Chinese Gamers Pirating "Glorious Mission" Despite Developers' Polite Reminder About How That's Illegal

Americans may recall hearing about Glorious Mission, a Chinese PC game being developed by the People’s Liberation Army, from when the game caused a brief media flurry in the US after someone noticed that the soldiers in it appear to be fighting the United States. This, of course, deeply hurt the feelings of the American people, especially since America had recently changed the villians from Chinese to North Korean in that Red Dawn remake to keep from offending China.

Well, the game — which may or may not actually pit players against the US but does explicitly feature models of US military hardware — isn’t out yet, but a beta version of it is already being pirated and sold by unscrupulous vendors on Taobao for 160 RMB ($25). That’s a crazy high price in a market where pirated games generally go for about 5 RMB ($0.78) or are just downloaded for free, but apparently it’s a premium gamers were willing to pay to get their hands on an early build of the game, which is meant to serve as a military recruitment tool much like the US military’s America’s Army game.

That people would be willing to pirate and sell the game has apparently come as a shock to the folks making it (the PLA is collaborating with Giant Interactive), especially since just a few days ago the developers released a formal statement notifying everyone that pirating the game was forbidden. I know, I would have thought that telling people not to pirate games would magically solve the Chinese game industry’s piracy problem too, but apparently it hasn’t. Who could have guessed?

Anyway, the pirated copies of the beta have apparently been scrubbed from Taobao — we couldn’t find any — and I’m sure that now that we’ve been reminded again via news articles about the piracy, no one in China will ever pirate anything ever again.

If you want to see some old footage from the game, and listen to some guys talking about it in English, check out the video below. Or check out some better (but un-embedable) video on the game’s official site.

[Via QQ Games]