Dissapointed with TH's attitude about game piracy - Page 5

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...I think I said my share about 'that'. 'It' isn't even worth of being called a game . But since were on the topic anyone interested in buying a copy of Hellgate London?

Wow lol honestly my heart rate went up a second until I noticed the - symbol. I'll part with it for $33 which includes shipping. Not bad considering I paid $53. I'll even include the beta code for the dye kits

I don't hear honest people complaining, only those who wish to defend the act of stealing...OH SNAP!

It's so easy to claim that you're owed something...or that your unethical actions are justified, it seems to be the most used defense. This is what separates "honest" people from the rest.

You have got to be kidding me. Sure, if there was not an option to pirate games then ,"pirates" would play less games, but they would also pay for far more games. Sorry but, this, to me, seems like a very simple concept to grasp. Piracy is hurting the PC gaming community, this is the point I am trying to make and this is why I feel so strongly about this issue.

Really? How hard can it be to type in 16 digits?

You obviously didn't read my post about the issues I have had with the worst offender for intrusive and broken DRM - Microsoft.

I have 4 legit copies of Windows Vista Ultimate. Laptop and one of my desktops are using Preinstalled Dell OEM copies. These are no issue as they have the certificates in the BIOS and the Install which means they do not need activation.

Another desktop has a legit copy of Vista Ultimate Retail on it. This one is not toooo much of an issue as MS can't argue with me when I change components etc. Its still extremely annoying to have to phone them (and its 20p a minute from a mobile in the UK) and mess about inputting 321142 digit long numbers, persuading them that I am not trying to Steal, erm, Murder, erm, I mean, Pirate Windows.

The final desktop has Vista Ultimate OEM on it.

Oh the hassle of that machine...

The activation system broke completely on it at one point. It said it was activated on one screen but not another, I assume there was some sort of data corruption. I tried to phone MS and fix it - it had gone into reduced functionality..

I spent over 3 hours on the phone that day. First they decided they wanted me to pay £50 to talk to them as it was technical support (no, its activation, your activation system is broken, intrusive, and gay). Then they decided the system knew I was not a registered system builder and therefore didn't activate. (Sweet I have a PC that can read minds!!!) So I registered as a system builder.

Eventually MS just told me "tough you must have broken it because you must be a theif pirate" Which I can assure you I was not.

A reinstall cured it. Vista activated fine after this. I lost alot of data, all because of MS's broken DRM.

As a legitimate MS customer x4 I have to say I would rather there was no activation BS. I don't give a damn if other people pirate it to be honest, it doesn't affect me.

DRM that affects legitimate users even slightly, even once, is broken and morally wrong. While piracy is morally wrong, it does not cause a direct financial loss to anyone, and is therefore, in my eyes, much less morally wrong than not allowing your customers to use that which they have bought.

The peddlers of DRM infested crap are every bit as evil - and every bit as responsible for killing PC gaming - as the pirates.

And you know what? The whole concept is completely flawed anyway. You are building a digital vault to house your precious content, and protect it from the purchaser, but you have to give the purchaser the key to the vault in order for him to use the content.

Especially with movies, if you can see it, you can pirate it. If you can play a game, you can pirate a game.

Like I said going barebone naked with no protection would, I think, be the most intelligent path to go. Think about it for a second, for the money they spend on the protection, probably would costs more than the loses from the 'extra' (if there would even be 'extra') pirating and would not break an honost purchase like amdfangirl made. The only thing that should probably remain for online play is key code verification.

That's 3% too many.

Basically, the games companies are screwing over 3% of their legitimate customers.

That's 3% of the people that legitimately hand over their hard earned cash for the game, not being able to play it.

Isn't that just as morally wrong, if not more, than pirating a game? At least pirating a game is not obtaining somebody elses money by deception.

