Bungie Should Blame Themselves for Halo Reach Leak

IGN reported earlier today that Microsoft are “aggressively” investigating the claims of hackers cracking the special Halo:Reach download currently on the Xbox Live Marketplace. While it was put there to buy at the cheap price of 99999MSP, it can only be downloaded with a special code, given to game reviewers. In the mean time, Bungie moderators have warned fans to go in the dark for the mean time until the game is officially released on September 14th.

Whatever course of action Microsoft takes next, it’s already too late anyway. Even if they take the game off the marketplace server(s), it is already no doubt on torrent sites everywhere. Whether it was Microsoft or Bungie’s idea to supply the game to reviewers like this, it wasn’t a very good one.

If the game hadn’t been publicly listed then maybe they could have avoided this problem. It wouldn’t have been a guarantee (Halo 2 and 3 were both leaked before their releases) but a leak might not have happened so easily. Would it really have been so hard for Bungie and/or Microsoft to just supply review copies traditionally? There is already a secret review event in the UK this week so it’s not like the resources aren’t there.

In conclusion, next time around, don’t put such a high profile game that pirates would love to have on a public service like Xbox Live. It was only a matter of time before hackers would manage to grab it.

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