Some people are persistent, there’s no doubt about that. Even when games are hidden inside Microsoft’s own fortress of code and priced at over $1250 on Xbox LIVE, pirates still find a way to get what they want. Halo: Reach, which is slated to come out in less than a month, has been grabbed from Microsoft via some skullduggery on their very own servers. The prohibitively expensive version of Reach (statue not included) was intended to be available to reviewers so Microsoft does not have to ship out box copies. Furthermore, even if you manage to scrounge up that many Microsoft Points, you still need a special download code to get it (Microsoft had done something similar with Crackdown 2, which is still not available publicly via LIVE).
While there’s been plenty of debate on this site about piracy and whether it’s good or bad, this is a pretty ballsy move even by Internet standards. Most games are pirated after their release or shortly before, but never from Microsoft’s own website. Spoiler-related threads are springing up all over the Web, so if you’d like to stay pure for September 14, batten down the hatches. Until the Cyber Police get this leak under control, there will be much chaos in the house of Xbox.
What do you guys think about this development? Are you going spoiler hunting or avoiding forums at all costs?
Source – Joystiq
This just pisses me off, but I’ll definitely stay away from forums.
Lame!
Yeah, this sucks, but I think its even worse for the people who preordered. Imagine spending $60 on a game and finding out the ending/plot before you even get to play.
🙁
Where there’s a will there’s a way. I’m just surprised they had a copy on their servers at all… Halo dudes: close your eyes!
I wasn’t going to make a comment on this but it seems to be a persistent issue. I can only assume that this comment: “While there’s been plenty of debate on this site about piracy and whether it’s good or bad (hint: it’s the latter)” is in reference to the discussion (or non-discussion, by Eddy’s point), in the recent article relating to piracy that mentioned Machinarium. I may be wrong.
I will only state that I mentioned multiple times in multiple comments that I did not agree with piracy, but that I also did not agree with persecuting people for sharing for no profit, because there are a great number of holes in copyright that may or may not leave a copyright infringer up to persecution, depending generally not on whether it is actually infringement or not, but on whether a party wants to pursue said infringement, or whether said party allows infringement regardless of whether it goes against the original copyright agreement or not, and also because the question of whether someone is pirating is left up to the assumption that anything that isn’t taken from a direct source (i.e. taken from a P2P site, a streaming site that isn’t, for example, MPAA sponsored, or some other random site) must be pirated (which begs the question of how someone can say, watch something on YouTube that may or may not be copyrighted and determine said thing as such, unless everything on YouTube that is copyrighted is going to be under VEVO).I also stated that companies need to spend the extra money to say, set up servers, host things from there, and have people authenticate themselves when attempting to access material that they’ve paid for (or, to be more specific, paid to access, because the way copyright law is set up, that’s what people are truthfully doing), which they seem to not want to do because of the cost, and that if protection methods are put in place, people need to suck up their problems with the possible privacy issues and inconveniences as they can’t have things both ways. Since I stated those things in my previous comments, I do not believe that there was a discussion of whether piracy was good or bad, and I also believe that either my comments were not read in full, or they were not understood. If it was the former, that is unfortunate. If it was the latter, that is understandable.
I enjoyed everything that came out of SmoothFewFilms and was a fan since the beginning of The Leet World (or more precisely, the 3rd episode. People on the forums, and possibly Eddy or JJ might remember me from other screen names, as I do recall Eddy stating that one of my comments on Web Zeroes in its early stages was one of the best he’d read on the site a while ago), and I enjoy coming here for some gaming news and both the philosophical and practical questions asked of gamers, but also, I, unfortunately, can’t be a part of a community whose heads make accusations that are not only untrue but have been pointed out as such by me on multiple occasions only to have seemingly been ignored, which, if my comments are gone back to and read closely, should be confirmed.
On the point of Halo:Reach being leaked. It should not have been available for purchase on public servers at all. Why it was put on public servers instead of transferred through some private electronic means is something I question, but irregardless of that, providing a special code on a public server provides a chance that someone who has the code could possibly leak that code, which disregards the fact that, as seems to be the case here, someone could use a security hole to get a copy, which also begs me to ask the question of how many other games are pirated directly from Microsoft’s servers, as if this is possible, it most likely has happened before.
Traveling Man, I don’t think Mitch’s comments had anything to do with the discussion on that article at all. I simply he think he was making an editorial statement. Don’t feel like anything any of us says in a post is directed at a user because of a perceived beef. That would be ridiculously passive agressive, uncool, and also highly lame.
For real, we’ve loved your comments here as of late, there was just a disagreement we had on a particular discussion. I don’t let silly disagreements cloud the way I feel about any user here, unless of course they’re just being a jerk, which you weren’t.
And yeah, this just seemed to be a bad way to handle the Halo: Reach press distribution in general. No arguments there at all.
@TravellingMan,
I don’t think anyone misunderstood or didn’t read your comments. But you say again that sharing for no profit should not be “persecuted” (another word we could use would be “prosecuted”) and that fails to address the issue.
The issue was not people making money off piracy, it was the companies LOSING money off piracy. You may burn your friend a copy of a CD and you just cost someone a sale, which hurts their ability to make a living. That is the issue, I think. Perhaps there was a miscommunication.
As for Reach, yeah, MS dropped the ball bigtime.
Yeah, to echo what Eddy and Anthony said, it wasn’t meant to reference the StarCraft II thread or any of the comments made with in. It was simply an editorial addition. Regardless, I’ve removed it from the post to avoid any further confusion.
[quote comment=”12918″]Yeah, this sucks, but I think its even worse for the people who preordered. Imagine spending $60 on a game and finding out the ending/plot before you even get to play.
:([/quote]
At the Halo 3 launch, someone brought a TV and plugged it into their car though a cord, sat outside of gamestop, and played the final mission :/ I refused to watch it, but some kids find that to be horribly amusing to ruin stuff for other people/ dont care. They already got to see what happens and be surprised for themselves, so to some, it wont matter. I just say dont go looking for it.
Wow on this though, interesting to know, but eh, shouldn’t hurt sales. Too much replay value in the game. (knowing details about the story shouldn’t hurt sales) I wont be looking for the details though
Also MC dies and Bungie takes back all the other halo games. The end