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Piracy 'sales' charts revealed
Author: Joe MartinPublished: 6th March 2008
Not all pirates are loveable scamps like Guybrush. Some of them make Infinity Ward cry.
The snapshot was gathered by heading to torrent site Mininova and working out which the most popular games are and monitoring the number of leechers on each for a single day. So; we present the top ten pirated games, along with figures, for a single day from a single site.
- Assassin’s Creed - 25734
- Frontlines: Fuel of War - 12688
- Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - 8792
- Dark Messiah of Might and Magic - 8402
- Lost: Via Domus - 5883
- Turning Point: Fall of Liberty - 5183
- Sims 2 - 4026
- The Club - 3672
- Bioshock - 3489
- The Witcher - 3121
"Call of Duty 4 has been on sale for 113 days, assuming day zero piracy. A seven gig torrent, assuming a 100k download speed, takes just under a day to download. Assuming that the rate of downloads now is constant across those whole three and a bit months - which is incredibly conservative, of course, as it’d have been much higher upon release - that means 993496 copies will have been illegally downloaded via Mininova alone. Which is the sort of number that makes Infinity Ward sad."
Discussions about game piracy have been raging on the forums for a while now, and though everyone agrees that not every torrent downloaded is equal to a sale lost, even if just a tenth of those downloads were turned into real sales then it would massively help the industry. Or would it? Throw your thoughts in with the continuing discussion.
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Comments (252)
and also how piracy of say hl2 or orange box compared to the numbers for cod4 and bioshock he quoted
i voted "Yes, but I often buy the game too. Really."
I'm quite materialistic when it comes to having a game, I like having a case, manual, disc etc. a reason as to why I wont buy off Steam.
I wouldn't download if developers released good demos more often
However I am a complete whore when it comes to grabbing movies and tv shows.
There is a massive difference between a bit-tech gamer and any other gamer - most people out there have no clue what so ever. They should be left to consoles and never let near a PC because their ignorance is astounding. Just go to any i-event or other LAN to see what I mean.
Truth is, I only don't pirate to see what it's like now because I can borrow it from Joe. If I do like it I will buy it - Stalker, Half Life 2, Zelda etc. Most of the games I've tried are just crap and I'd never ever spend £40 on it - they get dropped within two minutes.
I borrowed Crysis from work, but that was a plastic piece of arse. I will also borrow CoD4 in time to see what it plays like, given time. I haven't pirated anything since before joining bit - everything at work is legit - I've just fallen into wanting stuff to just work.
Closest I've ever come was I borrowed a friend's steam acccount and downloaded HL2 (with his permission, he only plays online FPS) played about half of itand then went out and bought it myself. Other than that, I buy the games i want to play, but I have so little time or money these days that it's maybe one game a year. I see STALKER is down to $20 in the stores, so I may pick that up soon. It will be the first game I've bought since HL2E1.
1. Piracy === everyone in sweden and norway (if you believe the news and the riaa)
2. Hardware -- (yep ATI etc were out to get him)
3. reviewers - (see I know it had to be bit techs fault some where its all the bit tech reviewers fault)
4. Audience -- (nope i was wrong its everyone elses fault)
theres a word for thinking like this its called Paranoia.
I now say to everyone not to pirate because I know how much effort goes in to games.
I'll pirate a game if
A) You can't get it in the shops anymore
B) I want to know if it's a waste of money or not
Although now I do little of B, last time I remember doing that was for STALKER, after a few hours playing I decided it was good, but due to my obsession with restarting RPGesque games I got frustrated, might pick that up now it's cheaper. Now I've had my ups and downs with awful games and awesome games, I can usually tell if I'll enjoy a game from previews and the like. I haven't bought many duds in the last year or so.
The only games I kind of regret buying that I've bought in the last 6 months or so is probably the club and eternal sonata. I've barely played them, but I did pick them up very cheap.
I picked "Yes, but I often buy the game too. Really." BTW
But you know what, those I liked I went out and bought, those I didn't got deleted.
There are times I glad I did as it saved wasting money on a crap game, on the other hand there are games I might not have considered but bought them after trying them out first.
The last major game I kind of stole was Half-Life 2 and that was a special case. At uni we had very poor internet and you needed it to run the game. Only one pc in the house could get online and that was in Bauuls room, so I used his account to play the game. Even then, when we moved out at the end of the year and I could get online properly I still bought the game to play it again.
Hell, even some new games (Like Audiosurf) that I could get review copies of for free I still buy if I really want them. Review copies in the office often aren't available to nab afterwards because Tim needs them for testing something or because we keep them in the office for relaxation at the end of the day.
And yeah, three times for that quote was excessive, but relevant in the previous conversations and worthy of seperate discussion here I feel.
1. Nobody (apart from a small minority) bother pirating console games (in the UK/USA at least).
2. The older you are (and hence the more money you have [and less time]), the less you pirate games.
I have downloaded a few games in the past, but apart from one game (which I really should have bought), I wouldn't have bought any of them. I've been buying quite a lot of legit software recently, including all my MS stuff which is an achievement. :p
Otherwise I'll wait and see. Crysis for example, I haven't bought (lack of cash), nor pirated yet (because I'll definately buy it one day). It's a poor excuse, and not really much of a veil for my conscience, but there we are. :p
As i've said before i also have the N64 goodset, some Dreamcast games and a couple of megadrive and SNES sets which i acquired about this time last year. The chipped xbox in the living room is slowly acquiring a decent back catalogue of xbox games as well. I can honestly say i have no pirated games which you can buy 1st hand in their original format that i play on a regular basis. But then again after my first year of uni i think i've become very ambivalent towards piracy.
After reading this, I decided to buy Hellgate London but it is not available to be bought on both direct 2 drive (UK website) and steam. If they make it so updates are only available via steam or another prorgam, it would probably help alot to sell games.
Honestly look at this page:
http://www.direct2drive.co.uk/buy-pc-games-download
When you see what are the games highlighted, it makes me sad ...
EDIT: I just saw that it is available via the EA app, I really hate this app, it is a real memory hog ...
It's debatable whether that's any better than pirating, with a second hand sale, the developers get nothing, in their eyes you may as well have pirated it.
On the non-game side of things, I've been making an effort over the last couple years to go totally legit. As of right now, thanks to some pretty quality open source applications, I'm happy to report that everything running on my computer is legitimate. :)
Edit:
-monkey
The games companies that think they only sold 1 million copies, probably had 3 million people play their game because the orignal purchasers sold it on and thats 2 miillions sales they lost out on.
because piracy is illegal?
But its not the only reason for lack of sales
if you could rent PC games i think people would pirate less.
As for the second hand market, well, its one of those sided swords, I mean if you know you will be able to recoup some of the cost later on it it might increase the chance that you buy it to start with, on the other side the manufacturer would get more if who ever you sell it to would go buy it from the bargain bin, btw, many games, music cd's, dvd's, software and whatever allready states either on the disc itself or in the eula that selling it would be illegal (even though the law says something else), so its only a question of time until the mafia ehh riaa will come for you for that too.
The guys rant about piracy made alot of sense tbh, id never suspect they put in security checks halfway through a game! :O
I fully understand kids pirating. When I was a kid I had about enough money to buy a £16 game every 4 weeks, IF i didn't buy anything else - and they were the days when PC Games weren't £16. I realise the price is probalbly fine, but my point is many of the people pirating will just be kids who cant afford it anyway, some of it will be people who crave having everything on the internet. The people who pirate when they have the money is just ridiculous though, its stealing for the sake of stealing.
People pirating a game the having the audacity to post on their forums complaining are just ******s. If one of the games I pirated back in the day wouldn't work it was que sera sera, if I can't ****ing afford to buy it then I don't deserve the tech support - even me as a 15 year old knew THAT.
Since then, I don't bother, games are pretty cheap anyway :)
save your money buy guild wars instead its a better game :)
Haven't really bought any games for the PC for a while, but that's generally because my PC won't play much these days.
Id imagine more console games will start to get pirated the more net integrated they get, its harder to pirate console games but they are getting more like PCs every day.
But the main topic against piracy in Joe's quote is lack of developer support, one of the reasons Iron Lore had to close down was lost sales due to piracy.
I'm not saying buying second hand is bad and evil, I'm saying that if you're looking from the perspective of supporting the developer, buying second hand is no better than pirating. The reason I buy games isn't so I'm not breaking copyright law, it's because the developer made a good game, I want to pay them so they can carry on making good games, and I definitely want to support them if they make a good game that isn't laden with DRM, like Stardock's games and the original CoH (wasn't impressed by the steam like login system they introduced in the expansion pack ). So for me, I rarely buy second hand.
Totally agree. 2nd hand is seen as acceptable but piracy isn't, so people will easily own up to, and defend, 2nd hand sales.
True, but it's an acceptable middle ground to me for people who are short on cash but who want the games. At least that money goes into the games industry at some level - just having it go into retail stores is good to some degree as it provides more of a market for more game to be sold on etc I suppose.
