Steal and run, steal and run.
The sneaking away on the eve of the release of "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom" made a lot of noise. When genuine players and pirated players have their own words and quarrels, a long-standing problem has also been ignored by most players:
Where did the game sneak from?
Japanese media Wen Chun Online released a report on May 26, confirming one of the answers: there have always been ghosts in the supply chain. Any pirated game must be cracked on the basis of the files of the genuine game, and the files of the genuine game are likely to come from the physical cartridge leaked by the inner ghost.
Taking Amazon as an example, many of Amazon's secondary and tertiary subcontractors have been hiring temporary workers, and their time in the subcontractors is short, and it is easy to get out of the way; And because of the high turnover rate, prisoners may not necessarily be caught if something goes wrong.
In theory, Amazon's security policy is binding on subcontractors and personnel
Wen Chun interviewed an insider at an Amazon subcontractor, alias "Mr. A." "This time," Mr. A said, at least two part-time couriers have stolen physical copies of "Tears of the Kingdom" from his own company alone.
The two couriers, one 21 and the other 24, both interviewed and hired about a month before the release of Tears of the Kingdom. As the launch day approached, they stopped going to work and lost contact with the company.
At Mr. A's courier company, the game products delivered are usually put into storage three days before the game is released, and then the courier confirms the quantity and delivers it to the delivery vehicle. This arrangement gave two couriers the opportunity.
In fact, subcontractors don't necessarily have Amazon's own robots. Source: Reuters
For the 21-year-old courier, Mr. A consulted the administrator of the courier site and dialed the home of the courier's parents. It was his mother who answered the phone, and the administrator asked him what he was doing, to which she replied: "He's playing a game." ”
Of course, he is playing "Tears of the Kingdom", which has not yet been released, which is on May 11, and the game's scheduled release date is May 12. After being caught, he confessed to his premeditated theft: the reason why he applied for a part-time courier job was just to "play Zelda as soon as possible".
The motives of another 24-year-old courier were less pure, profiting from reselling stolen goods on Mercuri and Rakuma, Japan's second-hand trading sites.
Not only did he steal the physical cartridge, but he also stole a total of 10 Kingdom's Tears-related items, such as the Kingdom's Tears-themed Switch Pro limited-edition controller, an exclusive giveaway for the physical version on Amazon — a spoon with the game's logo on the handle, and an Amiibo figure that can be used in the game. His records on the trading platform involved hard-to-buy commodities, and Mr. A commented angrily: "This person must have a previous conviction." ”
Hia is really selling spoons
Both couriers were asked to return the stolen goods, compensate for the damages, and were finally fired. However, the subcontractor did not report the problem to Amazon as required. Mr. A lamented: "If we tell Amazon that we have inner ghosts, we will not be able to get jobs in the future." Therefore, the company is concealing the facts of the crime. He also worries that couriers could become a kind of "dark part-time" for younger people.
Before he joined the company, at least 40 physical versions of the games were lost at the time of the release of Pokémon Ju/Zi and Hogwarts' Legacy, the details of which are still unclear. Once the release day of the masterpiece, the company will mobilize a large number of temporary workers, and the warehouse will be full of inventory, and it is difficult to find out who is the inner ghost who stole the game. Even if the inner ghost is caught, in addition to fines and dismissal, there are no too serious punishments, resulting in repeat offenders.
When Wen Chun contacted the representative of the courier company and the site administrator by phone, the representative only said that "there was no problem with the delivery of the game software", and the administrator also vaguely stated that "there are indeed people who resigned in May".
Since few people in the company figured out the situation, if it weren't for his mother's extra words, the 21-year-old courier might have escaped.
Of course, this is just a joke. However, considering that a large number of Japanese express delivery companies are hiring temporary workers, there may be similar internal ghost problems that cannot be solved in the short term, and they are all worried about being kicked out of the subcontractor list by Amazon... Now we can basically predict which game will be the next game that sneaks away before release.