Last week, Microsoft revealed their free-to-play online multiplayer PC game, Halo Online, which just so happens to be exclusive to Russia. That's right, there are no plans to bring it to other regions.
So, what happens when you lock a game, let alone a game from the Halo franchise, to one region? Pirates, hackers, and modders take matters into their own hands.
A leaked copy of Halo Online was obtained by modders and has since then been made accessible to anyone and everyone who would like to play the game. Microsoft never intended to allow anyone outside of Russia, so this pushback from the Halo community has left the company filing DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) takedown notices on Github in hopes of stopping the modders from making Halo Online publicly available.
It doesn't sound like the modders plan to stop.
“In terms of DMCA/C&D mitigation, we have made redundant git backups on private and public git servers. This is to ensure we will always have one working copy. These are being synchronized so that data is always the same,” Woovie, a member of the modding team Eldorito, explained.
“Further DMCAs may happen potentially, it’s not really known at the moment. Our backups will always exist though and we will continue until we’re happy.”
Whether or not the premature availability of Halo Online is damaging is arguable. The game was to be free and available to anyone in Russia in the first place. Microsoft and Innovo might not like the fact that their region-locked game is being accessed by anyone and everyone ahead of schedule, but members of the Halo community have been looking for the game to return to PC for quite some time. It honestly seems like this game might raise the anticipation for such a return.
If the modders had taken a paid game and made it accessible to everyone for free, then I could see it as pirating; but for now all I'm seeing is a free-to-play game having its region lock removed. The part that does suck is that it's not the full game, as the game is scheduled for a spring release.