I worry though that the reason piracy is so rampent is not the evils of people, but simply that it has become a force of habit. Click here, click there, wait a bit, it's-a-game! Easy, simple, rinse and repeat. People have become so used to not paying for games they don't think about it any more, they just do it. You want to play the game? Download it. However, I think for online-delivery systems such as Steam, this isn't the case. Cracking a Steam game is hard and risky, arguably too hard to be worth the effort, so people don't automatically think "Episode 2? Download it!", they just accept that the need to spend money on it, and so do. It's not even an option. There's a bit of me that feels that even if piracy is not as rampent as developers worry it is, we'll be seeing a major gathering of games on digital-distribution platforms such as Steam, locked to a single account.
I used to pirate PC games last century.
"to"
I believe the consumer is getting ripped off 99% of the time.
Yeah I agree, it depends on what game I'm buying whether I decide that I'll find it acceptable to buy second hand, for instance, GoW or the 360 version of the orange box sells like hotcakes so I had no qualms with getting that cheap off eBay. However, something like Sins of a Solar Empire or DEFCON I wouldn't buy second hand (not that you actually can in the UK as they're download only, but anyway) as the smaller developers need all the support they can get.
Sorry, it's not a middle ground. Pirating games is illegal. Buying second hand games is not. It's not a grey area, legally or (IMO) morally. We live in a capitalist society. People have every right to buy any products that are legally available for sale. If I don't buy Generic Shooter 3 when it comes out because it's not worth £39.99 to me, buying it for £24.99 3 months down the line second hand is not a lost sale for the developer, as I would not have bought the game at the price at which it was made available for sale initially. Personally, I really don't think that the games industry is anywhere near the sweet spot in terms of game prices. I haven't got any evidence for the following, so take it with a grain of salt however large you want, but my instinct says that if games were priced more in line with DVDs, people would buy a lot more of them, and overall profits would increase. I'd be really interested to hear any justification for game prices being as they are.
Of course, the "I wouldn't have bought it anyway" argument is a common one used by pirates - "I wouldn't have bought the game, so stealing it is not a lost sale". It's not an argument that holds any moral water, but it's certainly relevant to Michael Fitch's back of the envelope calculations in your first post. You can't say that the 90% of people who pirated Generic Shooter 3 would all have bought it if they were unable to (or decided not to!) obtain it illegally.
AH
You people disgust me.
I used to pirate xbox (gen 1) games. I do not anymore because I lost interest, but the games are still there. Now I am very materialistic with any games I aquire. I like looking at my games shelf and enjoying my vast collection af games. I like the way it looks (I know, that's weird lol)
This guy seems real pissed off, and he has every right to be. I feel sorry for him and other companies (large and small) that get the shaft because of piracy.
As for game prices, I would like it if they were cheaper, especially console games, £50 RRP is far too much. PC games are priced a bit better IMO, but brand new releases can still be pricey unless you get them off places like play.com at discounted prices.
The reason they can't make them the price of a DVD is a film is shown at the cinema so has usually already gone into profit by the time it gets to DVD, any extra they get is just a bonus. With a game there's nothing like that, although the cost associated with making a typical game is a lot less than making your typical film. The market is also a lot smaller, almost everyone watches films, yes, some films only cater to a certain market, but that's the same with gaming, RTSes only cater to a relatively small section of a large market, but a horror film caters to a relatively small section of a massive market.
Yeah he does seem pretty angry, he does make some good points, but at the same time, I think he's complaining about a few things that they shot themselves in the foot over. If you put DRM in a game, IMO you're asking for any trouble you get because of it. I see his points about hardware issues, but he can't expect everyone to be able to flash their BIOS simply to make their game work. Other games manage to get it right. He comes across as a bit elitist on some points really, but I can understand his frustration.
When the hell did they start calling copyright infringement piracy anyway? And why? It's got nothing to do with theft on the high seas.
I have no sympathy for this man and his company, that is one of the worst systems I have ever heard of.
Don't underestimate the power brought by a system where masses can complain without giving your real name and without the fear of being punched in the face for being an idiot : )
Unless it's the try before you buy crowd. That, and people just like to complain. The point is, that if a bunch of people are ranting about what a POS this game is, are you going to go out and buy it? If a game is buggy and the developer says "That's only because people are pirating it", are you going to believe them?
As much as I hate this fact, perception matters. I really sounds like this developer did it to themselves. They delivered a product that was hard to make work, and which was intentionally broken for significant part of the user base.
Lets take a look at the user expierience for a minute. You hear about this great new game coming out, maybe see a little advertsing about it. Of course, in this day and age no one trusts the claims that manufacturers make, but at least we know a game is coming that might be interesting. So then one of two things happens. Either you wait to see what other people say about it, or you download it and try it yourself before spending money on it. If you do the first you see a lot of people saying this game is crap, it crashes at the first quest and the developer replies "That's because you pirated it" or "That's because your computer isn't up to date".
In the other case, you download the game and it crashes all the time and you decide it's a total POS and feel good about not spending money on it.
Neither of these outcomes are likley to encourage potential customer to buy your product. The fact that they did as well as they did only shows that there are a lot of people willing to take a big risk on a game without researching it.
Does anyone else hear just a slight bit of entitlement in that statement? I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it sure sounds like he thinks the world owes him a living because he made a good game. What I don't hear in the quoted post is any acknoledgement that they bear any responsibility for the failure of the game. It's all someone elses fault. It's pirates fault, it the reviewers fault, it's the stupid customer's fault. Don't blame us, we made a great game and it's everyone elses fault for not buying it.
And besides that, they didn't lose money on it, so why are they going out of business?
i pirated defcon, but i had it pre-ordered the whole time but the pirated one was out before my pre-order went active (steam)
i wonder if that counts as pirated or a sale wherever these numbers come from (still havent seen any sources for them :p)
was checking the release dates for defcon on wikipedia and it just reminded me how much they take the piss
i find it mind-boggling and franky insulting that games are still released on different dates for different areas
i cant remember which game it was but i remember last year marvelling at how there was a game on sale US Retail for like a week before it was available on steam
i suppose you could argue shipping time or something (but it probably all comes from taiwan anyway :p) for retail but delaying online distribution for a week? what the hell
ET:Quake Wars is the only game i can think of that was released in the EU before the US
While I agree with you about his copy protection schemes, I think he's actually implying that it would be different if the pirates had spent money on it. It's less about him being entitled to a living for making a good game, but more to do with him being entitled to not to be stolen from - or to expect that much at least.
Well, supposedly it was a number of different factors. Titan quest was just one - and just because they made profit doesn't mean that they made enough profit for their business to remain financially viable.
We get spore a day earlier woo!11
It is rather annoying, the main problem is for a US release you only need english, and spanish if you're feeling generous. For a european release there are so many languages to localise the game into so it takes a while to get the game ready for the european market. I do like how a lot of developers are going for general releases now and get their acts together with localisation, but with some games it's still awful.
probably counts as both a sale and a lost sale. aren't statistics wonderful?
The argument that second-hand sales are as bad as piracy doesn't really hold water. In the case of piracy, everybody gets their copy of the game from a common source, usually on-line. It only takes one person to buy the game, crack it, and post it to the interwebs (or, one person to sneak a free copy out of the production house, factory, etc.).
In the case of second-hand sales, in order for the millions of people to buy a used game, millions of other people had to buy that game first, which puts money in the developers' pockets.
They really are different animals.
-monkey
Reminds me of this 2006 SiN Episodes story:
I could say something similar about copyright laws. It wouldn't change a thing.
No, that sounds pretty on-the-ball to me. For example, I bought 2 Colin McRae games, then started pirating them, simply because they're all the same, but with better graphics.
I just thought of something. If you're really anti-piracy, a really good tactic would be to upload pirated copies with a couple of critical files missing and a corrupted crack, so they can never play it and get frustrated enough to buy it. That happened to me with McRae 2005. The pirate copy never worked, so I just bought it, and was pleasantly surprised.
I pirate according to quality, normally, and the climate surrounding them. Doom 3, for example, didn't trouble my conscience, because (a) already had it on xbox and felt robbed in that sense, (b) they'd made an unbelievable amount of money on initial hype-sales, which the game didn't really merit, and (c) I was never going to bother buying it anyway.
I've given up trying to find moral lines in all this. I buy when I can, steal the rest. I don't try to excuse this behaviour, it's just the way I do things.
In Point B, are you suggesting that a developer's profits determine the legitimacy of piracy? If so, can you quantify the amount of profits required before piracy is legitimate?
Point C doesn't really make sense to me. You say that you had no plans to buy it, but you spent time and effort to obtain a pirated copy. If you were going to play it anyway, why not spend the money for a legitimate copy?
-monkey
Of course. Doesn't mean that code will hold up though.
You feel sorry for him and other companies, but distribute copies of your games to your friends? and therefore are a pirate. ok...Make your mind up.
Anyway, I dont feel sorry for them as I dont personally know them and admit to pirating in the past for myself. I think the main problem is the people who distribute copies and make them available and those that try to make a profit from them. Kill the big distributors and you will see a huge difference.
But it doesnt look like they are very successful at that and people like the RIAA are giving up and going for the little downloader (user) instead.
I have however made an effort to remove all and any pirate media from my home as im materialistic and must have boxes :) My xbox 360 and PS3 are clean from piracy, however my PC needs a OS and I still have 2 games on there which are not paid for but in the process of buying them sometime soon.
You bring up an interesting point.
I wonder if anyone here who doesn't pirate games, does use a cracked version of windows or (less commonly) OSX?
Does it seem to anyone that using a cracked Operating system is "less wrong" because Microsoft have the market share they do?
