AppleInsider Staff
Square Enix, publisher of iOS action role-playing game Deus Ex, has decided to remove an in-game limitation that would disable a user's ability to fire a weapon if the title was installed on a jailbroken device.
It was reported Thursday that Square Enix's Deus Ex: The Fall, an extension of the company's popular Deus Ex franchise, instituted a restriction that would disallow players with jailbroken iOS devices from shooting guns, effectively hobbling the game.
The company apparently had a change of heart, and plans to reinstate the crucial feature in a forthcoming update.
Gamers noted that the publisher didn't state the limitation on the app's download page, and would only be shown the above warning message after purchasing and opening the title.
Square issued the following statement to Eurogamer:
We have not been clear in our communication earlier this week when we launched Deus Ex: The Fall. We did not state clearly that the game would not support jailbroken devices and so we will be switching this off via an update, so that all the supported iOS devices will be able to play the game in the near future."
"We feel it's the right thing to do in this situation and apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused. No customer should be out of pocket when we were not clear from the start, so we'll get the game updated as soon as possible so that everyone who wants to play Deus Ex: The Fall can do regardless of whether their device is jailbroken or not. As soon as this update is live we will communicate this via the Eidos Montreal Community channels.â€
As of this writing, Deus Ex: The Fall has yet to be updated, though a new warning regarding the restriction has been added to the app's description. The title can be purchased from the App Store for $7.
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69 Comments
Just because someone jailbreaks their iDevice, it doesn't mean they pirate games. I'd be upset if I bought this game and couldn't play it because my iDevices are jailbroken. It would be completely different if they actually were able to detect that the game was pirated. Then I could see the justification of their original intent.
It either was that, or deal with mass legitimate refunds.
FFS. How about limiting the game difficulty setting to "cakewalk" for jail breakers? Then they could play the whole game, see all the media, and can't complain they didn't get their money's worth?
They did the right thing, since it wasn't made clear from the beginning. If they had a disclaimer on their app description stating that it would not function 100% on jailbroken devices, then that would have been fine too. I still think that most jailbreakers pirate games. Not many people are going to post and say, yes, I jailbreak my device and i pirate games.
Just because someone jailbreaks their iDevice, it doesn't mean they pirate games. I'd be upset if I bought this game and couldn't play it because my iDevices are jailbroken. It would be completely different if they actually were able to detect that the game was pirated. Then I could see the justification of their original intent.
True, you can't generalise, however there's a related trend and you can't discuss this away nowadays anymore. This was easy when iOS was much more limited, locked to exclusive carriers in most countries, etc. Now it's not anymore and thus the geeky few, who jailbreak for being allowed to SSH to their phone or whatever other reasons, remain a minority.
These days, many people jailbreak for the major purpose of installing cracked apps. And I'm being completely honest here, most people I meet with jailbroken devices, start showing off some of their cracked apps once you start a conversation.
Either way, naturally paying customers shouldn't be put at a disadvantage here and hence this was the right move. However, at the same time I believe that while stating so, locking out jailbreak users could be a good way forward for developers. I have been toying around with this idea for a while now and been wondering why it is still so uncommon, although there are some signs of change on the horizon.
As to why they do this over other forms of copy protection is pretty simple: It is very easy to reliably detect jailbroken devices. It is not so easy to implement halfway reliable piracy detection that actually lasts longer than 10 minutes through more penetrant attacks than those crack-it-yourself website tools. So while it is more or less simple for good crackers to disable piracy detection mechanism or modifying the app bundle in such a way as not to trigger it, there are ways of detecting jailbreaks, crackers just can't do too much about.
Essentially, I believe we should all understand developers trying to protect themselves. We wouldn't want to end up like Android did and have adverts and collection of private data in every app, would we?