October 19th, 2012Top StoryWho Is Stealing Halo 4?By Evan Narcisse
As of this week, half a dozen people in different cities across the United States were trying to unload their Xbox 360s on Craigslist for extra cash. That's not such a rare occurrence, right? What is special about these consoles, however, is the fact that they all have Halo 4 loaded up and ready to play, weeks before Microsoft's biggest video game release is set to hit retail shelves everywhere. Every year brings with it massively hyped games that drop with million-dollar impacts. And, like clockwork, the theft and surreptitious distribution of one or more of these games precedes its actual release. Chances are, if you can name a super-successful game from the last few years, players got their hands on it before they were supposed to:
 A modded Xbox 360 and pirated game discs from a Craigslist ad for Halo 4So far this year, Resident Evil 6 found its way into the hands of players before it was supposed to. And now Halo 4 joins Capcom's action/horror release in the ranks of leaked AAA games. It's become an unwelcome tradition that has companies scrambling to do damage control and fans complaining about spoilers and an uneven playing field. Kotaku reached out to Activision for insight on how the company dealt with previous years' leaks of Call of Duty titles. The publisher declined to comment. Stephen Toulouse used to be on the frontlines of the fight against piracy. As Director of Xbox Live Policy and Enforcement, he was Microsoft's man in charge of policing their game console's online service for bad behavior. In this role, Toulouse interfaced with the Xbox Live community, which meant helping track down and mete out justice to those who illegally accessed games ahead of time. I reached out to Toulouse over e-mail to get his insights about how big leaks happen with such regularity. "Leaks happen in a variety of ways, starting usually with a single person or tiny group of people," he answered. "It involves getting a physical copy of the game. It's important to note a lot of people have access to a game once it goes gold. Reporters, testers, partners, people who replicate the discs, then warehouses and retailers. The larger the number of people with access, the higher the probability that someone will get a hold of a copy before the street date and rip it."
Constantly shifting counter-measures mean that theft, leaks and piracy only benefit a sliver of the game-playing population. While the patient zero that steals a game from its release pipeline can sell it for a ridiculous mark-up, the ones downloading it often grab it just because they can. Thieves do get caught, though. The most infamous example might be where Valve attempted to lure the person who took the source code from Half-Life 2 off of their internal network with a job offer. As of now, no one knows who stole that initial physical copy of Halo 4 where the game data was ripped from. But Kotaku has been in contact with some gamers who have pirated the game.
The first person to reply made his acquisition of Halo 4 sound compulsive:
Another cited dissatisfaction with the series as a reason for pirating:
The most conflicted correspondence came from a European downloader who goes by Lex:
Kotaku has had access to the full game, under its final debug build, as early as October 11. Our video capture permissions were limited mainly to the multiplayer modes, but nothing of the single player campaign. Most importantly, all of our contact with the final build of the game has been in sessions held in controlled, closed environments. Participants never got to hold a Halo 4 disc in their hands. Halo 4 downloader: Stores… get it early, break street dates, someone buys, rips and upload it. Yes, it's that simple. The need to be out in front of everyone else is a prime motivator for lots of gamers. All too often, you'll get passed by someone more skilled. But, if you could cross the finish line before the starting gun ever sounded? Who could resist that? "In many ways, people exhibiting that kind of excitement are a natural side effect of creating an amazing product like Halo," explained Toulouse. "At the end of the day the barriers to running pirated games on modern consoles is still high enough that the impact is blunted somewhat from a sales perspective, but you can't count on that being true which is why console manufacturers and game publishers are always making changes to keep that barrier up." From a sheer numbers standpoint, there probably aren't enough modded consoles out in the wild to hamper Halo 4's chances at wild success. The company's only comment on the Halo 4 leak is as follows:
Still, even after Microsoft's high-profile release gets into the hands of people who actually paid for it, the reality is that piracy seems like less of an anomaly and more like an inevitability. Or, as one person who got in touch with me said: "oh, and Black ops [II] shall leak soon.... trust us."  |
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