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Hackers Leak Xbox One SDK Claiming Advancement In Openness and Homebrew
MojoKid writes Microsoft, it seems, just can't catch a break. Days after a major hack took its servers offline on Christmas day, and after being lambasted in multiple stories for shipping games like Halo: The Master Chief Collection in nigh-unplayable condition, the company's Xbox One SDK has been leaked to the public by a group calling itself H4LT. H4LT, which apparently objects to being called a hacker group, offered this explanation when asked why it was distributing the SDK. The group claims that "the SDK will basically allow the community to reverse and open doors towards homebrew applications being present on the Xbox One." To be clear, what H4LT has done is a far cry from groups like Lizard Squad. The SDK for any given product is typically available behind some degree of registration, but they don't necessarily cost anything. The SDK is one small component of creating the ecosystem that would be necessary to get homebrew up and running on the platform. Whether or not users will ever pull it off is another question.
My son downloaded the Master Chief Collection the day it came out. He has gotten many hours of play out of it. Hasn't had one problem with it. A week ago I asked him about it specifically because of all the online ranting about problems. He knew about the rants, but dismissed them - apparently it was just one part of online matchmaking or something. He had no problems and could not understand what the fuss was. Nigh unplayable? Obviously written by someone who never even tried...
No, that's not what we're talking about here. It was either leaked by a Microsoft insider / licensed developer or it was obtained by hacking into some system that had the files on it.
You can't get the major native-code console SDKs simply by registering. The way it's typically set up is that you have to formally apply to become a licensed developer, which generally involves having a corporate entity (Nintendo used to also require that the entity have its own dedicated commercial-grade office space, i.e. no "garage startups") with some demonstrable track record of publishing commercial-quality games and substantiation of sufficient funding to actually complete development on commercial-quality games. Then you have to drop a decent chunk of money on a short list of approved test/debug hardware in order to actually develop games. There are several levels of security and contracts/NDAs involved that require manual review and execution.