With at least three million copies sold as of last count, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is doing just fine for itself, but that doesn't mean pirates aren't getting the game the old-fashioned, illegal way.
"According to TorrentFreak, a BitTorrent enthusiast site, StarCraft II has been illicitly downloaded via BitTorrent 2.3 million times. The download file's huge 7.19 GB size makes it the most data sent via BitTorrent for a single file -- 15.77 petabytes.
It's unclear how those who downloaded the game were able to play it afterward, as Wings of Liberty normally requires users log in to Battle.net with a legit account, but pirates do tend to find a way. Curiously, TorrentFreak notes that the official Blizzard downloader -- which also uses torrents -- may have moved even more data than the pirated version.
I don't think we're in any risk of Blizzard going out of business because of piracy, but if anyone's reading this who downloaded an illegal copy: Quit being an idiot and go buy the game already."
As much as I hate corporate greed. I find it disgusting on how entitled some people are to a luxury(games). Blizzard really is putting a lot of effort into this game and I don't really like how some people just decide to just not to pay for it. This kind of stuff is why companies have started using Draconian DRM measures.this is of course my take on this news.
Edit: Sorry, I don't know if this is the right section for this.
That's terrible, I hate seeing people who cheat there way through such great things (music, movies, etc.) That many people have put a lot of effort into and are free to enjoy what they want without even supporting such products. It disgusts me when people like this "Bite the Hand That Feeds" (if anyone gets this reference +300 cool points).
I'm not shocked at all and I'm pretty sure Blizzard isn't either. With a game this big you have to expect a high piracy rate, Blizzard took the "must be connected" approach to combat it and frankly I think it works to a certain extent. There are better options though.
you could also flip the coin and argue why did blizzard try to fight pirating in the first place and simply give its community what they wanted (lan, cross-region etc...)
Not surprised and honestly don't really care because I highly doubt that 2 million people d/l'd the game and somehow got around the key and b.net log-in system. It's just 2 million retards who wasted all that time downloading the game only to realize they couldn't play it. lol.
On November 16 2010 12:07 mufin wrote: you could also flip the coin and argue why did blizzard try to fight pirating in the first place and simply give its community what they wanted (lan, cross-region etc...)
if that many people dl'ed it for just campaign, if lan was included (and hence non b.net online servers) how many more people would not have bought it?
Honestly I don't all that mind seeing as they can't play online- and that's where all the fun is at! I remember people boasting it'd be cracked with LAN play in a week, or a month, yet here we are and it's still not done. :D Besides, I'm proud to have my Starcraft 2 box sitting on my desk. One of my most favorite purchases. ^^;
Well, I did enjoy the Single player campaign. So I don't doubt other people did.And not all people pay only for the multiplayer experience.
ThatsNoMoon.I agree that with big games a lot of piracy is expected. What I don't like its that because some people do this the majority of legit customers are affected by moronic DRM(Spore anyone?)
This kind of stuff is why companies have started using Draconian DRM measures
And draconian DRM makes the official version less valuable, thus making the pirated version more appealing, so good job there. I guess it's the same reason they leave out game features like LAN play to "fight piracy", being apparently under the assumption that making their offering worth less will draw in more customers.
On November 16 2010 12:09 ckw wrote: It's just 2 million retards who wasted all that time downloading the game only to realize they couldn't play it. lol.
I seriously bet that this is true. I'd say the vast majority of these players downloaded it not realizing that they couldn't play online, or downloaded it and wouldn't have purchased it anyway. This statement cant be read as 2.3 million more copies would have been sold if the game hadnt been pirated.
I can see both sides of the argument (not that there are only two sides); of course it's wrong to pirate, but why should a college kid have to pay $60 for a game he may or may not like because the developer won't let them demo the game?
I've been on forums where a lot of the users torrented Crysis just to see if their computer could run it.
I think the statistics are slightly misleading (can't play multiplayer, I doubt everyone who downloaded it actually played a significant portion of the game, etc), and in this case I don't think those 2M downloads automatically correlates to $180M in lost profits.
imagine if the game costs 200+ dollars for u, would that be a good enough reason for u to pirate?
fact is that in foreign countries they have to import the game and if their country's currency is weaker, then the price of the game shoots up to almost ridiculous level..
On November 16 2010 12:09 seaofsaturn wrote: Well, a lot of people who actually bought the game probably used a torrent to download the client because the blizzard downloader is slow as balls.
This, and the "Problems authenticating your download" bug.
On November 16 2010 12:10 NovaTheFeared wrote: Yes, I'm glad we didn't get LAN, ruining finals and high profile tournaments, so Blizzard could put a halt to piracy.
Blizzard will probably just make LAN copies and distribute them to tournaments, thats what they did with WoW arena.
The whole LAN thing can still be circumvented. Require activation via bnet for multiplayer, then LAN gets unlocked (just like offline play gets unlocked after you log in once)
Hell, I'm fairly sure there will be a LAN workaround created by hackers/pirates in the near future. Blizzard has to do something, especially with the e-sports scene at risk of mayhaps like MLG Dallas. There's not much you can do about power outages, but lag and disconnects are very preventable. With LAN support, obviously.
I bought the game, and I still can't watch the GSL matches for free! Horse shit!
Seriously though, isn't sc2 unpirateable? You can't play on bnet, there's no lan feature... Last time I checked, the only thing that makes this game amazing is the competitive nature of multiplayer. The pirates are frankly shooting themselves in the foot and missing out. It's almost more sad for them than it is for Blizzard
The campaign was great, I guess, but it's so ridiculously shallow compared to the multiplayer aspect it almost pains me to think that some people out there think that the campaign is the only aspect to this game worth sinking their teeth into.
A fair bit of the day 0 torrents weren't actually for illegal purposes, it was because the people who bought the digital download couldn't get the download going through Blizzard's servers (which were overloaded and slow). There were even a lot of people who preordered the box but wanted to have the client installed, so they grabbed the client off torrents (once again, faster than through Blizzard's servers) and once their copy arrived entered their keys. The same was true in the beta, where it was faster to get the client through torrents.
As such (while single player piracy does certainly exist) these numbers aren't reliable.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
QFT. I had to download it like this for my laptop since the disc drive is broke.
This doesn't really matter until a hack for multiplayer comes. Blizzard has done a great job in not letting this happen. BW was hacked very easily, and so were a lot of other games. Making a game unhackable is very hard to do nowadays.
I'm actually suprized there hasn't been a LAN hack yet, since it's been almost 4 months since release, and like 8 months since beta. I guess that big mistake the some of the first hackers did (making their contact info and progress publicly obtainable) really did a number on it.
What would be interesting to know though is how many people downloaded the pirated game without buying it first, and those who bought it after they played/downloaded the pirated version.
My bet is many people just downloaded it via torrent for friend invites, because they lost or don't like using DVD, or felt like the download would be faster over public torrent for digital purchase as opposed to blizzard's download. You'll also have people who trade the game to a friend because they don't like it or because they're done/bored with it.
Of course lastly there's the people that try it via pirated, then buy it later.
On November 16 2010 12:14 Omigawa wrote: I can see both sides of the argument (not that there are only two sides); of course it's wrong to pirate, but why should a college kid have to pay $60 for a game he may or may not like because the developer won't let them demo the game?
I've been on forums where a lot of the users torrented Crysis just to see if their computer could run it.
I think the statistics are slightly misleading (can't play multiplayer, I doubt everyone who downloaded it actually played a significant portion of the game, etc), and in this case I don't think those 2M downloads automatically correlates to $180M in lost profits.
