Dissapointed with TH's attitude about game piracy - Page 4

Last message on previous page:
Or, he doesn't get the new updates until he gets a more recent hack...

Instead of saying DRM and piracy are fighting each other for the strong hold of the PC market, I'd say they were destroying it like a tag-team effort.

"When go to see a movie, are you going to ask your money back when the movie sucks? I don't think so.. If you read a good book from the library, you're going to buy it afterwards to support GOOD books? I don't think so..."

I have gotten up and walked to the front and asked for my money back on a crappy movie. Sometimes I get a voucher for the next time I come but it still adds up. The movie theater then removes my purchase from that movie and thus total sales go down. If you wait till the movie is down and then want a refund though...
Gates of Fire was a recent book I read from the Library and then bought the book. I've done that with a few books.

* burgles PhobetorXVII's house *

Enjoy.

Very clearly put, thank you bildo123.

Piracy of games should be illegal thats with out a doubt true. But look at the prices we need to deal with. The software market should be based on massive production and sales rather then small and exp amounts.

If Crysis was aroudn 10-20$ I doubt any1 would go through the trouble of pirating it (although there might be some).

I don't condone piracy but I'm sorry if I don't want to spend 50$ plus tax on a game that is over in a couple of hours.

Look at adobe's software, its 300$ for a simple dreamweaver program, where other web design sites offer it for a simple fee. yes I kno its a complex program but commong 300$ thats hardware money!

my motto is never spend money on a program that is more than a mainstream Video card (which today's standards is 100-150$)

I pay for antiviruses, because those guys are alert 24/7, I pay for windows because with out it we wouldn't have much choices in every day oses, I pay for games that bring their game to the table (Hl2, unreal, COD4) The people I see that actually offer really good deals would have to be valve.

But look Crysis, horriblly linear, other than graphics has nothing to put on the table, mild Multiplayer...not worht 50$ I'd rather spend that money on a HDD.

I'll say again, Although Piracy is taking food away from developer's mouths and families, if the companies marketed them better or offered more for our money (like a 30 day satisfaction gauranteed or 2 days or w.e) our thoughts wouldn't be on how to get it free as much.

If Crysis goes down to 10$ I'll go buy it even if I don't like it, its a good benchmarker.

Either way, prices are outrageous.

Erm, those descriptions are completely different. At no point is a pirate taking anything from anyone. If it was theft or stealing, it would be enforced by the police as it would be a criminal offence. However, the police will not arrest you for it, as it is not.

Piracy isn't theft, its piracy. Just as Manslaughter isn't Murder, Indecent exposure isn't Rape, Slander isn't murder, Driving without insurance isn't Taking without consent.

As for religion? Meh. Its also a sin to wear a condom according to the catholic church. In fact, didn't they publish a new list of "deadly sins" recently to include stem cell research and pollution? Anyone that drives a car breathes is emitting CO2 and therefore polluting and therefore going to hell anyway.

If its irrelevant "how wrong" things are, then we should start punishing all crimes and misdemeanors equally. The death penalty should be issued for everything from Murder to Littering. Yay for Judge Dread!!

Finally,

Stealing a game from a shop will get you arrested. This is because stealing is a criminal offence.

Copying a game will get you sued by the game's author, but NOT arrested. This is because piracy is a civil offence, and not stealing.

Ok lets take it from a non technical standpoint.
Option 1) Buy game
Option 2) Pirate game

Results from option 1) Dev's make money to possible release another great game
Results from option 2)Dev's make no money and go under (Can anyone say TITAN QUEST?)

In simple terms. It doesn't take much more than common sense to know that pirating in the end harms the development of new games from a company. It doesn't matter what you call it the end result is always the same. It decreases profits from that game for the dev's.

Epic is already thinking of switching to Consoles....

Go back to your bridge, troll - you have no powers here.

lol its so funny that in usa forums everyone are shocked by people who download software in my country forums everyone shocked by somone who buy software

Shocked? No. There's a whole swarm of people, probably more here in the US that pirate everything from games/movies/ to Radio Heads "practically" free album.

I guess that figures, that you don't understand I mean.

If you don't buy the game and noone else buys the game, then people that made it cannot make a living. If that is normal in your country: not paying for stuf you use that others put work in to make, then how do they make a living?

So no one has ever been arrested, fined, or imprisoned for software piracy?

