Origin User Base Expands

[CHHš Aethon]

If they come out with enough spaceflight/vehicular stuff to keep me interested, I will likely play SWTOR, simply because the Origin program itself is never installed for that game.  It originally was going to require Origin to install AND play the game, but the people on the Bioware forums raised holy hell over it, so Bioware got EA to back down.

Too bad this is not happening on the Mass Effect part of their forums... <_<

[~SJ~ Griffin]

I've been reading through all these posts lately about how much EA sucks and whatnot. But if I could just speak of my personal experience for a moment, when MWLL went Crysis Wars-only, (.3 .4?) I quickly downloaded Crysis Wars off Steam. However, as some here would remember, there was some critical bug inherent with the Steam version where the CD key needed for online play was invalid. I tried for hours to contact Steam with no luck at all, all I received was an automated email saying to "double-check" I was typing the CD key in properly. So I decided to try EA. Within one to two minutes I was on the phone with a EA rep who quickly provided me with a valid CD key and I was on my way to enjoying MWLL no questions asked.

I realize this is a personal experience, and was prior to Origin, but I have say even though EA has done some absolute bullcrap things in the past, they aren't entirely bad. And opting out of these services and then pirating the game will only make matters worse. I mean, you all know the companies do these things because PC gaming suffers so badly from pirating.

[=KoS= Saber15]

I've been reading through all these posts lately about how much EA sucks and whatnot. But if I could just speak of my personal experience for a moment, when MWLL went Crysis Wars-only, (.3 .4?) I quickly downloaded Crysis Wars off Steam. However, as some here would remember, there was some critical bug inherent with the Steam version where the CD key needed for online play was invalid. I tried for hours to contact Steam with no luck at all, all I received was an automated email saying to "double-check" I was typing the CD key in properly. So I decided to try EA. Within one to two minutes I was on the phone with a EA rep who quickly provided me with a valid CD key and I was on my way to enjoying MWLL no questions asked.

I realize this is a personal experience, and was prior to Origin, but I have say even though EA has done some absolute bullcrap things in the past, they aren't entirely bad. And opting out of these services and then pirating the game will only make matters worse. I mean, you all know the companies do these things because PC gaming suffers so badly from pirating.

EA's support is completely hit-or-miss. I got instant help once, and the next time I had "John" from Bangladesh trying to help me (in broken English) on some issue with BF2's CD-key; he didn't help very much, because I still had the issue after he said it was fixed. 

STEAM's support is unbelievably slow from what I've heard (upwards of a week to respond), but usually helpful with an actual human responding.

[Bloodycrow]

More like; Origin Looser Base Expands

[Mitchpate]

I've been reading through all these posts lately about how much EA sucks and whatnot. But if I could just speak of my personal experience for a moment, when MWLL went Crysis Wars-only, (.3 .4?) I quickly downloaded Crysis Wars off Steam. However, as some here would remember, there was some critical bug inherent with the Steam version where the CD key needed for online play was invalid. I tried for hours to contact Steam with no luck at all, all I received was an automated email saying to "double-check" I was typing the CD key in properly. So I decided to try EA. Within one to two minutes I was on the phone with a EA rep who quickly provided me with a valid CD key and I was on my way to enjoying MWLL no questions asked.

You got extremely lucky.  I've never had a pleasant experience with EA's support, using email or phone.  The email always produces an automated reply that has nothing to do with my problem and the phone support is always an indian.

And Saber is correct, Steam virtually always contacts you with a personalized response where a human being actually knowledgable about the program has put more than 5 seconds into diagnosing it.  That's why their support takes so long.  It can vary from 12 hours to 2 weeks, depending on the complexity of the problem and the game involved.  An automated reply is generated whenever you submit a support ticket and is meant to try to provide solutions to the most common problems associated with your ticket.

If you look at the Steam message board you'll notice a recurring problem with EA serial keys and Steam.  EA habitually issues Steam keys that don't work.  This isn't really Steam's fault as they've done it to other digital distributors as well.  Considering Steam has hundreds of games with serial keys and the only publisher they have consistent issues with is EA, where the blame lies is pretty clear.

I mean, you all know the companies do these things because PC gaming suffers so badly from pirating.

