Print

[shanafan]

And that should be enough. Piracy talk is not allowed here at XS. If you wish to talk about it, do it elsewhere. Not here.

[shanafan]

QUOTE

Almost a month before its scheduled release, Halo 2 has surfaced on a variety of newsgroups and websites for download. The game, a PAL version with French dialogue, has followed a route taken by many popular games which sees them available for download immediately following the Gold announcement. Although illegal, this is the fate of most popular games, in recent months The Sims 2, FIFA 2005 and even as I write these lines, Tribes : Vengeance have all found their way to the same websites. Most developers and/or publishers however, continue to rave on about the successful sales of their titles, with the most recent example being Konami claiming that 1.5 million units of PES 4 were needed for the European launch, even though the game has been up for download for over a week. In some cases the online element of the game is enough to make most gamers buy the original since online play is (usually) not possible in pirated copies. This is always the case when the highly regulated environment of XBox Live is involved. Even though the emergence of pirated copies is unlikely to do Halo 2 sales any serious damage, MS has issued a very strong-worded comment regarding the available copy: MS has learned that a version of Halo 2 has been posted to various newsgroups and web sites. We consider downloading this code or making it available for others to download as theft. We are currently investigating the source of this leak with the appropriate authorities. Pending the result of our investigation, we do not have further comment. MS takes the integrity of its intellectual property extremely seriously, and we are aggressively pursuing the source of this illegal act. The launch of Halo 2 worldwide remains unaffected.