Lineage III Source Code Stolen? 61
Shack News and the Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo are reporting that sourcecode for the MMOG Lineage III may have been stolen. As the third Massively Multiplayer game in a huge-selling South Korean series released by publisher NCSoft, over a billion dollars may be lost as a result of this theft. "The Seoul Metropolitan Police said Wednesday that seven former NCsoft employees are suspected of having sold the technology to a major Japanese game company. The seven left the Korean firm in February and allowed the Japanese company to review the software during a job interview. Police believe that the technology might have been copied during the demonstration."
The Departed (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't think any company would publicize its interviews, and I doubt these former employees would sing about their code demonstration.
That means there might be a NCSoft mole inside the competitor.
A billion dollars! (Score:2, Interesting)
Somehow, now that this code has been "stolen", they are unable to make another penny from it. Anything they would have made will go to the new possessor of the code.
From the other comments, I'm clearly not the only one who thinks this makes no sense. For this to be worth that much, the code, and the code alone would have to be the sole reason people were playing the game. Marketting made no difference, content made no difference, game design made no difference. People were only interested in the game engine. And now that another company has it, people are going to choose the other company in preference.
Sure, the code isn't worthless. Knowing how a successful project works can save a lot of time, but the competitive advantage this gives isn't going to be anywhere near the order of magnitude suggested. We're talkng tens of thousands of dollars. Not a billion!
Oh, the irony... (Score:4, Interesting)
I have no real sympathy for NCSoft in this case. Maybe if they dropped all the bots for good, stripped out the ineffective Gameguard / Themida, and supplanted the non-automated parts of L2Walker, they'd have a leg to stand on.
Re:Yes and no (Score:3, Interesting)
Now if you were to subtract all bot/raid farming accounts, and accounts in known botfarming regions(e.g. China), I'd bet that number would drop far from 1.25M.
I'd argue that if this was possible, the game code is already broken. In any event, there's any number of minor changes that could be made before release that can alleviate if not eliminate the problem. I don't see how any of it would require a huge investment in time.
Their policy enforcement and design is broken - they slap on 2 applications that behave like rootkits (Themida, Gameguard) yet L2Walker and such go right through the front door without them being broken.
Yeah, no way there'd be lawsuits there. Besides, people play MMOs for coherent content and (supposedly) the community/social aspects. If all your friends are on Lineage II, they're gonna move to Lineage III, not some half-assed quasi-Lineage that no one has heard of. I also think you're intentionally ignoring the infrastructure costs of running an MMO that would even start to compare with the player population of Lineage. Not to mention that the content would have to completely re-written in order to even start attracting players without attracting Lineage-Lawyers.
Do those costs include the cost of defending the bot/raid farmers?
Or change the protocol just enough that it doesn't work.
Lineage II has seen tons of "protocol changes" and yet third party programs still persist.