I, personally, by myself, have purchased no fewer than 10 games that have utterly failed to operate correctly due to the DRM that they came with. I had to hunt through pirate sites for something to crack the DRM just to make my legitimately purchased games work at all. I personally know at least 20 other games who have had similar experiences multiple times and do not personally know a single PC gamer who has never had such an experience.

From my experience 100% of legitimate customers are negatively affected by DRM. Your 3% seems awfully suspect to me.

DRM is counterproductive, harms legitimate customers more than it does the pirates, and makes pirates out of legitimate customers. There is no excuse for it and it must end. It will end too, either by way of gutting their own industry or by way of ending this insanity. One way or the other it will happen. The only question is how long will people put up with it before moving nearly exclusively to consoles or the developers wise up and realize that they are paying tons of money to scuttle their own sales.

drm is basically an eye for an eye system that will leave the world blind

before there wasnt much drm but game developers were greedy so if 2 or 3 people out of the millions that paid for the game pirated it, they found it unacceptable so they made drm which punished everyone, people tired of the drm, moved to piracy to escape the drm, seeing this, the game developers add even more drm which further pushes their honest customers to pirate the game, this is an endless cycle

drm has always been met with piracy through out history.

when books were first created, they were popular but the governmants decided to drm it by controlling access and adding restrictions

shortly after, pirates and printing presses sprung up all over the place and you started to see pirated books that didnt have all of the government information restrictions.


humans like freedom, when you take the freedom away, people will revolt

drm is taking away freedom because the user is no longer free to choose which device the music can be saved to, which computer can be used to use the content and many other things.

why do people permanently move from many other countries both legally and illegally: to escape the oppression and limitations of their current countries in order to have a less restrictive life

same goes with drm, no one will gladly accept having freedoms taken away

I also believe the number is significantly higher than 3%, but I just used his number to save arguing about that.

I don't know about where you are, but all the retailers in the UK have a policy of "no refunds on opened software", ironically as part of their fight against piracy.

If the software won't work, it must be something wrong with your computer, and/or you didn't check the recommended specs.

This is also driving piracy as people want to test before they can buy, but leaving that aside, it means that those 3% really have been willingly shafted out of their money by the software companies. Intrusive, broken DRM that stops legitimate customers using the product is much closer to fraud than piracy is to stealing.

Seriously, drop the DRM and sales will go up, and when you get on your soapbox about piracy, people wont see a pot calling a kettle black.

Also, don't go the way of the music industry, counting every pirate copy as a lost sale, as if they are to be believed, they have lost £1,203,981,289,7981,234 in the time it has taken you to read this post, and 2,368,208 people have lost their jobs. (I can only assume at one point the music industry employed every person on the planet twice)

I've had Game refuse to take back a number of games after they have been opened.....

For example, bought X3:Reunion the day it came out, but the starforce virus contained on the disk would not allow the game to run, as it refused to believe it was a valid copy.

Game simply said I must have tried to pirate it and would not take it back.

Seriously, you are very lucky to have persuaded them to take back an opened PC game. I'm pretty sure their 10 day return thing (or was it 14 days?) no longer applies to opened PC games.

Most consumers of PC game software are used to the idea that they cannot get their money back. They will either find a crack and fix it themselves, or they will just soak the loss.

In every case for me personally and my friends, we crack it and the problem goes away.

Also keep in mind that we are saying 3% of customers, not 3% of sales. 3% of sales would be a tad low but not completely off kilter. 3% of customers is absurd. To say that such a small percentage of PC gamers have ever been affected by DRM is quite frankly naive. However I do think that it is a modest percentage of games that do have crippling DRM. Most just have slightly annoying DRM.

As far as a solution to the problem, we have a solid working example of a strategy that allows for no DRM. Stardock. Their business model has allowed them 3 high selling PC games out of their 3 biggest projects. Publishers should notice this and catch on.

