Crysis 2 Leaked Over a Month Before Launch 203
iviv66 writes with this excerpt from Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
"According to a thread on the Facepunch forums, a developer build of Crysis 2 containing the full game, multiplayer and the master key for the online authentication has been leaked, and is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites. This sounds like it might be a serious tragedy for Crytek. Crysis 2 was scheduled for release on the 22nd of March, so the leaked build could be dangerously close to finished."
EA and Crytek have responded to the leak, saying that the illicit copy is incomplete and unfinished, and that "Piracy continues to damage the PC packaged goods market and the PC development community."
Obligatory.... (Score:5, Funny)
Now thats a crysis
Re:Obligatory.... (Score:5, Funny)
Looks like the game was released with "maximum speed."
Re:Obligatory.... (Score:4, Funny)
It's a farcry from the Half-Life 2 leak.
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Considering crytek keeps their workers in "company provided" living spaces to make them work longer and underpay them quite strongly I say they deserve it.
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Re:Obligatory.... (Score:5, Informative)
crytek keeps their workers in "company provided" living spaces
Crytek Germany provide free accommodation to new developers who've relocated to Germany while they find their feet, and provide assistance finding private accommodation for longer term workers.
to make them work longer
Work longer hours, or work longer for the company? Quite a few of these people have to be persuaded to relocate from Crysis UK to Germany. Persuading people to relocate for a significant length of time requires carrots, not sticks.
Astonishing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Astonishing (Score:4, Insightful)
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Everything is "illegal" nowadays, im not astonished.
Only media corporations are pretending to be astonished so they can go and whine about the "astonishingly illegal" sites to politicians.
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It would appear you're new to the writing style of the RockPaperShotgun guys. Playing on words is their motto ;)
Oh and, they're British.
Re:Astonishing (Score:5, Funny)
"...is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites."
So these websites aren't just illegal, they're *astonishingly* illegal! This changes damn near everything about my view of the story!
Astonishingly illegal web site will contain material that illegally violates copyright laws, with exploits that will first illegally violate your computer, and after sending spam will illegally violate other peoples inboxes, and after intercepting your web banking session will illegally violate your bank account, and after getting you your web cam and photo collection may illegally violate your privacy (which may or may not involve pictures of someone being violated, but as long as it's all legal, it's not relevant here).
Sounds pretty astonishingly illegal to me.
Better stick to just non-astonishingly illegal web sites, as they'll be mostly limited to copyright infringement.
Remember the HL2 leak? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Remember the HL2 leak? (Score:5, Insightful)
The HL2 leak was of a build that was nowhere near ready. If I remember, Valve was somewhat guilty of having pretty heavily exaggerated how close HL2 was to being finished at the time. This doesn't in any way justify the leak, but it does explain why the game changed substantially and for the better - it wasn't really much to do with the leak at all. Crysis 2, on the other hand, has a release date that's not much more than a month and a half away. There's not much that can be done.
There isn't really an upside to this one. The only way there could be would be if whoever in the supply chain is responsible for this leak were to say, trip up and fall out of a third floor window into a skip full of broken glass and dogshit.
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What was unfinished HL2 leak like? Was it ugly or something? Any screen shots and videos of it?
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He didn't say anything against any of what you said, he only said that he hoped whoever was responsible for the leak gets punished. Because they are clearly not acting in the interests of Crytek as a "private company". The guy likely doesn't work for Crytek, otherwise he'd just be shooting himself in the foot by doing this (hence why RogueyWon mentioned the "supply chain"). Saying this is Crytek's responsibility is like blaming someone for having their car stolen while it was being repaired at a garage.
You
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Okay, so what you are saying is, you think nobody should ever make big budget games any more because they shouldn't be allowed to sell them and can't make their money back? Likewise nobody should make big budget movies or try to sell their music?
If you don't like my car analogy, how about me saying "this is like someone copying your personal information off your hard drive while your computer is in for repair" or something along those lines? The point was not to do with the stealing, but to demonstrate that
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It's not just voice acting and marketing, it's stuff like story/script, texturing, level design, modelling, animation and testing. Also, have you actually played any games with poor voice acting, or do you just prefer your games not to have voices in them? The second is acceptable in some types of games, the first just breaks your immersion from the game. You don't have to spend millions to get good voice actors either. If you're paying millions you're doing it for the name, not the talent.
