Xbox 360’s Fallout 3 Not Safe From Pirates

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.”

0 thoughts on “Xbox 360’s Fallout 3 Not Safe From Pirates”

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Post

Kaz Hirai Dooms 360 To Short LifeKaz Hirai Dooms 360 To Short Life

Sony’s PlayStation 3 has a 10-year plan. We’ve heard about the plan, we’ve seen Sony’s current execution and we’re starting to see some of the titles making their way to the PS3 for 2009. The Xbox 360? Kaz, Sony Computer Entertainment’s head man, made his thoughts clear when speaking to Official PlayStation Magazine.

kaz“Last time I checked, they’ve never had a console that’s been on the market for more than four or five years and we’ve committed to a ten year life cycle, so you do the math…,” he says. He goes on to state that the Xbox 360 won’t have a larger install base by the end of their 10-year plan has been completed, “unless things go really bad.”

Of course, nobody says Microsoft’s 10-year plan isn’t to push out yet another console. Is that wise? We don’t really know, but you can’t count them out on it. Maybe they’ll only have half the install base but two consoles in the market within the next ten years, nobody really knows.

The one major hole we can see in his comments revolve around their claims that the Microsoft doesn’t have any history of a console being on the market for very long. If I recall, Sony managed to squeek one by on Nintendo with the original PlayStation, which changed everything for the next ten years. Sony didn’t have a 5-year track record when they started taking Nintendo down, why does Microsoft need to have an extensive resume as well?

As for Wii?

“It’s difficult to talk about Nintendo because we don’t look at their console as being competitors. They’re a different world and we operate in our world — that’s kind of the way I look at things…” (kotaku)

Say what you want about Microsoft vs. Sony, but it sure sounds like Sony doesn’t want to acknowlege Nintendo’s success because it casts a dark shadow on their own product. Nintendo and Sony have been battling for years, that’s just the way it is and that’s how the industry sees it. When NPD releases numbers, when journalists write articles about consoles and when the war is finished one thing remains constant: all three consoles are included in the equation.

Episode 257: The Golden BoysEpisode 257: The Golden Boys

This week’s episode has a lot of … personality. That is, a lot of mockery, cursing, sniping, and general chaos – making it one of the best podcasts ever. Jordan Lund wasn’t available due to commitments at work, so Dan Quick once again filled in, and as expected, got along with Paul S. Nowak famously, as they tagteamed Jonah Falcon. In the meantime, the Gaming Flashback this week was Civilization II.

This week’s news also made Paul explode. Twice:

  • Congressmen want warning labels on all games
  • Exec: Console version of Diablo III will be “full Blizzard experience”
  • Grand Theft Auto V details allegedly leaked
  • EVE Online FanFest Panel accused of “tasteless” behavior
  • Rumor: Microsoft to release ‘Xbox Lite’ before next-gen

The winners of The Darkness II contest were also announced. All this in an episode bursting full of good, old-fashioned bitchiness.

Trials of a World of Warcraft Player: Entry FiveTrials of a World of Warcraft Player: Entry Five

“The Grind”

With Wrath of the Lich King arriving last week it only made sense to jump into the new content “Lich King” style. Although we had initially reacted to the beta, playing the final content was much more fun with all of our guild and friends to play along.

It only took a few hours to get my new Death Knight to level-58 beyond the starting area and into the real world of Azeroth. Upon reaching the main city (Ogrammar as we’re horde) I picked up two new professions to make me a bit of dime: mining and skinning. This is where the beauty of the Death Knight fell apart…

A level-58 character has a few options open for exploration with the Burning Crusade content being the most desirable starting point. However, quickly it became apparent that my professions of mining and skinning were useless in Hellfire and other Burning Crusade areas. Why? Professions start with a value of 1. The last expansion requires your professions to be roughly 300 before you can utilize them.

My level-58 Death Knight has no experience in the ways of skinning and mining, what has he been doing all his life? Apparently killing innocent people in small villages throughout the Eastern Plaguelands. My anticipation with leveling my Death Knight died knowing I’d spend the next few days hunting mines and killing animals as if I where a level-10 toon.

There I was, a high level character trolling Crossroads and Thousand Needles hunting for copper and tin and skinning all the low level creatures I could find. Why didn’t Blizzard consider this when they allow you to create a level-55 character on day one? If we don’t go off and grind our way to a profession level of 300 we might as well not even pick professions at all.

I was not alone in these findings, along my path I found several Death Knights with skinning knives and mining tools looking for open opportunities to cut into the earth or the dead animals skins all around them. Sure, we can kill a cat in seconds flat but the “grind” is what we wanted to avoid, this is what characters spend their first twenty levels doing!

After three sessions of mind numbing grinding I’ve managed to reach a skill of 340 in skinning and coming upon 200 in mining. Mining is still too low for high level game content so I must whisk myself away to noobville every so often to catch a few mythril nodes and pray for a gold deposit along the way.

This may not be a bug in the Wrath of Lich King expansion but it sure is an annoying design flaw.