Modelworks
Lifer
- Feb 22, 2007
- 16,240
- 7
- 76
The last developer that tried this was with GTA IV. It may seem funny to some to put things like this in games to try to curb piracy, but what it does instead is make people think the actual game is buggy and it does hurt sales. I am surprised Eidos allowed them to do it.
I also did some checking around and all those bugs they so carefully coded in have been patched out by crackers so they accomplished nothing and may have hurt legitimate sales in the process. Typical for DRM.
The thing I don't think most understand about reverse engineering and cracking software isn't that the crackers do it so they can get the game cheap. It is all about the competition, the learning and proving that you can do something that someone, in this case the developer, says you cannot. Crackers actually buy their software most of the time. It is usually the friends of the crackers that leak stuff to torrents and the masses.
I have cracked a lot of software but it was for fun not profit and I already own legal copies. For me and many others it is like a puzzle with the pc program being the target. Many of us even post programs and dare people to crack them just for the fun of it. Unfortunately there are many who don't want to do it for learning they want to do it because they are too cheap to spend the cash.
I also did some checking around and all those bugs they so carefully coded in have been patched out by crackers so they accomplished nothing and may have hurt legitimate sales in the process. Typical for DRM.
The thing I don't think most understand about reverse engineering and cracking software isn't that the crackers do it so they can get the game cheap. It is all about the competition, the learning and proving that you can do something that someone, in this case the developer, says you cannot. Crackers actually buy their software most of the time. It is usually the friends of the crackers that leak stuff to torrents and the masses.
I have cracked a lot of software but it was for fun not profit and I already own legal copies. For me and many others it is like a puzzle with the pc program being the target. Many of us even post programs and dare people to crack them just for the fun of it. Unfortunately there are many who don't want to do it for learning they want to do it because they are too cheap to spend the cash.
brblx
Diamond Member
- Mar 23, 2009
- 5,499
- 2
- 0
i don't understand how the '#3 group' pirates (those who wouldn't have bought the game anyway) are hurting the economics of gaming. are you guys actually saying that if half the people pirate a game and half buy it for $50, then it is then now only 'worth' $25 and more people will pirate it because retail is now officially 200% too much? seems a little absurd.
CD's are still $10-20 (and similar when bought through online stores) despite music piracy being way easier and more widespread than game piracy. and people are still buying them. yeah, not as much as before, but to be honest the 'artists' who get bit the most by piracy generally need to go the hell away, anyway. sorry if i'm a dick for looking at it that way, but the majority of good acts don't get any attention other than online, where downloads actually often help sales.
again, i'm not defending piracy, i just don't see how economics factors into it other than direct relation by lost sales, which are by definition impossible to measure.
CD's are still $10-20 (and similar when bought through online stores) despite music piracy being way easier and more widespread than game piracy. and people are still buying them. yeah, not as much as before, but to be honest the 'artists' who get bit the most by piracy generally need to go the hell away, anyway. sorry if i'm a dick for looking at it that way, but the majority of good acts don't get any attention other than online, where downloads actually often help sales.
again, i'm not defending piracy, i just don't see how economics factors into it other than direct relation by lost sales, which are by definition impossible to measure.
GodlessAstronomer
Lifer
- Oct 27, 2007
- 17,009
- 5
- 0
I can see the point about making people think the game is buggy. They should let the pirated version run for a while then pop up a dialog that says "hope you enjoyed your stolen copy, please consider purchasing this game!" then crash to desktop. It has the same effects of frustrating pirates and causing Torrent sites to fill up with flawed copies, but leaves no illusion as to why the game crashed.
JoshGuru7
Golden Member
- Aug 18, 2001
- 1,020
- 1
- 0
If your point is that Fred's piracy of game A hurts game B because he now has less incentive to play it, then I would place Fred in group 2 and agree with you that DRM is beneficial from the developers point of view in regards to Fred. Whether it's beneficial enough to counter the cost to group 1 of including the DRM is another issue and obviously depends on the specific game. The occasional pirates in group 2 may check torrent availability as part of their inner benefit/calculation cost on piracy for each title, as the distinction I am making here is that these are the casual pirates who could be customers if the game was better or the cost of piracy was higher.
