If you haven’t played Trials HD yet, you should really check it out. It’s a fun, compelling puzzle game with a time trial twist, but it doesn’t feel like work. Though it’s been doing rather well, the game’s developer, RedLynx, didn’t think it would sell as well, so they decided to pirate the game the day it released.

Tero Virtala, the CEO of RedLynx, says that the RedLynx team seeded a limited copy of the game on multiple torrent websites, but that the version of the game didn’t have leaderboard support, which Virtala refers to as the game’s “soul.”

It might sound like a crazy idea to leak your own game on torrent websites for the world to use, but the statistics say it’s definitely worked in RedLynx’s favor. The game has sold 150K copies since launch, and their leaderboards haven’t been cracked yet.

(via Kotaku)

Activision’s highly anticipated Modern Warfare 2 can already be found on a multitude of internet torrent sites (so I’ve been told), but the quick work of Dallas based IPCybercrime (hired by Activision) helped move one cyber-thief out of his spacious gadget filled hacker pad into something a little more “cozy”.

According to Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat, a Craigslist post offering a Modern Warfare 2 Xbox 360 bundle perked the interest of Activision and prompted them to hire Dallas based IPCybercrime, a private investigation firm specializing in internet crime.

A little Facebook investigating revealed that two men stole a pallet of Modern Warfare bundled 360 units from a video game retailer. After apprehending the store thieves, the focus of the investigation shifted to locating a modder known online as “cdelamo815″ who planned to duplicate the Modern Warfare 2 game.

Again, the search started with Facebook, which ultimately pointed investigators to a console modding site. A little wheeling and dealing landed them 18-year-old Christian Del Amo’s cell phone number. They used that to pin point his residence and turn him over to authorities.

IPCybercrime owner, Rob Holmes, commented on the case:

“It all happened very fast … If these guys get their stuff out, then they can do some major damage to sales and spoil it for everybody. We plug leaks every day, but this was one of the biggest ones of the year.”

In the end this won’t do much to stop the leak of Modern Warfare 2 on torrent sites, as it’s already spreading across the web, but it does serve as an example of just how far an entity will to go to protect their intellectual property. Hell hath no furry like a publisher scorned.

Xbox 360 piracy is already a problem. (From the view of the developers, anyway) So when Datel announces a memory card for the Xbox 360 with an SDHC/microSD card slot that you can use to backup game saves and “anything else on the Xbox” (up to 16GB worth), you know that they’re not really going to help.

While I definitely think this memory card is a great idea, I feel like it could’ve been done in a much better way. It’s incredibly useful for people that are unlucky enough to suffer multiple RRoDs, s they can back up any game saves and transfer them without Microsoft’s confusing HDD transfer cable. However, I’m gonna go ahead and say that Microsoft is going to try and put a halt to it’s production as soon as possible.

Really.

Mere days after Gears of War 2 began popping up on various torrent sites there has been an arrest made in the case.

Rodney Gray, 43, is a security guard employed by Technicolor, the Memphis Tennessee company that packages and distributes games and DVD’s in the U.S.

According to a Memphis Police Department affidavit, Gray stole hundreds of copies of Gears of War 2, as well as Fable II, and was selling them on the black market. He and another unidentified person of interest are currently under investigation for stealing and selling the games from the plant, but neither have been formally charged as of yet.

Detectives followed Gray from a Memphis apartment and pulled him over for driving related offenses. After doing so, they performed a cursory search of the vehicle and discovered 31 games in a red bag.

Memphis P.D. estimates the net worth of the theft to be more than $60,000.

Source: commercialappeal.com

Vault 101 just got plundered.

The eagerly anticipated Fallout 3 is nearly upon us, yet a full three weeks before its release rapacious pig-fuckers cracked the game and offered it via various torrent sites.

This is the third AAA title that has been hacked and cracked in as many months, leaving publishers frothing at the mouth as they consider even more draconian digital rights management.

To the casual observer this may seem like an overzealous response to retain the vast sea of greenbacks the industry seems to float upon. And that certainly is a concern, after all Electronic Arts is not motivated from a position of altruism. This is about control of their product, control of their intellectual property, and control of the consumer.

Flinchingly I have read DRM proponents scathing insinuation that, and I’m paraphrasing, that “nothing is safe! Nothing is sacred! We must protect ourselves at any cost!” Yet the price of that protectionism is at the expense of the consumer. Pirates care little for the mores of the videogame industry and will, and are, molesting their games as we speak. However it’s not the pirates that are feeling the brunt of the industry’s wrath, it’s us.

