Second Take: Did Piracy Kill Iron Lore? - Page 4

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Really? Have you seen VATS in action? I have, actually. But have you? Or seen ANY part of Fallout 3 other than a trailer? How can make such a definitive statement? How do you KNOW it's going to be bad?

Can we agree first off that piracy had nothing to do with the failure of Iron Lore...

As now the 34 gamers in total I have talked to regarding this issue.. not a single person has even heard of it... and now all but 2 use Pirating for the exact reasons I said people pirate for.

Fact of the matter is .. Bad Games killed Iron Lore.

Those are stickies in the help section. I haven't seen an update of the posts that says it is corrected. No, the solution is to completely uninstall your AV. Great!

How is the problem with non-working universities resolved?

Aha...and when I want to install it and play it somewhere without an Internet connection or in a network that doesn't allow me to connect to Steam? What do I do then?

@Chetou
What do you have against Steam man?

I don't have any of those problems that were in those threads you posted, and I even use AVG.

Apparently you don't own any games from Steam and merely went to their site searching for reasons why it sucks so bad. The fact of the matter is that millions use Steam everyday, and if it was a broken system that was going nowhere it would not be doing so well.

Do you have a better idea on how to combat piracy? Or can you just point out what is wrong with Steam and Valve?

That is true about the dedicated servers. I think it is mostly for performance boost that you cannot play on the same machine.

Sorry I kind of tore into you. It just seemed like you wanted to pick apart Steam because you were not a fan of it. I guess for me, I like the idea of not having discs since I like to make images of mine anyway to play with. I don't want them getting stolen or broken at school, so that is just the way I have done things for awhile. Getting the image of a protected disc to work can be a huge pain, and Steam solves that problem completely.

I also agree that piracy can be used as an excuse for poor sales. But until the game developers realize it is not as bad as they think, it becomes a problem for us when copy protection gets out of control (Bioshock). If it gets bad enough in their eyes, the honest ones are going to suffer for it.

Actually we are a Republic...(If we can keep it)

And a well trained and conditioned one at that...

I hear what you are saying.. but as the writing on the wall says..

"If voting changed anything, they would make it illegal"

But that is a subject for another thread.

I actually decided to read through the other posts in this thread to get a better understanding of where everyone is coming from, and I have finally come up with a good explanation of the state of piracy right now.

First of all, I have been using torrents extensively for the past 4 years, so I know what I am talking about. I also know about cracking games as well, like for getting them to work at lan parties for people who do not own the game. That being said, I buy all my games legally. I just know and understand the process of how to get games illegally off the internet.

Now, to say that just because some torrents do not have a lot of seeders or leechers that piracy is not a problem is complete bull. Before I continue, check out these searches from Mininova, ThePirateBay, and Isohunt:

http://www.mininova.org/search/bioshock/seeds
The best seeded torrent has been downloaded 63,412 times.

http://thepiratebay.org/search/bioshock/0/7/0

http://isohunt.com/torrents/?ihq=b [...] lla-search
For those of you who don't know, Isohunt is like a Google search for torrents. So, it searches many trackers, including Mininova and ThePirateBay, and therefore gives a great reflection of the availability of something on most of the bittorrent sites.

Towards the top of the list of the Mininova search, there is another torrent with 42,673 downloads, and a few others with about 11,000 - 12,000 downloads. And that is just for Mininova. There are countless other torrent sites and trackers that I have not mentioned, including private torrent sites that have their own private trackers. Their torrent will never show up in any searches, but I assure you that many of them offer game downloads as well.

For anyone trying to discredit this evidence by saying that the numbers are not that bad, think about this. Who's to say that the people who download these files don't give them to their friends? It is not like it is hard to give the files to someone else.

And as for the small files that are merely the cracks so the game can be played without a disc, those count too. Why? Because all someone needs is a copy of the game disc, an image of it, or just to borrow a friend's disc that they paid for. It is very simple. There are also other avenues for downloading game files too, such as Usenet, DC++ and many others. DC++ basically turns a network into a p2p haven, where files are shared by people like over a network and download speeds are whatever the network connection speed is.

Piracy is a problem, and for anyone who does not think so, you just aren't looking hard enough and are not aware of all the different sources for it.

And just to reiterate one more time before I finish, I DO NOT PIRATE GAMES. I buy my games because the developers deserve the support for their awesome accomplishments. My knowledge of torrenting and cracking games mostly stems from my interest in playing my games using cd images to protect the disc.

Hopefully this was helpful in understanding the potential of how widespread game piracy (and all piracy for that matter) really is.