For instance, one of my friends won't pirate games, but he's never bought an Operating System in his life - and I don't mean he uses FOSS.
He sees this as acceptable because "Microsoft make enough money out of people" (his words, not mine).
Yes, and it's been done. Incidentally, those are the games I run a cracked version of despite owning a legal copy.
Sure, it'd be nice to live in a perfect world where nobody pirated games, but here's a few points about their in-game check:
+ It was stupid and naive of them to think that someone wouldn't get a pre-release rip out on the net.
+ If they knew there would be a rip on the net, it was stupid and naive of them to assume that a cracker would be good enough to cleanly and completely circumvent their in-game check (Such copy-protection schemes by their very nature aren't intended to be transparent to would-be crackers, after all).
+ If they were going to go to the effort of such an elaborate copy-check tied into the game mechanics then they could have at least included an error message along the lines of "Copy protection check failed, exiting game" instead of crashing silently in a manner that looks exactly like a bug - That would have done a fair bit of damage control on the people who thought the game was just bugged and badly-made.
He said it himself, people are stupid, so why didn't they account for that when they were wasting their time on such an elaborate protection system?
Maybe because 'people' were working on the game?
The effort they spent on putting a such a system into the game may have been better spent making other aspects of the game better, such that people might actually think the game is worth buying.
Companies who use simple copy-protection systems (basic cd-checks, etc) that get the job done of preventing the "copying for a friend" type of piracy should be lauded in my eyes.
Others have gone to great lengths in eroding the rights and convenience of the end-user (StarForce, later versions of SecuRom and the insidious, hideous, disgusting C-Dilla system) but where does it get them?
Nowhere - The systems get cracked soon after release (or even before) and the honest end-user who paid for the game is the one to suffer the hardship, inconvenience and intrusion of privacy (C-Dilla monitoring drive usage and phoning home), while the prat who plays a pirated copy may have a more pleasant, problem-free time with the game.
Though I find the reliance on an active connection irksome, I find systems like Steam to be an almost pleasant copy-protection experience because I gain some advantages as the honest end-user (no disc required to play, streaming updates, cheaper initial game costs) instead of just being treated like criminal dirt.
--
I'm against piracy. I buy albums, I buy movies, I buy games.
I used to download games when I was younger and couldn't afford to buy them, since I thought I may as well play the games and show my appreciation for them, which would be better than not getting to play them at all.
As soon as I gained an income I stopped downloading games and began buying everything I could and haven't looked back since.
The only time I'll download games now is when the games are certifiably Abandonware and can't be bought any more. Buying them on eBay doesn't give any money back to the copyright-holders, so that doesn't count in my eyes.
--
A few years ago I contacted Interplay, asking them if they could tell me where I could buy a first-hand retail copy of Planescape Torment, or perhaps sell it to me themselves, since the game could no longer be bought in stores.
Interplay sent me a brand new, sealed retail copy of the game (including manuals, original box, etc) for free, with a hand-written note along the lines of "Enjoy :)".
I wanted even more to pay them for the game, then.
This is my Envy face:
http://img131.imageshack.us/img131/6831/n2731024701346783241nw1.jpg
Heretic! You cannot replace The Relix, for He is a living incarnation of a deity.
Anywho, I've pirated a couple, such as Sims 2 for my ex, because i'd be damned before actually paying for it, and a few other games on a "try before buy" basis. But I've grown older and wiser, and I actually now the take time to read reviews, and make up my mind about whether it's worth buying, buying when it comes to budget, or not touching with a 12' bargepole.
I don't see why we should be considered *******s for not being able to afford to buy new games all the time, and lest you forget that a thriving 2nd hand market will encourage more games sales because you know that if you hate it, you can get rid of it and not have wasted your money on a product you have to keep ad inifnitum.
It certainly makes me buy more games, and everytime I get stiffed for something like that it makes me less inclined to buy games, despite the fact that I love them dearly.
BANG! AND THE JOB IS DONE!
so surely i cancel out one pirater, where are idiots like me factoring into his equation eh ? :)
other than the fiscal side of piracy, it must be seriously demoralising when you know that literally thousands of people are stealing the thing you've just worked so hard on.
I think that alone would be enough to make me shut up shop.
ps. joe you look scarily like a girl i know, which is mightily worring!
Do you think piracy is encouraging the rise of the MMO? With an MMO developers constantly receive money and its very difficult to pirate.
At the moment I've just started playing Eve Online and I can feel myself being drawn in.
I do crack the games I've bought so I'm not sitting next to something that sounds like a buzzsaw.
One thing that I cant understand is people who say they pirate games just to see what they're like. Only if they like the game, then they'll by it. It just like taking cookies from girl scouts and telling them they can have the cash if the biscuits are any good. Still theft imo.
you say that like its a bad thing. do you not know that girl scouts are the devils recon scouts and must be destroyed at all costs. The only way to destroy a girl scout is by nicking her cookies and then running away :)
This destroys the evil spirit inside the poor little girl the girl scout is possessing she'll be so grateful that you nicked the cookies and freed her that she will stand they crying her eyes out in thanks.
either that or
you'll see her explode in a puff of smoke.
try it and see :)
Same here
In that pic at least, I think it's the hair's fault.
After all, people dont steal your car then come back 2 days later whining you only have a tape player and no spare tyre.
Piracy is going to happen, guaranteed, so why not make the most of it and use it as a marketing tool? Make your games user friendly by making them DRM free, and you'll get good press like Stardock does, hell, you'll even get people buying the game who aren't interested in it in the slightest because they want to support the DRM free stance. Make your games work well right off the bat, and you won't get so many complaints.
I remember when I pirated Stronghold to see what it was like, I found it was buggy as hell, so I uninstalled it and I never decided to play it again, even though all those bugs are probably now fixed and the game works fine. The first impression is the most important, if you make it good you will sell more copies. It doesn't matter if the person who is playing it is playing it legally or illegally, if you leave a poor first impression people will hear about it, and you will lose sales.
If you want more sales, give people a reason to buy the final copy over pirating it (instead of the other way around by loading it with DRM), like only being able to download patches if you have a valid game serial code (using a system like Steam or Stardock Central for patch distribution) or only being able to play online if you have created an account with the registered game (but with multiple aliases for if your little brother wants to play too).
This is pretty basic marketing, I'm surprised he ignored it and then complains that it's everyone else's fault he had to shut down. A design that does work but requires your average user to do things they're uncomfortable about doing, or plain don't know how to, is a failed design.
Actually, it's easily done but harder to copy, it's what copy protection drivers do, basically on a CD/DVD there are extra "sub channels" the two main ones are used by videos for sub-titles/extra audio, but the others are normally left alone and the reader will ignore them, but games have extra "data" placed in there on purpose so to a normal driver it is ignored, but copy protection drivers look at them and ensure the "garbage" is in the correct format.
And the music industry absolutely complains about second-hand shops. They just know there's not a damn thing they can do about it.
Truth be told, I think many would prefer to have their content downloaded than resold second-hand. For all they're concerned, it might as well be a pirated Chinese knock-off copy, since it's a copy of their product that's actually being *sold* and they're not getting anything from it. I can't speak for the industry, but I'd rather nobody get paid than someone who's not me get paid when content I produced is acquired.
QFT, I think you put it perfectly there.
http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/03/06/piracy_sales_charts_revealed/1
Indie website RockPaperShotgun has done a breakdown of the top ten pirated games and the number of downloads for each.
Those numbers are pretty scarily high, especially since it's just for mininova. However we'll never know how many of those were lost sales. Could be most, could be only a few. It also depends on how they worked it out, even with a well seeded torrent, I sometimes struggle to get a quick download of larger files, plus if I'm torrenting I'll only do it at night as it would slow everyone elses' internet down. So that means if their number is just going on adding up leechers per day then it's probably very inaccurate. Still they do say it's not very accurate but I wouldn't be surprised if it were roughly right.
Steam wouldn't let me run it, proclaiming some BS about the Keyserver being down. Only this has continued for like 5 months, and I still can't play the copy I bought.
As for other stuff I've downloaded; I've had problems with Demos before. AKA I've downloaded a demo from some game, and had it work perfectly. Only when I go out and buy myself a copy of the Game, it refuses to work, sometimes even for months before a patch is released that actually fixes the problem.
Yeah I had the problem with Darkstar one, demo worked fine, I thought it was quite fun. Bought the game, it ran like total ****, and the actual full game was so dull, it was basically the demo on repeat. Had I known how the game had turned out I would never have bought it.
Do you get many Girl Scouts selling cookies in Cornwall?:|
I put Never but realised nearly all my Amiga games were pirated. Way back when we lived in Cyprus we couldnt get hold of legit ones so when ever anyone came over with a real game it would get copied and do the rounds. Ive copied music (a few albums) Id never have brought them as I rarely listen to music (other than radio/last.fm etc) but theft is theft.
Those figures from the news article are shocking. Trouble is people will always want something for nothing or less.