I suppose by "big
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Your three separate cases are not really separate. They are all instances of data you want to prevent from being released publicly for fear of the repercussions. As you mentioned in previous posts, the onus is completely on the party wanting to keep the data secret (in this case, the person getting computer repair).
If information is really important, how hard is it to keep on a storage medium that does not require connection to your machine for it to operate? Having all that data on an external drive tha
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You're just acting in your own self-interest, not on any principles. Why is privacy limited to your photos, but not to your work? It's a much simpler principle to state that somebody is not allowed to hack into your computer and copy information.
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Your idealism is impressive, but useless. The point of copyright was to end a situation in which everything was kept secret except to a select few. Now it's spawned into a monster which completely defeats its original intention. However, reverting to a situation in which there is no protection for information will cause more problems than it will solve. Companies will become more secretive, loads of stuff produced, whether good or bad, will never see the light of day. The public will lose out, DRM will
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Aside from the fact that your rant is TL;DR, you seem to miss the basic point. At this point in time, the only people that rightfully have access to the game are under non-disclosure agreements. So someone broke that contract, either willfully or unwittingly.
So the car theft analogy still stands. The point is that as long as Crytkek took all the measures they could (locking the car and handing the keys over to the repair shop), they're not as responsible as you say they are. It's like saying they shoul
Re:Remember the HL2 leak? (Score:4, Insightful)
The pile of matter that works together to call itself "Stellian" apparently decided it lords over more piles of matter and that other piles of matter may not touch or manipulate those piles of matter.
You can make anything sound absurd by abstracting enough but there is no inalienable right to download, store and copy copyrighted works. Sure, nature itself won't prevent you from doing it but that's not a standard to form a society by.
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there is no inalienable right to download, store and copy copyrighted works. Sure, nature itself won't prevent you from doing it but that's not a standard to form a society by.
Quite the contrary, I have the inalienable right to anything nature allows me, for as long as I don't overstep some other individual's inalienable rights.
I will use my property as I see fit (circumvention, duplication) and I will assembly with like-minded individuals (internet broadcasting) which are clearly inalienable rights inscribed in any the constitution of any free country. In doing so Crytek can claim their business plan was ruined however there's no inalienable right to a have a working business pl
Re:Remember the HL2 leak? (Score:5, Insightful)
Bill Bryson wrote (and I'm paraphrasing here) in his book "At Home" that often times aristocrats held unreasonable expectations of their servants because they had never preformed the work that the servants did.
I'm reference this because people who wrap themselves up in the ideology of "internet freedom fighters" probably don't understand the process of creating something and how debilitating it is to have that work released before it is ready. Especially after years of hard work and personal sacrifice went into it.
I don't expect you to understand because I'm not talking about laws and rights and the inherit freedom of digital bits - I'm talking about what it takes to be a good neighbor.
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To which I could reply: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"
I'm a programmer BTW. Strangely enough, I believe the world would much better-off without informational fascism.
Re:Remember the HL2 leak? (Score:4, Insightful)
"I have the inalienable right to anything nature allows me, for as long as I don't overstep some other individual's inalienable rights."
Thing is, that's a circular definition. I might assert that I have the inalienable right to not have my software duplicated by you. So then we just end up arguing over whether that right is inalienable or not and we get nowhere. It's not like God is going to make a personal appearance and set the record straight.
This is clearly a subject you care very much about. But I think you are missing something. IP rights are actually socially useful, just like physical property rights. There are useful businesses that just could not exist without IP rights, i.e. businesses that benefit everyone. Yes, we can do without movies, games and musicians who don't tour if we have to; they may be entertaining but they're hardly essential.
But IP rights also protect things which are useful. Some software could simply never be written on the "free as in freedom" model. I'm thinking particularly about specialised tools, such as the EDA software used to design chips, or the simulation software used to model and analyse biological processes, or the CAD software used to design and manufacture physical objects.
These are a few examples of programs that take thousands of man-years to develop. They are engineering projects on a vast scale, which require huge investment but produce something useful that could not be produced any other way.
