Lineage 3: Source Code Pinched
By Chienne - Tue May 1, 2007 10:13am
| Korea's largest game developer NCsoft is currently under police investigation - again - this time over the fact that a large chunk of code for upcoming MMORPG title Lineage III has, well, been stolen. Not only that, it's apparently been sold to a major Japanese game company... and it looks like it was an inside job. Seven former NCsoft employees are currently under suspicion. They left the Korean firm earlier this year, and in a later job interview with the Japanese company, showed off the software they'd been working on. It's believed the technology may have been copied during the demonstration. Calculating the current worth of the Lineage IP (sales over 1.6 billion US$ for both Lineage I and Lineage II) and combining it with the current subscriber base (more than 1.5 million subscribers worldwide) - damage value for the lost data is estimated to be over 1 billion US$. It doesn't stop there. These are the same NCsoft (former) employees who are considered to have something to do with leaking the program design of Lineage III by email or USB disk last September. NCsoft hasn't been a happy place to work for a while now, the company's been suffering since sacking one of it's senior game developers who apparently displayed "poor leadership skills". Apparently those skills were so poor he lead most of the 90-person dev team to follow him out the door, and it looks like some of them took some souvenirs on the way. | ) Korean police use interesting tactics (from Lineage II) |
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