As for the second hand market isn't it more of a console thing. Good games must sell well 1st hand long enough to cover dev costs (surely??) as people want to play them. Bad games end up in the 2nd hand aisles quicker and thus (in my head at least) mean the 1st hand sales a low due to being poor or unmarketable game. The developer gos back to the drawing board. Surely it helps to keep the market going, as low sales figures mean the developer improves its next project, and the previous 2nd hand sales, with higher profits for vendors, keep the vendors happy to stock games isnt it win win?
put a 1gb limit on them
that way games wont be distributed
i dont know - i dont bother with torrents etc
i have a life
LAMO, you mean like rapid share does, all be it a 100meg limit. Then you just get stuff like this happening. Check comments 4 & 6, split archive anyone? And thats not even a popular game so think how many file hosting sites will have split archives of AAA games on them.
And you have a life, how much effort do you think it takes to torrent. Once the inital setup of port forwarding, finding decent trackers is done its just a matter of clicking a link, setting a download location and leaving alone.
That's not the answer either, there are games that are less than 1 gig (not a lot of new ones admittedly), but the whole point of P2P is it's good for distributing large files because it doesn't take all that bandwidth from a single server like it would if you downloaded it from rapidshare or fileplanet. It also won't stop stuff like films, TV, music, etc. being pirated.
What I do buy into though, is the online gameplay. Games such as COD4, Sins of a Solar Empire I bought because I want to play online!
I know what I'm doing is wrong and wither or not it affects the publisher is arguable. Piracy is here to stay, and developers need to realise that there product is going to be cracked whatever protection they put on it, so they should probably stop affecting the actual buyers of the game with all the Copy Protection schemes that install system processes etc.
Well, Cornwall, Hollywood, same thing really...
Whenever articles like this come up in the press, I can't help but think of those design studios that have disappeared. I guess each has their own reason for closing but when names like Ion Storm and Troika Games bite the dust, I feel a little bit sad inside.
But, I don't see second-hand shops suddenly stocking their shelves with millions of copies of a given title (or, enough copies to supply the pirate market). I imagine the second-hand market is very small compared to the number of people who pirate. I think it stands to reason that with the supply of second-hand copies exhausted, the would-be pirates would have to spend their money elsewhere and buy a new copy; however, they don't. They just go online and grab a free copy because it costs less (in both dollars and opportunity cost). Regardless, it still stands that when you download a pirated copy of a game, the developer doesn't make any money from an original sale. You are enjoying the fruits of the developer's labor without paying for that privilege.
-monkey
i refuse to buy games that have *** protection that uses device drivers or sercrom (cant run some games due to Alcohol 120%, an Payed copy of Bioshock will not run on my pc) if it can be removed via an No cd i am fine i buy it (C&C4 no cd) but bioshock is part of the installer not even downloaded that game
as i use the Mutiplay part of the games i pay the most of my games as punkbuster or just going online game will not let you due to key
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i norm do try(as well as demos as well) before buy if the game is not intresting no point in spending money on it if i not even going to play it, so its no money lost to the devs any way
also, EA and others, if you're reading this, lower your prices. $100 for a game is ridiculous. unless its really awesome. i have crysis
did he forget that COD4 is a ONLINE GAME? that 10 to 1 ratio simply means that 10 times more people play the game online via the console than computer, simple as that.
Its just not the best game to use as an example since the multiplayer part of the game is the reason you buy it (for most people) and you can't play online without a legit CD KEY.
Bioshock is a good example, but at the same time, the fact that the ratio was LOWER(4-1 vs 10-1) than COD4 is odd considering that its a single player only game, and you would think that it would be pirated MORE than a online only game.
I'm not going to argue that piracy doesn't cause revenue losses. of course it does. BUT the easiest way to fight piracy is to take it away from your average computer user. If we were all still stuck in the usenet ways, a lot less people would be pirating overall.
this is where i see STEAM shining. How fast have any of you seen STEAM only games get hacked? I mean aside from the ones they offer in a retail box, every time ive looked into hacking steam games, its a PITA. STEAM is headed in the right direction to help prevent piracy IMO.
And I have paid for load's of stuff over Steam aswell.
No guy who pirates will ever convince me that there is a reason to steal!
You can always make sure that you make the right decision before spending the money, Check with a friend, ask for a demo, read reviews, ask for an introduction to the game at the retailer, check the official and non official forums for issues with the game, wait until the first patch is released.
There is honestly no reason to pirate.
If you pirate you are the type of person that likes to use an opportunity to get stuff for free, and in that case you see it as the right thing to do, but it does not deter from that fact that you are hurting the industry, stealing someone else's intellectual property with out compensating for it. If you feel a game is too expensive just wait for the bargain bin!
I bought it for Xbox, and completed it. Buying the same game twice would have been...I dunno, I suppose it's the politically correct thing to do, because my way involved stealing, but in the common-sense way, there seemed no point.
Yeah, I think profits determine legitimacy. I feel ok about stealing from large companies - not because I'm against them (au contraire, I love them) but because it won't impact. I don't pirate small games from small companies - except darwinia, and I feel really bad about that, and am going to buy it soon :( No employees are going to be fired or meals sacrificed by my pirating doom 3, whereas stalker, I made a point of buying, because I wanted to support them.
That's the thing, see. It's a gesture of sorts, of approval or disapproval. Just as you can watch a film in the cinema and then give it a low score on IMDb, I pirate a game, and if I don't like it, I don't buy it. A small gesture.
(Okay, THAT was a lame excuse. I apologise.)
It was no effort, really. I enjoy pirating, there's a momentary illusion of comradery when 300 peoples' torrents help you steal a product, and when the work of some cracker makes it possible for you to play it.
[/immorality]
I didn't like the game enough to buy it twice. I was just curious if there was anything in the PC experience that the xbox experience lacked. (answer: yes. So maybe I ought to buy it, now. But playing doom 3 three times? That's like...masochism.)
The point people are trying to make is they're not trying to stealing the game, they're testing it out to see if it's worth buying, the only way that causes a lost sale is if the person pirating the game decides the game is awful and they won't waste their money on it.
It's kind of like a bookshop, they'll usually have an area where you can sit down and read a book to see if you like it. You pick out a book, read a chapter or two, if you like what you've read, you buy it, if you don't, you put it back.
Generally games are pretty good value for the money (at least the good ones are) when compared to movies, DVDs, the symphony (don't laugh, I enjoyed it), concert tickets, ...
Sorry but that wwas a very bad excuse, you can buy it via steam !!!
Yeah I can see that being a problem depending of the hard drive space. You are supposed to be able to re-ask them free redownloads if you need them, and I think you are given them back over time. I can't remember where I read this though so I may be wrong.
But as I get older, I realize exactly what I'm doing. True, I'm a teen and wouldn't of been able to buy the game even if I had wanted to, but it's people with attitudes like my old one (it's free - why pay for it?) that are killing idustries all over. I'm hoping once I get a job soon, I'll be able to buy a copy of XP (running on a pirated one :() and all my favourite games. I can't justify piracy anymore - it's wrong no matter how you slice it.
Within the last 2 months or so though, I've been legit, and I feel better knowing that I'm not supporting the death of the industry anymore.
There are 2 mayor flaws in this woven protection Steinberg is using; 1) without all the protection code, Cubase would have worked 20 times faster and would crash less then now. 2) The protection has always been cracked. Infact it is one of the most 'prestige cracking targets' from crackers around the world. There are only two loosers here, one being Steinberg that still thinks protection works, the second being the users who are working with a slow sometimes crashing expensive program.
One example from my own experience. When I had Cubase VST with a printer dongle. I never could get it to work without crashing. I have contacted steinberg many times. They even send me a new printer dongle. But in the end I had better luck with the cracked version. And with me there where many professional producers around the world, that uses the cracked version instead of their (getting dust on the shelf) original version.
To be honest since a young age I have bcome tired of buying a game on its marketing and also bias reviews only to get it home and realise its a pile of **** (yes EA im looking at you and your rehashes)
Its just way too expensive to be falling into this pit especially when vendors dont allow returns on software. The last game i bought was Frontlines Fuel of War and god i wish i had pirated it but no...i took the risk and i paid the price. I sold it the same night on ebay at a loss even though it was brand new literally.
Iv bought the great games - Call of duty 4, Gears of War, Crysis, The orange box and im waiting for more to come along. If i like a game iv downloaded i will buy it, i have to anyway because the only games im interested in are FPS and RTS games that require cdkeys to play online which is what im always after - the online experience.
I dont play single player games anymore or extremely rarely, they have waaaay too limited appeal yet online play with others is way more gratifying. I played BF2142 for donkeys and im living of Gears of War online even despite its buggy as hell and its a nightmere finding and joining low ping games but i love its gameplay and am very happy i bought it and will do so if the game itself is good.
Single player games are always going to suffer from piracy, developers can counter by allowing online play, throwing in legitimate cdkeys that are needed and a sophisticated ranking system and your guarunteed sales .
Isnt there an easy way to avoid this sort of thing? Force people to pay for accounts? its much harder to pirate WOW because you have a pay for an account, sure u can play on someone elses account but at the end of the day the developer still gets money.....
Now i appriciate that i probably wouldnt be to happy if i had to do this,but i think it would work pretty well
im not necessarily talking about subscriptions im saying make people pay for an account not the disk. Without an account the disk is worthless... like i said i actually dont think i would like this system but i do think it would be more effective than the current system at preventing piracy.
As it is, I thought Bioshock was terrible so I'm not exactly bothered, but I'm not going to buy ANY game that needs to be activated, much less do it through Steam.