This isn't about pirating, it's about revenue and control.  Digital distribution takes the physical copy of the game away from the consumer and forces them to use their service if they want to actually play the game.  Once they're able to maintain ownership of the game after selling it to you, they effectively control every aspect of that game and how you use it.  If they release expansions or DLC, they control the cost.  Walmart can't heavily discount it on a Black Friday because they can't sell it.  Same goes for all the other retailers.  You're permanently locked into using the game and buying expansions on their terms.

Btw, software piracy helps much more than hurts.  How many people do you think would be using Photoshop today had they not used it for free at some point in their life?  The truth is people who pirate rarely would have purchased the software anyway.  People don't just go out and buy software and games anymore.  Well, most don't.  Where a console user can buy a game and then re-sell it, we're stuck with it.  This is what makes Valve's approach much more effective than any anti-piracy measure.  They claim if you make a game that's worth a damn people will happily purchase it rather than pirate.  Their sales figures and profit margins support the idea which is why even with one of the easiest copyright protections to crack they don't care about fixing it.

[Bloodycrow]

This isn't about pirating, it's about revenue and control.  Digital distribution takes the physical copy of the game away from the consumer and forces them to use their service if they want to actually play the game.  Once they're able to maintain ownership of the game after selling it to you, they effectively control every aspect of that game and how you use it.  If they release expansions or DLC, they control the cost.  Walmart can't heavily discount it on a Black Friday because they can't sell it.  Same goes for all the other retailers.  You're permanently locked into using the game and buying expansions on their terms.

Agree. Also see; online pass codes.

[Askis]

Btw, software piracy helps much more than hurts.  How many people do you think would be using Photoshop today had they not used it for free at some point in their life?

There was a rather funny instance of something similar some time ago, VRay, a quite expensive renderer available for most 3D Programs and generally thought to be one of if not the best one, ramped up their anti-piracy measures for a new version by improving the dongle encryption or some such, and the crack took ages to be released.
In that time, tutorials on how to achieve similar results with Mental Ray (which comes free with at least 3Ds Max, maybe other programs) got released by the bucket load.
When the next version of VRay came out, it was cracked in about a week.

Coincidence? I highly doubt it^^

[~SJ~ Griffin]

I mean, you all know the companies do these things because PC gaming suffers so badly from pirating.

Btw, software piracy helps much more than hurts.  How many people do you think would be using Photoshop today had they not used it for free at some point in their life?  The truth is people who pirate rarely would have purchased the software anyway.  People don't just go out and buy software and games anymore.  Well, most don't.  Where a console user can buy a game and then re-sell it, we're stuck with it.  This is what makes Valve's approach much more effective than any anti-piracy measure.  They claim if you make a game that's worth a damn people will happily purchase it rather than pirate.  Their sales figures and profit margins support the idea which is why even with one of the easiest copyright protections to crack they don't care about fixing it.

In my opinion, this is a very wrong way to view piracy, specifically with the PC and gaming. I would recommend reading this article: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

It was first written in 2007-08, but the author has continually updated it with new info. Just a snippet from the very long article:

Update: For 2009, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam, demonstrating that the most popular game of 2009 was also the most pirated, and more importantly, that the actual number of downloads for the most popular game is now almost three times as high as in 2008, signalling the rampant growth of piracy. It is also interesting to note that while COD:MW2 sold around 300,000 copies on PC and had 4.1 million pirated downloads, the console version sold in excess of 6 million copies during the same period according to this article, and yet had a fraction of the number of pirated downloads at around 970,000.

For me, if I was a developer, those numbers alone would make me swear off any development for the PC. When we pirate games/software, we scare developers away from the PC and they then make their games for consoles. Granted, there are many things developers could do to make PC gaming a more "user-friendly" experience, but simply going and downloading the game illegally is the wrong way to fix it. The author of the article above tackles many urban myths about pirating such as only games with intrusive DRMs are pirated, MS and sony just pay developers to make games only for xbox/ps3, etc. In addition he looks at the issue from the side of the pirates as well. Its a very good read if you have the time to read the whole thing.

Another great example

I've saved an excellent example for last. As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%. This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%. Regardless of the precise level of piracy, the key point to consider is that World of Goo addresses every single item on the checklist of excuses which people usually present for pirating games - yet it is still being pirated quite heavily.