A valid point, but there is still no way to even find out how many of those people would have bought the game if there was not a method for obtaining it for free. The numbers speak louder than simply saying that those people would have never bought the game to begin with.

Do you have any hard evidence that states one pirated copy does not equal one lost sale? I can say a lot of things, but does that make it fact just because I post it in a forum. No.

As for the constant Steam bashing, have you ever used Steam? I bet you that every game you buy has a statement in the user agreement stating something similar regarding the functionality of the game. It is there to protect them from massive lawsuits if something does go wrong that is out of their control. That is just common sense from a lawyer's perspective when writing one of those agreements. Is that going to stop you from playing it? I hope not. It is a small price to pay to use the Steam system, and I will continue to do so until it dies...if it dies.

I like Steam, so I use it. You don't, so never use it. That kind of solves both of our problems doesn't it?

I'm sure if 70%-80% was a legitimate number, it would not take much time before there would be no games to pirate. I'm also sure that 51% is no where close, so pirating games is still illegal. I on the other hand, I believe in the try before you buy. The Crysis demo showed me enough that I didn't buy it. COD4 demo was awesome and play ok on my current game systems (no upgrade needed). That was an easy purchase. Being a UT fan I tried the UT3 demo and only one of my system could even play it over 30fps. I still bought the game with the hopes that in the next year I will be able to get all my game machines playing it much better. It will cost me $800.00 today to upgrade two of my game machines. In the months to come I hope hardware will keep dropping and I will get an even better deal. I'm sure if I could afford the upgrades today, I would have probably bought Crysis. I did try the 10 day free WOW trial with my son. We spent 9 of the 10 day running back to our dead bodies and only made it to level 12. I don't have $30.00 a month to blow just so I can run back to my dead body. Got old fast MMO sound good on paper, but if you work a full time job, you shouldn't have time for MMOs. I guess that is why I like UT, I come home from work and I can sit down for 15min and play two or three maps on UT and be satisfied. RPG on the other hand are real hard to stop after only 15min. If there is no Demo, I will not buy it period! I've been burned once too many times, IT WILL NOT HAPPEN AGAIN. Curiosity does get the better of me at times, when Manhunt 2 was rejected for it content I did look for a DL to see what the hype was about. No luck though. BioShocks DRM issues got me to DL the Demo and the cracked game. I never made it past the demo and I deleted the cracked game before I even installed it. The game demo was "same **** different day" and none of my game computer could play it very good, flushed that one. One last thing, I will not buy a game that requires a CD/DVD to play. So unless there is a NO-CD crack or a system like Steam I will not buy a game. Orange Box was my first Steam purchase and I love it. I installed Orange Box on 5 computer in my house and I can play on any one of them without the DVDs. At my last lan party I was able to play TF2 on 15 computer with no problem. Just don't let it log on to Steam and only play LAN.

There was a day when the pirating of many things was not possible like it is today (as in CD/DVD burners did not exist, and software to make copies of discs didn't exist either). There was also no internet, so no p2p programs to obtain the illegal copies of everything.

I was not into gaming back then like I am now, so it is hard to think of the answers to your questions. Because really, that is the kind of thinking it would take to answer your scenario properly.

1. I think Iron Lore would have still died honestly, because I had never heard of them, and I am sure many of my friends who game have not heard of them as well. Not to say that Titan Quest is a bad game. I just don't think they were able to compete with the other competition monetarily, so that was one of the major factors in their downfall.

2. As far as consoles are concerned, I don't think their numbers would change too much if at all. Some people are PC gamers, some play on consoles, and some both. That is just a matter of preference, so I don't think piracy would affect that at all.

3. I also think the same goes for the little companies. A lot of it comes down to marketing I think. Without piracy the little companies might last a little longer, but overall the same ones would fall due to the inability to compete with the larger ones.

Small companies can make it. They just need to make a quality product and make a name for themselves. Valve did this very well with the original Half-Life, as did Epic with the original Unreal and Unreal Tournament, and Crytek with Far Cry. If Titan Quest had been that great of a game, they would have easily survived. They didn't, so I think it is safe to say we did not have another Unreal or Half-Life on our hands.

I remember back when if someone wanted some music, they went out and bought the CD because this was the only option (besides borrowing it from someone). For the most part people were happy with this system, and there was not a lot of bitching and complaining about it. Then the CD burner came out. Next thing you know, CD's can be ripped to mp3's. Then programs and websites started popping up where the same music that once had to be bought could be had for absolutely nothing. Then everything got really complicated.