If not for IP rights, we would not be able to benefit from this sort of software, because it would be sold once and then pirated forever. Any investment would be worthless. The software would never be made, and therefore, whatever it enabled would also never be made. Technological progress would stagnate.
Thus, I think there is a pretty strong argument for governments enforcing IP rights like they enforce physical property rights. Just as physical property rights allow businesses such as shops to exist, IP rights enable the investment in highly specialised projects to be recouped. And that is valuable to everyone, not just the people making a profit from those investments. The ability to watch big-budget movies and play non-trivial games is just a nice side-effect.
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[...] that's not a standard to form a society by.
Not taking sides in this debate, but you do realise that "intellectual property" was invented only a few hundred years ago, right? Those societies that at least we in the Western world consider to be our intellectual ancestors thrived through the ability to build upon others' works and create something new from them. So a society without any form of protection of immaterial goods is very much possible. The FOSS ecosystem is not a society, but it does show that a collective can indeed benefit from free shari
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you do realise that "intellectual property" was invented only a few hundred years ago, right?
Wrong. For instance, goldsmiths since.... well, whenever.... have carefully guarded trade secrets to protect their methods and skills that they spent lifetimes to learn/master. It might not have been called "ip" back in the day, but it certainly is an example of information that doesn't "want" to be free.
When an artist, craftsman, or a business wants to protect these methods and techniques from lazy assholes that want to exploit their hard work without giving anything back to them or the community at larg
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If everyone thought like you then your supposed inalienable rights would be irrelevant as there'd really be no more games being made for you to download anymore anyway.
Well, ok, there'd still be floods of free Flash games and indie stuff but let's not pretend that anyone downloading this leak is disinterested in the kind of AAA games that depend upon the current publishing models. Making them is simply unsustainable in the face of sufficiently high piracy rates and this is primarily why most publishers bare
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The fact that no-one happens to have invented a way of magically cloning the latter without damaging the original isn't really relevant
That fact is entirely relevant. The human mind cannot begin to comprehend how would the world look like without scarcity of physical property. The ability to clone any object will have such far reaching implications that our current legal or philosophical system will no longer be relevant. Well, guess what, we have that ability right now in the informational domain. Insisting to treat information like property is equivalent to banning the physical replicator when it's invented on the grounds that it might v
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>The complete liberalization of information exchanges will have such far reaching effects in our society that worrying about games is like pondering the future sales of hair wigs on the brink of finding a cancer cure.
But, without financial incentives, much of that "information" would not be shared or created in the first place. Even assuming an overwhelming amount of altruism - a privilege of those with excess resources - consider that becoming really good at something, particularly in the fields of art
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But everyone doesn't think like him, which is why computer game companies continue to make huge profits despite the possibility of "piracy". However there is a significant amount of people who think like you, and have been brainwashed into believing corporations when they overstate the "harm" done to them. I'm sure EA is almost going to go
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There are no imaginary strings that force me to use my property in such a way as to support the goals or business objectives of other private individuals. The right to use my property as I see fit for my goals is the cornerstone of freedom. Conversely, the confiscation of my freedoms by a handful of powerful entities is totalitarianism.
I have the unalienable right to download, store and copy the leaked copy using my physical property, regardless of what the copyright or anti-circumvention laws claim. If Crytek can find the individual that leaked said secrets, and has some form of legal binding contract with said individual that covers confidentiality, they are well entitled to damages under that contract. But by all means, don't hold me responsible when your business model fails because of your own ineptitude. Using your clout to draft laws against me is not only unjust, but a violation of my inalienable rights.
That's kinda like shooting someone, then saying "there was a gun and I have the right to shoot it, it's not my fault he got in the way of the bullet!"
If you used your computer to hack into bank and transfer a load of funds to your account could you say I was just using my computer how I saw fit. They should've had better security. I don't think that'd fly to well. Or more like this situation someone else had done the hacking but just left it open for anyone else to get in. just because a door is open you'
Re:Remember the HL2 leak? (Score:4, Insightful)
I have the unalienable right to download, store and copy the leaked copy using my physical property, regardless of what the copyright or anti-circumvention laws claim.
