Project Zomboid Game Runs Into Piracy Problems – No, This is Not An Internet Joke
We previously discussed indie Anti-Zombie ‘survival’ game ‘Project Zomboid’ here on the ZRC blog, and then it kind of fell off my radar. In our defense, this has been a very busy spring for Anti-Zombie gaming news, what with two Resident Evil titles, lots of Dead Rising news, Silent Hill and the like.
Well, the game came out and apparently has been a bit of a hit in the circles of people who don’t care about fairness or decency to Zombies, but now this Independent Anti-Zombie game has run into trouble… with pirates.
I know, I know, but it’s not the setup for a net-based joke and so far there aren’t any ninjas:
A popular indie zombie-style RPG game has been taken offline due to an unofficial feature made available in a cracked copy. The developers of the game say that they usually turn a blind eye to piracy since it could have benefits for their project, but when pirates keep using their servers to get updates instead of using BitTorrent, they had to make a stand.
Basically, the issue is this; the developers openly accept, to some degree, the piracy of their game. Unfortunately a pirate decided to ‘improve’ on the original with a feature that checks for new updates every time the cracked copy is run, which has resulted in a significant drain on Project Zomboid’s bandwidth.
Here at The ZRC we also take a very relaxed approach to copyright, releasing all of our materials, in fact, under Creative Commons licensing. Even though Project Zomboid is obviously not a game we’ll be recommending to our readers, we would ask, in the spirit of all of your independent content publishers online, to not be jerks and effectively launch a denial of service attack on them out of laziness. Please?
It’ll be that much harder for us to direct scorn their way if their site is down. Thank you.
About The Author
Thanks for the coverage. You’ll be pleased to know that in the interest of zombie rights we’ve made this game to show the struggles of innocent zombies who eventually win against the odds and destroy humanity. Hopefully this pro-zombie bias becomes more apparent in the completed game.
I’m sorry lemmy but The ZRC just can’t accept that framing; Zombies cannot destroy humanity like some outside invader or devastating plague, because Zombies are people too.
We strive to avoid precisely this sort of ‘end of the world’ scenario here at The ZRC, offering educational services and conflict mediation in an attempt to bring peaceful co-existence to the Living and the Undead.