Citing piracy concerns, EA slapped DRM restrictions on Spore that prohibited more than one installation per copy, turning it into a $60 rental. Yet that did not keep Spore from being cracked and on the day before its release.

Activision recently pounced and monetarily mauled some assclown for distributing their wares on torrent, and rightfully so. Yet has their Torquemada approach to prosecuting infidels resulted in scaring away such a nebulous enemy? Perhaps, but not enough. Swinging a big stick in a fight is only good if you can find someone to hit with it and so far, it’s been hit and miss.

Fallout 3’s rape and pillage is unfortunate. I’ve interviewed Pete Hines and have gotten the distinct impression that this was a fellow who, along with a talented and motivated crew, created something worth spending my hard-earned money on. And I don’t mind spending that $60 because A) I feel I am buying a superior product and B) spending that kind of jack will only encourage another Fallout title, but hopefully encourage the same stringent adherence to quality and making a game worthy of its namesake.

The piracy of Fallout 3 is an unfortunate byproduct of the age we live in, a casualty of commerce. Yet it’s not the rallying cry that DRM proponents are looking for. If anything it’s a rude awakening that DRM isn’t working as intended.

Restrictive DRM that affects the end user will only drive off wary consumers and if nothing else, encourage reporters such as myself to call companies who employ it on their collective shit.

Games shouldn’t punish gamers. Selah.

Today in WTF! news, Gears of War 2 is announced as having gone gold (which means the game has been finalized), and just a few hours after that, the game surfaces in the hand of a mysterious figure on the popular Neogaf gaming forum.

Coincidence? Bullshit? It doesn’t matter. What matters is that every time something like this happens the collective butt-cheeks of software executives clench in unison.

Eventually, games will come with remote detonators that sense a premature case ejection. Removing a game from its container before the specified release date will cause it to explode violently, and affected individual will have a hard time convincing anyone that they didn’t deserve every piece of gaming shrapnel they end up having to dislodge from their face.

Hey, I love reporting news and rumors as much as the next guy, but if continuously pushed, it’s not far fetched to think that developers will find better ways to protect themselves and the media they create at the expense of time and resources that could have been spent developing better content. Everything comes with a price.

Fallout 3, one of the most highly anticipated titles for Xbox 360 and PS3, is already available for illegal download. It seems that PC games are not the only ones to fall prey to the digital cutlasses of piracy.

With only three weeks until the game’s official release (Oct. 28), the leak will only serve as bragging rights to asshole gamers who simply need to play the game before anyone else does. The pirated version of the game is brought to you by the same people that ruined Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince.

The strange thing about this is that only the 360 version is available to torrent. With all of the controversy surrounding DRM on PC games, a pirated PC version would have caused a much more explosive outcry in the gaming community. Where it stands now, it just makes people feel awkward and upset. Like when you find out your girlfriend’s been cheating on you with a furry.

Pete Hines responded to inquiries by saying,  “We’re looking into it. Since we haven’t sent out a single disc, it greatly reduces the number of places this might have come from.”

Hopefully this won’t have too much of an effect on sales. Seeing as you would need a modded 360 to play the pirated version, those who which to enlarge their e-dick Gamer Score will have to wait for the official version.

Alright, the Devil may not be crying, but Capcom sure is. Capcom, which has produced the emo-kid wunderkind Devil May Cry series, is currently trying to repel all brigands and cutthroats as their most recent installment in the series is getting pirated.

Christian Svensson, Capcom’s senior director of strategic planning and research posted on the industry giant’s forum lamenting Devil May Cry 4’s abysmal PC sales.

“It’s such a good version and it really deserves better sales,” Svensson wrote. “I know it’s getting pirated to hell and back – it was up on torrents literally the day it shipped.”

Despite rampant pirating of the title, Svensson is adamant to continue digital distribution of future titles, including the forthcoming Bionic Commando.

“I certainly have pushed for digital distribution on (Devil May Cry 4) – globally, I’m responsible for all DD deals,” Svensson wrote. “I have a presentation I’m making shortly that I’m hoping will make that approach something we do with all our PC content, even those developed in Japan, but no promises. It might not happen.”

Source: Capcom.com

After the disappointing sales of PC-exclusive FPS Crysis, Crytek president Cevat Yerli has said that his company will no longer make titles exclusive to the PC platform. The main reason? Piracy.

“I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy,” Yerli explained. “It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.”

Yerli also commented on the possibility of bringing the visually impressive Crysis to either the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, saying that it would be nearly impossible. “Crysis would have to be largely changed to bring it to Xbox 360 or Playstation 3,” Yerli said. “Crysis is designed to be PC exclusive.”

