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id Software talks piracy (again) at GDC 2007
Author: Brett ThomasPublished: 13th March 2007
"Don't steal me!" - Hollenshead talked about piracy, including the theft of Doom 3. All we can ask is "Why?"
It seems like just last year that Hollenshead stood in a panel of industry members to discuss piracy. Oh, wait, that's because it was. At E3, Todd and others from the industry went on to say how rampant piracy costs the industry billions, and game developers would stop producing games. A cautionary note was sung about developers moving to consoles, where piracy is nowhere near as rampant.
In fact, the same tune was sung in 2005 in an interview with Forbes. During that interview, Hollenshead blamed publishers for turning a blind eye, leaving developers to pay the price. Of course, it's very rare that a developer studio is paid based solely on units sold - but the RIAA has proved time and time again that there is little place for fact in a discussion on piracy.
The story at GDC 2007 held a new twist, though... oh, wait, no it didn't. Hollenshead blames piracy for the decline of PC gaming and western civilization, explaining that the software thieves were the primary reason for Enemy Territory: Quake Wars being forced to be developed as a multi-platform title. The moral of the story? "Casual gamers" don't understand how piracy hurts the industry, and devs are running to consoles.
There's no doubting the fact that piracy is an issue on the PC and Hollenshead did make some good points in his keynote. However, he seemed to put the blame for his company's decision entirely on the piracy problem. We think there's more to it than that though, as around 41 percent of homes have at least one current-gen console. This generation of consoles is an emerging market and emerging markets are always a great place to make a buck or two.
Of course, there might be something to his logic - just look at Doom 3. Had many of us not played it before a trip to the store, we may have actually bought it thinking it was any good. Maybe piracy does hurt sales, in that respect...
Do you have a thought on Hollenshead's speech? Tell us about it in our forums.
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Comments (30)Stats: 0.150 seconds
Sounds like a cheap excuse to justify the delay of ET:QW to make a few dollars out of the xb360 and ps3 markets.
Actually if you know what you're doing you can get keys quite easily what work online
There are ways to "Pirate" online games, but they are not nearly as attractive/simple as for singleplayer games.
Regardless though, of all games, Online (Authenticated CDkeys) would likely be the ones that are least affected by piracy.
Aggies
So to sum it up, good games need good secure multiplayer environments, a good plot and great gameplay.
Doom3 lasted an hour for me before I uninstalled. Same with many many other games. I simply dont have enough money to buy every game that comes out promising to be the best game ever without actually trying it out.
Sorry, but what do you think Piracy is? If you have connections they can get you a key as easy as 1 2 3.
Piracy isn't theft, lol wtf
I also think the sheer SIZE of games (SupCom is around 6GB) makes it a good deterrent to downloading + piracy...
And Orb,not everyones has the right connections...you could be mine ^^
Piracy *is not* theft. That's why we have a discussion in the first place, isn't it??
If torrenting a program would be the same as stealing someone's bicycle we wouldn't have the discussion if it's evil. (We do have one, do we?)
SW Piracy is a copyright infringement (yes, I needed to look that up to spell it right). This is not the same as theft.
br,
-btb-
So far, the best "anti" theft/piracy solutions I have seen have been the use of registered, online keys. True, it's not anywhere near 99% secure. But compared to physical disc protections, rootkits, complex inbuilt key algorithms, etc -- I think it's the better option.
But the way it's broadcast out, how badly it's hurting the industry, etc. How is it any different than someone stealing a car? Or your mobile? Or your wallet? I mean, major car companies (or i should say insurers) have to deal with this inevitabilty of theft. But they keep supplying more, innovative models and technology to us. So why is the gaming industry throwing its hands up so high? It's the same principle, just different medium.
If they want to stop it, address some of the deeper social issues about wealth, poverty and the pervasivness of technology, etc. People will *always* want what they don't/can't have. And bigger doors and better locks simply mean bigger hammers and better keys.
