Half-Life 2 is far from the only game to deal with hackers during its development. Valve is a self-sufficient company with lots of resources at its disposal. The hackers who attacked the one-man project Minecraft rank even higher on the scale of internet dickishness.
Minecraft is the product of the efforts of a single man, Markus Persson. After becoming a viral sensation earlier this year, his time became split between adding new content to the game and forming a company so he could bring on help to expand his creation.
Apparently, this was an inexcusable offense to a cadre of hackers, so they launched a distributed denial of service attack on Minecraft's servers. They later claimed responsibility for the attacks on 4chan, using this inspired bit of reasoning to justify themselves:
“[The attack's purpose] is to send [Persson] a clear message of how the future of Minecraft will turn out unless he gets to work, namely by influencing the amount of sales taking place, due to the attacks. Start providing your customers with the updates that you promise them.”
Apparently, Persson wasn't creating enough content for these douchebags, despite working on a content update that was scheduled to go up on Halloween, just a few weeks after the attacks. Again, the conspiracy nuts came out of the woodwork to accuse Persson of engineering the attack himself.
Let's break down the reasoning of these entitled douchebags:
1. I buy Minecraft to play it.
2. Persson promises me content and gives me a date.
3. Persson doesn't deliver the content two weeks early.
4. Therefore, I will destroy the game I like. Which technically isn’t even out of beta yet.
Yeah, we don't get it, either.
Classic games are worshiped like gods amongst gamers. Once the forum dwellers-that-be have enshrined a game in their canon of classics, woe be upon the developer who wants to express their love for the series by, you know, actually making more of it.
Above: Bargh! Bethesda Fallout smash!
Such was the lesson Bethesda learned when it announced Fallout 3. Fans of the first two games cried out and decided the best way to support the series they love was to unfairly criticize every piece of news that came their way. When the Lead Character Artist admitted to never playing a Fallout game before development, the rest of the staff had to come to his rescue and publicly defend him. Throw in a little reductive soundbyte, and the meme around the internet became “Fallout 3 is Oblivion with guns.” Of course, the game was more than that, but “fans” were even more vicious to those outside of Bethesda that defended the game.
Sure, this kind of knee-jerk, “Don’t change anything or you’ll foul the ….aaaaargh! Too late!” reaction is all too common, but come on – this was Bethesda, folks. Don’t they deserve a little faith? Thankfully for the non-dick community, Bethesda stuck to its guns and Fallout 3 was awesome.
The first time Blizzard announced StarCraft II, fans went nuts. The second and third time, not so much. When the WoW-fed giant decided to make three games instead of one, entitled fans spun the story in a way that would make Fox News proud. “Blizzard is giving us three full length campaigns,” inexplicably became “Blizzard is giving us just 1/3 of the game each time and making us pay full price every time.”
Can you believe Blizzard wants to give us two more campaigns of this garbage? How dare they?!?
The big hullabaloo revolved around Blizzard's decision to create three separate, but full-length campaigns, but only include the first one as part of the initial release. The next two would come in expansions. Just to be clear, the first StarCraft came with a thirty missions single-player campaign. StarCraft II came with a 29 mission single-player campaign, and far more robust multiplayer and modding options. Still, it's not uncommon to hear players complain about Wings of Liberty being “only 33% of the game.”
It seems that there's no small number of people who expected Blizzard to hand over a 90-mission campaign out of the gate. Sorry, the economics of game development would never support that. StarCraft II was an amazing game that was well worth the money. Still is. Unfortunately, players took up the third-of-a-game soundbyte and used it to justify piracy. Which is, as you might guess from this article’s title, a total dick move.