The people who I'm talking about in group 3 are the ones who subscribe to premium newsgroup servers and newsbin, or do not just search for specific torrents but go through recently added torrents to add anything that looks interesting. They typically do not buy *any* games, movies, or music but instead acquire 100% of their media through these means and skip whatever isn't available via those processes. The only case in which they purchase a product is where they enjoyed it to the point of wanting to support the developer, which is typically a lot less often then they'll maintain in forum posts. My point about this group is that (in my experience) they are a much larger fraction of the overall population than people typically recognize.
I understand the "morality is black and white" viewpoint but I can't agree with it personally. I believe that the morality of any action is altered by both the affect and the impact and would no doubt be reprimanded as a police officer for failing to cite jaywalkers who crossed completely empty streets. Duplicating bits on a disk is akin to duplicating the product and is only wrong to me by whatever degree that resulted in lost profit for the company (potentially more or less).
I would include you in group 1 as the cost of piracy includes not supporting the developers and you simply put a high value on that non-dollar cost. I'd put myself in group 1 partly for the same reason.
- Sep 13, 2008
- 8,313
- 3,177
- 146
Man, so many people out there have it so wrong. But then there is always different opinions on what piracy is, is it bad or not, or to what degree, and then there is the whole moral ambiguity issue. I support developers of good games, and I do buy a lot of games. This isn't to say that piracy is evil, I think some companies deserver to have their games pirated.
One thing I will say is definite is that there are too many people here claiming moral high ground and saying people who don't agree with them are degenerates and have poor morals. Morals come in many different flavors, opinions differ, and not everyone believes in the same thing. Also, there is a difference between the moral and legal definition of stealing, and it depends on who you ask.
Oh, and I won't be buying or pirating this game, it just doesnt sound that great to me. I will stick to QW for now, which I payed 50 bucks for when it came out, and I still am glad I did even though its dropped to like $6 now.
One thing I will say is definite is that there are too many people here claiming moral high ground and saying people who don't agree with them are degenerates and have poor morals. Morals come in many different flavors, opinions differ, and not everyone believes in the same thing. Also, there is a difference between the moral and legal definition of stealing, and it depends on who you ask.
Oh, and I won't be buying or pirating this game, it just doesnt sound that great to me. I will stick to QW for now, which I payed 50 bucks for when it came out, and I still am glad I did even though its dropped to like $6 now.
StrangerGuy
Diamond Member
- May 9, 2004
- 8,443
- 124
- 106
I?m impressed no one has called you out on that. Maybe you are taking very generous protection with your "almost" and "just about".
Proof please.
Ten years ago you went to a B&M store and bought a game for $50 or stole it that was pretty much all your options. Now you have the internet where price is king. Now I don?t have to go to a B&M to spend $50 on a game, if I want it right away its $40 on Amazon or gogamer or what not. Lets also ignore the explosion in inexpensive Indie games. Or the proliferation of digital distribution offering even heftier price cuts. Let us also forget the fact that the fit and finish as well as overall originality of large titles has dwindled. Or the fact that a lot of games are launched on consoles early, I can see why they would do that, but the people who were really looking to spend $50 on a game are going to do so at launch on the consoles thus increasing console sales. Those people who would have liked to or preferred to play on the PC are not going to re-buy the game on the PC (certainly not at the $50 price point) thus hurting PC sales.
PC gamers are benefitted by the waiting game. If it?s a game with expansions\DLC (Bethesda games for example) you wait for the GOTY edition and get the game and all expansions for 50% off (or more). The cost savings is also the same for non-expansion type games. You also miss all the launch bugs and there is also the chance that you pick up the game after your next hardware upgrade improving your experience. The only negative I can see is that if it has a major multi-player environment that you really want you may miss the busiest time.