What do you mean? There's plenty of ways to demo SC2, it's just not an easy hand-out. Plus the game hasn't been out very long, Blizzard is already allowing Latin America to have 2 free days of play to demo it and more will come. 60$ is not a lot of money at all and it's the same collage kids who can't "afford" to pay for SC2 that go out and spend 60$ on a night of partying every day of the week.
On November 16 2010 12:10 NovaTheFeared wrote: Yes, I'm glad we didn't get LAN, ruining finals and high profile tournaments, so Blizzard could put a halt to piracy.
Blizzard will probably just make LAN copies and distribute them to tournaments, thats what they did with WoW arena.
They don't have LAN copies for WoW Arena, they play on specially dedicated tournament servers, but they are not on-site AFAIK. (MLG confirm?)
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
That's the reason why I downloaded it, I bought my copy but blizz downloader is retardedly slow compared to torrents.
On November 16 2010 12:36 ionlyplayPROtoss wrote: I don't understand. How would they play anthing other than maybe campaign without a cdkey and bnet account?
Well if you have 7 gigs of free bandwidth and the campaing is "free", why wouldn't you download it. Assuming multiplayer is as secure as I think it is, If I was blizzard I would be happy so many people were getting access to starcraft and incentivised to try there hand at multiplayer with a legit copy.
I think this would only increase there sales as the people who only wanted to play campaign were probably not going to buy it even if they weren't able to torrent. Therefore, no lost sales and potentially gained sales by providing an extended trial.
It is indeed sad, piraters are probably the biggest reason many people in this world can't pursue what they love (jobs in music, art, or any kind of business where their product can be stolen).
I mean cmon, if you like what they do, just pay. $60 really isn't that much... especially if you have a job. Although I guess that's a problem, a lot of people (like teens/kids) may not have jobs yet. I don't believe it's nearly as bad for a pirater, however, to pirate a game planning later to support the company (i think the fairest way would be to pay back in full directly as a donation, not buying another copy lol), because in the end they're giving the company what they want, but yeah it's still not the best method (enter argument here about people's individuality and how some people's bad choices should not case the banning of others who do the same thing but make good choices xD).
Thanks for sharing though, but yeah they can't play online (unless if someone set up an illegal server or something, but that's WAYY over the line and they can be in big big trouble). Hopefully they'll buy the game sometime though, the campaign is like a demo for the multiplayer in this case xD
so again, why is there no LAN in starcraft 2? i think theres absolutely zero excuse now, not that i didn't know sc2 was getting pirated, people always find a way to do it, they're still missing out on the best part of the game though ^^
I played a "pirated" version of beta that was downloaded from a torrent before sc2 actually came out. This was because I didnt get a beta key, even thought i own a TONNE of blizzard games (im a huge blizz fanboy).
I had to play the game, blizzards fault as far as im concerned
It's not really all that surprising, the more popular a game is the more it's pirated. Seeing as how Starcraft 2 is the fastest selling pc game after Wow( which you can't really pirate).
the campaign is so bad that I stopped playing it 1 month ago...
Honestly, if Blizzard do not plan on implementing cross-realm play, I sure hope the pirates get to pirate the game and allow some decent worldwide laddering à la iCCup.
I paid for the original game, so I wont feel guilty after all.
i actually downloaded the starcraft 2 iso via torrents as it was a lot faster than blizzard downloader as well. figured there was no harm in it considering you need an account to play it anywho.
On November 16 2010 12:42 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: It is indeed sad, piraters are probably the biggest reason many people in this world can't pursue what they love (jobs in music, art, or any kind of business where their product can be stolen).
Wrong. For the small independents piracy increases sale revenue, because it's free advertisement. Word of mouth to friends. And some pirates pay for the stuff to support the stuff that they enjoyed. Also, big music artists get the majority of their pay checks from concerts, not CD and Download sales, the record labels get that money.
I mean cmon, if you like what they do, just pay. $60 really isn't that much... especially if you have a job. Although I guess that's a problem, a lot of people (like teens/kids) may not have jobs yet. I don't believe it's nearly as bad for a pirater, however, to pirate a game planning later to support the company (i think the fairest way would be to pay back in full directly as a donation, not buying another copy lol), because in the end they're giving the company what they want, but yeah it's still not the best method (enter argument here about people's individuality and how some people's bad choices should not case the banning of others who do the same thing but make good choices xD).
I can't exactly decipher what you said here other than the first sentence, so i'll talk about that. Not everyone can afford 60 USD or its equivalent value. Not everyone has a job or lives in America. I'm not saying that they deserve free shit, but it's something to ponder about.
Thanks for sharing though, but yeah they can't play online (unless if someone set up an illegal server or something, but that's WAYY over the line and they can be in big big trouble).
Only the person who sets up the server would be in any legal trouble, if at all. There are plenty of "illegal servers" for WoW which for the most part goes unnoticed, atleast back when I played, Idk if they cracked down on that kind of stuff.
Hopefully they'll buy the game sometime though, the campaign is like a demo for the multiplayer in this case xD
Exactly, increases sales revenue to people who wouldn't otherwise buy it.
On November 16 2010 12:09 ckw wrote: Not surprised and honestly don't really care because I highly doubt that 2 million people d/l'd the game and somehow got around the key and b.net log-in system. It's just 2 million retards who wasted all that time downloading the game only to realize they couldn't play it. lol.
no they can play the campain. My dumbass friend did that
On November 16 2010 12:59 dcemuser wrote: There is already a multiplayer crack out for SC2; these pirates are NOT just playing campaign.
There was a multiplayer crack out in late MARCH for beta, and one came out for retail SC2 on August 3rd, one week after release.
Blizzard removing LAN from SC2 has stopped 0.00% of pirates. They cracked it in the same amount of time they would have otherwise.
Delaying for a week after release is usually considered a huge success for DRM given the percentage of sales that happen on release day. Normally cracked copies are available before a game even comes out.
On November 16 2010 12:59 dcemuser wrote: There is already a multiplayer crack out for SC2; these pirates are NOT just playing campaign.
There was a multiplayer crack out in late MARCH for beta, and one came out for retail SC2 on August 3rd, one week after release.
Blizzard removing LAN from SC2 has stopped 0.00% of pirates. They cracked it in the same amount of time they would have otherwise.
Delaying for a week after release is usually considered a huge success for DRM given the percentage of sales that happen on release day. Normally cracked copies are available before a game even comes out.
Campaign was cracked three days before release; only multiplayer took that extra week.
I know someone who downloaded it, and then due to the excitement of the GSL, purchased a copy. So I don't think all those torrent figures can be taken as pirated copies without knowing the full details. Like another poster said, some people probably got fed up with slow blizzard download speed and used torrents instead even for their payed blizz account.
Starcraft costs too much. I mean yeah they can get away with charging it, but when you know you're going to sell millions of copies, plus expansions, then you really should charge $40/game and then you'd sell more.
On November 16 2010 12:59 dcemuser wrote: There is already a multiplayer crack out for SC2; these pirates are NOT just playing campaign.
There was a multiplayer crack out in late MARCH for beta, and one came out for retail SC2 on August 3rd, one week after release.
Blizzard removing LAN from SC2 has stopped 0.00% of pirates. They cracked it in the same amount of time they would have otherwise.
