Today the game was pulled from Steam sale pending a code fix for a "timebomb" in the code.

This game has had an astonishing amount of drama between the author, Pavel Zagrebelnyj, and the publisher, Oovee. In December of 2014, Mr. Zagrebelnyj claimed that Oovee was keeping all of the money from sales and had locked him out of the code. Relations slowly improved over last year. Now, some time codes have crashed the game, and accusation were leveled at Zagrebelnyj claiming he had sabotaged his own game to get back at Oovee. He has denied this, saying that the "timebombs" were early anti-piracy code that couldn't be updated in time because of poor communication with the publisher.

What a mess!

Not to say this isn't just bad contract negotiations between the dev and publisher (malicious timebombs in the code designed to trigger for everyone) but if it is some (potentially timed to avoid detection as clearly broken and needing more work by crackers in the early window of the game's release to disable) anti-piracy code that's become active then I'm not shocked.

Every time some dev or publisher thinks they've got some great angle on getting press coverage by "sticking it to the pirates" with some crappy defective bit of code that they intend to only break when you crack the game, I fear stuff like this happening. Games are skirting the line between functional software and lawsuit material under trade description laws. My day job is coding, I've done some game dev coding as well as other game dev work. You know what I'm never going to add to any project I work on: more points of failure. Why would anyone working with these incredibly complex codebases inject intentionally broken code and extra bugs into the system and then hope they only trigger when the condition of piracy are met? How could you look at the professional code of ethics you signed when joining your local trade body for Software Engineers and think you were upholding it. It's madness.