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A hacker who ported hack-and-slash title, The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile, to PC from its native XBLA home, without the permission of its creator, has claimed he did it “for justice”.
Barabus, the alias of the Russian hacker responsible for this hack, claimed they had ported the Xbox Live-exclusive game to give PC users the chance to enjoy it.
“This is not piracy. This is restoration of justice,” he said, in response to comment’s on an IndieStatik story.
“Users always have the option to pay for the game or not. This also applies to Xbox 360 which has the opportunity to play pirated games.”
In the same thread, the game’s creator Ska Studios founder James Silva said: “I guess you could say my reaction is mixed. I’m flattered that there’s this much interest in Vampire Smile on PC. I’m not mad about the crack itself, in fact, I’m actually pretty impressed. But I’m bewildered by the cracker’s attempt to justify the morality of it. He assumes a lot about why Vampire Smile’s not on PC yet, and he could have cleared up a lot of those assumptions by just emailing me. I get that piracy is a service problem, but that’s a consequence, not a justification.”
Barabus argued that porting the exclusive game to PC was ‘fair’ because their not making money from it.
“We do not steal the game for the Xbox 360, we release it for the PC port. Given that developers ignore the PC platform, about any loss of profit for them is not out of the question. After all, if they wanted to earn money, then the game would be issued on all available platforms. If the game came out on PC officially, then this thread would not exist.”
Further to Barabus’s comment about doing it for justice, Silva gave a response to Eurogamer: “I should add that I’m totally giving the guy the benefit of the doubt and saying he probably didn’t mean to come across quite the way he did with that restoration of justice stuff.”
On the other hand, Michelle Juett, Ska’s art unicorn, was far less forgiving. In an email to the media website, she wrote: “James is always the good cop. I’m kind of livid myself, I just see him as the overly-entitled gamer saying ‘I deserve this because I want it!’ I was saying earlier on Twitter ‘Halo: Spartan Assault only on Windows 8 devices! That Russian guy should port it FOR GREAT JUSTICE!’ Like James though, he’s going to do what he’s going to do and it’s kind of impressive but trying to justify it morally really irks me.”