Come on man, piracy is theft in a way
However, i believe that for example, if i go and download supreme commander, and play it, and then decide i don't like it - that i haven't really done anything wrong
If you like a game, and play it lots, then i think you should buy it, because the Dev's deserve it, and if you didn't it would just be like going to the shops and taking a copy off the shelves
It would be like going to the supermarket, if you eat a grape to find out if the bunch is OK, then that's OK
but if you go in and just eat bits of food, with no intention of buying it, that's wrong
Just because piracy isn't walking into a store and taking the software doesn't not make it theft, you're still using software you haven't paid for
So true :P
I think it seems rather stupid blaming "punters" on this.
The problem is whoever leaks the content into the mainstream, be this a coder at the company, someone at the DVD/CD Fab plant, somebody in the shipping dept taking a copy, or just someone at the store taking a copy.
If they took a look at the two examples, where a great PC game doesn't account for a large chunk of torrent traffic across the Internet; Half Life 2 and WoW, they'd notice a few things:
1) These games are bloody brilliant. They've pushed the boundries, enthralled gamers and above-all else, provided a new experience for many.
2) They both rely largely on content servers.
There is the argument against not being able to play a game without your Internet connection, but for pete's sake; the 1990's called and they want their lack of Internet access back -- this is the 21st century.
And again, the question of privacy. Of not having someone snooping on you to check that your copy of xx game is legitimate. The answer is that they don't have to necessarily -- the practice of requiring a simple login/key authentication is probably deterrent enough for most.
Couple that with needing an account, specifying personal details to be used with your games, and you've got a 'casual piracy' deterrent right there. Of course some would still go to greater lengths, but piracy is only rampant because it's easy..
For instance, you want to purchase Quake 4:
i) Walk (probably drive) to the shops and pay for the game across the counter
ii) Buy game online, wait 2-3 days for delivery
iii) Download it from xtorrents.xxx within an hour, whilst you're playing another game. For free.
So what, you're lazy. We're all incredibly lazy as a species, so if it's possible these games are available to be paid for and delivered via the Internet, again, a-la Steam (and I think soon, WoW); you suddenly take one very large component out of casual piracy.. Laziness.
When it came to Half Life 2 (and the subsequent Episode 1 expansion) I of course chose to pay for it online and download it from Steam. After-all, you're only paying for a license? My 10Mbit connection makes mincement of the download times (and it'll be 20Mbit come June).
If id were to launch a content delivery service (or possibly strike a deal with Valve, whom I'm sure would love to have id on-board), possibly include a few nice new features to get more people downloading (option for a DVD to be mailed along with your order, for instance), they'd soon chop their piracy issues in half.. If not more!
Console development worries me slightly, though. Take 'Deus Ex: Invisible War'; what a way to spoil a game. Design it for the console first and hope we wouldn't notice? Halo too, what was so special about that compared with other FPS games available on the PC?
id need to stop fixing the solution, and start fixing the problem. Catch up with the industry, and above all else.. Actually make some enjoyable games! There's been hardly anything fundamentally new from them in the last few years, and if they really want people to pay for their work, they need to work a little harder at keeping it impressive or some gamers just won't see the £20-30 justified.
due to the fact they don't do as much work to protect them because they think their safe, as soon as you compromise it, then its wide open, whereas PC games usually require modified exe's, other funny fixes or whatever and even then you cant play online
So really, i don't see how consoles are better for less piracy, because its easier to pirate on them
I really doubt it'll take an hour to torrent a copy of Q IV. I've torrented games before (which I later purchased out of reasons oh great now I need a legit one cause of patches). And it'll take you like a day or even more and since most people don't even seed maybe even longer.
By that logic, every game I decide not to buy, for whatever reason, deprives revenue from the developers. So not buying a game is "theft". Every time I walk out of a store without an armfull of games, I should be arrested on the spot, for all the revenue I just deprived the developers of :P
At *best*, piracy is "stealing a sale", but stealing a sale, and stealing a product are not the same thing. And then one can debate the fact that exactly how much piracy is infact stealing a sale (eg. if you never would have bought it in the first place etc).
If I walk into a store, put a copy of supreme commander under my coat, and walk out. Thats theft. If I download the game from the internets, that's piracy. I'm not saying one is any better/worse than the other, only that they are different.