Lets also comment on pirating artificially increasing the ?supply? of entertainment. Lets compare the numbers from 10 years ago with the numbers from today. I?m sure you can make a very compelling argument if you selectively decide to ignore the fact that ?entertainment suppliers? also have to compete with YouTube, and Podcasts, and Mods for games that increase replayability (in some cases many magnitudes).
The world has changed and pirates make easy scapegoats.
If you would like to get into an in depth debate over this particular topic we can take it over to the video forum, you'll discover pretty quickly that my viewpoint isn't exactly out of line with consensus. Radeon 4770. 4770 numbers. It doesn't handle Crysis with AA, and using 4x AA on FarCry2 puts it a bit under what most people consider ideal, but other then that yes, a ~$100 board is handling the rest of the titles in that review with all other settings at maximum. Of course a GTX 295 is going to show big improvements for hard core enthusiasts, and those with 30" monitors, but this is nothing remotely like the days when we needed to drop $600 to get reasonable performance at the typical top resolution for consumer displays in the latest games.
Or you could buy it online, that's where I was buying a good chunk of my PC games in '99. Nothing has changed on this front in a long time, the B&Ms used to compete more heavily on pricing then they do now in the PC games market also.
What explosion? The big difference now is that they are readily available as DLC. Low cost indie games have been in great supply for many years now. Time warp back into Wal Mart 10 years ago and walk through the PC games section, close to half of the section was low cost indie games. This is nothing remotely close to new.
Give me some examples. The level of polish and production values on run of the mill games today dwarfs what we were seeing ten years ago across the board. In terms of innovative ideas, they have always been rare in the gaming market, people just like to condense time so they seem more common then they are. Portal and Spore spring quickly to mind as examples of recent innovative titles that actually did fairly well on a commercial basis.
All gamers are benefitted by waiting. Title comes out at launch price and eventually drops down to a lower price point.
Mods for games today are actually far less common then they were ten to fifteen years ago, it isn't even remotely close. The level of complexity to make a decent mod has reduced the available content by a rather staggering amount. Yes, we have YouTube and Podcasts, but neither of them are interactive and I would be loathe to compare them to any sort of commercial product. Freeware games are what should be looked at versus that sort of entertainment, the production values and depth of entertainment pale in comparison to $20Million budget games(well, the good ones at least).
Golgatha
Lifer
- Jul 18, 2003
- 12,445
- 1,141
- 126
The DMCA is a means by which Big Content asserts control over it's IP. The US government putting the wants of Big Content over the rights of its citizens is shameful. The DMCA makes criminals out of people of have nothing but the best of intentions and want to enjoy their paid for content on their terms, not terms dictated to them. If content has been actually pirated, there were pre-DMCA laws which criminalized those actions. IMO it was an immoral law to pass because it not only (further) criminalized pirates, but made criminals out of morally right consumers as well.
Stripping DRM protections from items a consumer owns is not immoral, and thus should not be criminalized. Therefore I personally judge the DMCA as an immoral law and choose to disobey it, and furthermore, speak out against it.
Then I guess we have had two very different experiences over the years.
Except for the fact that the amount of internet sales has increased by 10x. Congrats you were ahead of the curve.
$5Bill/Qtr in 1999
$204Bill/Yr in 2008
That may have been the case but that half was entirely Casino games, 10001 games CD-Rom, My Little Pony, and assorted educational games. Utter rubbish at least in my experience. Sorry I didnt have a 1.1 MP floppy based digital camera to take a picture of it back then for proof.
I don?t even know where to lookup mod statistics so unless you can come up with something we may both have to concede that point. In my experience I know there are a lot of mods for Oblivion and FO3, and addon maps for Portal that added significantly to the amount game play.
