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There must be an air of despair this morning amongst those who have slaved away to nearly finish Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2 – a sequel that has been over a decade in the making. You sit down at your desk for the day ahead and browse a few game news sites and the first thing you see are stories that a build of the game from two weeks ago is now rampaging freely around the internet as a torrent.
You can’t get it back. You can’t pull it down, it’s a torrent, and it’s seeded everywhere now. Stupid people playing it are uploading footage to YouTube and they are getting hit by copyright strikes but this is a small win. All your efforts of the past few years have been stolen and distributed before anybody ever got the chance to say ‘Well done, thanks for your hard work.’
The life of a dev is hard enough. These days you get laid off for merely completing a project on time to keep the margins up so it’s especially harsh when all that work is in the gleeful hands of those who dabble in the darker arts of game piracy and then judge you on something that isn’t even polished up yet.
The build circulating isn’t finished completely but it’s totally playable, even in multiplayer. It is beyond ridiculous that this has leaked and it is high time companies took some responsibility for securing their assets properly and protecting their staff from this kind of mental trauma.
At a board meeting further down the line, it may well be brought up that the game didn’t sell as well as expected because of this leak. Profits are down, people need to be laid off. No. You need to protect your assets better and blame those who need to be blamed.
It’s a massive peeve of mine when my data gets leaked by a big company and I get a “maybe you should change your password” email. No, I should be able to keep my password. If I want the same password on multiple sites, I should be able to do that. What should be happening is you secure your servers enough so I don’t have to change my password. These companies force me to hand off my data anyway and then leave it lying around on the coffee table for anybody to take. Then somehow it is my fault for having the same password.
It’s the same here. You have worked on a game that is important to your company for years, how do you let a 70-odd gig torrent through the door? Or Disney, one password, and the entire Slack is your oyster.
I know it’s not as easy as it sounds but I probably don’t care. As a journo I have to sign NDAs at the like to even look at software in advance and there will have been builds sent out for evaluation to stakeholders and the like – how do you keep track of them all – no, I actually don’t care. You just need to do it. For the sake of all those people this morning who are feeling so dejected at a heinously bad lack of security somewhere.
