EA hacked : 780GB of data stolen including Frostbite engine source code

I am sensing a little bit of Anger toward Electronic Art's.

I mean come on they are just guy's like you and me.


Guy's that want to teach your kid's and anyone else they can get there grubby corporate slimy claws into to Gamble through loot box's.

To keep paying them a TAX through a rental game model they and other's of there ilk are pushing as the new norm.

To Charge over ever more for the games they peddle even though you don't to through the retail system, it is not distributed in warehouses, is not printed on a CD or DVD or Blue Ray and is just a client these day's.

Yeah EA, Ubisoft and others of there ilk, Can't Blame Valve (Steam) though they did start some of this crap with there client.

Yeah EA, I mean who would not want there garden full of weed's, who would not want there PC over run by bloatware client's, always online rental software.

For some people it is more convenient, until the internet line breaks but you know there are still folk's that rebuilt Atari 800's and those thing's had cartridge's not far off the size of a Video Cassette.

So for many we just don't like it, we want our collection of CD's and Optical media, We want the ability to not have to be hard wired to the net when we want to go and escape into a fantasy game world for a quick hack and slash adventure.

But of course Social gaming is the new norm, or is it an engineered norm?.

Yes its' great to play with your mates on a Lan but do you want your kid to play an online social game while some pedo scum is playing it?, good work EA for shoving this down society's throats and social engineering an entire generation of weak minded consumers.

The sad fact is it's the idiots who buy the games and pay for the extras who are at fault not EA , I don't own any EA games but in a market economy EA are as entitled to sell add-ons as any none video game company is and does , fools who pay for skins and cosmetics are the minnows EA feeds on.

a reply to: EdisonintheFM

Give me a cartridge or disc.

A disk requires you to have an optical drive and insert the disk when you want to play , digital is far better.
Cartridges ? , never again.

a reply to: RussianSpy
Activision makes Call of Doody not EA , EA make the other cash cow Battlefield.

a reply to: OccamsRazor04

Curious what changed several months ago that emboldened these hackers.

Nothing has changed except the target , hacking businesses has been going on for years.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus
Sadly it's to be expected , knee jerk reactions with little or no thought to the bigger picture mate.

a reply to: gortex

Cartridges ? , never again.

Cartridges definitely have the fastest load times of the three options, their storage is rather limited though and they're costly to produce.

Sadly it's to be expected , knee jerk reactions with little or no thought to the bigger picture mate.

There is no bigger picture. EA got hacked and some source code was stolen. Inevitably it'll be leaked to a torrent somewhere and people will play with it. CDProjekt Red was hacked and lost some source code a while back, Nintendo was hacked and lost source code. In the end, nothing really happened to the companies, but a bunch of people ended up with some cool source code and Dev tools to play with. It's not like they literally 'stole' it from EA. EA still has it, they can still produce their subpar garbage.

And, it's not like there isn't already an open source editor for the frostbite engine.

greydynamics.github.io...

This is basically a non-event with no bigger picture. EA just got screwed and it's funny, that's about it.

a reply to: gortex

The cat is out of the bag as far as digital online distribution is concerned but up to now the corporations have been pretty much self regulating and it is time for legislation to limit what they can and can not do to consumers.

That said I do actually agree, dug88 does make a brilliant point as well, cartridges were usually an eprom or prom on a small circuit board with a few other components usually diodes and sometimes a cap and transistor or two with a few resistor's, other than the chip they were a simple affair but did cost far more and were far less ecologically viable than even a CD or the the media less digital distro method.

My bone of contention as far as the Digital distro and forgive my grammar earlier I tend to think then type half way through the sentence without realizing I have missed words which is compounded by spelling errors, is that the corporations and distribution method are making almost one hundred percent of the profit, saving themselves the huge overheads of distribution warehouse, media production and retail staff but of course that also means all those job's along the chain have been sacrificed just so some corporate penguin's can fill there bank's with all your money and non of that retail cost then going back into your own economy.

My take on it is this, other than the Job losses it caused I have no problem with digital distribution but I do not like always online client's that can be used as spyware, be hacked, crypto mine using my hard ware without me knowing etc, I do not like the fact they are charging not less despite the massive reduction in overheads with this method of distribution but actually far more today than they were back when media was sold via retail outlets on the high street and that to my mind is just greed.

I do not blame the developers it is the parent company's and publishing houses that are most at fault here, some developers though like EA are fully responsible for this mess they have created and foisted onto the consumer.

They have a monopoly and are fully exploiting it, they need to be regulated more thoroughly and it has to be done on an international level which is the hardest part about creating such an international economic agreement especially while many governments would be scared of upsetting there digital economy's.

Blizzard Employee Disclaimer: Thoughts are my own and not an official statement of the company.


Anyone that has talked to me here or even those that have pinged me outside of ATS and become friends knows that I am 100% in favor and will always support the ability to pass negative feedback about whatever topic they want. It's much better that people are frustrated by element X in the gaming industry then not talking about it at all. Hell I could list many things I see wrong on all sides of every fence from my current active years in the gaming industry. That being said.


It always makes me laugh how people throw out comments about how evil a company is, how they sold out, how they used to do this or be that without knowledge of both sides of the story or at an even deeper level without true knowledge of how an org runs. Sorry Kotaku leaks from disgruntled employees does not make anyone an expert on anything.