As for YouTube\podcasts not being interactive or even comparable to a commercial product why the heck does that matter everyone has X amount of available time in which to consume entertainment. What rule says X needs to be interactive and X needs to be of commercial quality. There?s lots of stupid crap on YouTube that millions upon millions of people have watched and did or did not enjoy and did or did not interact by posting comments on the site or via forums\facebook\twitter\etc. My girlfriend is just as content to sit down and play <insert name of popcap type game> for 2 hours over spending $50 on the sims\spore\etc. People have more and more ways to waste time which in increasing competition for those precious minutes\hours and $$$.
Yet pirates are the down fall of the entire industry.
Someone will torrent a game if its a chore to play or not entertaining it gets deleted and they move on (Dead Space comes to mind). However, if someone plays the game and enjoy it they will buy it online\DD (GTA4, Bioshock, Mass effect, FO3, etc). Did they hurt EA by pirating the game? No they got hurt by making a game that was crap\or that was just not for that someone. Maybe at the $5-$10 price point they may give it another shot. If it was just as easy to buy a house\car\gadget and use it for a few days\weeks to really see if you liked it or not we may see more stark sales drops in certain items\brands\etc. IP owners are unfortunate that it is far easier to really put their product through the paces to see if its truly worth the asking price, and it may sting when its not.
Dont get me wrong. Pirates that take download a game\enjoy it\ask for support\etc and never support the gems are loosers. That said I believe that the impact of these pirates are a drop in the bucket when compaired to the other issues developers face.
Except for the fact that the amount of internet sales has increased by 10x. Congrats you were ahead of the curve.
$5Bill/Qtr in 1999
$204Bill/Yr in 2008
That may have been the case but that half was entirely Casino games, 10001 games CD-Rom, My Little Pony, and assorted educational games. Utter rubbish at least in my experience. Sorry I didnt have a 1.1 MP floppy based digital camera to take a picture of it back then for proof.
I don?t even know where to lookup mod statistics so unless you can come up with something we may both have to concede that point. In my experience I know there are a lot of mods for Oblivion and FO3, and addon maps for Portal that added significantly to the amount game play.
As for YouTube\podcasts not being interactive or even comparable to a commercial product why the heck does that matter everyone has X amount of available time in which to consume entertainment. What rule says X needs to be interactive and X needs to be of commercial quality. There?s lots of stupid crap on YouTube that millions upon millions of people have watched and did or did not enjoy and did or did not interact by posting comments on the site or via forums\facebook\twitter\etc. My girlfriend is just as content to sit down and play <insert name of popcap type game> for 2 hours over spending $50 on the sims\spore\etc. People have more and more ways to waste time which in increasing competition for those precious minutes\hours and $$$.
Yet pirates are the down fall of the entire industry.
Someone will torrent a game if its a chore to play or not entertaining it gets deleted and they move on (Dead Space comes to mind). However, if someone plays the game and enjoy it they will buy it online\DD (GTA4, Bioshock, Mass effect, FO3, etc). Did they hurt EA by pirating the game? No they got hurt by making a game that was crap\or that was just not for that someone. Maybe at the $5-$10 price point they may give it another shot. If it was just as easy to buy a house\car\gadget and use it for a few days\weeks to really see if you liked it or not we may see more stark sales drops in certain items\brands\etc. IP owners are unfortunate that it is far easier to really put their product through the paces to see if its truly worth the asking price, and it may sting when its not.
Dont get me wrong. Pirates that take download a game\enjoy it\ask for support\etc and never support the gems are loosers. That said I believe that the impact of these pirates are a drop in the bucket when compaired to the other issues developers face.
Golgatha
Lifer
- Jul 18, 2003
- 12,445
- 1,141
- 126
Yes, don't release it on PC to eliminate those sales...oh, and piracy. Good plan! Let's also release the PC version 6 months later and complain about poor sales. Here's a hint, the hardcore gamers already bought it on a console, the less hardcore are buying used console copies 6 months after release for less than the cost of a "new" PC game, and the game is now largely irrelevant because the hype machine has now broken down!! Also, even with a simultaneous release date, perhaps the PC version of Batman AA will not sell well because of the anti-piracy measures employed. I purchased the PS3 version, and some of the factors I weighed were the SecuROM disc check with Online SecuROM IA, and a mandatory Games for Windows Live install, which come bundled with my content. Oh yeah, I'm also guaranteed to be able to resell my game once I'm finished with it too since I don't have to activate it on my PS3. Big Content sure has you brainwashed pretty well PhatoseAlpha.
