Jailbreakers who went to download the newly-released Deus Ex: The Fall yesterday were met with an unpleasant surprise. They were unable to properly play the game, because the developers built in code that disabled firing on jailbroken devices.
Of course, it wasn’t an issue for very long—a jailbreak tweak called xCon patches the code that identifies jailbroken devices. But today, Publisher Square Enix apologized for the whole thing and said that it would remove the code in a future update…
Here’s Square Enix’s official statement via Eurogamer:
“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’s the right thing to do in this situation and apologise 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 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.”
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a developer disable an app’s features on jailbroken devices—it seems to be a blanket attempt to thwart piracy. But this is the first time, that I can recall at least, that a dev has apologized for it and reversed course.
At the time of this writing, the game hadn’t been updated, though a new warning has been added to the app’s description. We’ll let you know as soon as it becomes available, but until then, you can always find the xCon tweak in the ModMyi repo.