I am not saying I am disgusted in the way things turned out. I am just saying the same thing can be said about the PC gaming industry. Remember when games NEVER had copy protection, because it was not needed? Now look where we are.

sezyboy, that was an excellent and probing topic you put forth. I did not mean to write so much, but it definitely got me to thinking. I don't really care if anyone reads it all, but someone might find it interesting and that is enough for me to write it

Does anyone feel that this entire discussion has gotten way out of hand...

Does anyone know what some of the more common DRM companies charge to put their hooks in a piece of software?


This is completely an aside, but after all this talk about Stardock being so great I went out and bought Sins. It isn't a bad game, but I'm not seeing what all the fuss is about. It's like Civ 4 light with a space skin.

What am I missing that makes this game so great? Don't get me wrong I've had fun with it. However, it isn't the bastion of excellent PC gaming I thought it would be based on everyone's comments in here.

I'm with jomicbro and Iscabis - if pc gaming dies, I'm out. My wife would be happy (not that I play that much - really!)

It would be too bad - There will always be an element of the population that prefers PC gaming over consoles and that element would just be shut out. I remember, when I was younger, it seemed natural that the tykes playing on their Nintendos would one day graduate to the adult platform - the PC. It didn't happen. I don't know why - there are more PCs out there now than ever, but the younglings never bothered to figure out how they worked.

As far as pirate portals go, usenet is another major source of illegal D/Ls. I monitor the stats and the most popular PC game group gets, on average, around 10K D/Ls a day (way more right after a big release). Sure, that number is spread across several titles, but it adds up fast....

Iscabis - I'm really confused, what "day" are you talking about here? There has always been piracy. Look back to even the origins of currency, there were people "pirating" currency by making their own clones of coins and papers. In software, piracy was an issue even back in the early 1980s, with a lot of people (geeks) either exchanging code via printouts (that you could re-enter yourself manually) or via diskettes. Application developers started creating things like hardware keys to combat this (like parallel port based ones), while others made master key diskettes among other things which were bound to the application. A lot of this was before my time, but I have heard about it in my research over the years. Piracy has been a debate for a long long time, and I always tried to understand both sides.

Even in the 1980s, game developers also jumped on the bandwagon, with sometimes very elaborate designs. For example, the original "Terminator" game had a wheel which was a very deep red color with black symbols on it, which you had to rotate based off what the game asked to generate the correct response. Due to the color of the wheel, it was almost impossible to photocopy. The game itself was easily pirated, but the wheel made it much harder to play without it.

Even adventure, flight, and RPG games started doing things like requesting data from the manual of the game (What word is on the 15th page on the third paragraph, three words across?). In terms of music piracy, "trackers" were replicating popular songs in .xm, .mid, .s3m, etc. formats pre-mp3s. WAVs were also sometimes shared, but most of all, cassette tapes were the primary source of music "piracy" especially the very popular "mix tapes" of the 80s and early 1990s. CDR burners almost completely eliminated the need for tapes by the end of the 1990s.

Furthermore, pre-internet there existed BBSs, which were in every state and in many countries. Every major area of the US had at least 20-30 BBSs, with probably half of them devoting a portion of their purpose to piracy. The rest were official business boards (game developers for example), chatlines, or dedicated to what were called "DOOR" games, like Legend of the Red Dragon, Global Conquest, or MajorMUD. The pirate BBSs, especially the "topsites" had every single game and application within hours of their release and then spread across the nation very quickly. Piracy aside, developers and publishers would use their own boards to share patches (which were pretty rare at the time), free content, or just to run community events.

Piracy is not the killer of media, at least one that is the end all be all of a specific platform's development. People need to accept that it will never be stopped, it's the realistic truth. There is not enough room in the jails for the pirates, and executing them will do nothing but harm to society. Banning pirates from computers will no doubt hurt economies worldwide, because they are tech geeks who contribute to the working world. I would estimate that almost all but say a small percentage of pirates do actually buy software, movies, and music quite frequently. It's really the local areas of Chinese and Russian markets where you'll find people who really do not ever purchase legit media. If you think you can change those areas of the world, good luck. Getting them to pay full price for anything media related would be nearly impossible and it's not going to happen anytime soon - they don't have the money. If companies try to combat this by lowering their prices in these poorer regions, then these people will make a business off re-exporting the cheaper product back to the countries who are paying more for it.

In my opinion, piracy did not kill the studio behind Titan Quest, it was a poor excuse to try to take some blame off THQ. THQ should have owned up to the situation and said "Damn, we should have done all these other things like more marketing, better QA standards, less efforts on implementing high end anti-piracy measures, etc." The reality is, most Developers and Publishers accept the fact that piracy exists and always has existed, so it's not like they're crying themselves to sleep every time they release a game. It's hyped up and used as an excuse way more often than it should be. In terms of quality, some can argue both for and against the quality of Titan Quest. The marketing campaign for it was virtually non-existent. The game itself was protected by some very very strong anti-piracy measures, which actually made it one of the least pirated games. Per the logic of many on this board, due to the fact that it was for awhile almost impossible to pirate, that it should have sold exceptionally well. Well, it didn't. It sold ok. THQ didn't want to market it well, and the build wasn't as stable as it should have been.