Um... if there's a law against something, then you, by very definition, do not have the unalienable right to do that thing, regardless of what your contradictory social ideals claim.
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Um... if there's a law against something, then you, by very definition, do not have the unalienable right to do that thing, regardless of what your contradictory social ideals claim.
So MLK should have just shut up and sat down at the back of the bus then because, hey, it's a law and there's no inalienable rights. Right?
That's not at all what I said. Jim Crow laws were enacted and enforced, meaning that whatever rights Africans had (which were actually approximately none) were alienated. Rosa Parks (not, MLK, mind you) stood up for what she thought was right, but which she did not have the right to do.
It's mostly semantics, I know, but you do not have the inalienable right to violate copyright and intellectual property laws. I'm not saying it's wrong to do that, but nothing gives you the right to do it.
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In the case of your computers and hard drives, you most certainly do not have the inalienabl
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If a law is written and approved and upheld by the court then you have no right to violate that. The download of an illegally leaked copy of software, which you have no permission to use, is theft. Copyright theft is still theft - despite the MAFIAA's determined efforts to prove that claims for compensation against that theft is actually more like theft than the breach of copyright. Receipt of stolen goods, be they electron
Aww... Someone 'os mad at me got mod points.. (Score:2)
Ain't that cute...
Too bad I got karma to burn.
Come on! Troll me, mod me, make me feel so cheap!
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Honestly, as much fun as the original was, I will buy the new one regardless of whether I download the pirate version or not.
Good games are worth what they cost, as long as they didn't totally screw the pooch, they already have MY money.
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then no one will pirate the inferior version.
No, they'll pirate the finished version instead. I'm not sure i get your point.
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Remember the Doom III leak? It was spooky, atmospheric and made for great screenshots?
Id went and change the game substantially and for the worse...
Just fantastic... (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh well that's just fantastic, isn't it?
Look, I know that there are all kinds of flaws in the copyright legal system. And yes, I know that there's plenty wrong with the approach that most of the industry takes towards DRM. But seriously, who the hell thought that leaking this was a good idea? All this is going to achieve - beyond letting a bunch of scabby teenagers play the game a bit earlier than they would have otherwise - is to seriously piss off one of the few remaining developers who really cares about the PC as a platform. Yes, Crysis 2 may be getting console ports, but everything I've seen so far suggests that it is still a PC game first and foremost and, most critically, one of the few around to really be pushing the limits of the platform.
PC gaming isn't dying. In fact, it should be positioned for a real comeback over the next few years. The current generation of console hardware is aging, there are no successors on the horizon and there are a lot of people out there who got into the development business because they want to make games for the latest and greatest technology. Whatever the corporate priorities, it's almost inevitable that we'll see games over the next five or so years on the PC that far outperform their console cousins - in terms of both graphics and gameplay (because like it or not, better technology does sometimes unlock new gameplay options). However, I say "almost" inevitable. Because, justified or not, if there's one thing that could prevent a PC renaissance, it's arseholery like this, which goes beyond even the usual day-one piracy. It's not just about the impact on sales - which slashdot can and does argue over all day on occasion - I can just imagine how galling it must be for developers to have people playing their work for free, before honest customers even have the chance to buy it. Particularly if the build is unfinished and the game is now going to get criticised for flaws not in the final version.
I'd like to think that people would just ignore the leak en masse. Sadly, we all know that isn't going to happen.
Leaks are GOOD for the FANS (Score:2)
I'll give an example of one of my most anticipated releases, the Michael album [wikipedia.org] released after Michael Jacksons death. I've been a fan of MJ's since I was about 5 years old, my whole life he's been my favourite musician. I host a small podcast talking about Michael Jackson, I live in New Zealand, we hit day X before anywhere else in the world. I thought I'd have the album before the rest of the world. Not so. I go on Skype, my fr
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Except this isn't about regional release date timings. The game isn't out anywhere yet. And the leak isn't of a finished version. And the last phase in getting a game ready for release is QA - getting rid of the bugs.