Huh really? I just checked the usual sites that release this stuff and couldn't find anything. Maybe you're thinking of a singleplayer crack? And removing LAN did stop iccup which was probably their main goal.
the same as Epic Games saying Unreal Tournament 3 was pirated 20-40 million times. if piracy didn't exist would Unreal Tournament sell 20-40 million copies? i doubt it.
also there is no multiplayer crack. only solo vs ai capabilities. which can easily be done with the map editor. hardly need a crack...
this thread should be closed as it has already divulged into flat out WRONG information.
On November 16 2010 13:08 SNAX wrote: Starcraft costs too much. I mean yeah they can get away with charging it, but when you know you're going to sell millions of copies, plus expansions, then you really should charge $40/game and then you'd sell more.
The expansions are going to be cheaper and won't be $60.
I disagree with pirating and believe it is wrong, would not partake myself. But frankly I can't manage to get angry about people pirating a game with draconian measures like Bnet 2.0.
Requiring online activation for single player, continual connection, no offline support like LAN or direct-ip, no third party servers so the community can't mod-in stuff like the missing chat channels. These are dick moves, I assume enforced by Activision.
Again, I am not condoning piracy - it is unequivocally unethical. But instead of anger at these pirates, I feel more of a yawn coming on in cases where the DRM abuse of customers is particularly egregious.
SC2 is the first and last game with online authentication requirements I will buy (or play, since I don't pirate). I only put up with it since it's freaking starcraft, and only then because I have an interest in competitive online play and so would be online anyway. But I'm still not happy with it.
Frankly, I doubt there would be quite so much piracy if the single-player campaign delivered more value. A short single-player campaign with a smattering of random plot points with the only real payoff coming at the end, it doesn't really justify the ticket price and there's no option to purchase just the single-player component. If I wasn't interested in SC2 multiplayer, I wouldn't feel that the price was justified at all.
On November 16 2010 13:08 SNAX wrote: Starcraft costs too much. I mean yeah they can get away with charging it, but when you know you're going to sell millions of copies, plus expansions, then you really should charge $40/game and then you'd sell more.
you've got to be pretty poor to complain about game cost
the value of a game is hours played divided by cost, and if anyone bought SC2 for multiplayer, then they definitely got their money's worth
This was always going to happen. It's unavoidable now that people will crack and release pirate copies of games. But piracy really isn't as HORRIFYING as the media and big companies make it out to be.
Personally, I think Blizzard has the right idea when it comes to anti-pirate measures, but they're just going about it the wrong way. LAN and cross region play are two of the biggest features that made SC1 great and so popular. Removing them was a mistake, pure and simple. Surely there's a way to have the best of both worlds, even if it is just a LAN client for big tournaments.
I think LAN would work great if you could log into your account (while connected to the net of course) and just have a validation check to a blizz server right before the match. That way blizzard can know that you're on a legit client, players can have LAN ping and you won't get booted out of the match if you disconnect half way through.
I "illicity downloaded the game" for the EU version. I received an EU account key through legit means and it's faster to torrent the installer than to download it via the Blizz downloader (which ironigcally is a torrent...) 12-14 hours vs 1.5 hours. So I have a legal copy and my installer was technically "pirated." Though I see nothing really illegal about this.
On November 16 2010 13:10 MavercK wrote: these stats are pointless
the same as Epic Games saying Unreal Tournament 3 was pirated 20-40 million times. if piracy didn't exist would Unreal Tournament sell 20-40 million copies? i doubt it.
also there is no multiplayer crack. only solo vs ai capabilities. which can easily be done with the map editor. hardly need a crack...
this thread should be closed as it has already divulged into flat out WRONG information.
No, it wouldn't have sold 40 million copies. But to deny that the piracy didn't eat up some sales is wrong too. About this thread being WRONG as you say it may or may not be the case since nobody can really know if those illegal downloads were just done because the Blizz downloader was crappy.
But I get your point as companies tend to exaggerate the piracy numbers. But we can't deny that piracy is not a problem regarding game sales.
About this thread being closed. I didn't post this with any malicious intent. I'll leave it up to the judgement of the admins
On November 16 2010 12:05 B-Wong wrote: That's terrible, I hate seeing people who cheat there way through such great things (music, movies, etc.) That many people have put a lot of effort into and are free to enjoy what they want without even supporting such products. It disgusts me when people like this "Bite the Hand That Feeds" (if anyone gets this reference +300 cool points).
Nine Inch Nails?
And I'm going to be honest here: I pirate games all the time. I pirated Starcraft 2. HOWEVER I do not play all the way through games, and most of the time, I just buy it if it's fun enough. With SC2, I wanted to play the campaign and practice for multiplayer, so I pirated it, beat the campaign and played the AI, and when I had the money, bought it. Pirating to me is a good thing, because it pretty much allows me to have a free demo of the game. If I don't like it, I just dont play it. If I do, I buy it. However, most people just steal it, and that, to me, is despicable. Seriously people. If you pirate a game, buy the damn thing, especially if its indie and the dev doesn't get much money from it anyways.
On November 16 2010 12:05 B-Wong wrote: That's terrible, I hate seeing people who cheat there way through such great things (music, movies, etc.) That many people have put a lot of effort into and are free to enjoy what they want without even supporting such products. It disgusts me when people like this "Bite the Hand That Feeds" (if anyone gets this reference +300 cool points).
Nine Inch Nails?
And I'm going to be honest here: I pirate games all the time. I pirated Starcraft 2. HOWEVER I do not play all the way through games, and most of the time, I just buy it if it's fun enough. With SC2, I wanted to play the campaign and practice for multiplayer, so I pirated it, beat the campaign and played the AI, and when I had the money, bought it. Pirating to me is a good thing, because it pretty much allows me to have a free demo of the game. If I don't like it, I just dont play it. If I do, I buy it. However, most people just steal it, and that, to me, is despicable. Seriously people. If you pirate a game, buy the damn thing, especially if its indie and the dev doesn't get much money from it anyways.
Problem with your argument is the availability of trial keys to try the game legally.
On November 16 2010 13:10 MavercK wrote: these stats are pointless
the same as Epic Games saying Unreal Tournament 3 was pirated 20-40 million times. if piracy didn't exist would Unreal Tournament sell 20-40 million copies? i doubt it.
also there is no multiplayer crack. only solo vs ai capabilities. which can easily be done with the map editor. hardly need a crack...
this thread should be closed as it has already divulged into flat out WRONG information.
No, it wouldn't have sold 40 million copies. But to deny that the piracy didn't eat up some sales is wrong too. About this thread being WRONG as you say it may or may not be the case since nobody can really know if those illegal downloads were just done because the Blizz downloader was crappy.
But I get your point as companies tend to exaggerate the piracy numbers. But we can't deny that piracy is not a problem regarding game sales.
About this thread being closed. I didn't post this with any malicious intent. I'll leave it up to the judgement of the admins
i meant flat out wrong information in regards to someone saying theres a multiplayer crack
and i just see this thread going downhill. they always do. immoral/moral who cares. piracy is here to stay. you can't put a padlock on software. all you can do is deliver the best possible product and the best possible service to the point where playing your game legally is a better experience than pirating. this is where most companies get it wrong. they try to padlock their game. cut features (LAN) and restrict everything. this PROMOTES piracy as generally a cracked/unlocked game offers more features, is more easily played, etc etc.
you can bet your ass if a iCCup type private server started up. or the ability for people to host their own, local, b.net servers. piracy for starcraft 2 would skyrocket. why? because suddenly the community has put together a better game than blizzard. not because all pirates wear eye patches and are evil.
I really don't understand the point of pirating games like this or Bad Company 2? You don't even get to play the major component of the game unless you pay for it.
