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On November 30 2011 22:50 ZtOzZ wrote: I think that game developers will slowly stop making the games for PC, since there is so much piracy compared to consoles.
They will only stop making pc games if there's no money in it anymore. Correct me if I'm wrong but the pc gaming industry is doing quite alright at the moment, despite all the pirating.
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On November 30 2011 22:28 Neo7 wrote:Show nested quote +On November 30 2011 22:24 Interloper wrote: Many people who pirate do so because they want to try a game out. If they enjoy the game, they will buy it too support the developer. 4,5 million downloads becomes a useless figure since you can not in any way know how many of those 4,5 million purchased the game afterwards. I feel that piracy is a good way to get rid of shitty developers how make crappy games only for the sake of making money (Well all developers want to make money ofc, but i hope you get my point). Good developers get the money they need and then some. Piracy will not be the end of gaming. This is the most common reason that has been given to me but more than often the person is also an expert at procrastination and gives the "oh I'll buy it later excuse". In the case of single player games, what usually winds up happening is that they'll beat the game and it becomes forgotten on their computers. Either way, I'd be willing to be a huge chunk of those who pirated wouldn't have bothered buying the game if piracy wasn't an option in the first place (in which case nothing would have been lost anyway). I would rather prefer to see game demos be more prominent to get rid of that whole "I wanted to try the game" excuse.
But demos aren't the full game! They often don't give you enough experience to decide. Also the game can look promising in the beginning but turn out shitty.
For example. I pirated Portal 2. I liked it. I went out and bought it months after I completed the game just because I wanted to support Valve.
I pirated Amnesia. I liked it. I am planning on buying it soon (tight on cash).
I pirated CoD. It sucked. I didnt buy it. Everybody's happy (except Activision trying to steal my money).
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On November 30 2011 22:59 ZtOzZ wrote:Show nested quote +On November 30 2011 22:55 Interloper wrote:On November 30 2011 22:50 ZtOzZ wrote: I think that game developers will slowly stop making the games for PC, since there is so much piracy compared to consoles. There are pirated games for consoles as well. If all games were to move to consoles, all energy would shift from PC piracy to console, and the same thing would happen again. True, but i doubt it would be just as many as it is now for PC. you're right it wouldn't as many it would be more. Since you'd have all console pirates and PC pirates pirating console games.
Only way to "fight" is going the sc2 way. needing an internet connection to play which is a pretty shitty solution. At least sc2 offers decent functionality (b.net) for that trade off.
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On November 30 2011 23:06 Daimai wrote: I pirated CoD. It sucked. I didnt buy it. Everybody's happy (except Activision trying to steal my money).
I'm interested - did you play through the whole game?
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Good developers will get money and the teriible ones wont. I smile everytime i see a list of most pirated games and they are usually made up of 3 different types of games :
- very hardware intensive games - cause many people want to check if their pc can handle them or are they worth buying a new graphics card to play the game - yearly sequels and iterations of the same damn game - im not buying the same call of duty for the forth time and the addition of one new gameplay mode wont persuade me to shell out 50€ for a new FIFA game - EA games - cause fuck EA
The fact that a title has DRM or not doesnt matter, in fact if a title is very DRM restrictive some people will pirate them just to prove a point.
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I would have been an average piece of shit person from my country, drinking beer every weekend, being fat and have 0 culture. You know what made me different? The internet. I downloaded so many movies and videogames I actually learned some decent english that then I used to read classic books like 1984 for free. Without the internet I would have been nothing because all these accesible culture really made me a whole lot different from the people around and I feel proud. Take down piracy and you take down a huge part of human culture too, just for some guys to make a few bucks because the people that really download things are from the third world and we don't have the money to pay even 5$, because our jobs pay 150$ a month, we barely fucking survive.
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Cool article, made me feel slightly better for actually paying for games. I've never pirated games that arent like +15 years old already, if the games too expensive for the value I'l wait a few months till I can get it for 15€ or less, it's not like the game degenerates unless if it's an online game then you might be missing out if you wait and the community dies during that. This is just how I roll though and not trying to force it on anyone, other than my friends.
If I'm not even willing to pay for it, is it really even worth my time. However I do agree that the prices on games when they launch are ridiculous and due to this theres very few special games I buy on launch.
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Fun idea, but if pirates can circumvent the DRM they can circumvent this too.
