Atari pirates its own game?

Ratty Sr.

Ratty Sr.

Ratty, except old
Moderator
Orderite
A trial version of TOEE is available for download on Kazaa and apparently eMule, too. It has a six-hour playing limit, after which you must purchase the game. The interesting thing is, this "demo" weighs 843 MB, which means its actually a full game with a time limit, and it's also missing music and videos. Apparently this time limit was cracked several hours after the game was released, and crack/keygen/whatever is becoming more and more available. Troika also says they had no idea Atari published the game that way, which means Atari was testing new distribution methods on Troika's products without so much as asking for their consent. If the game sells badly due to this decision, Troika will be blamed, naturally... Nice going, Atari.

I also picked up a rumor that Atari published unfinished version of the game and they now blame Troika for excessive amount of bugs (not that I have a problem with that...) and refuse to allow them to make a patch! I'd love to meet the idiots that run Atari.
 
I had heard about this. Who was the idiot at Atari that thought this would be a good idea? Why, when Troika was perfectly willing to put together a demo, would you upload the entire game to Kazaa? Do they not understand that people use Kazaa to get things for free, not to get shareware? At least Valve didn't intend for people to get ahold of HL2 - Atari just went ahead and said "Hey, please pirate this game!"

As for Atari publishing an unfinished version of the game - as much as I want to defend Troika, this is kind of a 50/50 blame thing. Sure, Troika kept working on debugging the game and polishing it, but that doesn't really help much when the game is already being pressed and prepared to ship to stores.

The patch though, that's just more idiocy on Atari's part. What kind of company doesn't have a plan to support the product after release?
 
Is every game publisher on Earth stupid? Pirate you own game? Make the World's lousiest license rip-off; and it's you own license?

Man, it seems like the Darwin theory could use some speeding up in the games industry...
 
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