor cross-platform ports, and talked about how he sees the hacker community as more of an ally than publishers do. Quoting:
"'... 50 percent of the people that work for me come from a hacker background - that's true.' When asked whether approaching leading hackers and asking them to put their programming skills to good use was a wise idea, Sundberg added: 'Oh yeah. I absolutely think that's a fair approach, to think about how these people can fit on the right side of the law. It's one way, at least. Perhaps the truest pirates are too much down the road of anarchy to ever work with you in a proper way; these are the guys who see us as evil! But in Sweden the [hacking] scene was huge... As a studio, we've found that there's definitely a lot of talent [in that community].'"
I wonder how much of his coders come from the cracking scene, and how much from the demo-scene.
The cracking scene has always had some ties with the demo scene (and in some cases demo groups where the 'legal-branch' of some hacking groups) but cracking PC games does not bring much skill for game coding. (or is x86 assembly code really such a special skill these days?)
The fact of the matter is that in the 21st century, media & games companies have set goals of ensuring that customers don't hang to things for too long & are always clamouring for the next upgrade with wads of money in their hands - we've already seen the results of this with the movie & music industries.
In the movie industry, it's about rechurning concepts that bring in vast profits quickly - a constant barrage of 3D movies, CGI animations with cute animal characters & endless sequels.
In the music industry, it's about elevating unknowns to pop star fame in very short periods of time, then dropping them after a year or two when they probably start getting too belligerent & demanding too much money.
The games industry is no different, games companies do not want their customers hanging on to games for too long - because they want customers demanding the next release as soon as possible. Unfortunately, the difference here is that the average new game costs at leasts 3 times as much as a new music CD, a new movie DVD or a cinema ticket.
Games hackers are therefore seen as enemies of games companies because the "nice" hackers create (at least for PC versions of games) mods that can prolong the life of a game many times over, resulting in customers being entertained for a lot longer before buying the next game, whilst the "naughty" hackers break games open so that others can copy & play them.
This is precisely why games companies (for the most part) have worked hard to convert PC gamers to console gamers because a console gamer can be restricted in what he/she does with the game a lot more than a PC gamer can be - consequently, this is why the number of PC games titles have tailed off dramatically over the past few years, despite there probably being more people than ever who own PCs and who play games. In other words, it's an artificially induced extinction of PC gaming to suit games company coffers.
As a PC gamer in my 40s, I wouldn't for one minute want to compare myself to teenage or younger gamers. But I still play a lot of PC games today despite buying very few (in all honesty, the only PC games titles I sit in anticipation of are the Fallout series ones) but I don't copy or pirate any either. All I do is enjoy playing and replaying old titles with community mods & levels, I also do a lot of retrogaming.
If the youngsters of today need better & better graphics in a game for better immersion then good luck to them & I'm not one to argue with them - if anything, graphics were something that appealed very much to me when I started computer gaming on the ZX Spectrum & the Commodore Amiga.
But ultimately, it all comes down to the hackers who write mods & emulators that allow me to satisfy my gaming needs without my having to buy any new games - not to mention, as a mostly Linux user anyway, the large number of Open Source games like Alien Arena and World Of Padman where, if I feel like a little multiplayer gaming, I can dive online for a half hour or so without having to spend weeks in an MMORPG or the like.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
I have a co-worker who is absolutely enamored with hacking and cracking. He is by all definitions a script kiddie.
You pretty much answered your own question: he is a script kiddie, not a hacker or cracker. Hackers are elegant and, in my experience, have a higher sense of intelligence and thought process. That's often the divide for people who go to school to earn their degree in computer science and the ones that are successful programmers without going to school to earn their degree; the formally educated feel like they deserve some bonus credit because they blew tens of thousands of dollars getting a piece of paper. Don't get me wrong, going the degree route is the smarter choice overall, but it certainly doesn't give merit to your skills. In fact, I'd probably hire a seasoned hacker over someone with less than 10 years of school-earned programming experience.