Update: Just to show that World of Goo wasn't an isolated case, there is yet another example of the irrelevance of DRM, big greedy companies and high prices to piracy. The independent game Machinarium, released by a small Czech developer and priced at $20 with no DRM also has the dubious honor of a 90% piracy rate.

[=KoS= Saber15]

Update: For 2009, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam, demonstrating that the most popular game of 2009 was also the most pirated, and more importantly, that the actual number of downloads for the most popular game is now almost three times as high as in 2008, signalling the rampant growth of piracy. It is also interesting to note that while COD:MW2 sold around 300,000 copies on PC and had 4.1 million pirated downloads, the console version sold in excess of 6 million copies during the same period according to this article, and yet had a fraction of the number of pirated downloads at around 970,000.

For me, if I was a developer, those numbers alone would make me swear off any development for the PC. When we pirate games/software, we scare developers away from the PC and they then make their games for consoles. Granted, there are many things developers could do to make PC gaming a more "user-friendly" experience, but simply going and downloading the game illegally is the wrong way to fix it. The author of the article above tackles many urban myths about pirating such as only games with intrusive DRMs are pirated, MS and sony just pay developers to make games only for xbox/ps3, etc. In addition he looks at the issue from the side of the pirates as well. Its a very good read if you have the time to read the whole thing.

I think one of the #1 reasons why most people pirate Modern Warfare is because they try to nickle-and-dime you to death with map packs, and the singleplayer lasts ~4 hours.

[Mitchpate]

Update: For 2009, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam, demonstrating that the most popular game of 2009 was also the most pirated, and more importantly, that the actual number of downloads for the most popular game is now almost three times as high as in 2008, signalling the rampant growth of piracy. It is also interesting to note that while COD:MW2 sold around 300,000 copies on PC and had 4.1 million pirated downloads, the console version sold in excess of 6 million copies during the same period according to this article, and yet had a fraction of the number of pirated downloads at around 970,000.

What that article conveniently ignores is the massive boycott of the game that was in effect.  Infinity Ward removed dedicated server support, switched to playerhosting (double the ping), removed access to the console, removed lean, removed custom maps, cut the max players from 64 to 18, disabled modding, removed game recording, removed kick/ban control, removed the ability to pick where and who you played, granted hosts a ping advantage, and charged for DLC.  So basically they gutted the game, slapped a higher price tag on it, and told PC gamers to get over it.  They did, in their own way.  Holding up a game that was loathed by a very large percentage of the prequel's fanbase as an example of rampant piracy isn't just comparing apples to oranges, it destroys your credibility as an industry analyst.

For me, if I was a developer, those numbers alone would make me swear off any development for the PC. When we pirate games/software, we scare developers away from the PC and they then make their games for consoles.

Ten years ago, maybe, but in today's world this is simply wrong.  They're ALREADY developed primarily for consoles and then ported to PC, almost as an after-thought.  The ported copies often contain errors, bugs, and random issues that cause endless headaches for PC gamers and only makes the decision of whether to buy or pirate easier.  A history of endlessly charging for extra maps and expansions hurts as well.  For example, Valve's piracy numbers are much lower than the industry average and they contain no DRM.  They manage that by developing PC games with the PC market in mind, making those games damn good, and then supporting them long after sequels are released.  They also have steep discounts for pre-ordering.

I've saved an excellent example for last. As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%. This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%. Regardless of the precise level of piracy, the key point to consider is that World of Goo addresses every single item on the checklist of excuses which people usually present for pirating games - yet it is still being pirated quite heavily.

You know how they came up with that figure?  Again, convenient details are ignored.  The company took the number of IP addresses of those reporting high scores and divided it by the total sales.  That means someone who legally purchased the game and happens to use DSL, the IP of which often changes at least once a week, counts as not only a sale but as dozens of pirated copies as well.  Its an entirely wrong way to come up with a piracy rate.  It not only misrepresents the number of pirated copies but by that logic any game would have an astronomical piracy rate and Windows would have a piracy rate well over 99%.

Update: Just to show that World of Goo wasn't an isolated case, there is yet another example of the irrelevance of DRM, big greedy companies and high prices to piracy. The independent game Machinarium, released by a small Czech developer and priced at $20 with no DRM also has the dubious honor of a 90% piracy rate.