When we compare console piracy vs pc piracy its like comparing mini-golf to F1 racing. In the console field, the reason why it does better is a great population of the consumers are kids under the age of 16. Not to say another great portion of players are 16+ but consider this. Consoles don't get viruses/spyware/crash/need upgrading(you simply buy the next gen console roughly 3~4 years later). Its so simple which is why it gains the market advantage. You simply buy the game pop it in and tada your off to the races. Also take note there are a LOT of people out there that are computer illiterate and nowhere near as knowledgeable as us on the subject. Let alone landing cracks/key gens/ to get a game to work. It's not that the computer industry is doing bad(well maybe I don't know for sure) but it is most certainly not the most popular. And as with anything, the more popular you are the more advertising/support you will get. Example, I honestly cannot think of any other PC game commercial on TV other than WoW, and even then that was a rare site for me.

I know that piracy is not just a pc problem

Piracy has plaged all formats from the Spectrum to the Xbox 360.. Nintendo Wii, PSP, DS etc

The problem with pc piracy is, its just that much easier to copy as games are already cracked and include the patch when you download it... Xbox 360 for example need to first have it moded with special code... Then download the torrent and burn it in a special way for it to work... Same with Nintendo Wii, PSP's need to be flashed to do it and DS's need a special card.....

Now what one do you think is easier to play with out pay....

Thats it,, the pc..... Now most drm is a real pain, but what we need is something that gives us content which makes us buy it for free, or a small fee such as ea downloader or steam.

I know how each system works, and how to copy games for them but as someone has said before, I buy games because I enjoy them and look after them more...

Generally speaking PC's have always been a developers nightmare with out the piracy crap.. Games take longer to make on the pc as it is that much better at games it needs more innovative and creativity to utilize the latest uber videocard....soundcards, chipsets, processors all change the way the experience.

Once this is done then they work on how the character is controlled and how it interacts with the outside world..

PS3 etc have developement kits and incentives for developers to create games for, where pcs have loads of different engines to choose from each offering different aspects of getting end results and consoles also have the same control pad etc.

PC's have mice, keyboards, sticks, keyboards and soon the OCZ NIA ( google it and youll see what i mean )

All these reasons is why pcs are loosing more and more creative talent as consoles offer a quicker return on costs and pcs pirated games are ready to be downloaded.

Well I have 2 desktops and a laptop that I use for gaming. I suppose I wouldn't be too bothered about having it on the 2nd desktop however.

The problem comes a little down the line. For example, in the last 3 months, I have had 3 motherboards. A Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6, then an Asus P5N-T Deluxe, and now an Asus Striker II Formula.

That means my desktop (had I been an avid Bioshock player and installed it on all of them) would have eaten up at least 3 of my installs during that time, the Laptop 2 (as I have shifted it from Vista x86 to Vista x64).

Yeah I know that there is now a deactivation tool, but firstly, you don't always get the choice, Windows sometimes decides not to boot and needs to be reinstalled, a piece of hardware can die, forcing replacements and possibly Windows reinstalls - and when you get a new motherboard or other core piece of hardware you usually don't even think to yourself "oooh must remember to deactivate my Bioshock install!!"

I have a Steam copy of Bioshock but I didn't play it long before getting bored of it to be honest so it hasn't affected me. The REAL issue was when it was released. An excerpt from a statement by Activision:

As you can see, at release it was limited to 2 installs, and if you remember, there was an issue with the authentication server making it impossible to deactivate it. THIS was what caused the controversy, but even today it is possible for a legitimate user to fall foul of it.

Its just another thing end users shouldn't have to deal with. The only people that are hurt by DRM are the legitimate customers. The pirates have their crack, and the 5 install limit will never affect them.