So it's a bit like going to a torrent for your new MJ album, finding that the only version available is based on a dodgy tape recording of the tracks as they're broadcast over a dodgy radio, while some guy reads out the weather forecast in German in the background. Sure, the hardcore fans might
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I know all the stuff about The Hulk, about the leaked version with crappy CG etc, unfinished, but nobody truly believe it was THE real movie. It cost some buzz, true, but not the movie, which was panned on release as it was.
I'd think a leaked, unfinished game was more like a Closed Beta, I've been in those before, and they made me want the real thing MORE.
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Speaking of which - why on earth, when any grandmother can send a video of her cat farting to the furthest reaches of the planet within seconds - do regional release dates exist? If that is not about racketeering, then I don't know what is.
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Oh, agree entirely.
I think partly it's about companies still liking to feel "in control". The other, more significant part of it is that there are still a number of entertainment companies out there who still entertain the hilarious notion that they might actually be able to sell their products legally in places like China and India (as opposed to just having them pirated there). Pricing products at way below the international value in those markets is the way they think they'll succeed - so they like regi
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I don't think regional release dates are racketeering, but I do think that region coding is price fixing, which is illegal basically everywhere, every time, except as explicitly protected by law — and there are numerous examples. In fact, farm subsidies were invented as a means of price fixing. (Today they are just a means of giving big piles of money to already rich people.)
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Its cool, why, why, its just Human Nature.
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Hard to say it's sexist. Maybe he's just had a bad trip to Thailand, where the streetwalker's gender can be decidedly ambiguous.
Not to mention your stereotyping of hedge fund managers. George Soros may be scum, but is he any scummier than a sex worker plying for trade on the streets? He's probably less likely to transmit something medically embarrassing, and not all hedge fund managers are robbing tens of millions, destroying millions of jobs or reducing overall standards of living.
Don't take this personall
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"is to seriously piss off one of the few remaining developers who really cares about the PC as a platform"
Headline: CEO Cevat Yerli defends EA’s controversial PDLC strategy, remains unsure on Crysis 2 demo...
http://www.develop-online.net/news/34545/Crytek-foresees-the-end-of-free-game-demos [develop-online.net]
Somebody who wants to charge for demos DOES NOT CARE about the PC as a platform. Most dev's these days (at AAA houses) couldn't give less of a shit as you see with their sloppy ports to PC and draconian DRM (assass
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Only one? What about those who are designing the levels, character animations, textures/shaders etc and need to test them in game, those who write the AI and need to test it in game, those who do any part of the game, and need to test it? Then of course, you have the quality testers.
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Eh, what? Are we talking about the same company? Electronic Arts, right? EA has always been about business, not about games. In fact considering their size, the number of decent video games they manage to release is minimal. Certainly they don't compare to a company like Microprose, where almost every single game produced was a blockbuster. What they (EA) do is collect smaller companies [wikipedia.org], like the Borg
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Re:Just fantastic... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just fantastic... (Score:5, Informative)
Its missing all ground textures and a lot of other textures, it doesn't run on any setting other than minimum, the screen constantly flickers when you play, you cant customize visuals, it crashes when you load a level for almost everyone, and the list goes on. Its a earlier beta than people are reporting.
If you download and play this you aren't playing crysis 2. This version is quite old. It shouldn't hurt sales.
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You do realize that "more advanced" graphics isn't just about upping the polygon count, right?
Crysis was not just the most technically advanced game of its time, but also had fantastic art direction. While the first half was set in a fairly generic location, the second half made my jaw drop. The interior of the spaceship was more impressive than any science fiction movie I had ever seen, but was rendered in real time. That's the kind of achievement that should have netted these guys the a "PC Gaming Academy
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Typical lazy slashdot editors (Score:2)
The whining just gets more annoying (Score:4, Funny)
EA and Crytek have responded to the leak, saying that the illicit copy is incomplete and unfinished, and that "Piracy continues to damage the PC packaged goods market and the PC development community."
Then just hurry up and die already. Or pull out of the PC market.
What's that? You still make money hand over fist so you can't justify pulling out to your shareholders? Well fuck me, how unexpected.
RTFA... (Score:2)
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But what do they mean the copy is unfinished?
They mean they haven't finished downloading it yet.
Who cares? (Score:2)
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I enjoyed Crysis. Accomplish these objectives within a relatively open sandbox, given these powers. It only became standard fare scifi bullshit during the alien mothership levels, but was otherwise pretty neat.