Yet again, unsubstantiated piracy figures are published as fact.  There was no supporting evidence to support the claim.  The figure was posted on the company's blog and referenced "our estimate from the feedback" as the only source.

Here is an extremely thought-provoking article on the subject.  It explains alot of things that the guy you've been referencing just doesn't understand.

[~SJ~ Griffin]

So a boycott was in effect for MW2, why download it at all then? All that says to the developer is, "Well, they all like the game, but I need to use better, nastier DRMs on the next time." I tend toward the thought-process that many people used the boycott as an excuse to pirate the game. In addition, according to http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2011-111230/ MW3 suffered from an estimated 3.65 million illegal downloads. And as far as I can remember, there was no boycott of MW3.  And while the article you posted does make some decent points, it also skips some critical ones. The idea a person is going to go tell their friend all about this amazing game they pirated, but then not tell them where to get it for free is kinda ignorant. What person wouldn't tell they other guy, "Oh hey, and if you go to piratebay.com you can get the whole game for free." Maybe a few would tell about the game and skip the part about the free source, but I've never met a person like that.

I know that developers are just porting games from the consoles to the PC, that's part of my argument on why pirating is bad for the community as a whole. Just read this quote from Cevat Yerli (part of the team behind Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis Warhead) "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 that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] 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 won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future."

Right there, a developer is stepping away from the PC and towards the consoles because of pirating. What is even more telling, is current estimates place at least 1 billion PCs in use globally (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=703807) while "next-gen" consoles have sold an estimated 162 million (http://www.pvcmuseum.com/games/charts/total-worldwide-console-sales.htm *current figures are at the bottom of the page). Yet, time and time again PC sales for video games are always significantly lower than the sales on consoles*. Now one might assume many of those PCs are incapable of handling current gen games, so we'll look at the video card suppliers. This article http://www.edge-online.com/news/study-claims-pc-market-largest, although slightly dated, shows how more "gaming" PCs [196 million] have been shipped and sold than all next-gen consoles combined. Then, in an interview with Roy Taylor of NVIDIA (http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/nvidias-roy-taylor-interview?page=2) he stated, "....there is a very large installed base of GeForce gamers. We estimate that we have over 180 million active GeForce users. That's a much bigger installed base than PS3 or Xbox 360."

Also, it seems to me that you didn't read the article I posted because he talks, directly, about the information provided by your link mitchplate. Also, in the link you provided the author cites this page http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/. Scroll down and you'll see that 2d boy took into account exactly what you said they didn't and the piracy rate was still at about 82%. And you said that none of the information provided was cited, but your source as well is extremely lacking in evidence. To "prove" pirates feel bad for what they do, the author used one example of some person's twitter account where they apologized to the game devs. 161 people retweeted it. That's a really small drop in the bucket. While the article provides an interesting opinion, it fails to back any of it up with any hard data.

In closing, i should say this whole thing reminded me of what Socrates said to those around him who wished to rebel. I'm paraphrasing of course, but he told them if you are going to rebel against a system for any reason, then you must abstain from any benefits provided by that system. For example, if I hated paying taxes and decided one day to never again pay my taxes I then should never drive on a road, never call the police/fireman, never use any sort of government/public service because to do otherwise would be illogical and ruin my case against taxes. And after this I'll stop posting about this for I know at this point, no one will change their mind, rather only become more in-grounded in their beliefs. It was fun having a good debate, and i look forward your responses.

*For sales info on video games I used data provided on the article I posted previously and he cited it from www.gameindustry.biz. The one hard example he provided was Fallout 3. 55% of Fallout 3 copies shipped were for the XBox 360, 28% for the PS3, and 17% for PC. But in general, any gamer should realize how much consoles versions outsell PC versions by how the retailers advertise the consoles and how many people are playing online on the consoles compared to that of the PC.

[Cik]

I mean, you all know the companies do these things because PC gaming suffers so badly from pirating.

