Square Enix Apologizes For Deus Ex Jailbroken iOS Restrictions, Promises to Unshackle

When Square Enix rolled-out its latest mobile game, Deus Ex: The Fall, to iOS devices, fans of the series hoped for an exciting experience, close to what Human Revolution on the PC delivered. For some, that wasn't the case, leading to the insta-meme: Deus Ex: The Fail. The problem stemmed from the fact that the game wasn't designed to work on jailbroken iPhones and iPads, and not surprisingly, a lot of gamers have those. The biggest problem: Square Enix did not warn gamers in advance about this limitation.

It seems obvious that the reason Square Enix did this was to help prevent piracy - after all, a jailbroken device enables users to install apps outside of the App Store, something stock iOS devices cannot do. However, with that sort of logic, the game shouldn't come to Android (which it is), since on that platform, you don't need to jailbreak a device in order to install out-of-store applications. In the end, this move wasn't a wise one, and it just made the publisher look a bit foolish - not great with the amount of hype this game has been receiving.

That all said, the company is doing the right thing and rectifying the problem in the near future. It says:

"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."

For what it's worth, the company is totally fessing up to the goof, and admits that it's simply not right that it didn't warn gamers in advance to the limitation, and likely, the company probably now realizes that it was a foolish decision to begin with. Clearly, not everyone who jailbreaks their mobile device has the intention to pirate software.

As someone who's really looking forward to this game's Android release, I'm glad to see that Square Enix is righting its wrongs. It would have been truly difficult to buy the game from a company that doesn't respect its legitimate customers.