Of course, bandits have plagued the information highway for years. In 2004, prior to its release, Doom 3 snuck onto file-sharing networks and was downloaded to over 50,000 home PCs in the space of a few hours, translating tonearly 3million dollars in lost sales. On the infofilter.net game torrent chart, Command & Conquer 3 is hot property with 1,010 traders, although (weirdly) Backgammon Pro MultiPack takes first place with 9,120 traders.
Like the music industry, pre-release leaks are PC gaming's bugbear. Before Funcom's epic adventure Dreamfall reached shelves in Europe, over 200,000 illegal copies of the game had been downloaded.
"We first launched in the US and just days after release it was cracked, so everyone who wanted it in Europe and Asia could download it illegally prior to release," says Jørgen Tharaldsen. "It's a strange feeling being 'download of the week' when you launched in retail only a few days before."
Valve marketing director Doug Lombardi tells his war story. "During the development of Half-Life 2, we had a security breach on our network and the source code for the project was stolen. Gabe (Newell, Valve boss) reached out to the community, asking folks to help us find the person(s) responsible. After a few months of working with community members alongside various international authorities, arrests were made."
Above: Frustration over the delayed release of Half-Life 2 culminates in the game's code theft. A 21-year-old German programmer is arrested on recommendation of the Feds for having created the Phatbot Trojan, linked to the leak. A patsy, we think.