Crysis 2 sounds the same way, only with the multiplayer designed by Crytek UK - formerly Free Radical, the guys behind Timesplitters and Goldeneye 007.
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It's worked for Id since Doom 2, Quake, or Quake 2, depending on who you talk to.
PC Demo (Score:2)
If the game is incomplete and what not. Just ban that "master key" and simply relabel it as the PC Demo which they weren't going to release.
Sure, this release might result in some lost sales (because people tried the game and didn't like it).
It's a trap? (Score:2)
This could be a stunt for publicity as well. Something like beta builds of games aren't regularly leaked.
I dunno (Score:2)
I'm not one to jump on conspiracy theories for the most part. An equally valid explanation would be an employee within the company was pissed off about something and leaked it to get back at them in some way.
I will give it credit as having some plausibility though. The Crytek CEO whined and bitched up a storm about Crysis 1 'only' selling about 1.5 million copies in the first couple months, blaming pirates for taking away all their money. This of course conveniently ignored that there were only a few millio
Re:It's a trap? (Score:4, Interesting)
... This is a ridiculously huge blunder for such a huge company and they've pointed fingers at piracy before ...
Finally, someone talking about the main point. Exactly. This has nothing to do with piracy at all; along with any damage caused. They fucked up, plain and simple.
The tone of their response to the leak just sounds like posturing, by a management that may be looking to either impose some hair-brained DRM scheme, or more than likely *hang on to their jobs*. Ridiculous.
It's this new breed of management that is turning the PC gaming platform to shit and FUD.
Piracy is like the new "the dog ate my homework" for the 21st century.
And that (Score:3)
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As a fellow game developer, I can assure you that your accusation is absolutely unfounded.
Such leaks frequently come from preview versions sent to journalists, because they need to write an article about the game at the same time as the game is published, and testing a game requires a few days of testing, so they receive early copies a few weeks before publishing.
Magazines also rely heavily on freelance journalists, and because of their contract, they don't care about exchanging a game against an access to
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As a fellow game developer, I can assure you that your accusation is absolutely unfounded.
There are other sources of leaks, but in this case (since it's a beta release), I've no doubt about the source.
From the fine summary, "and the master key for the online authentication".
Absolutely unfounded? No doubt? Let me get this straight... you're telling me that you're utterly confident that no developer could possibly be the source for this leak and that it's completely a given that it's a journalist? Seriously?
Maybe at your place of employ everyone's highly gruntled, but at a lot of other game houses employees are positively disgruntled. Don't let your personal experience convince you the entire world sha
Free advertisement (Score:2)
This is not hurting them in any way, since the game would have been available on pirate sites the day of its release anyway, quite the contrary it's providing for large advertisement just before the release.
Who cares? (Score:2)
Recently played Crysis as free giveaway with my games mag. I can say I was seriously underwhelmed. Technology was reasonable, but game-play is nothing to write home about, just a generic shooter with pretty bas storytelling. That said, I am not even interested in looking at Crysis 2 and their problem is not piracy.
PC development? (Score:2)
Isn't this also being developed for consoles with little to no change to the game other than a few higher res doo-dads?
apparently they've never searched torrent sites for any of the console names either..
all I see is a company trying to generate an excuse for what they know will be a sub-par product ahead of time. I wonder what they'd do if they had to actually be honest for even 5 minutes?
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The PC version has higher res doo-dads than the console version, otherwise the games are identical. So trying to claim PC development is ruined is garbage.
Shit happens (Score:2)
If you have ever run or been part of a large project of any kind you know one thing you can count on:
Things NEVER go as planned. It's how you overcome those problems that makes or breaks your product.
Regrettable as this unplanned leak of of their game is you can't just stop and whine about like a little girl you come up with a solution!
For example and this is just one of the top of my head..
Issue a modding and/or mapping contest for the game! Release the editor by it self legally and people will use the lea
This changes nothing. (Score:3)
Secondly, this "Crysis 2 Crysis" will only do what all similar leaks do: It will amplify the effect the quality of the game, has on its sales.
Meaning, that if the game sucks. it will absolutely sink when it becomes available commercially.
