Slashdot Mirror
Sega Cancels Yakuza 6 Song of Life Free Demo After Gamers Unlocked Full Game (businessinsider.com)
Sega pulled the highly anticipated "Yakuza 6: The Song of Life" demo this week from the PlayStation Store after discovering some players had inadvertently gained access to the full game using the demo. From a report: This discovery came only hours after the demo was initially released for PlayStation 4. The Japanese video game company tweeted, "We are as upset as you are, and had hoped to have this demo available for everyone today. We discovered that some were able to use the demo to unlock the full game." [...] When the demo was initially released it required more than 36 GB of storage, to the surprise of many video game critics. Kotaku, an online entertainment publication, suggests that the demo was so large because it actually contained the entire game, but was supposed to restrict everything beyond the first few stages of the game.
It worked in the past, it could possibly work again if you tried it.
Ruining things for everyone-- oh wait this is on a Sony platform. Fuck them for their root kits last decade.
That's basically what they tried to do.
But they fucked up because the "free shareware episode" here already contains the data for the extra "commercial episodes" and only a small switch gets flipped to enable continuing.
(Whereas, you got extra floppies with Commander Keen episode 2 and 3, or Wolfenstein Episodes 2 to 6, once you paid after testing the free shareware episode 1).
(Though I've read somewhere that Id *DID* make the same blunder with the shareware CD of Quake1. There was only a simple registration procedure that was supposed to unlock the full commercial game with extra episodes out of the shareware CD, the same way here the full Yakuza6 can apparently be unlocked out of free 36GB demo).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Shouldn't have to...but human nature ruins it for others.
...game series ever to come out of Japan. It's a gritty look at the criminal underworld with heaps of culture (and local advertising) thrown in. There are a few historical non-canon titles in the series that haven't (and probably won't) make it over that are just as good. Highly recommended.
... after being lazy and wasteful of other peoples' resources (time, bandwidth, storage space).
I've made game demos before. It's not exactly rocket science. Heck, many entry-level game engines (Unity) have, as part of the build process, a way for you to select what levels you want for a given build so that it creates output with the appropriate size & content (and nothing more).
This sig has been enciphered with a one-time pad. It could say almost anything.
If it was supposed to be a demo version, then what the fuck was the full version doing there?
I get that you want to build them both from the same codebase, but that's what #ifdef is for.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
from the company that once knowingly and intentionally installed a spyware trojan on their customers computers.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Possession is 9/10ths of piracy. If they didn't want to distribute the full game yet, then they shouldn't have distributed the full game!
They also deserve it for wasting everyone's time and bandwidth on all the stuff that was supposed to be in the demo.
I have a technical app on the app store (telescope polar alignment), with a free version missing some extra tools and a paid version. I make sure I keep it light in case someone needs to download it from a remote location and, even though both are built from the same project, I make sure the extra stuff is not included in the free package, so that it is 10MB instead of 20MB...
But just throwing the entire 3GB game as a demo, that sure is lazy! An since they are that lazy, the were predictably lazy with the way they implemented the limitation so people got around it. Congrats.
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent. Polar Scope Align for iOS
Reminds me of the glory days of the Quake I demo CD & qcrack. Man, what a goldmine that was.
They have nobody to blame but themselves... why punish the gaming community for their fuck up? If you're going to release a demo, release a fucking demo... not a locked up version of the full game. The fact that they DIDN'T see this coming is the most alarming part of it all.
I'd be upset too if I knew I was paying top dollar for incompetent programmers.
Those quadded red armor rocket jumps can be a bitch.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Doesn't it cost THEM per gig for store bandwidth?
Why the fuck would they upload the entire game when they could ctrl+delete a bunch of assets and with 30 minutes at the most of coding, put up a "full game coming soon / out now go buy pls" replacement for the end of some mission or chapter?
Reminds me of a demo on the Playstation.
Warzone 2100. A training level was made in to a demo for it.
However, not only did the cheat system work for the demo, you could also place the other 2 factions units that weren't in the demo.
I played the fuck out of that demo using the other 2 factions for 5 total (including some scavenger non-faction).
Let's not forget hilariously bad shareware issues of having full releases.
This is why proper project management (of the asset kind, not people kind) can help streamline development with little overhead and also make it simpler to make changes on the larger scale.
Winging it and making a mess of spaghetti code just isn't nice. It makes shit spiral out of control and inflates development times to much much larger timescales than they need be.
Do it properly and fucking plan your shit out. Seriously. Plans are not a bad thing. A sequence diagram is the most helpful thing you can do when doing any large programming project. I don't care if you are an 80 IQ or a 180 IQ, still fucking do it. In fact, the latter tend to make disastrous messes more so than the former! I know!
"We discovered that some were able to use the demo to unlock the full game."
Nope. According to people who got full access to the game, they didn't have to do anything to unlock the game... it was already unlocked. They just kept playing it past the demo part.
1. Halfass your job.
2. Blame the users of your product when found out.