Saints Row: The Third, which was going to be distributed by Viva Entertainment , has been officially banned in the UAE by order of the National Media Council with no given explanation. In addition to this, the game was recently leaked as well weeks before the official release date.
Even though no reason has been given, Saints Row is a series fairly notorious for use of sexual themes, drugs, and alcohol much like Grand Theft Auto. As a largely-Islamic country, many might point fingers at their main religion, but the far more liberal nature of the UAE, especially when compared to the more strict countries in the Middle East means that it’s more likely to be the violence, criminal acts, and sexual themes of the game that rubbed a few people the wrong way.
It wont be a major loss for THQ however, the population of UAE only numbers in the 8-millions, and not all of them are gamers. It does however show that videogame censorship is alive and well even in these modern times sadly. The leak however is a nasty thing to happen, considering the amount of time between now and the release date next month.
The aforementioned leak was quite recent, and is likely part of the reason developers have been putting DRM on their products in order to combat this, but ultimately failing. Such a sad future where someone can just walk in and steal something before it even hits the shelves. If I could get a game before everyone else I’d be quite tempted to jump at such a chance myself but theft is the last thing I would resort to. I do wonder why I never hear about scandals where someone was caught trying to steal something in development.
Rian Quenlin
I actually wonder how these things even GET leaked, you would think the main compiled files would be under locks and the key would be on the collar of a trained attack dog when you consider the potential revenue loss.
Then again I did read a story on Reddit a month ago about a scumbag steve type guy who’s workplace got an engine under more NDAs than an Area 51 employee who tried to steal it. Maybe it’s just the really bad press of it that makes them keep quiet.
Chris Hernandez
It would be so easy to get a copy of the game leaked from such a large studio. Also PR people and some game journalists may have copies of it that they leak, as there is little way to trace the origin of such a leak.
Unless the company scanned every bag leaving the building for flash drives and burnt DVDs it would be impossible to stop.
Rian Quenlin
A friend of mine always puts a small easter egg in his code that makes some details pop up when you put in a sequence of keys. Normal things like filesize, date of compilation etc., if they put say… “Given to Mr. X of Gamespot on 05/08/12” somewhere in the code that can be accessed through obscure means it would be a lot easier to find out who was responsible. Even if they can’t find who exactly leaked it it would be a death sentence for their pre-release days. Of course compiling a specific thing every time would quickly get annoying.
Nick Hernandez
it’s a leaked Steam copy.. that is heavily encrypted and there is no crack for it at all… so there is no loss really *yet*
Rian Quenlin
Pssh, that’s like stealing a military ID and using it to buy drinks on the base!
Nick Hernandez
Not really.. I mean you could pre-download Battlefield 3 days before it’s release but you couldn’t unlock it and was equally as encrypted as Saints Row. Until it’s encryption is hacked there is nothing to worry about and nothing worth while happen aside from hundreds of gb’s of bandwidth wasted
Chris Hernandez
Deus Ex only took three days to unlock the Steam version of the game, so even if this takes a week there will still a be a playable version of the game out before the official release.
I agree with you Rian that if they encoded each release with a specific tag for each review copy it would provide the culprit right away, but would be annoying and hackers do look for those sort of things when they are cracking games.