Developer of popular XBLA FortressCraft game Adam Sawkins has got the police involved after a massive denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on the game’s dedicated site FortressCraft.com on the day rival game Minecraft launched on Xbox Live Arcade.
The incident went down yesterday while much online noise was being made on the highly-anticipated release of Minecraft on XBLA. Creator of Minecraft, Markus “Notch” Persson made a tweet to announce the rapid success of the 4J Studios port of his game, which apparently became profitable in its first hour on sale.
In one of many outbursts Sawkins singled out a certain someone as well as damning Minecraft players as a whole, tweeting “F**k you and your ‘community’, @Notch.”
“We know *who* it was, but sadly we didn’t get a note in the post saying WHY,” Sawkins said to Eurogamer. “We’ve sailed over our cap for the month so far, and are going through the process of talking to the police about it.
“Under British law, yes [the police can act on the attack]. Hacking is a fairly serious crime over here, and it’s not a personal site, it’s a business site. Loss of earnings, all that crap. I personally wouldn’t have bothered, but the guy who does my website is FLAMING over it!”
It’s not all doom and gloom for Sawkins though, with FortressCraft currently standing as the best-selling Xbox Live Indie Game on the planet, having hit 750,000 downloads this year. It has been a rocky road in some respects, as many claim the game is simply a MineCraft clone, which Sawkins denies.
There’s a little soreness in what Sawkins seems to think of as preferential treatment from Microsoft in their dealings with Minecraft.
“The poor (relative) quality and alleged success of Minecraft 360 has confused me,” he said. “4J had no budget restrictions, unfettered access to Microsoft, and a solid, world-class game as a template, and still managed to ship a game with a tiny world, no working skins, and no dedicated servers – and even that was a port of a 14 month old snapshot of the MC source base.”
Adding: “[Minecraft has] a bunch less simultaneous players than FortressCraft has. And that’s just muggins here doing that! I guess it’s the old thing though, deliver minimally, promise a lot, and hope people forget; Kinect support went for a wander, and their track record for patching Android and iOS is…. uh… less than stellar.”
Nobody quite yet knows the true weight of the impact of Minecraft’s XBLA release on FortressCraft though Sawkins suspects it may hinder his sales.
“I haven’t actually gotten any sales figures, but I can safely say that I’ve lost eight Twitter followers so far. I suspect sales will be quieter for a week, then people will get bored of the novelty of (a very old version of) Minecraft, and hopefully wander back.
“If nothing else, I’ve bumped ‘finishing split screen’ up my priority list.”
At the time of writing FortressCraft.com is still coming up blank.
Published: May 10, 2012 11:00 pm