Since Crysis was designed to be a trilogy, and Yerli has said that future games will be coming to consoles, you have to wonder what the future of the franchise will look like. If the first game can’t run on current-generation consoles, does that mean that later games will take a step backward in terms of graphical fidelity? Or will their be significant differences between the PC and console versions of the games?

Source: PC Play

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been noticing quite a few themes that have been making their way through the industry. Throughout last week at GDC, many of these took center stage in a variety of forms. Today, we examine the state of PC Gaming.

Every year a multitude of publications come out proclaiming “PC gaming is dead! All units bail out!” It’s all getting to be a little ridiculous.

Now, let’s not be naive. PC gaming as we know it is in hot water and is very analogous to an arms race. Who’s going to be the first with a water-cooled, overclocked, dual-quad-SLi rig that can run Crysis at an insane resolution with every setting jacked to the point of no return? This is the disarray that Cliff Blizenski was speaking of when talking to Stephen Totilo of the MTV Multiplayer blog.

Arguably the biggest factor of the “disarray” that the PC is facing is piracy, which inadvertently causes more and more former big-time PC exclusive titles to make their way to consoles.

Go back two years, and I ‘m fairly certain that you’d be hard-pressed to find a hardcore PC gamer that wouldn’t scoff at the mere idea of Unreal Tournament or Command & Conquer making their way to a console.

This is the very reason that World of Warcraft and every Sims 2 expansion on the face of this earth has managed to stay at the top of the charts. Those are the games that are scaled back to the point that they will run on any computer released within the past 6 years, give or take a few.

The recent release of SteamWorks further solidifies Valve’s dedication to the PC as a viable platform and marks a milestone in PC gaming. SteamWorks consists of a wide variety of development tools that may be useful to developers of all sizes.

Fast-forward a few weeks and we’ll see Microsoft and Havok following suit. Microsoft unvieled the DreamSpark intiative, which makes a suite of Microsoft tools available for students. Not long after, Havok announced that they will be releasing Havok Complete, their solution to physics and animation in May 2008.

The big bullet point is that all of these companies have (or are in the process of) releasing these tools for free, effectively making it available and possible for anyone and everyone to make a game should they have the patience, drive, and dedication.

Through 2008, we may see PC gaming evolve into something we don’t recognize – and some of us may not like it.

For example, take Battlefield: Heroes. Although it’s very much an off-shoot of the Battlefield series as we know it, it makes a statement about the position that the PC market is in right now. For those that may not know, Battlefield: Heroes is a free-to-play online multiplayer FPS that will launch this summer.

The free-to-play model will work on two fronts, with advertising that EA is claiming wil be non-intrusive, along with content that may be paid for (nature of said content has yet to be revealed) that won’t severely cripple gamers that are playing for free.

The outcome of this ‘experiment’ may be indicative of the way that the PC gaming market will go in the forseeable future.

Who can forget that classic title, “Pow”?

The claim that 90% of DS software in America is pirated may well have been a load of bunk, but there’s no doubt that piracy is a major problem for publishers and developers. So what to do? Well, it seems like they had the answer pretty much sorted out in 1989.

I’ve just spied some curious ELSPA (Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association) ads for combating software piracy from the 80s and 90s, and they are amazing. The ridiculous hair, the precocious ‘stars’, everything– but what really jumped out at me was the £1,000 reward.

Accounting for inflation, £1,000 then was the equivalent of £1840 in 2007. Giving a gamer that sort of money to stop a pirate – effectively giving them money to buy all the games they were going to pilfer anyway – would be rather effective, I should think. And good business, if the reports surfacing earlier of hackers making leaps and bounds in cracking the PS3 turn out to be true.

Check out all the ads here.

The Caribbean state of Antigua and Barbuda now has permission to effectively ignore U.S. copyright covering items such as films, television music and games after a legal battle lasting nearly five years.

The legal battle began when the U.S. blocked gambling sites from Antigua and Barbuda, yet allowed online betting on horse racing. The World Trade Organization ruled that this was illegal and as part of the compensation have said the state can freely violate intellectual property protection worth up to $21 million per year.

Although much less than the $3.44 billion per year asked for by the small Caribbean state, it is still significantly greater than then $500,000 offered by the U.S. This is only the second time that the WTO has allowed copyright violation as part of compensation for a dispute. Mark Mendel, Antigua’s lawyer, said “I hope that the United States government will now see the wisdom in reaching some accommodation with Antigua over this dispute.”

With a population of around 80,000 this theoretically grants each inhabitant of the two islands permission to copy around $260 worth of films, music or games.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

WTO Approved.