Unknown fraudsters have stolen and published access codes to the Dirt 3 racing game. As reported by Kotaku, with reference to the Steam forum, around 3 million codes had been accessed and distributed. In its turn, Lenta.ru, with reference to Geek.com, reports 1.7 millions of codes.
The leaked codes were intended for a joint campaign by Codemasters development studio and AMD electronics manufacturer. According to its rules, the buyers of the company’s videocards could download a free digital copy of the game from the Steam service. As reported by Kotaku, the database with the codes was stored on a Codemasters server, from where it was eventually stolen.
The measures, the two companies are going to take to stop the distribution of codes, are still unknown.
Codemasters Dirt 3 game was launched at the end of May, 2011, for PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 as part 9 of the off-road arcade races popular since 1998. The game was welcomed by both gamers and game media (for example, Dirt 3 console versions on the Metacritic site score 87 out of 100).
Comments by Nikolay Fedotov, InfoWatch chief analyst: «This leak of promo-codes to the game will not cause substantial losses. Except, perhaps, there should be some damage to their business reputation. It’s because of these insignificant material losses that some people think the leak was intentional and orchestrated.
No one would purchase the “freely attached software” for money. It has always been like this, and there is no reason for the situation to change. “Freely attached” (but not “free”) programs are pariahs among software products. They are mostly, and rightly, considered unsuccessful and good for nothing. And hardly ever used.
So let us see if an event like a leak will increase their popularity. Even if the leak was not intentional, it is an interesting marketing experiment».