The real problem is that often pirates get a better experience than they would if they went through the 'proper' route. Buy a DVD and you must first watch the mandatory trailers **, followed by lengthy menus to load and navigate. Pirates just play. For PC games we get draconian DRM where we must register, sign up, enter logon details etc. Pirates just play. Some games now have "limited activations" - you are only allowed to install 3 times and then you're just not allowed to anymore. Pirates just play. Other games required "always on" internet connection, and if that connection failed your game would be closed ("From Dust" being a recent example), or you would lose (or not be able to access) your savegames. Pirates just play.
When the knock-off experience is substantially BETTER than the real experience, AND it's free, it's not hard to see why so many people pirate.
** the most ridiculous one being, of course, the "piracy is bad" trailer. The trailer that PAYING CUSTOMERS must endure, but the pirated version will conveniently omit.
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Developers need to stop wasting their time with DRM, period. It only hurts customers, this has been proven with pretty much every piece of software from $50 games to $5.000 professional software.
You can't stop piracy, even somehow you could stop people from downloading it straight from the internet people will still sell pirated media (which is even worse).
You can only make people want to buy your game more by...
- Establishing a solid reputation as a developer: I can't imagine something worse than people not even wanting to pirate a game. This is the case for A LOT of game releases that are not even aimed at a niche market, they are simply bad games.
- Adding serious Coop modes for games that would make sense to have them on: Seriously how fucking awesome is playing Diablo 2 with your friends or over bnet rather than single player?
- Having worldwide release dates for boxed edition: Is some marketing / legal guy really expecting people not to pirate a game when they take weeks or even months to release a game on a different country after the US release date?
- Having Solid digital download platform: If you don't give a crap about the box / manuals why even bother walking to the store to buy it, or hell maybe you don't want to look around for an english copy of the game instead of the translated version the nearest store to you decided to import.
- Localized prices for countries that can't afford u$s / Euro prices of games. Strip them of box, manual (make a pdf in the dvd), cut the price.
There's many other things that can be done but stopping piracy cold turkey is not going to happen any time soon.
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On November 30 2011 23:06 Daimai wrote:Show nested quote +On November 30 2011 22:28 Neo7 wrote:On November 30 2011 22:24 Interloper wrote: Many people who pirate do so because they want to try a game out. If they enjoy the game, they will buy it too support the developer. 4,5 million downloads becomes a useless figure since you can not in any way know how many of those 4,5 million purchased the game afterwards. I feel that piracy is a good way to get rid of shitty developers how make crappy games only for the sake of making money (Well all developers want to make money ofc, but i hope you get my point). Good developers get the money they need and then some. Piracy will not be the end of gaming. This is the most common reason that has been given to me but more than often the person is also an expert at procrastination and gives the "oh I'll buy it later excuse". In the case of single player games, what usually winds up happening is that they'll beat the game and it becomes forgotten on their computers. Either way, I'd be willing to be a huge chunk of those who pirated wouldn't have bothered buying the game if piracy wasn't an option in the first place (in which case nothing would have been lost anyway). I would rather prefer to see game demos be more prominent to get rid of that whole "I wanted to try the game" excuse. But demos aren't the full game! They often don't give you enough experience to decide. Also the game can look promising in the beginning but turn out shitty. For example. I pirated Portal 2. I liked it. I went out and bought it months after I completed the game just because I wanted to support Valve. I pirated Amnesia. I liked it. I am planning on buying it soon (tight on cash). I pirated CoD. It sucked. I didnt buy it. Everybody's happy (except Activision trying to steal my money).
While I'm happy to read that you actually buy the games after pirating them, you really think that majority of people who pirate games do the same? What is the rational incentive to do so?
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I don't buy games after I pirate them.
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Lol that TF video is golden. I never knew about what the dark souls developers did to deal with it, so funny.
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On November 30 2011 23:18 Hairy wrote: Fun idea, but if pirates can circumvent the DRM they can circumvent this too.
The real problem is that often pirates get a better experience than they would if they went through the 'proper' route. Buy a DVD and you must first watch the mandatory trailers **, followed by lengthy menus to load and navigate. Pirates just play. For PC games we get draconian DRM where we must register, sign up, enter logon details etc. Pirates just play. Some games now have "limited activations" - you are only allowed to install 3 times and then you're just not allowed to anymore. Pirates just play. Other games required "always on" internet connection, and if that connection failed your game would be closed ("From Dust" being a recent example), or you would lose (or not be able to access) your savegames. Pirates just play.
