place to post about piracy and such.

[whitedrake 1FSAC]

here is the place to discuss what has been going on in the legging thread..


my opinion..?

some folks have $ and some don't..  I buy my games.. i'm 41 with a good income.

in my day, commodore 64 and amiga, I hacked everything i could, I just didn't have $ to buy games.

I'm sure there are younger folks that don't have the $ to dish out 40 to 50 a pop on a game.

does it hurt the industry?  yes, they do pass off that cost to the people who buy the games.

do i really care there are folks that P?  no.

my biggest grief is the cd in drive and 3 limit install, and all the other crap i have to deal with because of the piracy.

what do i care about?     a larger player base for mwll... that is it.

[Cujo]

I'm a poor college student, so I know all about piracy and stuff. 

But you do realize that the top two Devs are employees at Crytek, and so I use my favorite legal phrase: Res Ipsa Loquitor (more or less: The thing speaks for itself).  And obviously they cannot do anything about DRM or any other anti-piracy stuff for very obvious reasons.  Sure it sucks, but unfortunately some of em are retarded and you gotta deal with it.

[sgnl05]

Aaah the old piracy debate 

This article really opened my eyes. You hear a lot of claims that it's only games with draconian DRM, games by large publishers or bad games that get pirated, but this guy ran through the stats and concluded that none of this is really true, gamers will pirate anything for any reason. He also argues that the rise of PC game piracy is the cause of less PC exclusives and big name PC only games. In other words we're shooting ourselves in the foot by pirating PC games. Reading through it definitely made me determined to buy more games.

That said, I don't think the issue is quite that black and white. One of the main reasons I pirate games is for lan play. My friend runs a lan at a local community centre, and one of the biggest issues is what games we play. Getting 20+ gamers with different tastes to agree to all play the same game at the same time is hard enough even when said game is free and readily available. Telling them "go pay $40 for this game you may or may not like so that we can perhaps play it for an hour or so" just isn't going to work. On the other hand, we often buy games that have proven themselves to have good multiplayer. I went out and bought TF2 and CoH after playing cracked versions at lans so I could play online, and just to make playing them at later lans easier. This is a good example of why the game industry policy of equating every instance of piracy as a lost sale is really pretty dumb.

Another thing is the way the industry seems to be making it impossible to try games before you buy them. Games are really unique in this regard. If I'm considering buying a book I can go to the bookstore and read a couple chapters before making my decision. If I'm thinking about buying a movie I can watch the trailer or rent it for a couple bucks. Compare this with a modern game like MW2. There is no demo, trailers hint at the gameplay but don't actually let you experience it. With older games I could pop down to my local EB, buy the game and return it if I didn't like it, but they won't let me with MW2 because the DRM means they can't resell it after I install it. From my point of view, buying MW2 would be a $100 gamble. I don't know if I'll like the gameplay, I don't know if it's buggy and if any bugs will be patched out in the future, and I don't know if my internet will be able to handle the P2P multiplayer. The only way to answer these questions is to throw down $100 that I can't get back and hope for the best. Considering that Activision put me in this situation by reasing the game with DRM and not releasing a demo, I find it a bit hard to sympathise when they bitch about piracy.

To clarify, I haven't bought the game and I haven't pirated it, but there's no way I'd buy it without pirating it first, for the reasons above.

I'd be really interested to see what the devs have to say on this matter, since a few of them work for Crytek. I'd just like to say that I did pirate Crysis when I heard MWLL was coming out, but I bought it off steam a couple days later when I watched some gameplay footage and decided there was just no way I could turn down playing MWLL online. I regret NOTHING 

[~SJ~ Blhurr]

Piracy is the death of art.  Most people steal for the same reasons that big companies produce repetitive titles. Greed.  Very few thieves are robin hood.  Just admit it.

[(TLL)KitLightning]

Piracy is the death of art.

Not true, all artists copy/steal from each other, its always been that way. Id est you cannot create without copying or stealing from mother nature.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal ~ Pablo Picasso

In the C64 days, we copied tons of tapes to each other, with no whatsoever thought of it being piracy. Only drawback was sitting with a screwdriver to adjust the read header on the Tape Drive since one tape could have games from different recorded speeds on them.