I don't condone piracy, and I certainly don't pirate myself (although when I was much younger I did download the odd game) - but that's just a foolish protection system to put in place. If a game picks up it's a pirate copy it should SAY SO. If you have just crashes then users will do what users do - bad mouth the product. If the anti-piracy tech fails for whatever reason and pisses off a legit customer, then that's signing your own death warrant.
Piracy is bad, but I think the way MS handle it is very good. They tell you its a pirate copy, they don't give you nice freebies, but ultimately it does kind of work. This ensures the pirates don't go on rampages on the net, but also will slowly guilt people into getting a legit copy. At least in my opinion :) Of course the protection has been cracked, but those kinds of sales will be lost no matter what. You just need to stop casual 'here borrow my disc' piracy.
I liked Titan Quest :) Had the fancy metal case version, and had no crashes myself.
I will say that I pirate commercial class software. I actually legitametly own a copy of photoshop 6.0 but I pirated up to c2. As an individual I can't afford $200-1000 for commercial software when I just want to fiddle around in say 3d studio max or Reason or Cubase. My rule there is that if it's something I used for a commercial application or as a serious hobby I buy a legit copy, and as mentioned they generally work better.
there's no real excuse but I guess that's how the apple falls, never played TQ
Crytek on Crysis piracy and future releases:
PC Play: How do you estimate the current state of the PC gaming industry? Some say that it's only a matter of time when it's going to finally die-off, the others say that "the big one" is only getting its comeback pace.
Considering Crysis is a PC-exclusive title, what do you think of its market reception and its future? Skeptics would say that it's pretty risky going PC-exclusive with such a high-profile title.
Cevat Yerli: It is certainly. We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe thats the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy. To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.
Now we get consoles ports without even a proper menu ...
Could this just be that Crysis didn't sell to theirestimates, could this be that people didn't buy because its EA publishing (i know i thought twice) could it be that its so damn heavy on hardware (rumours still hurt sales) i could continue but there are dozens of reasons why people may not have bought this game.
Come back in a few years when the current consoles are looking like pooh compared to the PC and we'll see much larger sales in the PC market. Consoles are at their peak in their cycle but will soon start to plummet x360 is already on a budget slope.
I'm not going to start another argument with you impar since your opinion and mine are polar opposites.
The more I think about it, the more I believe people who think downloading it is ok just lack integrity for doing the right thing.
- You are taking something, that you didn't purchase (stealing)
- It doesn't matter if you weren't going to buy it anyway. That argument is like saying, well everyone in Gamestop left the store and turned the camera's off, and I picked up a copy of the Sims 2. Now we all know I'd never buy this game, but since it's there I thought what the hell and grabbed it.
- If you can't afford it? Don't buy it. Only have a $20 budget? Buy a $20 game, no games you want? Don't buy anything, save up that money for a $30 or $40 game.
For the Game companies:
- Demo's. -- doesn't need to relate to the story, but just give a game play demo and make sure it's not choppy. Doesn't need to be long, but just make it entertaining and make it show what the game can offer.
- Not enough $$ for a demo (small game companies) get a video of gameplay, some good screen caps, good descriptions. If you can't afford a demo then the burden is on your to get people to want to buy your game. (not that they should be stealing it, just buying it as oppose to not buying it.)
- Make sure the game is ready when it's released. (Not sure any game has done this for a while, but yeah.)
- Kick hardware companies in the balls to get their act together.
Exactly. In those countries its almost impossible to buy the real thing, even if you wanted to. Although, having said that, games like Crysis and COD4 wouldn't exactly sell well there anyway - they're not interested for the most part, in that type of game.
You are given free tokens to redownload very frequently so usually you will never need them, I just read them that if you do it too often you could run out of tokens, but from what I read on their forums you can get them by just sending an email to confirm that you would like to have some extras ...
The DS is pretty bad too. I purchased an M3 slot 1 card as soon as they were released to get my SCUMM on... But then the full games were just too tantalising. Since the DS has no proper demos and the games can be totally overpriced for what they are, I just cracked. I feel pretty **** about it but then I just try and remember that I play on my DS very rarely and they sell 2 billion of them every week in Japan.
I've definitely felt that for the DS, I can't say that I don't feel the need at times when stuff is just so easy to get, but I am rather proud that at least recently (the last year+) that I've been "sober" =p so to speak.
As far as piracy in foreign countries like or continents (looks at Asia) it's almost impossible to control. I can see why they do it, but I don't suppose it makes it any better.
Pirating your fave games is the #1 most effective way to kill off the genres you like.
I think Steam is great. Of course, there's the issue of their overloaded servers and sometimes slow download speeds, but once the game is up and running, it's amazing. I can access my account anywhere and play my games anywhere with an Internet connection, and never have to worry about breaking or losing discs. I know most companies don't have the ability to do this, but make games cheaper. Orange Box is an extreme, but $50 for 5 acclaimed titles - I'd buy that (and I did, even though I've played through HL2 and HL2e1 before). Compare that with Call of Duty 4. Sure. Great game. But it was universally acknowledged as too short, and it's still like $60. Another great thing is how Valve keeps updating their multiplayer games. TF2 is a great example. New weapons, new maps, new play modes are constantly added. You'd be a fool not to pay $20 for the game to play and get an old buggy version to play on LAN or cracked servers. Also, the ease of getting a game off Steam is amazing. Just buy online and download. No going to the store, lining up, making sure it's in stock. Running around town to find it. It's doing for for games what iTunes did for music. While neither will kill piracy, it will definetly curb it some.
Hong Kong has an interesting way to curb some music/movie piracy. They know it's prevalent, and they know it's unstoppable (every system with a lock will be cracked), so they made it more attractive to buy legit copies by including special bonuses like pamphlets, awesome packaging, extra content etc.
I'm afraid though, that PC gaming is dying. While piracy is to be blamed on people, it's also the companies to blame for not making their games more attractive to buy (because piracy is inevitable). Even I'll admit I'd get games to try out without paying, just because I'm not sure if I want to play them or not (oh, and that because I don't want to spend $60 on a game I won't even be able to sit through). However, having said that, I am fully willing to pay for games I believe I enjoy. I hope companies realize this, and make better, cheaper games, and stop wasting time and money on these convoluted anti-piracy mechanisms (like that proposed periodic phone home thing with limited installs). If anything, antics like that make me want to just pirate the game more and play it with a crack. At least that way, I won't get bothered by it. It's an insult to honest gamers who pay good money for their products.
It's a bit different for games though, counterfit money destroys entire economies if it is left unchecked, they have to stop it, and increasing the anti-counterfeit protection does nothing to the average citizen.
With piracy, it is inevitable, and trying to stop it pisses off the people who buy the game more than it pisses off the pirates. They always find a way around it, the crackers enjoy finding a way around it. As Stardock has shown, no DRM doesn't mean no sales, I really doubt Stardock would have gained many more sales had it put some awful DRM system in place.
Steam isn't the answer either, you can still pirate steam games, it's not hard at all, SecureROM isn't the answer, that was cracked after 7 days. Yeah it gets a bit more complicated to crack it, but they often come with a readme to tell the user exactly how to do it, it's not hard at all. The average
JoeBob is as unlikely to copy a game with no copy protection as the are one with copy protection.Perhaps crackers enjoy the challenge, but using cracks is often quite annoying. Generally less so than dealing with the DRM they're defeating which is a major problem for the publishers, but that's the whole problem.
So long as piracy is as easy as buying a copy of the game, it will exist. So long as DRM exists, cracking a copy (paid for or not) will be as easy as dealing with the DRM. As such, within a certain audience, DRM is actaully fueling piracy (or at least cracking, though they frequently go hand in hand). Some people will never pay, and some people will always pay. No sense worrying about either of those groups.
Unchecked piracy wouldn't destroy the gaming economy, comparing counterfeit money to casual game piracy is apples to oranges, software piracy is essentially left unchecked, even windows activation couldn't stop people pirating it, if an average user wants to, they can quite easily pirate anything they like without too much effort. So long as someone knows they can get software/games for free, they will find out how to do it if they want it for free. DRM is basically a knee high fence, some are a little higher, but they're all easy to climb over.
And damn, I sure was. I'll probably grow up into a well-adjusted member of society and recompense the industry for my ways, or something, provided the police don't confiscate my drives and arrest me first.
Also, an ethical/moral dilemna on culpability: if I feel no guilt, am I guilty?
I have this troubling notion that you can't call someone's actions Wrong if they don't believe their actions are wrong. I mean, if someone doesn't think they're committing a crime, they haven't, surely?
I am sorry to highly disagree with you, getting a crack for any game takes me probably less time than to look for the serial, store it on an email (just in case I lost it), and I do not have to put the DVD in the drive to play the game.
I systematically install cracks for all the games I own so I can play them with a double click ... Many games (including recent ones) had issues with some DVD drives. I recently bought GoW (it was only £10), and the installation is a total nightmare, not only you had to go back to Windows to register a "Games for Windows" account on a lousy website, but the update would crash and launch the ASUS BIOS updater (WTH !!!). After the update it would not recognize anymore the DVD (I had to check the logs to see that). So in the end I had to crack my own legit copy to play it and spent 1 hour total to solve all the issues so I could play the game.