$300, that's all? When I got DW from Macromedia it was $400. Sorry I see nothing wrong with the pricing of professional software. If someone thinks they actually need professional software to do whatever it is they're doing, they should expect to pay professional prices. For the amount of money a productive designer/artist can make with say Photoshop, the initial price of the software is a drop in the bucket. Sorry, no sympathy points for that.

a price drop and a close look at system requirements would result in less piracy. It is pretty much that simple. I think $30 would be reasonable for most new games. Collector's editions for $40 or $50 would be fair.

Maybe also take a look at release quality levels. If you need a 0 day patch then you released it too early. If you need a stability patch within the first week you released it too early. Patches should add content and rebalance/tweak, not be used almost exclusively for bug fixes as they are now.

The problem is that for some reason the general public does not seem convinced that piracy is a bad thing. They do not realise that real people, people that try to make money developing games, are really hurt by it.

The argument that many pirates would not have bought the game anyway, so no money was actually lost, does not fly because potential customers that are willing to part with their money to get their hands on the game, feel wronged in the moral sense: why should they pay, while many others are enjoying the game without paying for it. The fact that these pirates would not have bought the game ever, is immaterial to them. They still get the same thing for free while the honest customer is paying for it. That is not the way to keep people honest.

So I fully concur that in the sense of the law, piracy is piracy, a violation of copy right, and it is hurting real people and these people are loosing real money. How much exactly is unknown, but that it is more than a few thousand dollars, that much is obvious and so it is a very serious issue. Debating whether people are allowed to call it "theft" for the sake of bringing the point accross that piracy is really hurting people (because everyone understands that stealing something from someone is really hurting people) does not help one yota. I hope we can now consider this particular debate on how to call it in these discussions as closed.

This is actually illustrating just how much piracy is hurting the business. Obviously there are so many pirated copies out there that it severely impacted the image of the game. Apparently the developer should have made it very clear in advance what they'd actually done? Well if they had done that they would have shot themselves in the foot, because it would be really easy to start looking for the DRM in particular places in the code.

With this last paragraph I completely agree but you do not need the previous stuf to lead up to this. DRM is a dead-end street because until the killer technology is found that will prevent pirates from cracking a game, but will not limit regular customers in their enjoyment of the game in any way, DRM is what you call it: negative advertisement. The chances of getting that pirate killer technology right in one go is virtually nil, so the required investments are huge and the potential gains are unknown (they are significant, but how much is hard to project). Therefore DRM is a bad business decision, and the money should be invested in things that your paying customers care about, the exact strategy that Stardock is following (and they are now also using it as positive advertisement).

A few things I want to work off of this. I bet our new games for the PC would be $30~$40 IF they didn't waste, thats right even I consider it a waste, to implement and purchase the copy protections for the games. Therefor people on the fine balance of deciding to pirate or buy would more likely learn towards buying it. Of course I could be wrong but this would be an assumption. Also about your mention on release quality, ha do I got a nice little short story. Ever hear of Hellgate:London? Well I purchased it (since the dev's rode the "we made the diablo series" wagon) making it seem like this game was going to be the diablo 3. So I was in the beta and couldn't get too far since release was around the corner. So I get the game install it, tons of people crying about how the game has many bugs. Then later on a patch was released to help a bit. You know the numbering of that patch? 0.6... WTF? It suddenly came to me that what I bought was nothing more than an "extended" beta of a game that was severely undercooked. But here comes the kicker. Patch 1.0 finally roles around(about 3 months after official release) and the dev's Flagship Studio want you to SUB if you want the 'new' content features offered in the 1.0 patch. So #1 they sold me a game that wasn't even finished(I consider a game releasable/finished by noting the standard version everyone signifies as 1.0) And to put the icing on the cake they want me to subscribe if I wanted to take advantage of the extra features of the 1.0 patch. What a bunch of bull, Its the only PC game to date I have purchased and truly shelved and haven't played with and having no desire to go back to.

This is true, lol I remember when I went to go buy it the manager (ironically my cousin) tried selling me the super duper blow another $10 for useless garbage edition. Bad thing is I'm sure they already have a box of this game still packaged and going nowhere slow. I don't think gamestop takes PC games back

edit just noticed when I clicked your more info, it says view 'his' website etc, whats up with that Tom's web manager?

Pretty much nobody buys back or accepts returns on PC games. CD Keys saw to that. They can't resell it because if you cracked it and returned it, you are already using the CD key that came with it.

This is another thing that has been hurting the PC game industry. The lack of ability to buy or sell used games. Though this is a much lesser issue than DRM.