On November 16 2010 12:05 B-Wong wrote: That's terrible, I hate seeing people who cheat there way through such great things (music, movies, etc.) That many people have put a lot of effort into and are free to enjoy what they want without even supporting such products. It disgusts me when people like this "Bite the Hand That Feeds" (if anyone gets this reference +300 cool points).
Nine Inch Nails?
And I'm going to be honest here: I pirate games all the time. I pirated Starcraft 2. HOWEVER I do not play all the way through games, and most of the time, I just buy it if it's fun enough. With SC2, I wanted to play the campaign and practice for multiplayer, so I pirated it, beat the campaign and played the AI, and when I had the money, bought it. Pirating to me is a good thing, because it pretty much allows me to have a free demo of the game. If I don't like it, I just dont play it. If I do, I buy it. However, most people just steal it, and that, to me, is despicable. Seriously people. If you pirate a game, buy the damn thing, especially if its indie and the dev doesn't get much money from it anyways.
Problem with your argument is the availability of trial keys to try the game legally.
Absolutely. The thought didn't even occur to me with sc2. >.< See, even with most of the time me not outright stealing the games, I do forget legal options. Pirating is a slippery slope.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
Yep
I bought the game, but torrented it because it was a hell of a lot faster than Blizzard's downloader, and I didn't have a dvd-rom drive at the time.
On November 16 2010 13:10 MavercK wrote: these stats are pointless
the same as Epic Games saying Unreal Tournament 3 was pirated 20-40 million times. if piracy didn't exist would Unreal Tournament sell 20-40 million copies? i doubt it.
also there is no multiplayer crack. only solo vs ai capabilities. which can easily be done with the map editor. hardly need a crack...
this thread should be closed as it has already divulged into flat out WRONG information.
No, it wouldn't have sold 40 million copies. But to deny that the piracy didn't eat up some sales is wrong too. About this thread being WRONG as you say it may or may not be the case since nobody can really know if those illegal downloads were just done because the Blizz downloader was crappy.
But I get your point as companies tend to exaggerate the piracy numbers. But we can't deny that piracy is not a problem regarding game sales.
About this thread being closed. I didn't post this with any malicious intent. I'll leave it up to the judgement of the admins
i meant flat out wrong information in regards to someone saying theres a multiplayer crack
and i just see this thread going downhill. they always do. immoral/moral who cares. piracy is here to stay. you can't put a padlock on software. all you can do is deliver the best possible product and the best possible service to the point where playing your game legally is a better experience than pirating. this is where most companies get it wrong. they try to padlock their game. cut features (LAN) and restrict everything. this PROMOTES piracy as generally a cracked/unlocked game offers more features, is more easily played, etc etc.
Oh sorry I misunderstood you then. As for your last few points, I mean yeah they can deliver good content and hope that because its good people will buy it. But that is not always the case, I don't exactly remember much of the details, but there was a case where an indie developer offered its game and whatever price you wanted to pay. The game itself was great quality and you could buy it at 1 cent(and I even think part of the profits went to charity) people still pirated it.
Some people just feel it is their right to have stuff for free because X or Y reason(I do think that a lot of games are overpriced, and I have pirated a few things myself). But just offering a good game is just not enough incentive for some.
About the DRM promoting piracy we can't really say. Its just circular logic. DRM was implemented because piracy but it encourages more piracy, so what do we get? Worse DRM and on and on and on until the only people that lose are legit customers.
thing about pirating games like this, is that how many people pirate the game to see what its like, and then upon discovering this, want to play online and buy it.
couple that with people who download it just cos its faster that way, lol.
probably a lot of those 2,1 million paid for the game
I downloaded the client through a torrent and added to this number, seriously have you guys tried to use the blizzard downloader??? soooo slow and sooo many hoops to jump through.
On November 16 2010 13:10 MavercK wrote: these stats are pointless
the same as Epic Games saying Unreal Tournament 3 was pirated 20-40 million times. if piracy didn't exist would Unreal Tournament sell 20-40 million copies? i doubt it.
also there is no multiplayer crack. only solo vs ai capabilities. which can easily be done with the map editor. hardly need a crack...
this thread should be closed as it has already divulged into flat out WRONG information.
No, it wouldn't have sold 40 million copies. But to deny that the piracy didn't eat up some sales is wrong too. About this thread being WRONG as you say it may or may not be the case since nobody can really know if those illegal downloads were just done because the Blizz downloader was crappy.
But I get your point as companies tend to exaggerate the piracy numbers. But we can't deny that piracy is not a problem regarding game sales.
About this thread being closed. I didn't post this with any malicious intent. I'll leave it up to the judgement of the admins
i meant flat out wrong information in regards to someone saying theres a multiplayer crack
and i just see this thread going downhill. they always do. immoral/moral who cares. piracy is here to stay. you can't put a padlock on software. all you can do is deliver the best possible product and the best possible service to the point where playing your game legally is a better experience than pirating. this is where most companies get it wrong. they try to padlock their game. cut features (LAN) and restrict everything. this PROMOTES piracy as generally a cracked/unlocked game offers more features, is more easily played, etc etc.
Oh sorry I misunderstood you then. As for your last few points, I mean yeah they can deliver good content and hope that because its good people will buy it. But that is not always the case, I don't exactly remember much of the details, but there was a case where an indie developer offered its game and whatever price you wanted to pay. The game itself was great quality and you could buy it at 1 cent(and I even think part of the profits went to charity) people still pirated it.
Some people just feel it is their right to have stuff for free because X or Y reason(I do think that a lot of games are overpriced, and I have pirated a few things myself). But just offering a good game is just not enough incentive for some.
About the DRM promoting piracy we can't really say. Its just circular logic. DRM was implemented because piracy but it encourages more piracy, so what do we get? Worse DRM and on and on and on until the only people that lose are legit customers.
issue with indie games is they have no marketing. indie games these days however have a TON of success on steam. the only time people even find out about some indie games is when they pop up on release sites and then it's just a couple of clicks away to get the game. as opposed to hunting it down and trying to find where it's sold few more clicks to buy it. then gotta go through whatever DRM solution it's imposed. maybe install Impulse or something you dont want. it goes on. see what i mean by this?
"hmmm. 1 click.. free game?, 100 clicks... not free game"
often times it is FAR easier to pirate the game. just because it's far less effort. Gabe Newell said this perfectly in an interview. PC Gamers spend thousands and thousands of dollars on their computer. money isn't the issue. it's not that people want it for free. it's that it's often 100x easier and also a better SERVICE to just pirate the damn thing.
Almost all of them are just people who wanted to play campaign.
And seriously, these guys would NOT have paid for the game even if the pirate link wasn't there. Hell, you can just download SC2 normally anyway and just do some tricks for campaign.
Well, blizzard made it so that you can play the campaign without an account anyways. If you just lent your disc to all your friends, and they installed, they could play the full campaign as a guest. Can save and everything.
You pay for the multiplayer, if they wanna play campaign first to see how epic the game is, they can go right ahead. lol.
Edit: Seems someone else pointed that out already.
I pirate a game, if its fun... its worth my investment. Though I rarely play any games that are really for the single player experience. Exception would be Fallout and the Total War series, I always support them.
On November 16 2010 12:14 Shizuru~ wrote: imagine if the game costs 200+ dollars for u, would that be a good enough reason for u to pirate?
fact is that in foreign countries they have to import the game and if their country's currency is weaker, then the price of the game shoots up to almost ridiculous level..
and not everyone wanna play the game online...
