The Christmas season seems to be giving a lot this year, at least in terms of hacks. In a month full of hacked content and hacked company servers, 2023 has deemed it fit to give us one last little breach of security as the full version of Bandai Namco’s Tekken 8 has been cracked.
For those unaware, a crack is basically when hackers bypass a game’s security and release a now security-less copy out into the wild, available for pirates and anyone who just so happens to download it. Games get cracked all the time, it’s just the way the industry works and it’s something companies account for, but in the case of fighting games it’s interesting because for the competitive scene any amount of a head start can be a big difference maker in tournament environments.
This isn’t even the first time a fighting game has been cracked preemptively in recent memory, as Capcom’s Street Fighter 6 was cracked several months before the official release and a lot of early competitions were wrought with people who were very used to the system mechanics and abused that knowledge for easy and early free wins.
Luckily, in Tekken 8’s case, the release date is a little over a month so the advantage won’t be quite that big. Also luckily, as a fighting game and thus a primarily multiplayer experience, anybody playing the cracked copies for a head start in competition is going to buy a full release anyway as cracks can’t be played online.
So as far as pre-release cracks go, this one is pretty mild. It will probably have an effect on competition, and maybe a minuscule effect on sales for those primarily interested in single-player content, but Bandai Namco should be able to bounce back from this setback very easily.