P.S. There are torrent trackers for XBox 360 and Wii games too.
I agree. I can see the reason in the thought process behind making such bad decisions but just because they see 30,000 DL on a torrent doesn?t mean that all 30,000 where downloaded to completion, played at all, or that 0% spurred any sales because of it.
I know people with dozens if not hundreds of unplayed games downloaded. I also know someone for example that knew about STALKER and didn?t care about it and 5 years after its release they decide to torrent it because its there, they figure out its a decent game and pick it up on steam. Its arguable that piracy helped in that case.
I believe they may have good intentions in their attempts to protect their property but those attempts are having a far more aggressive impact on the platform than pirates.
Volume may have increased for overall commerce, but the option has been there all along and I would wager that PC gamers have been well ahead of the curve in buying online by a considerable margin.
Small indie games are almost all utter rubbish still, what has changed? Once in a while you get a gem, same as it was back then.
There are still quite a few mods available now, but they are utterly dwarfed by how the industry was 10-15 years ago. Ask anyone who was of reasonable age back then. To sort of date myself, my oldest kid is currently in driver's ed
YouTube useage peaks during the day time, it is largely something people consume while at work, this is much the same as freeware games that are popular. There are many other factors that place it in a distinct category(time to partake in a reasonable session, funds invested). While you can state that people have x time to consume entertainment, that completely eliminates that without y amount of time certain entertainment is completely unreasonable(ie- you have twenty minutes you aren't going to watch a historical epic).
You are absolutely right. The point is that gaming as a whole has seen torrid growth over the last decade while PC gaming has collapsed. This is not an issue of the money leaving the market, it is there more then ever. The problem is that it is all leaving the platform(well, not all yet, but most of it).
Of the PC gaming idustry? Yes, they are. The reality is that even if there wasn't a single pirate in the entire world the perception of them is enough to do the damage. The fact that publishers can see hundreds of thousands of torrents going for their game that sold 50K units without a doubt is going to have a very serious impact on their choices of where to spend their millions of dollars.
Absolutely not.
Did they hurt PC gaming? Without a doubt. You can try and say they didn't all you'd like, you can seriously convince yourself of that too. The reality is that PC gaming is in torrid decline because of pirates, meanwhile the other gaming platforms are exploding in popularity and units sold. Publishers are already deciding with increasing frequency that the PC isn't worth the trouble, and all too often they are proven correct.
You aren't understanding. It is a very, very simple issue for developers. Take the time and effort to support PC pirates and lose money, or swim naked in the pools of cash the other platforms are providing. People may not like hearing it, but it is the reality of the current situation.
All of these issues we are talking about, including all the obnoxious Draconian DRM all exist entirely because of pirates. It is 100% their fault, they are entirely to blame. If not for them, the PC gaming market would be in significantly better shape.
Golgatha
Lifer
- Jul 18, 2003
- 12,445
- 1,141
- 126
The task at hand seems to be to try and make sure your legitimate, paying customers keep on supporting you as a PC gaming company. No matter how much PC gaming company X locks down their content, the majority of pirates will either...
1) Wait for it to be cracked and play some other game in the meantime.
2) Not play your game because you foiled their plans.
Your paying customers meanwhile become jaded and vote with their wallets when it comes down to what they're willing to put up with. Unfortunately, IMO the majority of PC gamers have shown themselves to be too overly tolerant of the shenanigans of the big corporations. Mark my words, the Internet activation schemes, digital distribution, and general limiting of the 2nd hand games market is coming soon to a console near you once the PC gaming market has become to insignificant to care about any more.