The Australian Dollar is almost identical to the US dollar (98.7) at the moment, but we still get overcharged for any games. SC2 is $100 in retail and so is every other PC game. In America, it's only $60 :\
Im actually suprised at how low this number is, and im sure its much bigger than that.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
so tru, i friend of mine bought the game 2 days ago, and according to bnet he will need like 20hrs to download it. then he went to a torrent tracker dl it for 2mins.
On November 16 2010 12:14 Shizuru~ wrote: imagine if the game costs 200+ dollars for u, would that be a good enough reason for u to pirate?
fact is that in foreign countries they have to import the game and if their country's currency is weaker, then the price of the game shoots up to almost ridiculous level..
and not everyone wanna play the game online...
The Australian Dollar is almost identical to the US dollar (98.7) at the moment, but we still get overcharged for any games. SC2 is $100 in retail and so is every other PC game. In America, it's only $60 :\
Actually console games are $60 here, while 90% of the PC games are still $50. Damn you Activision!
Yea, I can easily say that alot of those d/ls wouldn't necessarily be sales. Alot of my friends were interested in just the single player, pirated it and beat it in a weekend and then promptly un-installed it. Yet there was never a chance that they would have actually bought it, it was more of a "Oh why not, its free" type of deal.
edit: two posts above me, yeah exactly, i always downloaded new games back when i had a 256mb now i have 128 so its out of the question for me, but yeah i was an sc player, so i would just dl free games for the single player and then uninstall it, keep the iso in extra HD's for later use if ever lost my internet. lol
Starcraft II was the first video game I actually bought since AoE two.
If they let me demo the game first, like people here have suggested, then I might buy it. But I won't sink 50-60$ in a game that may or may not suck. The only reason I knew SCII would be awesome was the beta, which was free.
Truthfully, the only games I ever liked enough after pirating to get were fallout 3 and supreme commander, and since my friends had the disks I just borrowed them. I really see no problem with people pirating SCII, seeing as there are probably emulated bnet2.0's out there, and if people want to have fun while sacrificing support, patches, and probably most if not all of multiplayer then Im not going to whine because I bought it and they didn't.
On November 16 2010 12:09 seaofsaturn wrote: Well, a lot of people who actually bought the game probably used a torrent to download the client because the blizzard downloader is slow as balls.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
There's no "corporate greed" aspect to this at all. Game Publishers aren't being greedy, they are selling a product that people can choose to buy or not buy. They are in this to make money, not be our friends. The sense of entitlement some of these pirates have makes me sick. These are the same people that would take welfare for 2 years and not bother trying to find a job just because they were already getting free money
On November 16 2010 13:41 klauz619 wrote: Almost all of them are just people who wanted to play campaign.
And seriously, these guys would NOT have paid for the game even if the pirate link wasn't there. Hell, you can just download SC2 normally anyway and just do some tricks for campaign.
That's complete bullshit. Always those piracy supporters, gotta make you sick.
"Oh they just download it there because it's faster." "Playing only the campaign is okay. Pirates have the right to do that." (and yes, even though it's possible to do that via some abusing with the guest keys)
Really, everybody should pay if he intends to play the goddamn game. Blizzard actually does want to make money with sells you know?
Having a huge multiplayer aspect is no justification for pirating it for the single player experience.
Gah it's sickening how many people in the gaming community tolerate if not even support piracy. And at the same time these people demand Lan? Hilarious. Is Blizzard supposed to give away SC2 free to everyone?
Edit: And why is everyone claiming the campaign sucks? What RTS campaign is done better than the one of SC2? I haven't had such a blast playing another RTS campaign EVER.
On November 16 2010 13:41 klauz619 wrote: Almost all of them are just people who wanted to play campaign.
And seriously, these guys would NOT have paid for the game even if the pirate link wasn't there. Hell, you can just download SC2 normally anyway and just do some tricks for campaign.
That's complete bullshit. Always those piracy supporters, gotta make you sick.
"Oh they just download it there because it's faster." "Playing only the campaign is okay. Pirates have the right to do that." (and yes, even though it's possible to do that via some abusing with the guest keys)
Really, everybody should pay if he intends to play the goddamn game. Blizzard actually does want to make money with sells you know?
Having a huge multiplayer aspect is no justification for pirating it for the single player experience.
Gah it's sickening how many people in the gaming community tolerate if not even support piracy. And at the same time these people demand Lan? Hilarious. Is Blizzard supposed to give away SC2 free to everyone?
They aren't supposed to give it away for free, but they also aren't supposed to punish people who bought the game by not offering LAN support. It's sickening that they'd not have LAN, a given in ALL rts games, because they were afraid that people would pirate it for use with LAN only. Do you have any idea how many people pirated SCI? Many more than SCII, and yet BW is still for sale.
All these white-knighting idiots spouting self-righteous shit about pirating really makes me sad. Please people, it doesn't hurt you, so stop caring.
Lol, Blizzard was actually a genius for once. They knew there would be almost as many people pirating SC2 as there would be buying it, so they made all the content online connected to battle.net. Now there's 2.3 million people disgruntled because their 7GB torrent isn't worth shit, so they'll give up and go buy the game. Expect 2.3 million copies of SC2 being sold within the next few months.
This only proves that unless you make it 100% piratefree people are gonna pirate it. There's no point in removing this and that, you're only hurting people that actually pays for it. Either make it so that you can't pirate it in anyway or make it so that you get stuff for the paid version that you don't get for the pirated version, like great online play. Removing LAN to reduce piracy is like... [insert bad analogy here]... it's like blaming one Zergling in a 200 vs 200 battle why you lost the battle.
Piraters are gonna pirate, the best is to just promote the legal version as much as you can and make people buy it that way.
I could be wrong but didn't they mention at Blizzcon that they're working on a safe alternative that would allow connecting to B-net to authenticate and then having the ability to LAN without internet?
Blizz is doing a great job at growing the SC2 esports scene, I'd be suprised if we didn't see this within the next year.
Hate all you want at Blizzard and their corporate greed as long as they continue to develop B-net 2.0, which they def said at Blizzcon (chat obviously, more thorough post-game stat breakdowns, and increased development with the ladder). I'll remain happy and excited to see what else they can do to make SC2 an even better game.
On November 16 2010 14:51 Icarus84 wrote: I could be wrong but didn't they mention at Blizzcon that they're working on a safe alternative that would allow connecting to B-net to authenticate and then having the ability to LAN without internet?
Blizz is doing a great job at growing the SC2 esports scene, I'd be suprised if we didn't see this within the next year.
Hate all you want at Blizzard and their corporate greed as long as they continue to develop B-net 2.0, which they def said at Blizzcon (chat obviously, more thorough post-game stat breakdowns, and increased development with the ladder). I'll remain happy and excited to see what else they can do to make SC2 an even better game.
most likely wrong. Blizzard seem content with the "if we ignore it long enough maybe it'll go away" approach to LAN.
On November 16 2010 14:47 dudeman001 wrote: Lol, Blizzard was actually a genius for once. They knew there would be almost as many people pirating SC2 as there would be buying it, so they made all the content online connected to battle.net. Now there's 2.3 million people disgruntled because their 7GB torrent isn't worth shit, so they'll give up and go buy the game. Expect 2.3 million copies of SC2 being sold within the next few months.
No. Not in the slightest.
Stopping piracy does very little to increase sales. If a pirate cannot download the game, he will simply not play it in the vast majority of cases. Only a small minority will actually buy the game, if piracy is not an option.
