Just last week in our gaming podcast we were talking about how Gears of War 2 wasn’t going to make a PC debut because it has a bit of a problem with piracy. We were afraid this movement was going to cause game developers and publishers to stick with console’s “big can of DRM” over the PC for many future releases.
Turns out, Fallout 3 was stolen before it was announced as finished and has begun to show up on torrents around the Internet. This, of course, has lead folks to believe the leak took place at the manufacturing plant given the obvious circumstances behind the event. Sure, the title could have been leaked at the developers studio, but who would want to cause their products sales to suffer? Perhaps a hacker broke into the studio and stole the raw images?
There are plenty of possibilities, but the fact of the matter is this is the “DRM” console version of the game. It has been stolen and downloaded by thousands of people who are going to actually take the time to make it work on their ‘tweaked’ console. Just when we said “it’s too hard to hack the Xbox 360 and its games,” some pirate comes out and does it!
While the pirates set sea with the glorious booty that is Fallout 3, Bethesda’s staying hush about the incident for now. In odd timing, Ubisoft came out, prior to this event, talking in respect to Tom Clancy EndWar saying:
“To be honest, if PC wasn’t pirated to hell and back, there’d probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two.” (gamasutra)
Perhaps, the pirates want to bring some attention to the console market in terms of piracy so developers continue to produce PC titles? If nobody is safe, there will be no one safe-haven console to run to when pirates are stealing “potential sales.”
Going for the sex sells eh? Not that anyone would know the difference either way.
“Companies spend money like fish” Doesn’t sound like any company I’ve been at. I have at two work places that had several computers still on XP, they take a long time to upgrade anything. I’ve seen old plotters still be used from decades ago. I think companies tend to the if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.
Paul if you have a spare Windows 7 computer why don’t you see if Grim Fandango works on it? Or have you already tried?
@Windows 10: Yeah it feels like a real desperate attempt at good will for the Windows OS in general. I think giving it away free for a year they feel will garner some slack. Though if you upgrade I don’t know if you can go back to Windows 7 or 8.
@Kojima: I think Metal Gear is becoming one of those games that need to be retired now.
@Tempest Debacle: Looking at the screen shots I feel like I have seen this game mechanic before in other games. Having never played these two I can see it’s a ship that spins around a “pit” shooting at things in the center. I feel that that was a very old Atari game at some point. However he’ll probably have to pay a settlement for this as it does look like he is trying to remake the game that belongs to Atari now. There’s making a game that uses certain mechanics and then there’s just making what looks to be a clone of what they did previously. If I made a game where you jump up and down a large block pyramid with a little orange dude named Q’bort I’m sure Atari would see through that as well.
@Xbox for sale: If it’s for sale maybe a former console company could buy it to bring its self back like Sega or Atari. Though I don’t know if anyone would want to buy it. With the way they’ve been talking about integrating Xbox and Windows gaming I don’t think they would sell that then.
@Nintendo’s NX Gen: I’m intrigued what they will do, if nothing else we’ll have a new name to have fun with the NX Gen.
Since there was no QotW, I thought I’d ask something: “What do you think is the future of Old Games?” To give more context anyone who wants to read an old book, see an old movie or listen to an old song can easily do so. However with Games that will become difficult, especially in cases of games that are Online only and once servers are gone so too is the game. Later generations of people may have a hard time playing games that are no longer workable on current gen consoles or even computers. I wanted to know what your guys thoughts are on this.