Edit: I believe the obnoxious DRM is due to not only piracy, which is certainly a legitimate concern, but also to control how the purchased content is used by the consumer once it is purchased...not licensed, but purchased. If I'm going to buy a license, it had better be priced accordingly.
I've lost interest in debating the topic.
I can see why the industry is taking steps to protect profits from pirating, and without pirating they may have not taken those steps.
So the root cause of the majority of PC gaming issues is piracy but most of the damage is being done (DRM, neglected ports, delayed releases) due to the fight against piracy rather than the piracy (theft of sales) itself.
The industry is commiting seppuku because of pirates.
I can see why the industry is taking steps to protect profits from pirating, and without pirating they may have not taken those steps.
So the root cause of the majority of PC gaming issues is piracy but most of the damage is being done (DRM, neglected ports, delayed releases) due to the fight against piracy rather than the piracy (theft of sales) itself.
The industry is commiting seppuku because of pirates.
Golgatha
Lifer
- Jul 18, 2003
- 12,445
- 1,141
- 126
The sorry state of affairs is that as much as I can talk about these issues, and as valid as I feel my points are; there seems to be only change for the worse as time goes on. I have little hope for the future of consumers in general in this digital age.
There is a very neat linear correlation between the increase in piracy and the decline of PC gaming sales along with the increased amount of BS DRM we have to deal with. Will pirates find a way around any PC DRM? Eventually, yes. Is that going to stop a corporate bean counter from increasing the effort put into it to stop them? Not likely.
I would strongly disagree with that. The majority of PC gamers left the market altogether.
Extremely unlikely, it helps drive sales in that market, a large chunk of new console game sales are funded through trade in value on used games. Too much of a market of them, and unlike piracy on the PC side, publishers got their cut of the game to start with. What we are already seeing is some games shippiing with DLC to unlock content that can only be used for one account, that is a rather effective way to devalue the used market while still allowing it to continue to help fund new game sales.
Impossible to say that unless we see a market free of piracy for a while. I will say at this point the DRM issue alone makes me far more likely to buy the game on another platform instead of the PC, so it is without a doubt losing the platform sales. But how many of those pirates would pay if they had no other choice? I think it is a much larger number then people want to admit.
Nah, in the drug market people get paid or people die. The piracy problem would be nigh non existant if the PC game market operated under comparable conditions
mindcycle
Golden Member
- Jan 9, 2008
- 1,901
- 0
- 76
Not true. Draconian DRM in the form of online activation, install limits, etc.. exist to hinder the used market. Pirates are an easy target and publishers like to claim that the DRM in question wouldn't exist if it wasn't for pirates, but game piracy has existed for quite some time now and it's not going anywhere unfortunately. To hide their true motives publishers pawn the need for draconian DRM off on piracy.
Ask yourself this.. Has online activation or install limit DRM ever stopped a PC game from being pirated? Look at Spore as an example. It's DRM is one of the most consumer unfriendly examples of a draconian copy protection scheme. Did it stop piracy of Spore? Or did it cause unwanted attention and increase piracy of that title?
Furthermore, does draconian DRM (install limits, online activation, required online accounts, etc..) hinder casual piracy? If you think about it logically you realize a simple disc check would accomplish the task of hindering casual piracy, so why the need for the extra measures..
TridenT
Lifer
- Sep 4, 2006
- 16,800
- 45
- 91
I doubt even that. Casual piracy is this: You download the game off of The Pirate Bay or wherever, unrar it, mount the iso, install the game with the keygen/provided-key, game is installed, and you just copy and paste a crack into the install directory. That's all you ever have to do for almost all of these games that have online activation, install limits, etc.
Not that Im debating this any more
but I feel that that is wrong. Casual piracy is you giving a game to a friend to install (no cd check so both can play whenever) or just simply hitting the copy button on your cd-burning software. Casual piracy = your mom can do it. Most moms dont know what the hell torrents are let alone cracks.
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