I hate statistics like these, because it's like saying "Blizzard is missing out on the sales of 2.3 million copies of Starcraft," which is totally bogus. In all likelihood, most of the people who pirated it just downloaded it, opened it up, played it for 15 minutes and then never touched it again. I have friends who pirate dozens of games a week and that's kind of how they play. You can speak ethically about whether these people should be doing this; I for one don't pirate because I want to support developers that make great games. However, in the grand scheme of things, these people are not as significant of a factor in how gaming companies make money than these statistics would lead many to think.
The worst part is that misinterpretation of statistics like these become a justification for gaming companies to take drastic anti-piracy measures that in my estimation hurt the entire industry by hurting the consumers that PAY for the product. Blizzard is certainly not the worst offender in this area, but the missing LAN functionality in Starcraft II is a direct result of this kind of thinking. With Starcraft II growing, these kind of problems don't just affect the consumer, but even large events like MLG.
The concept behind preventing piracy is to make those who pirate have a more difficult time experiencing the game than those who purchased it. But if you are negatively affecting those who purchased the game, you are diminishing the margin by which the "purchased" experience is better. In some extreme cases, pirated games actually work better than purchased games.
I am optimistic about the anti-piracy models that focus on making the "purchased" experience better, rather than working on making the pirated experience worse. If it is easy and convenient to buy, download, and update the game, and you get other features that you simply could not get through pirating, people are going to be more likely to just pay the cost of the game and get it going right away, instead of tinkering with cracks and stuff. Steam is a great example of this: you can re-download the games you purchased at any time, cross platform, it is insanely easy to update the software, and you get all of your user data on any computer through the steam cloud.
All that being said, Blizzard actually does a pretty good job of doing it right in my opinion. Yeah, the blizzard downloader isn't perfect but you can redownload SCII through your Battle.net account any time you want which I think is great. I just feel like Blizzard not allowing LAN is kind of showing that they don't trust the value of Battle.net 2.0 and they feel like consumers would opt to get pirated hacked versions rather than play on the ladder.
Who cares? This is the way of the world if you guys didn't know. People steal shit, and can you even call it stealing? When something can be copied for free? Everyone of you who criticize people who pirated the game have pirated lots of shit. We all have. Don't act like you haven't downloaded songs, or used a pirated version of windows, or anything like that in the past.
And for those of you who for some reason think that they cant do anything with the pirated copy. It's cracked for offline play. You can pirate the game and play the campaign.
Blizzards still making a fortune. We who bought the game and are playing online are satisfied. The pirates are happy. Everybody wins.
@oogles
excellent post, excellent points about the misrepresentation of statistics. and I agree and always infact knew and advocated that video games of the future will fight piracy by making the purchased experience better. like starcraft 2, you have to purchase it to use all the online modes and that's the best part. this is the future.
I was there at the midnight launch. I was on the phone with tech support half an hour later finding out why, exactly, they had flagged my account as a European one even though every setting I could influence was and always had been set to North America. Three days later I gave up on Blizzard and pirated the game so that I could play it.
Thanks, Blizzard DRM. I'm now certain that I'll be pirating all of your games I want to play in the future so that I can definitely play them. After how unhelpful Blizzard was (I'm still stuck with two separate accounts, they never did fix anything) I don't really care if they are losing out on my business. If I pay for something and then do not receive it, I'm not likely to pay again unless I'm sure.
On November 16 2010 12:09 seaofsaturn wrote: Well, a lot of people who actually bought the game probably used a torrent to download the client because the blizzard downloader is slow as balls.
Now i'm not saying that having LAN wouldn't be awesome, considering my friends and I have a weekly LAN at my place...but..
I'm just curious if anyone else noticed how weak of an internet connection you need to actually play SC2 online, one of my buds from work actually plays matches with me each week on a laptop that uses an iPad's tethered internet connection with absolutely no latency issues.
Also I'm wondering to what people have found is the max players for having on a LAN without experiencing lag. I've had 10 on my network with no issues (5mb down/1mb up DSL, with ASUS-RT-N16 router).
On November 16 2010 14:47 dudeman001 wrote: Lol, Blizzard was actually a genius for once. They knew there would be almost as many people pirating SC2 as there would be buying it, so they made all the content online connected to battle.net. Now there's 2.3 million people disgruntled because their 7GB torrent isn't worth shit, so they'll give up and go buy the game. Expect 2.3 million copies of SC2 being sold within the next few months.
No. Not in the slightest.
Stopping piracy does very little to increase sales. If a pirate cannot download the game, he will simply not play it in the vast majority of cases. Only a small minority will actually buy the game, if piracy is not an option.
But in that case - they probably wouldn't have bought it anyway if piracy wasn't an option..
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
I really wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. Especially since the Blizzard downloader is pretty much a p2p torrent anyways. It also has issues with Vista and Windows 7 'cause of the stupid run as admin crap.
On November 16 2010 15:15 oogles wrote: I hate statistics like these, because it's like saying "Blizzard is missing out on the sales of 2.3 million copies of Starcraft," which is totally bogus. In all likelihood, most of the people who pirated it just downloaded it, opened it up, played it for 15 minutes and then never touched it again. I have friends who pirate dozens of games a week and that's kind of how they play. You can speak ethically about whether these people should be doing this; I for one don't pirate because I want to support developers that make great games. However, in the grand scheme of things, these people are not as significant of a factor in how gaming companies make money than these statistics would lead many to think.
The worst part is that misinterpretation of statistics like these become a justification for gaming companies to take drastic anti-piracy measures that in my estimation hurt the entire industry by hurting the consumers that PAY for the product. Blizzard is certainly not the worst offender in this area, but the missing LAN functionality in Starcraft II is a direct result of this kind of thinking. With Starcraft II growing, these kind of problems don't just affect the consumer, but even large events like MLG.
The concept behind preventing piracy is to make those who pirate have a more difficult time experiencing the game than those who purchased it. But if you are negatively affecting those who purchased the game, you are diminishing the margin by which the "purchased" experience is better. In some extreme cases, pirated games actually work better than purchased games.
I am optimistic about the anti-piracy models that focus on making the "purchased" experience better, rather than working on making the pirated experience worse. If it is easy and convenient to buy, download, and update the game, and you get other features that you simply could not get through pirating, people are going to be more likely to just pay the cost of the game and get it going right away, instead of tinkering with cracks and stuff. Steam is a great example of this: you can re-download the games you purchased at any time, cross platform, it is insanely easy to update the software, and you get all of your user data on any computer through the steam cloud.
All that being said, Blizzard actually does a pretty good job of doing it right in my opinion. Yeah, the blizzard downloader isn't perfect but you can redownload SCII through your Battle.net account any time you want which I think is great. I just feel like Blizzard not allowing LAN is kind of showing that they don't trust the value of Battle.net 2.0 and they feel like consumers would opt to get pirated hacked versions rather than play on the ladder.
I agree with all this, I personally bootlegged it because I thought it was going to be a massive failure. After I finished the campaign I really enjoyed it so I bought it. They get my money because I liked it, I think that's fair. Sort of a try-before-you-buy thing.
And that's why they introduced guest accounts? There's really no reason to pirate SC2 other than a quicker DL.
On November 16 2010 12:09 seaofsaturn wrote: Well, a lot of people who actually bought the game probably used a torrent to download the client because the blizzard downloader is slow as balls.
The Blizzard Downloader is a bittorent client.
It's still slow as balls...
I downloaded the english and german client both with speeds consistently over 2mb/sec. Must be the internet connection on your end ... see if your provider is throttling bittorrent traffic, like some others do. That would hurt the blizz downloader a lot.