The sad thing is, piracy probably would have done Titan Quest some good. Had more of the "pirate" community checked it out, it probably would have sold more copies. Instead, the pirates played other games and ignored it. The general gaming community didn't really even hear much about Titan Quest (as also shown on this board), so even to general consumers they just were not all that aware of it. None of this is to say that I condone piracy (my game collection would certainly say otherwise), just that they purposely made it nearly impossible to pirate thus cutting out a very large part of the world community.

Anyways, I had to respond to this. In terms of software, music, and movies, there really hasn't been a day where piracy didn't exist. There have always been attempts to pirate each of them, and attempts to stop it. If more companies acted like Relic and Stardock, they'd find themselves in a much better position.

Also, speaking of consoles, the Wii, PS2, Xbox 360, PSP, and Nintendo DS have all been cracked and their games are pirated very very frequently. Consoles are not immune at all.

In the end, movies still sell, games still sell, music still sells, and people are still getting rich off media. How many pirates do you know that are living out in McMansions in Hollywood and driving exotic sports cars while smoking imported cuban cigars? Lastly, nearly everyone on this planet at some point has had some form of piracy in their hands. Whether it be a photocopied article, a mix tape, a copied cd, a VHS tape with a movie, or a copy of a game, you'd almost certainly be a liar if you said you hadn't been a part of it at some point in your life. It's not like the war on drugs where a fraction of the population may take part, it's something that almost everyone who has access to media in the entire world has participated in. People would be better off using their resources for other battles where quality of life is really affected. You can start with child labor, slavery, kidnapping for ransom, etc.

I remember people saying Appleworks was the best program never bought. Piracy was especially bad in the mid to late 1980s. In fact until cd burners came out CDs seemed to get copied much less. Then we had CD burners and pirating pickup again.

The reality is the next gen consoles are computers. They have hard drives, can take usb keyboards and mice, and they have internet connections. They also have cheaper components and are not expected to run at as high performance as a computer. Several of my friends have run xboxs are firewalls or linux machines. So the distrinction between consoles and PCs has greatly diminished.

We need to realize that people no longer need the highest end computers to run their programs. The high end market is diminishing and expecting games hardware to run reasonably on the newest and greatest hardware is ultimately self defeating. We can't expect our games to run only on graphic workstations nor can we expect people to upgrade every year like we used to.

My bet is the next couple of years will be bad for the games industry and hardware manufacturers.

I agree that the cost to make a game has grown too high. The same can be said of the movie industry. I just find it ironic when both industries blame piracy for poor products, lack of marketing or just accepting that it has a limited appeal.

It also doesn't help that the marketing/selling model of games has changed where the publisher has to rent space to sell. If nothing else the move to direct distribution to the buyer instead of brick and mortar is a positive for the publisher.

This is ultimately my point about Iron Lore. I don't think the average gamer understands how difficult it is to make a game in this day and age (I certainly didn't until I became a member of the "gaming media" ). It's extremely expensive to design a top shelf game these days. So when you have a young developer like Iron Lore come along, they're basically putting every dollar and resource into that first game. And let's be honest -- do we honestly expect a new game company to hit it out of the park on their first swing? Titan Quest obviously wasn't a great game, but do we expect a small indie developer to make an A+ game for its first title? I just think that's a little unfair. So even if the piracy rate for Titan Quest was lower, 40-50 percent, than what THQ suggested, my point is that ever dollar counts for a game developer, especially one that is making such a huge investment with its first title.

This is a really interesting forum post from Stardock. Basically, a Stardock employee outlines the company's view on piracy and why they decided to go with no copy protection, and also writes that piracy is a big issue but not the biggest reason PC gaming is suffering right now. Good read (though I don't agree with everything this guy writes, especially the stuff about the gaming media not paying attention to Sins of a Solar Empire -- Tom's Games reviewed it not once but twice!). Anyway, here's the post:

http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.c [...] tid=303512

Maybe you neglected looking at the issue close enough since you disagree with the statement about gaming media. It's easy to see it. Really.

Crysis failed to sell 100.000 copies during the first month. (source, google easily finds more)
Sins of a solar empire sold more than 100.000 copies during the first month. (source)

Crysis was sold during the chrismas season. I somewhat doubt there is a better time to sell games than that.
Sins of a Solar Empire was sold when? yep, right.