I'm not saying that things aren't wrong with every company but I'm saying when people think its funny that a company had its IP stolen I wonder how funny they would find it if the same happened to them. Knowing that if it did happen to them the damage would most likely be limited to their direct sphere of influence vs the expanding damage rings that happen when a company of any measurable scale with a world wide fanbase is it.

Then again IMO that is the nature of business in the current world: People want the sky, expect the world , at their approved price , in their approved timeframe with exactly the parameters they like and anything short of that is a failure. They also never seem to have ideas on how to fix things or follow up on any public facing feedback avenues because it's much easier just to complain then it is to be part of the solution.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

You're not wrong, BUT if those source codes end up released into the wild there are folks out there who will use them to create mods. Not the hackers, themselves, but rather those who download whatever the hackers data dump. I assume a lot of that will be dependent on EA paying whatever ransom the hackers are demanding.

a reply to: opethPA

So us little people are supposed to care when greedy, vampiric companies get hit??

Like EA cares about us?? Lmao EA can get wrekt the world would be better for it. I wouldn't lose a wink of sleep. Just as they don't care about quality or customer service. Or about me.

Maybe we could finally get a decent football game too. Suck it EA, your games suck, your whole business sucks.

a reply to: opethPA

I guess when you work for a company that hasn't produced a good game for over a decade and will blatantly insult their customers it's hard to realize maybe where the criticism comes from.

originally posted by: dug88
a reply to: opethPA

I guess when you work for a company that hasn't produced a good game for over a decade and will blatantly insult their customers it's hard to realize maybe where the criticism comes from.

Blizzard Employee Disclaimer: Thoughts are my own and not an official statement of the company.



More then welcome to your opinion, I have no desire to change it. Having been a gamer for roughly the past 35 years and currently working on this side of the fence I get to see both sides of the equation.

As I have said in every post I have made around games here I could list so many things wrong with where I work or in the gaming industry as a whole . Hell I have been pretty damn frustrated all day by something going on at work which seems so unnecessary. Please if you think im against that kind of feedback , read again.

originally posted by: burdman30ott6
You're not wrong, BUT if those source codes end up released into the wild there are folks out there who will use them to create mods. Not the hackers, themselves, but rather those who download whatever the hackers data dump. I assume a lot of that will be dependent on EA paying whatever ransom the hackers are demanding.

Oh, I know, it was just the funny 'hackers, make me games' comments.

I have no sympathy for EA. I worked for them for a while and the way they treat their employees and their general business practices make them morally corrupt. Criminals hitting criminals is a consequence of the life style, no one should feel bad for EA.

Honestly- best news so far this year. F@&#% EA.
I would like to see them selling the code back to EA @ $50 per-line and when EA have all their ‘source code’ returned they’ll come to realise that it still doesn’t work.

Then they’ll sell them the ‘dlc code’ promising to fix all the bugs, but ultimately nothing will ever work correctly again.
I would be very pleased if this causes EA permanent losses and translates into another iteration of Fifa never seeing that he light of day.

F*&k EA.

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

I don't think anyone here thinks the hackers are "going to make games". It's what people could potentially do with the information.

a reply to: Rekrul

If the engine whose source code they stole can be hacked as a back door to systems when always online games are playing then it becomes a very serious security problem, it can also be a back door for other illegal activity's.

So very good point, my take on modern code is that it is mostly crap, yes the engine may be brilliant but these programmers behind it are using high level programming languages and compilers which always produce junk code and fail to properly optimize.

Bring back the likes of Jeff Minter but he was programming relatively tiny program's and todays are absolutely huge by comparison, still the standards he set should never have been dropped, optimize to make more out of what you have than anyone would believe possible instead of lazy programming that is made to use hardware so poorly that what we think is cutting edge would actually have ran on pc's ten and fifteen years ago had it been programmed as elegantly as he did back in the old 8 and 16 bit day's.

All of this created not only known backdoors but also potential unknown accidental ones that hackers (whom are the only programmers that live up to Minters level of skill) can exploit or find way's to make use of they were never intended for.

And that makes this leak very dangerous to people's security, hacker figures out a way to turn part of it into spyware for example, to access the hardware and install hidden crypto miners as another or to lock peoples files while they play only to find there game suddenly seizing up and an extortion message appearing on there screen.

I also do not trust EA when they claim that customer data was not hacked but we will have to wait and see if they send out an email telling everyone to change there login details in the next week or so.

originally posted by: Rekrul
I don't think anyone here thinks the hackers are "going to make games".

LOL.....

originally posted by: Rekrul
I hope the hackers use the engine to make good games...

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Their are very talented and poor artists that will benefit from this whether stolen or not. EA has been a target for a long time I would'nt be surprised if it was from a team of artists that they shut down.

someone play a sad piano for EA

I hope that these tools live in the wild get into the hands of someone talented that cannot afford a dev kit and make something awesone.

a reply to: Brotherman

I hope the hackers make a cool version of Pong.

/ shrug

Whatever, it's EA, like anyone has any sympathy.


But it'll be interesting to see what comes of the code dump. Y'all tut-tutting the notion might want to check it -- nobody bitches about the stuff on NexusMods or the Steam mods shop being conjured up by Joe Blow after his Mickey D's shift between college classes, risk is risk. Even cell app stores have risky downloads, you can't vet ALL of it 100% effectively.

Again, / shrug

a reply to: AugustusMasonicus

Lol I knew that you were making fun of me. Internet short hand

originally posted by: LABTECH767
a reply to: Rekrul

to lock peoples files while they play only to find there game suddenly seizing up and an extortion message appearing on there screen.

Rockstar is really good at this too