On the other side, why even bother. This threads contains so much false info (almost every 4 posts) ... seems pointless to correct many misconceptions here.
Well, not really. I've got 3 friends who share 2 accounts which are not legal. They didn't buy the game and I asked them how did they do it and apparently one of them used some sort of keygen thing to get a SCII Battle.net account and downloaded the client off the net so they're pretty much free to play.
I keep bugging them telling to buy the real game before they did this. I told them it was definitely worth it (since I was pretty much alone playing it). They kept telling me they'll think about it. Then a couple of hours after one of them said they were trying this keygen thing and hoping it works, he managed to log in and play.
I don't see why this warrant a thread unless hackers managed to make pirated copies of SC2 multiplayer available. Blizzard games have always made the most popular PC games while PC games have always been the easiest to pirate. Pirating hurts small single-player PC game developers more than a massive company like Blizzard who bank on their multiplayer content to retain their sales and fanbase.
Actually I was one of the guys who downloaded off torrents, because the blizzard downloader was slow as f***. It kept saying that I was behind a "Firewall" even though all my other torrents download just fine. So finally I just downloaded off torrents and just activated the game through Battle.net. A couple of friends also did the same. So does that make us pirates? :S
On November 16 2010 13:41 klauz619 wrote: Almost all of them are just people who wanted to play campaign.
And seriously, these guys would NOT have paid for the game even if the pirate link wasn't there. Hell, you can just download SC2 normally anyway and just do some tricks for campaign.
That's complete bullshit. Always those piracy supporters, gotta make you sick.
"Oh they just download it there because it's faster."
What's wrong with that argument? You have an ISO. You can install the game. Not more - not less. To do anything else you need either a BNet account or a crack.
Yes, of course it's a bit nerdy to just play a few hours (minutes) earlier - but it's fun to do nerdy stuff once in a while. Three of my friends & me - we all downloaded the game beforehand and installed it (and updated?). Met for a LAN and waited for the postman to bring us our versions so we could start immediately.
I also "pirated" a Korean SC2 versions just for the lolz (using the relocalizer to play it on the EU server).
On November 16 2010 12:07 mufin wrote: you could also flip the coin and argue why did blizzard try to fight pirating in the first place and simply give its community what they wanted (lan, cross-region etc...)
if that many people dl'ed it for just campaign, if lan was included (and hence non b.net online servers) how many more people would not have bought it?
blizzard does have staff to pay after all.
I'm pretty sure they have that covered with the massive amount they make off of WoW.
On November 16 2010 12:42 Yoshi Kirishima wrote: It is indeed sad, piraters are probably the biggest reason many people in this world can't pursue what they love (jobs in music, art, or any kind of business where their product can be stolen).
That is such a fallacious argument it isn't even funny. People who make good things (be it music art whatever) can live off it while the ones putting out low quality stuff whine and complain about piracy in an attempt to dodge the fact that their "work" is complete crap.
That said, do you know how much a writer gets on a book sold 20$ ? 2$. An author on a CD sold 20$ ? 1.5$.
There are people out there who don't enjoy multiplayer RTS but like the campaigns. For instance I downloaded all the Call of Duty games because I enjoy the campaigns but I absolutely hate their multiplayer mode.
It isn't "stolen revenue" or "illegal experience" because I wouldn't have bought the game in the first place.
And then there are the AWESOME games such as The Witcher that I first pirated and THEN bought because that game was just phenomenal and that small studio honestly deserved encouragement.
In all seriousness, how can people say that "downloading SC2 is hurting blizzard" ? It's like saying stealing a coke can will put coca cola out of business...
On November 16 2010 15:29 Icarus84 wrote: Now i'm not saying that having LAN wouldn't be awesome, considering my friends and I have a weekly LAN at my place...but..
I'm just curious if anyone else noticed how weak of an internet connection you need to actually play SC2 online, one of my buds from work actually plays matches with me each week on a laptop that uses an iPad's tethered internet connection with absolutely no latency issues.
Also I'm wondering to what people have found is the max players for having on a LAN without experiencing lag. I've had 10 on my network with no issues (5mb down/1mb up DSL, with ASUS-RT-N16 router).
It really depends where you live, I know places like EU and NA get very low latency, but SEA gets lag no matter how good ur internet is. I play on SEA and get between 100-200ms of lag, same if I play on the NA server, why should I have to play with this when my friends and I bought the game legit?
I was at a LAN the other week, bunch of friends got together to play some SC2, that was the plan until ... server being patched and is down. You know what we did? Played SC:BW on LAN, a game which is 10 yrs older yet still retains more functionality ...
I don't think this is a big deal. I bet that the vast majority of the people who downloaded it didn't play it for any longer than a day or two. I'm also pretty sure that basically everybody who got the pirated version quit playing it after a week, since there is no multiplayer in the cracked version. In addition, I guess that there are some people, who bought the game after trying it.
On top of that, many of the people who pirated it, would not have bought it anyway, either because they don't really care for the game and just wanted to try it for an hour or so, or because they live in a country where a person with an average income couldn't possibly afford to buy an original pc game.
All in all, I'd say that sc2 is one of the games with the fewest income losses from pirating, since it's largest asset is multiplayer anyway, and bnet 2.0 has yet to be emulated...
I pirated it to play single player. I was able to finish it in like a week. I then purchased the game a month after it's release date when i had some time to play online. Blizzard has made it so it's impossible to play online without a BNET account. Whats the point of playing sc2 if you can't play online... They are probably going to do the same thing for Diablo 3.
On November 16 2010 12:07 mufin wrote: you could also flip the coin and argue why did blizzard try to fight pirating in the first place and simply give its community what they wanted (lan, cross-region etc...)
if that many people dl'ed it for just campaign, if lan was included (and hence non b.net online servers) how many more people would not have bought it?
blizzard does have staff to pay after all.
I'm pretty sure they have that covered with the massive amount they make off of WoW.
God I see this type of argument all the time ... I'm so sick of it. Can somebody tell me why Blizzard is not entitled to make some money?
As much as I don't condone getting stuff off blizzard for free, I feel it is a good thing. We need more people exposed to Starcraft 2 for it to unite esports and succeed SCBW.
Look at esports events in China like war3, counter-strike. They are always packed with millions of fans. Do you think all of them can afford the $60 price tag of sc2? No. The majority can't even afford a decent computer.
Sc2 is a great game, and the ONLY thing limiting it from being widespread is the pricetag and the online-only play.
Here is the fact if you pirate it your a dirty thief and no right to the property...Plain and simple.. No if ands or butts.. No one has "the right " to take something that does not belong to them. Get a life and get a conscience!
You can't justify stealing a game, you can't say i would have starved if i didn't pirate this. You are a crook and that is that.
I am very proud to say that I am in full support of any digital piracy of any medium, whether it is music, movies, etc. I don't even have a terribly fast internet connection (a very draconian 300kb connection), but, I will pirate at almost every opportunity, having plenty of exceptions.
The reason I do it isn't because I want to be a cheap bastard, deny the hardwork of artists, developers, etc. but rather, I believe that its a insane that full retail price is usually charged for purely digital products. For instance, why does do the hard copy and digital copy of SC2 have the same price? Boxes, discs, warehouses, shipping, encoding of those dvds, etc etc etc all have a cost associated to it, so why should I give Blizzard the convenience and bigger profit margin for buying a digital copy?