NOTE: I do buy games (just in case you didn't really read my post)
and FYI, i haven't pirated any games in a while
my legit copy of gears of war only worked properly when i cracked it too. Idiotic situation tbh
The worse part is when I asked for help in the official forums and got flamed by somebody who supposed that I was playing the cracked version and that my computer was riddled with spywares ... Very funny when you worked your whole life in IT ...
I am almost at the point where I will only buy blockbusters and steam games in addition to console games ... It's not worth the trouble (IMHO) to buy games on PC to get this kind of support ...
No you're not :D
I misread what he typed : )
Crytek: Piracy ratio is about 20:1, may impact our PC exclusivity
Makes an interesting read:
I think the closest analogy of piracy is the one Bruce offered in the comments: Its like sneaking into a movie. Sure, its not hurting anyone - nobody becomes poorer by virtue of your viewing of the movie - and you are not depriving anyone else of the product. (We must assume the theater is infinite in size and all the seats offer the same view for this analogy to work.) But most people recognize that sneaking in is still wrong.
In the case were dealing with, so many people are sneaking in the fire exit that there is a certain herd comfort to the act.
Huh?
As far as software is concerned you don't pay for the material, you pay for the licence to use that material. Acquiring software/media through accepted legal channels means paying for the right to use or view content in a specific environment. Hence the EULA for software or copyright agreements at the beginning of a movie. Home agreements will usually cover viewing or use of media by other people in your home environment (or neighbours at the window) but will exclude other areas of use, such as rental or public showing.
By not paying for those rights, you use content illegally. The rest is arguing semantics.
In it's nature, it's the same as theft - that being using or procuring something for free. But in reality, it isn't. You aren't causing any loss to any individual or company via the act of piracy; unless of course you download the application from their servers, then crack it, in which case you've cost them bandwidth. Otherwise, how do you define piracy as theft when there is no loss involved?
The best analogy to cut this one is that it's the same thing as photocopying pages from a book, recording something from TV, or ripping a song from the radio. Is there any loss to these three? Maybe in the photocopying if you're not paying for the copies, but otherwise, nil.
The licence agreement (EULA) that you agree to when installing software is a legal document. You're breaking the agreement by not paying for the software or media, which is illegal.
its about treating someone elses property as your own, you dont have to actually take it...
This is provided that the EULA is still provided when the software is downloaded. If it's not, you aren't agreeing to it, therefore it's technically not illegal. But I digress. That's not the point here.
The ideal behind software and media is that you don't own ****. You own a little plastic disk. You can't even say you own a copy. No, some company is so high and mighty to dictate you have the right to use it. So, if I buy a painting then, I have the right to view it? Alas.
I have to head off to work now, where I'll see 3-5 examples of actual theft. As in, where a product is taken, and loss or inconvenience is incurred to the store.
If the software has been modified beyond its original state and is missing its EULA, then the entire package is illegal.
To tell you the truth, I'm not worried about who does and doesn't copy disks. I'm more concerned about publishers not getting sufficient returns and being forced out of the business. I like using my PC as a gaming platform, but it seems like more and more developers are bypassing the PC in favour of consoles and citing piracy as the issue.
Does that mean I can expect a visit from the feds?
I don't even have a permanent optical drive on my main system, so it's not a case of inserting disks each time, it's a case of digging out my usb dvd drive.
Having rights tied to optical media is ridiculous in this day and age.
Now lets get down to the dirty truth. The reason why Titan Quest went downhill was because it was a marginal game in a tight genre. They got exactly what they should have expected for sales. Most people who 'Pirate' games, never had any intention of buying it. I dont want to hear that crap about 'taste-testing' or 'poor demos'. All of you are a very minnute part of the whole 'Piracy Conspiracy" as publishers are whining about. Micheal Fitch is trying to blame the games failure on something other than the cold hard truth. The game was not going to get any more money than what it did. Also, he lost by implemnting such horrid tactics of anti-piracy that it screwed the buying enduser. On top of that, his company spent too much money on customer support for pirated copies.
Lets break this down: The game was not going to sell more copies IF people did not pirate it. People who steal games do it because they can. Plain and simple. There are no morals. If it is that easy, you can bet people will do it. So lets rule them out as a potential for buying the game to begin with. Trust me. They probably sold a hundred TIMES more copies of this game than Quake. Why is that? There were alot fewer computers in peoples homes. I can tell you right now that the people who have never purchased a computer game due to piracy is because they never would have laid the cash for the computer in the first place. They would be spending money on a home stereo or something else. But since piracy became so damn easy (thanks to P2P), more people started getting home computers. Trust me. Most of the people who are part of the Bit-tech community have always had a computer since 8086 days. We have only known days of owning computers. But in recent years more poeple have begun owning computers for the internet. Now it is uncommon to find a household that doesnt own at least one computer. The computer business exploded and now there is 10 times more people who surf the net. And what do these people find? Torrent and P2P! They never cared about getting a high-end video card or dual core. All they wanted was to surf porn and blog. But you throw free s**t (although illegal) in thier face, guess what? They are going to take it. When was the last time you found a 20 dollar bill on the ground and made even the slightest attempt at finding the owner? It would be rediculous to do so. Send out fliers or an add? Wait there for hours and see if someone approaches you "have you seen a twenty on the ground here?". Its ludicrous. So the people who rampantly pirate games never had any intention of purchasing it to begin with. They are not avid gamers who tweak systems and try to make the game work regardless of quality. 5 to 1. I am willing to bet 4 would never have bought the game if there was a protection that worked in the first place. Lets be real here. One thing the publishers never tell you is what the market should have beared in the first place. I want to see the numbers like so:
From the early 80's to now, what is the percentage of computer owners to games purchased. Now, project that to today. Lets assume that a trend has been established through the 30 years of the home computer. Now, compare that trend to what the publishers say they have lost due to piracy. I would bet my left nut it goes something like this:
"Since the mid 80's to today, the actual percentage of computer users to PC games sales is 30%. Meaning that only 3 out of 10 poeple who own a computer actually buys a game since the dawn of PC gaming. The other 70% use thier computers for internet or professional service at home. This trend has been steady until the late 90's (dawn of P2P Napster and clones). Sales have dropped to 20%. It is now 2008. Sales are now 15%. But the percentage of computer owners has increased by 10 times since the late 90s. Also, average number of games released per year has grown by ten times. Gaming now has 'geners' There are people who only play FPS. There are others who only play MMORPG. So sales dropped to 15%, of what is now ten times more of a user base than what could have been projected. Realistically, game sales ahve increased by %150."
People buy computers for the internet more than 'just games'. It is bull**** to say that the projection should follow how many available people there are to sell to, rahter than the average percentage of people who purchase PC for games to begin with.
The second thing this company did wrong was ever attempt anti-piracy tactics. It is so annoying that these publishers even once imagine that anti-piracy tactics work at all. Fitch screwed the pooch by incorporating that crap into the game. I understand that the little leprechans who sell anti-piracy schemes to publishers (publishers dont have time to code this crap themselves, they actually buy it from other companies) kept wispering statistics into Fitch's ear "if you make it hard for the pirates, a few more will buy the game instead, he he". Fitch knew the game would get priated. The only reason to institute these protections is to garner a small amount more from people who would rather lay down cash for a little less hastle. That was his motivation. But what ended up happening instead? In his own friggin words: It hurt the end user who actually bought the game. I have two purchased copies of Half-life 2. I would give Valve another $100 if they could get rid of Steam as a required part of the game. I also like Steam for playing Counter-strike. As a consumer, I feel that having this damn utility running on my computer constantly talking to the Steam database is slap in the face. It is a way of saying that I cannot be trusted and owning this software comes at a price, a virtual doggie-collar to enjoy my most favorite game. ***holes. If Fitch put away the damn protections all together, he would have been better off. He would have saved the money paying employees/other companies of wasting time to implement the protections (that do no good anyway) and he would have gotten better reviews and first impressions.
Third: If the protections were never coded in, he would not have lost so much money on customer support. He would not have to service the supposed '5 to 1' people who stole the game as he puts it if the 'ripped' version was no different than the real one. Yet another executive decision he made.....wrong.
By now, if your still reading this rant you are thinkning I am a supporter of piracy. Nope. Stealing is stealing. There once was a time where only the elite knew anything about copying and downloading. Napster killed all of that. The term Piracy did not exist until P2P became public and the media money makers began to notice. Thier sales never went down mind you. But upon hearing that computer users could actually listen to music without giving $25 per CD to them, well that just put a needle in thier rear. Now, there are millions being spent on fast acting legislation to 'protect' music and video industry profits rather than on health-care, unemployment, and school systems.
I get pissed about hypocracy. Fitch made bad decisions because he felt the need to 'protect' what he thought was his 'piece of the pie'. If he had just ignored the downloaders, he himself with his own satements would have justified his companies success. He got bad first impressions from buggy ripped versions and game crashes linked to protection schemes. He also spent too much time supporting his own buggy software (buggy from the ripped version). He should have simply put a serial number on each disc. Customer service provided by that serial number. The serial number is not even used to install the game. It is just there for customer service. Fitch would have spent 5 times less on support (in his own words) and would have been the simplest of things to implement. Idiot.
