Jailbreakers beware

Apple has never been entirely keen on the idea of people hacking in to their smartphones, and here in 2013 its becoming apparent that developers of games for iOS devices aren’t finding the situation to be entirely positive either. What this week has turned up is the creators of Dues Ex: The Fall have included a code which, if your iPhone is jailbroken, will result in your complete inability to fire guns. And that’s important.

When you’re playing a game like Dues Ex: The Fall, you’ll find it rather difficult to get anywhere without the firing of guns. This news comes from Kotaku where users have flocked to flip out over the situation due to their full purchase of the game and essentially complete inability to play it. This game was released this week for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

When one downloads The Fall for $6.99 USD on the Apple App Store, it will work completely fine if you’ve got a factory-fresh iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. If you’ve taken the time to jailbreak the device, on the other hand, you’ll be unable to play.

At the moment it’s not entirely clear why the developers behind the game do not warn users that they’re so very against the jailbreaking process that they’ll stop anyone who does it from playing their game. Jailbreaking is not illegal at the moment here in the USA, just warrantee-breaking. Game developers certainly – again, at the moment – appear to have the right to initiate a break like this, but we imagine the situation wont be around for long.

At least, not with no warning as we’re seeing here.

UPDATE: It would appear that Square Enix has been quick on the pistol with a response to this public relations mistake of a release. These words were provided by the developers to Penny Arcade Report:

“We have not been clear in our communication earlier this week when we launched Deus Ex: The Fall. We did not state clearly that the game would not support jailbroken devices and so we will be switching this off via an update, so that all the supported iOS devices will be able to play the game in the near future

We feel it is the right thing to do in this situation and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused. No customer should be out of pocket when we were not clear from the start, so we’ll get the game updated as soon as possible so that everyone who wants to play Deus Ex: The Fall can do so regardless of whether their device is jailbroken or not.

As soon as this update is live we will communicate this via the Eidos Montreal Community channels” – Square Enix

This sort of situation has appeared with several other games in the recent past, notably Game Dev Tycoon which, having expected their game to be pirated immediately after having been released to the wild, added a bit of a break inside it.

As players played, they found their (pirated) game to be giving them massive amounts of bad sales reports due to in-game pirating. Irony at its best.