[SquareSphere }12thVR{]

So just cause i can't afford something i can just take it.  well that's the version i hear most pirates use.  There's never a context unless it's a necessity that can be a real cause for debate.  For example, you're starving and you can buy anything cause you have no money.  Ok you're probably gonna steal food to survive.  Last time I checked no one needs video games to survive :p.

Live in a country where the currency is less than the US$ so it makes games very expensive?  This is a gray area because it's more to do with world wide pricing economics than anything else.  There's no right answer on price, just look at pharmaceuticals drugs from companies based in the US.  They have lower prices for countries that have lower currency values, ie Mexico.  So what happens a lot of US seniors go to Mexico to buy drugs and complain to their congressmen why Mexico is so much cheaper.  The truth is that the drug companies want to give the drugs out to the people that need them but can't stand on the "only those who can afford it" stance and take the moral high ground.  So they use the higher prices margins from certain countries to subsidize the lower cost in others.

Obviously game companies don't see it the same way since they're wanting profit margins over volume.  Personally, I think they should have price adjustments for lower currency countries since it's really in those countries that pirating is at it's worst.

I don't buy games unless i can try them  This one is the most valid argument and one that I feel that devs in general have over looked.  A lot of games these days do NOT have demos released before a game hits the PC market.  They tend to wait till the day of or weeks after street dates.  More over these demos tend to be sub par in overall quality compared to the rest of the game.  Just look at the console market, players there use demo's heavily to help their purchasing decision.

On the whole can't trust reviewers things, just another reason to put out a high quality demo so players can make their own judgments.

For me, a game should have a high quality demo released at least 2-3 weeks before a game's street date

[~SJ~ Blhurr]

Piracy is the death of art.

Not true, all artists copy/steal from each other, its always been that way. Id est you cannot create without copying or stealing from mother nature.

Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal ~ Pablo Picasso

I know very little about Picasso's moral character but I think he would differentiate between an artist mimicking a technique to further his own craft vs stealing an apple so as to avoid paying for food.  I suppose this will always be a gray area as people try to draw the line between that which is part of the public domain and that which is of the private. 
 
Why is it generally agreed that a clutch of squatters pitching a tent on your front lawn and using your garden hose to shower and cook food would be stealing but executing thousands of lines of code that someone labored very hard on for one's own enjoyment without paying for it is not stealing? 
 
There are always going to be people that have the impulse to 'create' and there are increasingly people that do nought but 'consume'.  I find it hard to believe that the truly creative people out there would be ok with a definition of the private domain that instantly releases anything they create to be taken or used as anyone else sees fit; never mind the impact this would have on business, contract, and economies world wide.
 
People ought to have a right to dream up something wonderful and beautiful and desirable and then dictate what happens to that thing they created and labored on without having to spend the rest of their lives trying to protect it from those people who disregard that right because they themselves lack the ability to create.  If you really disagree with this here then please tell me where you live so that I can eat the stuff in your fridge and sleep on your couch and use your internet connection to play MWLL on 

[Liberius]

Piracy is the death of art.  Most people steal for the same reasons that big companies produce repetitive titles. Greed.  Very few thieves are robin hood.  Just admit it.

I agree. However piracy is the death of commerce in general, not just art.

It is theft, plain and simple. And like all thefts, legitimate customers are left to pay the price of those stolen items through tougher security measures. We are all treated like criminals by DRM, because many people choose to pirate software.

I don't buy games unless i can try them  This one is the most valid argument and one that I feel that devs in general have over looked.  A lot of games these days do NOT have demos released before a game hits the PC market.  They tend to wait till the day of or weeks after street dates.  More over these demos tend to be sub par in overall quality compared to the rest of the game.  Just look at the console market, players there use demo's heavily to help their purchasing decision.

On the whole can't trust reviewers things, just another reason to put out a high quality demo so players can make their own judgments.

For me, a game should have a high quality demo released at least 2-3 weeks before a game's street date

I disagree. For instance, Titan Quest was a really good Diablo II clone that had several new features and amazing graphics for an Action-RPG. The hype wasn't insane, but there were a lot of people closely following its development. A Month before the release, a demo was released that allowed you to play through the first real boss monster, and up to level 8. This gave the community a great idea of what the game was like.