One final note: I am an avid gamer. I play FPS games online. I try to invest in decent hardware frequently enough to keep pace with the hardware race (I cant afford $1000 on video hardware, I get the $200 on sale and play yester-months games). Most of my friends own PCs. They also own consoles. When we get together, we play on the console. When we go home, I am the only one who plays CounterStrike till 1AM. They all watch movies or work on thier cars or what-not. So, saying that a game sells 10-to1 on consoles vs PCs is a statistic that 80% of poeple playing a game pirated it is such a load of crap. I cannot exactly say why consoles are more popular for the average person, but they are. I am one of the 10% who preffer the PC over the console so I cannot give a good perspective as to why. It just is.
I very occasionally pirate games, and I try to have morals about it. I pirated one game this year and I owuld have bought it in a heartbeat however the developers decided to double the price of the game for no good reason. I choose to vote with my cash and not support that game.
I also have a habit of pirating games so I can play them when they are released then I buy them 6 months later when they get the local release. Im not giving excuses just explanations. If all things where equal I would gladly buy all my games.
Edit: To dig my grave deeper I did used to pirate old console games but since the virtual console came along Ive had no need to. Again with arguably fair and easy to accses channels I have to problem with buying games.
Some good points there but the word 'piracy' and 'pirates' to denote anyone copying movies, music and games has only been used by the media since when you said but before that (all the way back to the 1970's) the word 'piracy' and 'pirates' when talking about copying was referring to the people making money from selling copies and not the people buying the copies.
I was watching a re-run of Countdown (1970's music show from Australia) where they had a segment on pirating music cassettes and records and all the attempts to stop it along with the claims that piracy would be stopped and that it meant the consumer had to 'pay a little extra to be protected from illegal copies that may not have the same quality as the original', well the cost sure did go up but so did the amount of piracy.
People that prefer consoles over PC do so for 1 reason that was stated by a mate of mine when I asked why he bought an Xbox360 instead of a better PC than the old Pentium 3 he has:
He didn't want the hassle of learning about parts selection, selecting parts, building it, updating software and drivers or updating hardware to keep up with the latest games, the console is easier and he doesn't need the latest hardware to play games on it is what he said.
I did try and point out the obvious, he could ask me about what hardware to get or to build it for him, there are more games available on PC and they are better quality, you don't need the latest hardware unless you want bigger epeen or want to run every game on the highest resolution, frame rate and all settings on full and that the Xbox360 he has is only being run at 720 x 576i as he has no HDTV whereas the PC would run at a resolution of at least 1024 x 768p (he has a 17" monitor) and even if he had all game settings on low it would still be far better than the Xbox360 graphics he is getting, there are more online players for PC games, PC's last longer than the Xbox360 (never seen a PC RROD), he could use it for internet and watch Youtube video's at their proper frame rate instead of the slideshow he gets now(<5 fps).
He still insisted that the Xbox360 was better even though it was making strange noises, several months later he got sick of it not reading disks (just out of warranty) and went and bought a new Xbox360 Elite saying it is better and the problems have been fixed, imagine the look on his face the other week when I told him about the reports on Bit-Tech about the Xbox360 Elite still having the RROD problem.
He has spent over AU$1500 on both the consoles and even more just on games, he could have bought a decent gaming PC for AU$1500 and could have bought games for a bit cheaper than what you pay for console games or had more choice in the second hand game market.
He could have bought a good PC for the AU$700 he recently spent on buying the Xbox360 Elite.
If I'd have bought it, I have it.
If I wouldn't have bought it... I'd download it.
No company is losing out from me. Quite the opposite. I can afford to have more than one console if I pirate some games.
To be honest I feel good about the fact that I now buy games instead of downloading them :). The reason why i kept the old games is because well... I keep everything. I still have emails from 2000 and if my hard drive wouldn't have died in 2003, I would have all my msn received files for the past 8 years haha
My previous post wasn't really well constructed at all (like most of my post unfortunately...not that i don't try :D)
Games I can remember pirating
WiC (played once, I cant kill americans so not playing it any more :) )
SupCom
Dungeon Siege 2 (what Im playing at the mo!!!)
Far Cry (I pirated this after I bought it, as I broke the disks)
CM08
Lords of Chaos (are emulators pirating?)
Of these, games I payed for
SupCom
Far Cry
CM08
Stuff I play/ed without 'try before you buy'
medieval total accountancy
rome total accountancy
medieval 2 total accountancy
D3
Bioshock
EQ2
CMXX (up to about 06)
Pirates
Civ (pretty much all of them)
Dungeon Siege (I love them, shut up....)
Probably one or 2 more that I have forgotten.
Absolutley every game on my PC is cracked so that I dont have to spend 5 mins hunting round the living room for the fecking disks whenever I fancy a quick blast. I actually refuse to buy I game if it will require me to insert disks each time.
does that makes it ok? probably not
Console piracy would be more widespread if it was as easy as PC piracy. Remember the dreamcast?
Sad
On the practical side, I'm glad I pirated bioshock, because it gets boring after an hour.
/Delete.
/Save some money.
Why should I pay for something that doesn't work right?
Its like buying a pizza and some of the toppings are rotten. you can take back the pizza but you can take back poor software.
i'm not saying that one should pirate software but its tempting when you buy something and it doesn't work.
Today, i would never risk getting my ps3 or wii modded, and i already have the games i want to play. I find the best way for gaming is to rent it, and if it's good, then go buy it. I used to waste a lot of money just buying games without reading reviews or trying them out. Its the best way, as i thought assassins creed was great (played at a friends house) and bought it, but after a couple of hours i got sick of it. I coulda saved like 60 bucks if i had rented it...
But sometimes I'm forced to pay in order for online to work
Anyone else considering returning to the Dark Side because of DRMed games?
It is getting increasingly difficult to justify paying for games, though not just because of DRM. Fortunatly I have yet to have problems with DRM, but that's because I buy mostly Valve games that run over Steam.
There was a time when I downloaded like nobody's business. But when I found that these 7GB .iso's and annoying .rar were never actually getting played, only clogging up HDD space, I stopped and deleted them all. Besides, most game torrents have XX seeders, and XXXXXXXX leechers....
I believe the term is 'growing up'.
These days, I have little time for gaming, so I pick my games carefully, and buy them from GAME or Gamestation. (<- It is possible to mention 'game' too many times in a sentence :p). I just prefer the solidarity of a game which is guaranteed to work, in beautifully printed disks and packaging, and instruction manuals, and the mental satisfaction that perhaps the creators of this game benefited from my purchase, and can make some more.
And how do I know which games to buy? Well, COD4, I bought after playing the demo. Spore, I bought after playing on a friend's. And most other stuff, I wait until Joe gives his verdict ;) (Or I go on IGN or Gamespot :p)
I must admit though, I have downloaded a lot of ROMS over the years, though I suppose that isn't so bad since the games are out of production and if I were to buy them second hand, it wouldn't be of any profit to the creator...
Can anyone recommend a good NES frontend?
1) Spore - I downloaded, deleted after less than a day.
2) Stalker Clear Sky - Downloaded, the MAIN QUEST! broke just a couple of hours in to the game and I couldn't continue. That was with the latest patch. Deleted and never looked back.
3) Mass Effect - I played it one evening. It was OK but it's just not really my kind of thing. Several weeks went by and I actually forgot I had it installed and I got carried away playing some other games. I realised I forgot the story too so I just deleted it.
4) World of Goo - played it for 10 minutes and absolutely loved it. Bought it online. Kept playing it till it arrived, then deleted it and I installed the one I bought and started again from scratch. Well worth it.
5) Crysis Warhead - I read reviews and just bought it right away because I loved the first game, and everyone online said it is more of the same but better in a way. So I knew I would like it, and it was cheap.
6) Flatout Ultimate Carnage - one of the best games ever. I loved Flatout2 so I just wanted to see that they hadn't done anything silly. It was great so I played the downloaded version on the Friday night and I bought the game from a shop on the Saturday.
So basically out of 6 games, I bought 3, and the other 3 I tried, but I would never buy them, and it was nice that I could check before I wasted my money on them. I am dead against piracy because if you enjoy something that people worked hard and invested money in making, then it's only fair that you pay your tiny share. So I like to be fair and that's why I buy everything I play for more than a few hours or whatever. It also helps that I can get things so cheap from places like Play.com, and I also have a shop just 5 minutes from where I live that sells games, so I can drive there and pick it up immediately. It is a bit more expensive than buying online but if I am desperate for something, that wins every time because once I decide I want it, I can drive to the shop and have it installed on my PC within about half an hour. Usually I just buy from Play or Amazon though.
p.s: I have over 80 games in my collection :) Imagine how big that would be if I bought ones I didn't like :O and how much money I would have wasted.
I only pirate when there's no demo available, or i cant get the game through usual means.
BUT THE CAR COMPANIES LET YOU SELL YOUR CAR! ;)
And more importantly its your bloody car!
Wouldn't I?
No you wouldn't
Well either the question is stupid, or the question is asking "if you could, you wouldn't pirate a car". So either way my answer in the form of another question is on equal footing with the original question.
Lovin' it.
needless to say my pirating days are over (ive hung the cutlass over the fire YARRRRRR)
Were you really, or did you just pay up to one of those scam companies demanding money?
nope this was real, my solicitor advised i pay it rather than get dragged to the high court
You don't go to the high court for civil matters, all you needed to do was send them an angry letter back telling them to kindly **** off as they don't actually have any real proof that you personally downloaded the game. I had a similar letter through, we ignored it, and had no more hassle (although they're now taking people to court who do that).
