Online Worlds Roundtable #11, Part One

Another MMORPG-related roundtable has surfaced at RPGVault, this time discussing the game market in the Far East and the rampant amount of piracy that is committed overseas. Here’s a snip from Shadowbane’s Erik Bethke:

Piracy, however, is enjoying a revival via pirate servers. We saw this with Ultima Online and Diablo. Now, in China, this has become a very serious problem. Basically, free-spirit hackers or sometimes members of China’s organized crime host physical servers running pirated code for games like Webzen’s MU or Actoz’s A3. In the latter case, this has become so severe it’s unclear at the moment whether A3 will continue operating. The reason these MMOs are being pirated is because the services themselves are fundamentally vulnerable to hosting by another entity that delivers the same gameplay experience. Looking at it this way, it is parallel to copied CDs providing the same experience as the originals. These MMOs are essentially glorified Quake and Diablo servers and not “true” online worlds; the word true is in quotes because it’s an inflammatory one I suspect will just lead to perhaps fruitless discussions of definitions.