Now how many gaming magazines had Crysis on their cover during the last 2 years and how many had Sins of a Solar Empire on their Cover?

That's what it is all about. Nothing more, nothing less.

Yes an interesting read. For your information Rob, I do not consider Tom's Hardware a source of gaming reviews and I haven't for 10+ years. Although I do read the reviews, this site is not my primary source. So i dont think Stardock is knocking on TH's pride.

One thing I am definitely changing, and I notice this from my friends as well, is buying less and less games per year. Maximum of 1 every couple months. At the rate of this year, probably 4 more games on my buy list. Thats a maybe too.

The point the Stardock article mentioned about target audience is quite valid. Even though I have a bleeding edge machine, I am not necessarily going to buy Crysis in the future. Not to even mention those that have mid to low end gaming machines.

Also i used to live in asia, and all my friends pirate console games way more than PC games.
I remember the UFO machine attachment for the SNES. My friend had like 400+ console games in the form of diskettes. Recently, one of my friends modded their Wii and Xbox 360 for umm $20 Works like a charm. Give it a couple years and we will see a rise of console piracy.

Thanks Sezboy....I think. Though it would be great if you could, you know, at some point in the future consider Tom's Games a source of quality game reviews.

In any event, the comments on this thread have been a lot nice than the ones I've seen on other forums. I just got done reading a thread from an RPG forum that picked up our BioWare interview, and a few of the forum members called me some naughty names because I asked BioWare if they were concerned at all about piracy and has it affected how they develop games, i.e. making Mass Effect for the 360 first and then the PC. They assumed that I was trying to scare off BioWare from the PC gaming market and called me a stupid C-bomb. Good times.

Tom's Games...making friends across the Interwebs!!!!

I don't think he's referring to something hypothetical. I think it's actually written somerwhere in US law. Something about majority rules... It deserves more research seeing as how many people have been charged and how many companies have been run out of the US or shut down (now they're bringing money into aother countries)... I don't know. This is something I will try and look into if/when I get time. I was good at poly sci... but that was several hundred cases of beer ago. haha.

and just another side note based on pc gaming piracy... With virtual machines becoming better and better and the fact that pc hardware is ridiculously more powerful than any given console.... what's to stop people from going that route if pc gaming does go into a serious slump and developers stop building games for pc?

Either way, I don't want to see pc gaming go downhill, I really want to see it thrive, because It's one of my favorite past times... The most simple answer is go out and buy a few great games, but there really isn't any SIMPLE answer here, I think we're all going to have to be a little more proactive and start doing more than complaining about it and start brainstorming on how to fix the problem...Anyway, buying games is cheaper than golf or most hobbies like that if you look at it as time vs. money.

Sorry to dig up an old topic but just watched this episode and wanted to comment. I'm against piracy in general but I do believe the game industry needs to change some of its policies first. What is with this "no refund on games" policy? I've purchased games based on excellent reviews and solid demo but had compatibility issues and just didn't work. Also games that are just plain buggy and makes the game virtually unplayable. Now, shouldn't these be considered as defective products and are we not entitled for a refund in these situations? In situations like these, I frankly do wish I should've downloaded the game instead of purchasing first.

They can argue that offering refunds may increase piracy but I believe that's another excuse. Just make it a requirement for you to open a case with the tech support and if they can't solve the issue, then allow the refund. If someone would go through that trouble just to play the game for free, they would've downloaded the pirated version instead.

Game, movie, and recording industries complain about piracy but is it really hurting the industry that much? Movie industry uses piracy as an excuse to increase ticket price and now, box office records are being broken every year. Is it "because of" or "thanks to" piracy? It's been a while so I'm a bit vague on the exact figure but I read an article in 2006 which said that EA grossed more than top 10 movies of that year combined. That's also more than all the movies Pixar has released for 15 years since Toy Story... in just one year. Gamestop and EBGames locations are popping up everywhere in my area. Yet they maintain this no refund policy on defective products to take advantage of consumers. I'm not sure if we need a class action suit but until that policy is changed, their argument on piracy isn't justified.

update/nudge... i just bought the game off of steam. So nobody can bitch at me for not supporting them. :-p. I love the genre, and when I demo'd it i liked it, i just didn't have the money or the pc power to run it right... but now, i'm the proud owner of the gold edition. EAT THAT IRON LORE! i mean.. wait... they just got 20 bucks... well, i guess they could spend it on food and EAT THAT IRON LORE! :-p I know it doesn't help much, but I hope a few bucks still went to the developers.