No, but I'm seriously considering not buying RA3, even if it does have Tim Curry in it.
no it wasn't
i worked in the law industry for four years and therefore have plenty of solicitor friends, a couple of people looked at this for me and they all agreed to just pay it and be done with the matter
remember this was a PRE-RELEASE game, and thats the premise they stuffed me on.
atari are doing this quite a lot now so if you do download games just be careful
However the amount of xbox 360 games available to pirate seems to greatly outweigh pc titles and usually have greater numbers of seeders/leaches and the xbox 360 games are always up on the torrent sites before the PC games even when they have the same release dates.
So looking at this how can the developers justify not developing for PC using the piracy argument??
If they code it for PC, they have to come up with the anti-piracy code and dev also.
If they make console games, they dont have to invest time into the anti-piracy code since it is built into the hardware.
What they are really saying is they can get more money since thats what they really care about. I dont mean to say that that should not be thier goal. But it is starting to annoy me that developers view the numbers as "what we believe we deserve" vs "OMG, look how good we did!". Valve never bitched about what they got for HL 1.
Or you just download the torrent to see if it works on your PC. If so, you go and buy it. If not, then delete the bugger and be done with it. AFAIK, demo's won't be as strenuous on your system as the full game...
Games are to ****ing exspensive, yeah he could sell 100K more copies for increased profit or...
HE COULD SELL 1,000,000 MORE COPIES IF HE WOULD SLASH THE PRICE IN HALF!!! this is corporate whiny greed all over again. Why does Mcdonalds sell more with every passing year? Because they cut prices, it pretty simple buisness strategy. It's like if Bit-tech tried to subscribe me to their news, I wouldn't f'n read it or I'd find some otherway of getting it, god knows how many adds they've added. On that note, if you ever do those adds where you hover over words and little adverts pop up, I will never read this site again. With that in mind, I love this site!
Anyways there's also DRM and tech support:
Punkbuster and gamercomereade have ruined more than one game for me and EA wont even post a ****ing phone number on their website! I have to scroll through a useless faq before they'll let me send an email, of course I have to be a member to do this also.
Then you get to Valve.. steam is great and all but they absolutely will not help people who've been hacked, they absolutely wont. It's happended to several friends of mine, and all of them have had to re-buy their boxed games, which they offered as proof of purchase, but no "**** them" valve says.
However, this is not first time I encountered situation like this - friend gave to my brother a game called Boiling Point some time ago because he couldn't play it(weak PC). It's starforce protected game - I remember as my brother had to reboot his PC to finish installation of starforce copy protection software. After reboot it took hours and soon his dvd drive was absolutely unable to read anything - blank discs. At that time I blamed my brother for killing dvd drive. I think I shall apologize to my brother and point my finger at someone else...
Poor dvd drives. May your lasers shine a heavenly light and your motors spin forever in heaven, we miss you...
I'm moving towards the same weird middle ground that most people seem to be in. I'm not very proud of piracy and feel there's something wrong with it, but I also loathe DRM and will pirate to avoid it.
Here is my solution, and I know it would require a lot of work from developers and video card developers, and would not work 100% of the time. but anyway,
Have the game developers send the crack information to the video card makers. when new drivers come out, and people update with them(maybe forced updating), have the drivers check the games for evidence of the crack. if the crack is found. the card sets on fire and kills the user.
Ok maybe not the last part, but it could refuse to display, or force the minimum resolution to show while the game is running.
again, it would be a lot of work for the people involved, and if someone doesn't update the video card drivers(again, maybe forced updating?) it wont work either. but its a better solution than drm as it would not hurt the people who pay for games.
flame away if you dont like it.
As for pirating games, I don't, I even went out and bought another copy of dawn of war after I lost the serial key.
The only game i have pirated before was serious sam, lets be honest, there is no way I'm going to pay for that game, I'v only played it a few times.
I just wanted your thoughts the whole movie thing.
EDIT: i know the movie thing is pirating but i just wanted your thoughts on that.
It also wouldn't work. See: HDCP.
confused, what about hdcp?
why would you stop buying video cards? no card, no games. unless you like freecell.
its not like it would ever effect someone who legally buys games. what I hate now is that games are coming out with limited installs. I know that when you break it down, it should never have an effect on the average user. but it still bothers me. a simple check when the game starts for a known crack wouldn't take a measurable amount of time. It would only hurt the people who pirate games.
And the reason I picked video drivers is because eventually, you have to update them. try going a year without updating your video drivers. sure you could pirate a game, not update, play for a while, then update. and then you cant play the older games. unless you are actually willing to go through the trouble of uninstalling your drivers, rolling back to an older version, and then playing the game again. only to have to update again to play newer games.
It makes a lot of hassle for people who download games, but none for people who dont.
and yes there would be other troubles, and maybe there are better ways to do it. but really I think its a sound idea. The basic idea here is to find something that people do, on a regular basis, and use it to combat piracy.
There's better way to fight piracy than plaguing games with DRM, product activations or killing DVD drives. In fact, some of these protection methods encourages piracy or decreases sales. If only some publishers offered better prices. Only fanboys are buying their favourite games for high prices. After 3 months most of the fanboys have their game bought and finished while the rest is waiting for price to drop to reasonable level. And there are people who pirate the game but "legalize" it once the price has dropped.
For example - I'm still waiting for EA to drop prices of Crysis in my country. 66$ is far too much for me to buy it(checked several sources, this is the lowest price). 25$ would be OK for me. On the other hand I wouldn't mind spending 75$ on special edition of Oblivion or Fallout 3, since these games are very big with plenty of replayability and different gamming experiences.
Some publishers understand this - like CD Projekt. Some do not(or don't want)
Or maybe developers should release alpha version of their game so that pirates enjoy plenty of BSoDs, crashes, problems...at least they would help to test it :D
My idea would get rid of the current forms of drm/product activations.
Again, I am suggesting that what they should do to fight piracy is to use a system that would never have an effect on someone who bought the game.
And if the game exe is altered, thats what my idea would look for. if something else is altered, that would be looked for instead.
It takes little effort to figure out what the crack does to a game to let it run. If that information is passed on to video card driver makers, then they can input that information into the drivers to instruct the card not to run. Like I said before, a black screen, force the min resolution, etc.
Again this wouldn't have to be video card drivers. Maybe microsoft could put it out with their security patches. but have it embedded within so that you can't pick one or the other. that way if you want your pc safe from becoming a bot/infected/whatever, you have to update it.
And if the people who release cracks for games make a new one, then its just a simple matter of taking that crack, putting it in the next set of drivers/updates, and so on.
The point here is to make it a hassle to pirate games. Its too easy right now which is a big reason why people do it. If it becomes annoying enough, people will take the easier road and just buy the game.
(x) technical () legislative (x) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting piracy. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
(x) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from nVidia/AMD
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
(x) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for games
(x) Legal back legislation of foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
(x) Unpopularity of weird new drm
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
(x) Eternal arms race involved in all drm approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
(x) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with EA
(x) Dishonesty on the part of companies themselves
(x) Bandwidth costs that are escalated by pushing down patches
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical (hdcp)
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Blacklists suck
(x) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
(x) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
(x) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. :D
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
Sorry had to be done. :p
In all seriousness, GFX card manufacturers have absolutely no interest in combating piracy it doesn't affect their business and one might argue it benefits them. So why should they be involved.
Next, you're running a pirate game you know the next update might break the crack, two options update/don't update do you honestly think folk are stupid? Course not they'll wait a week for the new crack to get round the latest patch and off we go again, are we seeing the circle? Plus what does MS care, its windows dept is separate from its games dept as it should remain else it risks getting in more trouble from the regulators.
Also hardware based drm, basically breaking the system before the user gets to see it for example not allowing a picture to be displayed because you detect some black listed software is implemented in hdcp and has failed there. Next your black list is subject to failure same as any other, how would you feel if your new game was broken because your burning software was some how black listed.
Need i go on?
Jim Gordon: What about escalation?
Batman: Escalation?
Jim Gordon: We start carrying semi-automatics, they buy automatics. We start wearing Kevlar, they buy armor-piercing rounds.
Batman: And?
I guess they have to keep trying! :D
Yes, that sums up how I feel about piracy. It's not agreeable, but it's totally inevitable. If you keep trying to eradicate it everything just gets worse for everyone (read: DRM). What to do? Well, they're obliged to keep trying to defend their intellectual property, of course, and authorities are obliged to keep trying to enforce the law, but it's all for naught really. It's an insoluble problem if you look at it pragmatically, which makes all this moral posturing redundant.
Instead, the software companies make better software, and this will in turn reward them with more sales. Most people who have the intention of purchasing games will eventually purchase software they feel 'earned thier money'.
As a side-note, the software should be registerable: Each game/program comes with a unique serial number. This serial number is only used to register your name with the software company for the sole purpose of customer support if ever needed. No registration, no customer support. The software companies save money on support also.
You know, I would be willing to bet that if there was ever a piece of software that was completely 'unhackable', it would fail miserably at making a profit. At least hacked software benefits from word-of-mouth advertising (arguably the best advertising possible).
It won't affect sales, it's about quality. Even then - hardcore pirates wouldn't buy it anyway. Defi