However, a week or so before Titan Quest was released, pirated copies began appearing on various torrent sites. The problem with these cracked versions is that they still included a DRM that checked for the DVD in the drive every few minutes. If it didn't detect the DVD the game crashed to desktop.

As a result, player reviews began popping up all over the internet several days before the game was released, saying that it was incredibly unstable and crashed all the time. Needless to say, the game didn't sell very well. Players, like myself, that actually bought the DVD had no extraordinary stability problems. Iron Lore released an already planned expansion and one more patch and discontinued support. After being tasked by THQ to work on a Dawn of War expansion, the studio closed.

I attribute the closure of Iron Lore to piracy.

[HAARP]

Piracy is the death of art.  Most people steal for the same reasons that big companies produce repetitive titles. Greed.  Very few thieves are robin hood.  Just admit it.

The publishers are the death of art. Period. Piracy has NOTHING to do with this.

[Liberius]

^ Though I kind of agree, you need to back up your statement with evidence.

We all know EA is the standard example of a company you wouldn't want to work under as a developer, but what are your problems with THQ, Valve or other publishers?

[Alendor]

I attribute the closure of Iron Lore to piracy.

ya, don't bother figuring in that their games were all stale and repetitive.  Titan quest was real fun, but once people realized after a few hours of play, nothing changed, and nothing in the game really pulled you into the expierience they got bored of it.  Then take a look at their dawn of war expansion, which was horrible, and you see a pattern developing.

and the funny thing is the iron lore studio head not only blamed pirates, but he blamed the consumer for being too stupid to buy the correct hardware to run their games, and complaining that game reviewers were stupid because they complained about certain stuff that was buggy in the review build that they sent to them, that was fixed in the gold release.  Iron lore closed because a fool ran the company, not because of piracy.

Take a look at stardock, they release their games with no piracy protection whatsoever, and they supplement them with good gameplay and continued support.  They are having no trouble staying in buisness.  Piracy is just a convienient excuses developers use when their game doesn't sell well, instead of admitting that it was made poorly.  Take crysis for example, they complained that piracy ruined their game, and they won't make PC exclusives anymore because of it.  Instead of using that as an excuse, why don't they adress the fact that only a fraction of their TARGET MARKET could even run their game on release. 

piracy is a problem, ya, but its something we have to live with.  instead of using as an excuse, developers should create incentives to encourage purchase of their game, instead of just making a poorly made product, and tossing it out on the market.

[SquareSphere }12thVR{]

I attribute the closure of Iron Lore to piracy.

There's no way to end piracy completely only ways to minimize them.

[HAARP]

^ Though I kind of agree, you need to back up your statement with evidence.

We all know EA is the standard example of a company you wouldn't want to work under as a developer, but what are your problems with THQ, Valve or other publishers?

Here's a VERY interesting article
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_8/50-Death-to-the-Games-Industry-Part-I

As for the others...
Well, Blizzard is OK. They take ages to actually produce something, but that's actually a good thing (quality ftw!). They also still patch their old games (Diablo 2), which is very nice. Team 17 (makers of Worms) are equally good, they still patch their Worms Armageddon from 1999 and even bother to care about Wine (Linux) users!
Blizzard's acquisition, Activision on the other hand used to be a very good publisher, but has turned to the dark side. Modern Warfare 2 was a debacle and there are other games that fell victim to Av.
I can't say much about THQ. Valve makes very good games, but their mandatory DRM which is Steam repeatedly killed the experience for me (and for some reason it is well-welcomed by Valve fanboys)
Ubisoft...well, I don't think I need to mention them.

edit: to the guy below me: Have you even bothered reading the article I linked to?

[Alendor]

without publishers, most of the games on the market would never get the money they need to release their product, and all our games woudl not exsist.  to say publishers are destroying the industry is ignorant and childish.

[SquareSphere }12thVR{]

I wouldn't say that large publishers like EA are destroying the gaming industry, but rather commoditizing it.  If you look at the over gaming industry it's been growing by leaps and bounds in dollars spent each year. So "destroying" it is a very poor choice of words.  A commodity is something that you don't care how it's made just that it's there for consumption such as public utilities.

The new yearly iterations of sports games is the prime example of games being commoditized