Publishers make tighter and tighter DRM, all the while reducing the perceived value of their product relative to a pirate copy, and then go on to talk about the "genuine advantage". For example, MP3s that play anywhere, anytime, vs buying "playsforsure" music that, ironically, is sure not to play ever again... Seriously, they need to ADD value not reduce value. This could be done by :

1. DLC that requires you to register with a CD-Key. If you really want to be secure, fingerprint it automatically with a CD-key hash, meaning you can simply ban anyone that releases the DLC to P2P networks from online play and future DLC, and so that for it to work with a copy of the game, the CD-key used to download it and the CD key of the install must match. - THIS IS EASY. If a small site like www.cheathappens.com can do this with game trainers they don't want released to the wild before a certain date (quite effectively I might add!) then I'm sure EA games can manage it.

2. Tech support forums should only be usable by those that have registered their game, with the forum putting indicators in the posters profile to show they are registered - a number of games already do this at least partly. Bioware have this system iirc, and Egosoft did at the release of X3:Reunion, but they removed the post limit after releasing a Steam version without a CD-Key.

These two ideas could go a long way toward fighting piracy imho. While we are at it, remove overly restrictive DRM. If you must waste your money putting Safedisc or Securom on your game then fine, but make it apparent when it crashes that it is because of it being a pirate copy, and DON'T use things like Starforce and ridiculously complex and overly restrictive activation systems...

You will never eliminate piracy completely. That's unfortunate but realistic. All DRM will be broken. The solution is not "MOAR DRMS!!!!!111!!", it is to give people a reason to buy a legitimate copy, rather than giving them a reason to download it. The carrot works better than the stick.

How are 70% of CoD4 online people using pirate copies? Doesn't CD-Key verification prevent this?

I realize I come a little late to this thread and the whole debate, but reading through it, it seems to me that most of you have missed out on a rather important facet of the whole piracy problem.
We can discuss as much as we like such issues as drm, the definition and moral value of digital theft and how it affects the industry. But when doing so, we shouldn't lose track of a few facts that I will try to present here.

First thing is that as far as piracy or for that matter drm are concerned, we have no reliable numbers to work with.
The fact is, nobody really knows the real numbers for piracy (like the number or games or movies downloaded), what we can get at best are estimates, and then, even for those, most of the time they come from quite unreliable sources, namely the entertainment industry.
The second important number we don't know, is how much pirated copies affect real copy sales. The industry is keen on making a direct translation of their estimated number of pirated copies to an estimated number of lost sales. However, everybody here knows this to be untrue as many people download pirated content they would never buy otherwise. We could get estimates on that number, but that would require costly studies, and it might be the resulting numbers wouldn't please the industry so much.

So, as it appears, there are so few real numbers about piracy that both the pirates and the industry can pretty much say what they want about it. The main difference being that the industry has a huge marketing machine and is keen to use it to further its commercial interests.

So now, let's ask ourself, when an entertainment industry compagny sees its sales or going down or is on the verge of going bankrupt, what is the best position to hold from a commercial point of view? :

- To acknowledge that you've made some mistakes in management or in product design or even that your industry is going slower or might in fact enter a recession (the shareholder seldom look kindly on that).

or

- To blame it all on the pirates who are responsible for all the woes in the industry. A pity that nobody can verify they are actually the cause of anything or even a major contributing factor. But if one manages to convince the public and the investors, that pirates are the root of the problem, it will do for now.

What I'm getting at is that the communication and 'marketing' around piracy have quite a big commercial impact on the industry. Therefore it would be both foulish and naive to imagine that they will be honest about it.
Let us not forget that no matter how piracy really affect sales, these people have a commercial interest in the way the public perceives piracy.

RE: baba264

indeed. however they are screwing over legitimate customers to no gainful effect. At all.

The longest I have ever seen it take for a crack to come out is 3 days after release, and most games are cracked on the first day if not sooner.

You are not stopping the pirates and barely slowing them down if at all and at what cost? I can personally vouch for games losing sales due to DRM. I, and many people I know research DRM before purchasing games now, and if the DRM is particularly annoying, we do not buy the game. It comes down to this. They are almost certainly not inhibiting piracy with DRM, and they are definitely losing sales to DRM though it is unknown to what degree.

