‘FortressCraft’ Dev Suffers DDoS Attack On ‘Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition’ Launch Day

Adam Sawkins, lead developer of FortressCraft, has called the police after a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack was carried out on FortressCraft.com on May 9th – the launch day of Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition.

Since FortressCraft launched on the Xbox Live Indie Game marketplace, Adam has been exposed to a number of negative remarks due to the game’s similarities to Minecraft causing it to be labelled a clone on many occasions. This is a label that Adam has rejected and fought against ever since. Despite the flak, FortressCraft has risen to the very top of the sales chart for XBLIG and has recently been surpassed in total sales by another Minecraft similar, Total Miner.

Yesterday, the negativity against FortressCraft grew to a new height when the game’s official website was overloaded and is still offline due to the DDoS attack. Not long after, Adam took to Twitter where he made it clear that he believed the attack was planned by parts of the Minecraft community – this tweet being the most revealing:

“Aaaand, the FortressCraft website’s being DDOSd. Fuck you and your ‘community’, @Notch”

Since then, Adam revealed to Eurogamer that he has actually gone so far as to call the police about the attack claiming that, under British law, the police can play role in this as hacking in any form is treated very seriously and as it is a business site that is the victim, there is a potential loss of earnings.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Adam is also not a fan of Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, claiming that “4J [Studios] had no budget restrictions, unfettered access to Microsoft, and a solid, world-class game as a template, and still managed to ship a game with a tiny world, no working skins, and no dedicated servers – and even that was a port of a 14 month old snapshot of the MC source base.”

Despite those setbacks, Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition seems to have gone on to become one of the top selling XBLA titles of all time, the leaderboards boasting at least 600,000 players in the first 24 hours of the game’s launch. Markus “Notch” Persson also tweeted that the game was profitable in just one hour.

You can purchase FortressCraft from the XBLIG marketplace as well as Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition – you can decide which one, if not both, to try out for yourselves.