Halo Reach Leaked
Can’t wait ’till next month to get your hands on a copy of Halo: Reach? Well, if you’re the type of person to pirate games with no regard for the effects it has on the industry, you just might be in luck. It was recently confirmed that the game has been made available for illegal download.
The pirated version of the game was made available by Game-Tuts.com, a website that prides itself on being a community of happy modders. According to reports, the original game was uploaded to Microsoft’s website for members of the press, and could only be downloaded once a special review code was entered. However, a group of hackers was able to get past the access restrictions and put the game up for the world to see.
In an official statement, Microsoft representative Louis Wu wrote on Microsoft’s website “Just a warning – looks like Reach is out there in the wild. This time it seems we can’t blame the French; a group of modders figured out how to fool Xbox.com into allowing a download of the copies put up for some press (Ouch!).”
A warning? That sounds a little ominous. But hey, with a game as big a Reach, it’s not inconceivable that some fines may be levied or some arrests made over just this type of thing. There’s nothing that hurts the gaming industry quite like pirates, and I personally don’t think it would be unreasonable to say that this incident might very well prompt the company to keep prices up in the fifties for longer than most bargain hunters are comfortable with.
That said, this shouldn’t really come as a surprise to Microsoft. The fact of the matter is that if a high-profile game like Halo: Reach is put up on the internet, for whatever reason, you can’t honestly expect that nobody will try to pirate it. I’m not saying it’s their fault that the game was pirated, but the whole incident could have been avoided altogether with a little bit of help from good ole FedEx.
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