And similarly, if the game is good, it's sales will skyrocket.
I know what I will do (Score:3)
There will be a cost. Companies like NVIDIA and ATI may slow their development pace since they can't monetize as well any future advancements. Who is willing to shell out $300 to run MW2 at 90fps vs. 50fps...? Are we done generating real time photo-realistic images? Does this [imageshack.us] look like a screenshot from an action movie yet? I for one don't think so.
We need the next Crisis. That game that will bring to a halt all but the top 1% of existing PCs on maximum settings. The industry needs it. I need it. You need it too - you just don't know it.
I call BS (Score:4, Interesting)
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EA reviewed the gold master, realized it was another plotless tech demo like the first one and therefore unlikely to sell in great numbers, and decided to sacrifice Crysis 2 on the altar of public opinion, to help all their poor sheep consumers realize that "PC = EVIL".
I hope I'm totally talking out my ass, but it sounds like 'logic' we've seen from EA before.
Oh, I wouldn't go THAT far... It's just that your paranoia is a bit misguided and under-informed. They are not evil for the sake of being evil - they are simply capitalists.
This "full game, multiplayer and the master key for the online authentication" leak allows them to delay the multiplayer game that clearly has issues with the multiplayer. [wikipedia.org]
Within hours of its release, thousands of complaints were reported after numbers of players were met with disconnects from games, crashing during loading and, oddly, a temperamental incompatibility with the Xbox Wireless WiFi adaptor. Crytek issued a statement telling players it's aware of "technical issues" with the Xbox-exclusive multiplayer demo of Crysis 2, and is working on a fix.
While a pre-release multiplayer demo for PC has been confirmed, no release date has been given by either EA or Crytek.
They can even still publish the game "as is" (with slight delay, naturally), only have the multiplayer servers disabled until they fix the "leak issue".
Shit, what with
or... (Score:2)
I don't care about the game... (Score:2)
...but "facepunch forum" is awesome.
WTF! (Score:2)
The scripty kid who did this bullshit ought to be flogged publicly. Look, I've got no problem with retail games being released in the scene. They serve their purpose. But stealing development builds and releasing them is just plain wrong. This hurts the industry far more than a scene release. Now they'll have to re-jigger the multiplayer authentication and it will delay the game.
change authenthication key (Score:2)
couldn't they just change the authentication key?
This is a very early beta. (Score:2)
Missing textures everywhere, a constant screed flicker, not lined up audio, impossible to play on anything but lowest settings, etc.
I wouldn't worry about this hurting sales, nobody is going to play this instead of the full game.
How do I know this? Uhh, my friend totally heard from his cousin who downloaded it...
Re: (Score:2)
I for one know that I'm likely to *gasp* buy Crysis 2! And I'm certainly not the only one.
EA damages PC gaming more than piracy does (Score:3)
If EA really thinks PC gaming is such a waste of time and money maybe they should GTFO.
I for one wouldn't miss them. As it is now I have to check every game I look at on Steam to make sure it's not published by them. It'd be nice not to have to worry about making that mistake anymore.
They should blame the leaker. (Score:2)
This looks a lot like the development version of half life 2 that got leaked, except I don't think the full source code to the engine is with this one. Bottom line is that this c
Now time for the funny part. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Then the "leak" has clearly served at least the "freely distributed extended demo" part of its intended purposes.
Utilization of a piracy-based marketing scheme, while blaming all of their product's technical deficiencies on pirates.
Now we only need the confirmation of the delay of the game and the multiplayer "until it's fixed" for the "leak" to be a complete success.
Re: (Score:2)
So fire the guy who's guilty and move on. Let it be a lesson to treat your employees better so they won't leak your stuff.
(And in the vanishingly unlikely case that it's not an employee choosing to leak, let it be a lesson in IT security nevertheless.)
Re: (Score:3)
Apple and the media companies are raking in huge dollars. Amazon is raking in huge dollars. Studies over the years have suggested that piracy actually helps sell albums, games, and movies (The Japanese just released a study regarding movie piracy.) Avatar is the most pirated movie of all time, but somehow still broke every sales record in the book. How is that possible?
Instead of coming up with a scenario you thin