Btw, software piracy helps much more than hurts.  How many people do you think would be using Photoshop today had they not used it for free at some point in their life?  The truth is people who pirate rarely would have purchased the software anyway.  People don't just go out and buy software and games anymore.  Well, most don't.  Where a console user can buy a game and then re-sell it, we're stuck with it.  This is what makes Valve's approach much more effective than any anti-piracy measure.  They claim if you make a game that's worth a damn people will happily purchase it rather than pirate.  Their sales figures and profit margins support the idea which is why even with one of the easiest copyright protections to crack they don't care about fixing it.

In my opinion, this is a very wrong way to view piracy, specifically with the PC and gaming. I would recommend reading this article: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

It was first written in 2007-08, but the author has continually updated it with new info. Just a snippet from the very long article:

Update: For 2009, the most pirated PC game as reported in this article was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. The PC version had a staggering 4.1 million downloads via torrents alone compared with an estimated 200,000 - 300,000 actual sales via retail and Steam, demonstrating that the most popular game of 2009 was also the most pirated, and more importantly, that the actual number of downloads for the most popular game is now almost three times as high as in 2008, signalling the rampant growth of piracy. It is also interesting to note that while COD:MW2 sold around 300,000 copies on PC and had 4.1 million pirated downloads, the console version sold in excess of 6 million copies during the same period according to this article, and yet had a fraction of the number of pirated downloads at around 970,000.

For me, if I was a developer, those numbers alone would make me swear off any development for the PC. When we pirate games/software, we scare developers away from the PC and they then make their games for consoles. Granted, there are many things developers could do to make PC gaming a more "user-friendly" experience, but simply going and downloading the game illegally is the wrong way to fix it. The author of the article above tackles many urban myths about pirating such as only games with intrusive DRMs are pirated, MS and sony just pay developers to make games only for xbox/ps3, etc. In addition he looks at the issue from the side of the pirates as well. Its a very good read if you have the time to read the whole thing.

Another great example

I've saved an excellent example for last. As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%. This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%. Regardless of the precise level of piracy, the key point to consider is that World of Goo addresses every single item on the checklist of excuses which people usually present for pirating games - yet it is still being pirated quite heavily.

Update: Just to show that World of Goo wasn't an isolated case, there is yet another example of the irrelevance of DRM, big greedy companies and high prices to piracy. The independent game Machinarium, released by a small Czech developer and priced at $20 with no DRM also has the dubious honor of a 90% piracy rate.

you realize that piracy on consoles is rampant and pathetically easy, right? devs go to consoles because console users have a higher propensity to pay 60$ for a shitty game. the piracy smokescreen is a ruse to justify their ruination-for-profit of my hobby.

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

In during people thinking that 80%+ of a game's copies being pirated isn't a problem.

[Defender]

Piracy is free marketing.

If I like your shit, I'll buy your shit. If you had a shitty demo, I wasn't gonna buy your shit anyway. If you have NO demo, I'll never buy your shit out of spite. I'll buy your shit if it ain't shit though after I've tested it.

I would never know nearly as much about 3D Modeling/Animation right now if it wasn't for my innate ability to procure content and tools. Nor would I have purchased many a product or service, or want to purchase products that I currently use when funds someday do avail for such procurement's. Until I can make enough to buy it, I'll buy it. If I can't, I'll learn to use it anyway, then buy it if it's worth it.

[THIS STATEMENT IS IN NO WAY AN OFFICIAL ENDORCEMENT FOR PIRACY, OR ANY ILLEGAL PROCUREMENT OF SOFTWARE BASED ON THE PERCEIVED OPINION OF A SINGLE DEVELOPER. ALL INFORMATION POSTED ABOVE ARE BASED ON THAT OF A SINGLE INDIVIDUAL AND ARE IN NO WAY REFLECTIVE OF THE DEV TEAM AS A WHOLE]

[~SJ~ Xarg Talasko]

That's not so bad, it's the people who don't buy it ever no matter how much they enjoy that's the bigger problem. If a game had a 90% piracy rate, but 50% of those pirates bought it, the effective no-buy is only 45%. Thing is, noone has those numbers. With no real penalty for not buying it after you try it, there's no incentive to. You can't make an effective business model on the assumption that initially 90% of the copies are going to be pirated, but half of that number will enjoy and buy the product. Even if you did, you're still losing 45% of the income from the distribution of your product, what other industry deals with a 45% non-return on investment?