Doom 3 has been cracked and up loaded to the world’s various P2P networks – even the most casual search will uncover dozens of download sources.
This is terrible news for id Software, the game’s producers, after more than four years’ of work on the title. The game was due to go on sale on Tuesday in the US, and next week in the UK – so it is likely that this is final code version of the game, possibly taken from an advance or review copy, rather than stolen code in the case of Half Life 2.
First person shooter enthusiasts and Doom fans will undoubtedly buy legitimate copies of the new game, but it is likely that id will lose a lot of sales from P2P downloads. Because of review copies it is virtually impossible to stop PC games appearing on file sharing networks before titles appear on shelves.
id ran into problems earlier on this year when, predictably, attempts to stop a demo of Doom 3 from proliferating on the very same P2P networks failed.
Valve’s own Half Life 2 shooter was delayed for months after source code was stolen by hackers and then found its way onto the internet – it will finally be seeing release in the autumn, after a substantial rewrite of key sections of code.
Doom 3
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Fraser Lovatt
Fraser Lovatt has spent the last fifteen years working in publishing, TV and the Internet in various capacities, and believes that they will be seperate platforms for at least a while yet. His main interests at the moment are exploring where Linux is taking home entertainment and how technology is conferring technical skills on more and more people.Fraser Lovatt was born in the same year that 2001: A Space Odyssey was delighting and confusing people in the cinemas, and developed a lifelong love of technology as soon as he realised that things could be taken apart, sometimes put back together again, but mostly left in bits or made into something the original designer hadn't quite planned upon.At school he was definitely in the ZX Spectrum/Magpie/BMX camp, rather than the BBC Micro/Blue Peter/well-behaved group. This is all deeply ironic as he later went on to spend nine years working at the BBC.After a few years of working as a bookseller in Scotland, ("Back when it was actually a skilled profession" he'll tell anyone still listening), he moved to England for reasons he can't quite explain adequately to himself. After a couple of publishing jobs punctuated by sporadic bursts of travelling and photography came the aforementioned nine years at the BBC where he specialised in internet technologies and video.These days his primary interests are Java, Linux, videogames and pies - and if they're not candidates for convergence, then what is?
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