Second, while I'm sure they do perfectly good work at CD Projekt, I have a hard time believing that they're doing anything groundbreaking. As a game dev myself, we do some interesting work, but very little that I think stands alone, out of the context of our engines. We're not Epic, which would be a totally different ball game.
Third, what do you do with the source once you have it? I suppose it might make it slightly easier to pirate their game, but not so much so that it would be worth $1 million. You certainly can't sell copies of the games for very much, and your audience is seriously limited. I'm sure CDP is well on their way to making any DLC or future addons completely incompatible. I guess you might be able to bootstrap your own game from it? But that can't possibly be worth the effort; most game engines are an absolute morass to work in without the institutional knowledge of the company. One of the things that make Unreal and Unity so valued is that they're quite clear and easy to work with when you're starting from scratch. But also, everyone would know you were using the stolen engine right away. It's not like you could grab this code and then go straight and hope to make your million dollars back.
It takes dozens to hundreds of people to make games at the scale CDP does. I honestly find the desire for the source code baffling. It almost certainly comes with more baggage than it could ever be worth in return.
If the source code is so valuable, why doesn't someone just pirate Linux? It's running, what, 70%+ of all "computers" in the world?
It's GPL, you say. OK. So it's protected by copyright. So is 2077, and even under a *more* restrictive license -- namely, they haven't said anybody has any right to do anything with this, whatsoever.
So yeah, I agree, I don't see value, esp. $7M, in this. If the $7M purchase is actually true, It's probably from a person or group that is sitting on a ton of Bitcoin they
"I agree, I don't see value, esp. $7M, in this. If the $7M purchase is actually true"
If it's true is a good point. A couple things used to start working toward attribution for various roles is "who would want to do this, and would want it badly enough to spend these resources? So we have to ask "who would be willing to spend $7 million to get the source code of a game?" That's got to be a very short list of people, close to zero.
If you're developing a game, which you can then sell at full price, sure you
Perhaps they could be looking for exploitable security vulnerabilities that they could use to target players of the game? Seems like a pretty steep price for that, though; it's hard to imagine that security was a particularly high priority in development of this game.
We don't know how much money actually changed hands; if it was only a few tens of thousands there's probably a fair number of potential buyers who could find it worthwhile.
For that matter, the hackers could be completely full of shit and nobod
You are completely missing the group of people that will pay for objects illegally gained simply so they have them. Whether they do anything with the object is completely irrelevant - for all we know a Blue-ray with the code burnt to it will be lit up in a display cabinet somewhere, next to some moon dust and T-Rex bones.
This is honestly the most likely reason in my mind. You'd have to be a rich collector, but even then, how do you display this? What do you do with it? Print it out and mount it? Put it on a diamond studded USB key and carry it around with you?
Who would pay? (Score:2)
First of all, who has the money to pay for it?
Second, while I'm sure they do perfectly good work at CD Projekt, I have a hard time believing that they're doing anything groundbreaking. As a game dev myself, we do some interesting work, but very little that I think stands alone, out of the context of our engines. We're not Epic, which would be a totally different ball game.
Third, what do you do with the source once you have it? I suppose it might make it slightly easier to pirate their game, but not so much so that it would be worth $1 million. You certainly can't sell copies of the games for very much, and your audience is seriously limited. I'm sure CDP is well on their way to making any DLC or future addons completely incompatible. I guess you might be able to bootstrap your own game from it? But that can't possibly be worth the effort; most game engines are an absolute morass to work in without the institutional knowledge of the company. One of the things that make Unreal and Unity so valued is that they're quite clear and easy to work with when you're starting from scratch. But also, everyone would know you were using the stolen engine right away. It's not like you could grab this code and then go straight and hope to make your million dollars back.
It takes dozens to hundreds of people to make games at the scale CDP does. I honestly find the desire for the source code baffling. It almost certainly comes with more baggage than it could ever be worth in return.
Re: (Score:2)
It's GPL, you say. OK. So it's protected by copyright. So is 2077, and even under a *more* restrictive license -- namely, they haven't said anybody has any right to do anything with this, whatsoever.
So yeah, I agree, I don't see value, esp. $7M, in this. If the $7M purchase is actually true, It's probably from a person or group that is sitting on a ton of Bitcoin they
Yeah hackers may be lying :) (Score:2)
"I agree, I don't see value, esp. $7M, in this. If the $7M purchase is actually true"
If it's true is a good point. A couple things used to start working toward attribution for various roles is "who would want to do this, and would want it badly enough to spend these resources? So we have to ask "who would be willing to spend $7 million to get the source code of a game?" That's got to be a very short list of people, close to zero.
If you're developing a game, which you can then sell at full price, sure you
Re: (Score:2)
> why doesn't someone just pirate Linux?
How do you pirate something that is Free as in Speech and Free as in Beer??
Re: (Score:2)
Replace the licence comments from the source code and re-release it?
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps they could be looking for exploitable security vulnerabilities that they could use to target players of the game? Seems like a pretty steep price for that, though; it's hard to imagine that security was a particularly high priority in development of this game.
We don't know how much money actually changed hands; if it was only a few tens of thousands there's probably a fair number of potential buyers who could find it worthwhile.
For that matter, the hackers could be completely full of shit and nobod
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
This is honestly the most likely reason in my mind. You'd have to be a rich collector, but even then, how do you display this? What do you do with it? Print it out and mount it? Put it on a diamond studded USB key and carry it around with you?
Re: Who would pay? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
Maybe they can sell a knock off version somewhere that doesn't care too much about foreign copyrights, like Russia.
It does seem very odd.