Dear Johnny,

If you've read anything that I've posted here the last couple of years you know what my position is on pirating software so I am not going to repeat it here, you can check it all over these forums.

Just as people like yourself feel wronged by others who just take stuf for free that you pay for, other people feel wronged because certain publishers think it is ok to put software on their machines that screws up their machine, or other software that they have on it. And no, that is not limited to software that is only used for hacking, in fact that kind of software does not exist. That software has perfectly legal uses but it can also be used for cracking games or other software protection schemes, and as many americans say "guns do not kill people, people kill people" this same reasoning applies to software that can be misused.

It is already alarming when publishers force their games not to work when they detect certain software on a machine, but as long as a proper warning is issued beforehand, it is their prerogative to do so. It is quite something else, to install software bits in the OS kernel or elsewhere that may screw up the OS or other applications, or worse, create a security leak on the machine.

That is what people have against DRM and quite simply, they are right. That is not the way, and today you see a few small publishers and developers picking up on it. Hopefully more will follow.

Let's not drag ghosts from the past into this anymore and so we can stop worrying about StarForce.. that is sooo 2006.

Johnny, Daemon tools is used for mounting virtual copies of CDs and DVDs. Although you can steal copies of games independently and use daemon tools to install them, anyone who really steals games has already stolen better disc emulation software. In addition, most games tell you that your CD is not in the drive when using daemon tools.

i understand cd keys as they prevent little 2-3 year old children from copying the latest PC game and giving it to their friends in daycare or something

but i hate those extremely long cd keys the serial number space for games leaves millions of trillions of combinations, no game will ever sell that much. stop making the cd keys so long.

it is easier to have a keygen enter in a cd key for you then to have to type in a 5 million digit cd key that you will most likely make a mistake in typing

make them long enough for a 90 billion combination space (thats more than enough for a cd key )

cd keys are good but they don't need to be that long

most pirates use cracked servers so invalid cd keys are no problem, cd keys as copy protection is understandable but when there really long, there annoying to type in.

making a keygen for a 6 digit serial is just as easy as making one for a 70 digit cd key

it doesnt deter pirates by making them really long. just make the serial long enough to handle how many copies of the game you might sell

I read that most game publishers make 90% of all sales durring the first 30 days.
Advert "pre release sales" earns the highest per copy price and gets a good deal of people who want the product ASAP.

If a publisher want's more profit then stop using -and paying for- DRM as after that magic 30 days it really does not matter much.

I have most of every game made in the past 10 years for my LAN and all of them have no-cd patchs which I d/l they day I installed them. Each machine has a folder to keep the exe if an update for the games comes out.
The games are in thier box's gathering dust but otherwise as good as the day I brought them home.

I am one of those persons that disslike DRM on any lvl...more so in the Vista OS which I have zero need for.

Yep. Most theaters will refund your money if you ask for a refund within a certain amount of time into the movie. Most places won't if you watch the whole thing and then bitch about it, but I've had no problems getting refunds in the past.

What would be the slippery slope?

Because if every single pirate just didn't play the games at all, the industry would be doing way better... oh wait.

Calling it something it isn't only weakens your argument. When you say one thing that is completely incorrect, it brings into question every other point you make. You might as well call it murder in an attempt to illustrate that it hurts people.

The game really should have quit with some message about the copy protection failing, rather than doing an impression of a buggy unstable game. You wouldn't have had more piracy - its not like those that found it crashing lots went out and bought it to make it crash less - they just didn't bother with it. The negative advertisement from the crashing pirate copies, the developers themselves admit harmed sales.

In the last paragraph you were saying the Developer should do his best to intertwine the DRM and hide its actions, now you are saying DRM is pointless (which I agree with!) and Stardock are doing the right thing!

Piracy is a bad thing. DRM is a bad thing. **** games rehashed from more **** games are a bad thing. All these are killing the PC gaming industry, and to be honest, the DRM is driving the piracy to an extent - the release groups want to show off their cracking skills, and without DRM (just serials, or activation like Steam) these guys would lose alot of their interest.

Piracy is rife on Xbox360 and Wii, and the DS. Yet it has not "killed" these platforms

But it's so much easier to release crap, get a few rubes to buy it, then pack up shop and blame piracy for horrid sales so the investors you screwed aren't angry with you.

I should dig out my boxes of crap games I've purchased and been stuck with after loading. Some never worked at all, but you can't return them.