What is worse is that I know of people who have taken to pirating games that they would have purchased because they didn't want to deal with the DRM and they didn't want to support it financially.

Why pay big money on an inconvenience or outright screwing of legitimate customers for no beneficial effect whatsoever and quite probably a significant negative effect? It makes very poor business sense and it boggles the mind why it not only continues but gets worse with every generation.

For the good of the industry this needs to end.

I'm sorry for trying to shove a number in your faces, I think that many times people try and use numbers instead of intelligence.

I understand your point, infornography42, but I still believe that it is a much lower number than what people on this forum are saying. As a side note, I no longer work for EB Games. I am a PC Gamer, BIG TIME, and as such, I highly enjoyed getting into conversations with my customers on the topic of PC games. The shear amount of people that I got to talk to over the three years that I worked for EB should give me somewhat of a informed opinion on the issue. If people aren't talking about the games they love they are complaining about something or another.

I don't want to dispute the fact that DRM's is a bad thing. I just don't think it's a reason to pirate. Most of the DRM issues that people have claimed they've had in this thread, we can assume are due to other pirated games or pirating software that they've had on their computers in the first place. I know that some of you have had legitimate issue's with DRM and that is why DRM sucks.

YOU CAN RETURN PC GAMES!! You just need to know how.
If a game doesn't disclose what type of software is included then you will be able to return it. If a game doesn't properly list the requirements, them you WILL be able to return it. These requirements should also include the requirements of the DRM! You may have to talk to the manager and or the district manager, but it WILL get it returned. For anyone who's thinking of trying this(and I really hope someone does)I would highly recommend bringing in some information on the DRM that was included with the game in question. The only reason why people get talked out of returning open PC games is because of what is written on the outside of the box. If you use this against them you will win. If the information is not correct then you have a right to return it, and a return is what you'll get.
If you're calm and informed you can get anything returned!

If more people did this when they had a problem with DRM then publishers would stop using DRM faster than we could debate about it. The retailers forced the publishers to write all that crap on the box so that they could start turning away people that had issues.

What you're saying is funny to me, because I actually went with Hellgate London into the EB Games where I bought it with the original box (opened), and told them "This game has a lot of errors and is basically unplayable". LOL TOO BAD, it's a PC game.

Yeah, that's why I only buy games I've already played, and know I like. If we're going to play the blame game, and say that it's pirates faults that game companies are failing, let's go ahead and go a step further and blame the companies that made games **** enough to force people into piracy.

Ahh, RobWright. Every time someone pirates a game, a single tear drops down your face.

"When you put your hand into a bunch of goo that a moment before was your best friend's face, you'll know what to do."
-- Patton

Hey Rob, I think that it's time to change the name of this thread...

Meh.

If I don't like a particular DRM in a game I simply will not buy it.

As a fan of X2: The Threat, I was greatly anticipating it's sequel; X3: Reunion. However, I decided not to buy it since it was being released with StarForce.

I bought the game only after an official patch was released to that did not install StarForce when a newly installed X3 was first launched.

Apparently, the game publisher (Enlight) decided that DRM wasn't really worth it anymore (too many complaints and slowing sales perhaps). Enlight allowed the developer (EgoSoft) to release a patch that no longer installed StarForce. EgoSoft also released a utility to remove StarForce as well if it has already been installed.

Pleas don't get me wrong Darkstar, I have had issues with some older Ubi and EA games copy protection, and it really pi$$ed me of bad. But I also totally understand the publishers side of it all when hundreds of thousands of their games are getting played for free and then people bitching about them trying to stop it.
And also remember that this is all opinion, but this is really a chicken or the egg thing. The early games had a keycode, and as far as I know that was it. The people stealing the games in the first place is what gave way to all this complicated drm crap to begin with. All I can do is hope that they get it figured out soon and have a seamless solution, instead of giving up on giving the pc the "A" list high value titles. Cause we all know that people aren't going to stop stealing them. And the PC is still the best gaming platform with the most potential.