Aggies
as for id Software.... i can only say one thing.... "words out of a$$", piracy does not affect that much, 40% of my legal game purchased were due to the awesomeness of games i downloaded from the internet, so if i did not download them i would not buy them..... or the probability of buying them would be really small.
Haha ... I have been thinking along the same lines in the recent past ... :)
I will take the easiest route, not the "cheapest" one.
cheers,
btb
A choice few, whom track share ratios, will annihilate the bandwidth available on your connection. A 1.1MB/sec (more if you're on ADSL2+, I'd imagine) download makes mincemeat of a 4.7GB download.
An average speed of 1MB/sec will have you a 4.7GB image in just over 80mins, which isn't far off my assumptions (which were there for example, more than accuracy). :)
As with music, movies, & software, I download pirated games too (for all platforms not just PC)
The reason? Simple.
Download & try it first, then if I like it I buy it.
If I don't like it, I stop playing it, so therefore it doesn't cost the music/movie/software/games industry nothing at all.
With PC Games I almost always continue to play the pirated version anyway even after I have purchased the original simply 'cause I cannot be bothered changing discs all the time, plus my dvd rom drive makes too much noise when it's spinning :o
-monkey
The most idiotic sentence EVER? If you're gonna do it, at least have the stones to admit it.
(CORE f.t.w btw ;) )
The point is though that not all demo's are good, they falsly portray a cool game when in fact the full retail copy is boring, repetative, & dull, or worse...full of bugs :(
* Casual gamers don't buy the games at all. If some Joe wants to test this game or that, and just test it (whether because he/she doesn't really have enough time to play it seriously or because it's not his/her genre of game), they won't buy it anyways. Period.
* The "deficit" in PC game sales is due to this crazy hype whenever a graphics card is released, specially when there's a big change in architecture (like from DX9 to DX10). I think Ed, from overclockers.com, said once something like (my own words now) "it's a pity, but the PC-gaming market seems to be fated to die".
You know, if you have an XBox 360, you don't really need to get a new graphics card, or put more ram, or worry about a new operating system that'll lag your system to hell. You just buy the game, and play it. No hassles, no-****. Heh
And I've gotta say it again: I think PC-games will disappear from the market, and console-games are gonna take it's place. I don't like this idea, but that's a pretty real possibility... :-\
And gamers are putting all the money in the very expensive videocard in the hope developers would make a game that brings it to his knees with all the new eyecandy.... or let me rephrase that. Developers are forcing us to buy bigger better systems to play their games. But here is the catch...
After everybody spend their hard earned cash on system upgraded, there is not much money left to buy a game!
Piracy is similar and not equal to theft, why? lets go beyond RIAA and MPAA and think about it.
Theft?
"In the criminal law, theft (also known as stealing) is the illegal taking of another person's property without that person's freely-given consent."
taking: "depriving a person of private property without the payment of just compensation."
so to be a Thief, X must be able to take something from Y, and Y can not use that something because Y has been deprived of it by X, this is true in stealing another person's shoes or stereo.
Is piracy theft?
when X downloads a copy of "The return of the ones that never left, editors cut" made by and owned by Phony studios, he is making a copy of the data, the original data is still there, Phony studios was not deprived of the data and can use it and sell it at whatever price they want.
the taking part does not apply here.
How can i make piracy similar to real theft?
download "The return of the ones that never left, editors cut" movie, go to Phony studios, enter, destroy all other copies Phony studios has of the movie so they can not sell it.
OR
download "The return of the ones that never left, editors cut" movie, burn it to DVD, brand or re-brand it, go somewhere or to someone and sell it as if it was made by you.
Is there anything similar to piracy?
Yes there is, not buying any kind of media.
My answer to "Is piracy theft?": it depends on what you do with what you download and also if you buy original stuff.
anyway the probability of buying a game from a certain developer after you pirate it increases..... i have both soldier of fortune games after i pirated the first..... and farcry, and all of the Unreal games, all of the C&C games, some of the total war titles.... etc.... most of these would not be bought if i had not downloaded them first or played another game from the same game maker.
and i am not trying to force the change of the way you think about this, i am simply putting my cards on the table and then you can either see them or dismiss them.