Hellgate: London Code Theft?

I'd be watching game news for the next couple of years for any budget title using randomly-generated 3D levels.

i may be a moron here, but what exactly is in "code" that is worth stealing/trying to sell? would it be specific things, like "rendering" code or "network" code? aren't their a million coders out there who could code the same things w/out the hassle? i'm sure there are guys who are "better" coders than others, but it seems to me (probably innacurately) that the thing that makes a game "valuable" is the gameplay/art assets/story (not to underestimate the value of coders at all), things which, if stolen & used elsewhere would be terribly easy to discover / catch the theives? it just doesnt make sense to me, sexplain please :)

Doesn't Hellgate London use the Source engine?

god i hope this doesnt cause a longer delay on the game... ala-steam?

god damnit... HACKED BY CHINESE!

let me guess... his password was broper

Deja-vu?

Developer: We can't finish our product in time.

Marketing: Goddamit! Ship the game early! I don't care about the bugs....or wait! Spread that our sourcecode got "stolen" !

Developer: Awesome, we have some 2-year old code lying around which we will put on the internet.

In a few days/weeks
Marketing: Sorry fans, we have to delay our game to ensure best playability after the sourcecode theft.

According to Soccernet, this is the supposed conversation that led to the famous Bonk's Revenge:

Zidane: If you really want my shirt I'll give it to you afterwards.
Materazzi: I'd rather take the shirt off your wife.

I hope this isn't true. If it is, I feel very bad for the folks at Flagship. They're good people, and they're making a good game.

Network breaches can feel like your house has been broken into. It can be very unsettling.

Though I am saddened that an incident like this happened to flagship studios, especially for their very first game(as a company, so excluding the diablo series), I don't think that this will have any significant impact on sales in the least. With Half Life 2 for instance, there was a LONG delay with the game, most of which was not due to their source code theft, and it ended up being game of the year and being a huge cash cow despite all the negative press of there being a leak.

For all I know, people might have actually been even more inclined to purchase HL2 because they sympathised with the company's situation and what they went through, and is an entirely possible situation.

As for me, well, this game has been on my "must buy...or else" list for quite some time, and this news doesn't shake it off that list in the least.

BTW...I'd like to encourage any hackers out there who are bored of going after microsoft or better yet the government websites(not the smartest thing) and mess with that chinese "hacker"...and THEN turn him in :) ...am I allowed to encourage hackers to do these acts? oh well...it's for a good cause(did i just say that?).

another solution, would, of course, be to have the devs computers hooked onto its own network but not to the internet, except for a few computers which would not be attached to that network but was linked to the internet...it's the safest way to do things, so why the hell not? Are most of the employees doing work at home or something instead of the office and need a central hub instead? if so, of course it's going to be kinda easy to steal source code. How useful that source code is by itself is another story...what does it allow them to do? possibly create hacks/cheats before the game is out. However, what is the point of stealing source code that wasn't destined to be finished for another few MONTHS? the source code isn't finished, so it's not done being tweaked or patches of it revamped completely, a little manipulation in this area...oops, your hack no longer works. please insert coin to try again :)

just my $0.02

First Quake Wars is delayed, now this? Those were my 2 most anticipated games of 2006. At least my wallet is breathing a sigh of relief.

seriously.. how dumb are these companies. why would you have the computer with the code on it attached to the internet?

Can any legal action be taken against a hacker in China?

:( I hope this doesn't screw them over too bad, I'm looking forward to this game.

Valve'd!

wha? Flagship is aware of the rumors that their code was stolen, but they aren't sure?

Boo-urns. No good ever comes from these doin's a-transpiring.