Exclusive Friday the 13th: The Game Content Being Sold After Theft, Devs Respond

Who Is Savini Jason?

It might be hard to understand how upsetting the content theft is to some Friday the 13th: The Game players unless you know the history of Savini Jason, a Jason Voorhees variant that's extremely rare to see in-game.

For those who backed the game quite early in its development, backers were promised the Savini Jason "skin," a hellish version of Jason designed by and named after acclaimed effects artist Tom Savini. While it's still often referred to as a skin, it does more than just change Jason's appearance. Savini Jason has its own unique set of advantages and disadvantages, most of which make it a fairly formidable character compared to other Jasons.

Exclusivity aside, there have been several instances where Savini Jason has mistakenly become available, but Gun Media has vowed to never sell the Jason version again. While the suspicious eBay profile mentioned before has also had other content on sale – sometimes for as much as $300 per code – the distribution of Savini Jason was no doubt both the most profitable item and the one that brought too much attention to the account and resulted in this theft discovery.

The Suspicious Sales

A Redditor within the Friday the 13th: The Game subreddit brought attention to the issue under a throwaway account with a detailed catalog of evidence that something fishy was going on with this Jason-selling eBay account.

JasosThrowaway13 started a post by referencing Gun Media's staunch stance against selling Savini Jason before implying that the suspiciously large quantities of the codes being sold by the eBay account across all platforms might indicate a connection to the developers. After posting an image of the account that had tons of positive feedback after successful sales, it was theorized that the seller was one of many early backers who grabbed extra codes in hopes of selling them later.

To check if the account was legit or not, the Redditor even bough their own code to see if it would work. Sure enough, the $110 code netted them both Savini Jason and a Counselor Clothing pack. After purchasing the code, a paper trail left behind by the purchase allowed the Redditor-turned-investigator to narrow down the possibilities of the seller's identities.

Connecting the Dots

Tracking information that was provided after the purchases led to the discovery that whoever was selling the code was based in Raleigh, North Carolina, a city where both the executive producer and community lead for Gun Media are based.

While that might've seemed equally suspicious, looking at the seller's other listed items also showed that they were selling other content for games like LawBreakers and trading cards from Limited Run Games, a branch of Mighty Rabbit Studios. As it turns out, Mighty Rabbit Studios is listed as a friend of Gun Media on their site, and appears that the studio is also based out of North Carolina as well.

The Redditor suggested that there might be some connection between the seller and the various studios and distributors before leaving the evidence and the theories for readers to sift through while making their own decisions. However, an update from Gun Media revealed that there had indeed been a theft of content "at one of [their] distribution partners.

Gun Media's Response

Gun Media community lead Shifty Samurai responded to the Reddit post with a confirmation that while they initially thought the sales were coming from an early backer as well, it was now clear that this wasn't the case.

"First off, thank you for the information that you have provided. We previously assumed that backer-content keys being sold on eBay were the same as you; a fan who got in early and purchased extra keys. After reviewing the information that you have posted, it is absolutely clear that this is not the case. With some investigation, we quickly determined that the keys being sold come from a theft at one of our distribution partners. The company has worked to resolve the situation, but unfortunately, both we and the company were unaware of the digital portion of the theft until these auctions were brought to our attention. While there is not a never-ending source for these codes, we will be cancelling any unredeemed codes that have been affected by this theft."

No names of distribution partners or studios were named in Gun Media's response, but it appears that the code situation has now been taken care of internally with the deactivated codes likely putting an end to the eBay account's profits.

[IGN]