After last nights UT 2003 Demo leak! Here's what Mark Rein from Epic Games Inc had to say about it on the Epic Messagesboards .
leaked early test version of UT2003 is floating around the internet. It is not representative of the quality or performance of the final game. Infogrames' job in situations like these is to go after the people who are leaking or passing-along this version. They also need to suppress conversations about the leaked version on web forums to avoid pointing at it and tempting innocent people, who normally don't traffic in stolen software, to download it to find out what people are talking about. Their duty to their shareholders is to protect the value and marketability of their products to the fullest extent possible. They HAVE to do that, they're a public company and their shareholders would expect no less because Infogrames is invests a lot of money to bring games like UT2003 to the marketplace.
I wanted to address a few of related comments I saw on this forum. The demo was supposed to come out on date 'X'. This is just wrong. I think the closest we came to guessing (and yes, it was still just a guess) was that the demo would be out around the end of E3 or a few weeks after that. So far we're still "a few weeks after" E3 and working furiously to get the demo out as soon as possible. There are few big things we're still tinkering with such as the server browser. To put the demo out with an unfinished server browser would be foolish because we wouldn't get the all-important feedback on exactly what needs to be done for the server browser and you'd have a tough time finding decent servers that are playing the levels / maps / gametypes / rules / etc. that you want to play. We're also still continuing to optimize the performance of the engine, AI and maps and do a lot of other little things. The point of the demo (or test if you will) is to put it out when we think we've nailed just about everything (except maybe a few remaining map issues because only the maps in the demo need to be in absolute final shape) so that the feedback we get isn't about a bunch of stuff we already knew needed to changed or improved. I'm bothered by posts that say we let people down because we didn't ship the demo on some hypothetical date made up by rumor-mongers and using that as an excuse to justify piracy or slander us. That's really cruel and unjustified.
For the Full Thread Click Here
leaked early test version of UT2003 is floating around the internet. It is not representative of the quality or performance of the final game. Infogrames' job in situations like these is to go after the people who are leaking or passing-along this version. They also need to suppress conversations about the leaked version on web forums to avoid pointing at it and tempting innocent people, who normally don't traffic in stolen software, to download it to find out what people are talking about. Their duty to their shareholders is to protect the value and marketability of their products to the fullest extent possible. They HAVE to do that, they're a public company and their shareholders would expect no less because Infogrames is invests a lot of money to bring games like UT2003 to the marketplace.
I wanted to address a few of related comments I saw on this forum. The demo was supposed to come out on date 'X'. This is just wrong. I think the closest we came to guessing (and yes, it was still just a guess) was that the demo would be out around the end of E3 or a few weeks after that. So far we're still "a few weeks after" E3 and working furiously to get the demo out as soon as possible. There are few big things we're still tinkering with such as the server browser. To put the demo out with an unfinished server browser would be foolish because we wouldn't get the all-important feedback on exactly what needs to be done for the server browser and you'd have a tough time finding decent servers that are playing the levels / maps / gametypes / rules / etc. that you want to play. We're also still continuing to optimize the performance of the engine, AI and maps and do a lot of other little things. The point of the demo (or test if you will) is to put it out when we think we've nailed just about everything (except maybe a few remaining map issues because only the maps in the demo need to be in absolute final shape) so that the feedback we get isn't about a bunch of stuff we already knew needed to changed or improved. I'm bothered by posts that say we let people down because we didn't ship the demo on some hypothetical date made up by rumor-mongers and using that as an excuse to justify piracy or slander us. That's really cruel and unjustified.
For the Full Thread Click Here