When the knock-off experience is substantially BETTER than the real experience, AND it's free, it's not hard to see why so many people pirate.
** the most ridiculous one being, of course, the "piracy is bad" trailer. The trailer that PAYING CUSTOMERS must endure, but the pirated version will conveniently omit.
Oh god I hate that. I just recently spent an hour trying to get a game to work because of their retarded registration and activation process... And that was a single player game (that you had to be online to play as well).
I mean come on, give me a break.
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I was reading an article about PC piracy a while ago.
"Finally, on the contentious topic of DRM, aside from Spore whose audience may well have fallen victim to DRM-induced hysteria, the presence of intrusive DRM appears not to increase piracy of a game. For example Call of Duty 4, Assassin's Creed and Crysis all have no intrusive DRM whatsoever: they all use basic SafeDisc copy protection with no install limits, no online activation, and no major reports of protection-related issues. Yet all were pirated heavily enough to have the dubious distinction of being in the Top 10 downloaded games list. But strangely absent from the list are several popular games which do use more intrusive DRM: BioShock, Crysis Warhead, and Mass Effect. This indicates quite clearly that intrusive DRM is not the main reason why some games are pirated more heavily than others. We examine this issue in more detail in the Copy Protection & DRM section."
"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."
Anyways, full article: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
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Piracy doesn't decrease sales.
And piracy will only stop when developers and publishers give pirates incentives to actually buy the game, and have reasonable prices.What kind of money grabbing lunatic thinks people will pay 50 bucks a pop for a new reskin of CoD every year?
Look at Steam.Steam has solved piracy.Their profits are through the roof.
DRM only pushes paying customers into piracy.
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On November 30 2011 22:38 zalz wrote: Piracy is not a problem that needs to be adressed. It's a miniscule thing that doesn't make any mentionable dent on sales.
Meanwhile the damage done to the internet when the free flow of information is stopped will be of such a degree that the internet will never ever be the same again.
Any solution to the tiny problem of piracy is of such a massive and invasive scale that it is never worth it. It's like suggesting we should impose big brother-esque laws if that means reducing the crime rate by 0.2%.
It is impossible to combat piracy without resorting to totalitarian measures. We have to ask ourselves, do we really want to fuck up the entire internet just so music companies can start charging 50 dollars for a CD?
I heard modern warfare 2 had more than 10X the amount of people online as they sold games, more than 10X the people pirated the game than bought it on pc. This is an issue i would say.
I dont pirate games but I really don't like the DRM's that some company's have in place. I couldnt play any of my steam games because steam offline mode didn't work.
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I'm always curious when numbers like these come up,
4.5 million downloads. - How many used it as a demo and bought it after trying it - How many didn't buy it - How many would not have bought anyway
I buy games I want to support and I think are worth the money, including Witcher 2 and something like Arkham City.
I downloaded Hard Reset because it looked kind of neat and the demo was ok, and while they may have not made any money on me pirating it, I was not impressed to the point by demos or reviews for Hard Reset that I would have purchased it anyway even if I could not download it.
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The industry itself is feeding the pirating machine, plenty of good points in this topic.
Something is very, VERY wrong with the product if the pirated version is simpler, easier and more convenient to use than a legally purchased copy.
Pricing on products, especially some electronic vs physical products is downright retarded. Example from a well known, well loved(?) Blizzard Entertainment and none other than Starcraft 2: Wings of Liberty:
The day or 2 before the digital game price was announced, it was, if memory serves, very much the release date of the physical box as well. Local shops were pricing it at the 30euros range, give or take a 5, but this time I decided, to hell with a box and all that crap, let's save the planet and not buy useless garbage coming with the box, but instead get a digital copy. And then the day dawns, when the digital copy pricing is revealed, 59.90 euros. For a digital copy. Vs a 29.90 from local store box. Hell, the collectors edition was priced 35.90. ... ... yea, I cancelled the "digital preorder" and legged to the store to buy a box for 29.90 instead.
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I've been fucked over by the hype waaaay too many times. I'll never buy a game without having tried it out first, either through downloading or demo.
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I do agree with some above me that the lack of proper demo's are a problem. Either the game is gimped to the point where you can't get a decent feel for the game, or like in many cases of games I've been interested in, there is no demo at all.
As for DRM, they are not bad in themselves only bad when they are poorly implemented.
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