I really only ever buy a product in a few circumstances:
1. I want to give my financial support to those who created the product in hopes they will produce more products of similar quality. Best example of this is my purchase of both Mass Effect 2/Sonic: The Hedgehog Rpg; I want Bioware to stick around, and keep producing quality games, I enjoy them.
2. When there is added value to purchasing the product. ex. This is primarily why I pirate very few movies. Watching a movie in a movie theater is an experience, that unfortunately never be reproduced no matter how rich I am.
3. Whenever there is a good sale on steam, I will try and pick up a game, if my wallet allows it. This is a combination of all my reasons for why I pirate/don't pirate. These games are being offered to me at a discounted price from the hard copy retail version, they have the added value of always being attached to my steam account (therefore I will never lose them/can dl them to other computers), and it helps me support the whole notion of digital versions should be cheaper than hard copy versions.
So call me a thief, scum of the earth, pirate, etc. torrenting, cloud, steam, all of this is the wave of the future, and really should begin to be reflected in the amount of money we have to pay for information through these mediums. Kept a their ridiculously inflated amounts, you not only screw over your customers, but you condone those big companies screwing over the very people that created the intellectual property.
(for the record, I did man up and buy Starcraft 2; the "added value" was being able to play with people like you)
On November 16 2010 16:31 greeryan wrote: No one has "the right " to take something that does not belong to them. Get a life and get a conscience!
Says the guy living in the biggest country to date to be built on greed, exploitation and thievery...
Your nation murdered millions of civilians to steal oil so lazy rednecks could save 25 cents at the pump and you're here trying to lecture us about "piracy is evil" ? LOL.
Morality is quite similar to what comes out of people's asses...
On November 16 2010 16:04 Benshin88 wrote: Blizzard has made it so it's impossible to play online without a BNET account.
I'm not trying to single you out, because several people said similar things, but you're the most recent poster.
While it is currently not possible to play SC2 multiplayer without a bnet account, it is not entirely impossible, just HARDER than SC1. Back when SC1 was released, virtual networking was very rare and not used by many people. That meant the only way you could play multiplayer would be offline via LAN, which wasn't too common. (of course both these things changed with time)
What bothers me the most though, is my previous paragraph is ignoring the fact that you could have up to 8 OTHER COPIES OF STARCRAFT ON BATTLE NET FOR FRIENDS TO PLAY SIMULTANEOUSLY FOR FREE (LEGALLY) which were called spawn copies. It wasn't completely unrestricted play, as I think you could only play games with the spawn parent/host.
Anyway, like I was saying in paragraph 2, there will be a LAN/P2P crack for SC2 because SC2 is just using routed P2P technology for game hosting/playing. No server-side stuff going on at all (except the matchmaking system, which could be emulated anyway). If there was server-side tech, then not only would pirated multiplayer be close to impossible, but map hacking and disconnect hacking would be impossible. Seems like Blizzard is really skimpy with their resources though... I can only assume they have their reasons.
I downloaded SC2 when it first came out. Never played an RTS before but I heard good stuff about this game, and after a week of playing the campaign I went out and bought it. Very glad I did of course.
On November 16 2010 16:31 greeryan wrote: No one has "the right " to take something that does not belong to them. Get a life and get a conscience!
Says the guy living in the biggest country to date to be built on greed, exploitation and thievery...
Your nation murdered millions of civilians to steal oil so lazy rednecks could save 25 cents at the pump and you're here trying to lecture us about "piracy is evil" ? LOL.
Morality is quite similar to what comes out of people's asses...
says a guy that works 60+ hours a week with a 2 hour commute and works for what he has... the way america was built
On November 16 2010 16:31 greeryan wrote: No one has "the right " to take something that does not belong to them. Get a life and get a conscience!
Says the guy living in the biggest country to date to be built on greed, exploitation and thievery...
Your nation murdered millions of civilians to steal oil so lazy rednecks could save 25 cents at the pump and you're here trying to lecture us about "piracy is evil" ? LOL.
Morality is quite similar to what comes out of people's asses...
What's wrong with murdering millions of civilians and stealing oil if morality is shit? Your ambivalence between anti-Americanism and nihilism is shit.
I belive the No lan on release was not only to prevent piracy, it also preven kespa from doing whatever they want like they did with sc1, while im sure blizzard would take em to court im also sure that the case it be debated for years. Seem wierd but in the long run no Lan might be the best thing for esports because it keep kespa out of it.
I am very proud to say that I am in full support of any digital piracy of any medium, whether it is music, movies, etc. I don't even have a terribly fast internet connection (a very draconian 300kb connection), but, I will pirate at almost every opportunity, having plenty of exceptions.
The reason I do it isn't because I want to be a cheap bastard, deny the hardwork of artists, developers, etc. but rather, I believe that its a insane that full retail price is usually charged for purely digital products.
What do you do for a living? How did your parents make their living? Why should anyone make digital products if your view is the correct view? Are you aware that the digital work is much more expensive than the physical product? You're talking about a 10 cent plastic DVD and a cardboard box that is even cheaper.
You can word it however you wish, but there are obvious logic holes in your stance which leads to me believe that you're using a bit of doublespeak to convince yourself you can download whatever you want. Sure must be nice to play that fancy new $60 game every few weeks while I watch titles like Black Ops, Bad Company, Dragon Age expansions, and dozens others slide by me while responsibly keeping my curious wallet closed-- can't imagine how much coaxing it took to convince you to enjoy that in my stead.
maybe they just bought a key online from another source, and figured they might aswell download it somewhere else seeing as they cant play it without an acc anyway so guessing its somthing to do with download speed from blizz site and if that is the case i really dont see the problem :D
Yes, this kind of stuff happens. Battlenet isnt the almighty lord of security. It was bound to happen.
I would be a hypocrit to say that I hate all those who pirated sc2. As I download music a lot myself. I bought sc2 on the release though. One of the few games I ever bought after ~2008 I think. Couldn't be bothered to wait until some keygen was found.
Bittorrent is a good source to download something from.
It doesn't say "Cracked" version, it just says illegal. Downloading the game client, even if you can't play it, is "illegal". The percentage of people who actually downloaded it and knew how to crack it is extremely small, and keep in mind this is only for the campaign.
The article is extremely misleading. The author should feel ashamed for spreading such misleading information.
If you spend 60$ on a game and it sucks, you've been robbed 60$. Now I know this is entirely subjective to some people, but most gamers can easily see when a game is broken/botched.
Games these days being of generally very low quality compared to what used to be published 10 or 15 years ago (because before if your title wasn't perfect or near perfect AT RELEASE it basically meant bankruptcy and welfare line), people are more cautious. You didn't have the luxury of just saying "lolz we'll patch it later... sometime..." since most patches had to be distributed via magazines and were limited in filesize.
Sometimes you can find gems like The Witcher (mentioned before) and decide such game makers DESERVE money for their awesome work.
Little companies producing very high quality games actually PROFIT from piracy because it helps show and spread their work. Big companies producing games of questionable quality suffer from piracy because people can see what kind of crappy mess their games are BEFORE buying it.
On November 16 2010 12:05 B-Wong wrote: That's terrible, I hate seeing people who cheat there way through such great things (music, movies, etc.) That many people have put a lot of effort into and are free to enjoy what they want without even supporting such products. It disgusts me when people like this "Bite the Hand That Feeds" (if anyone gets this reference +300 cool points).
Meh.
Most people who pirate simply don't have the money to buy that shit in the first place. Blizzard is certainly not strapped for income, and Lars Ulrich can live with his Gulfstream IV with the non-Blu Ray entertainment center.
EDIT: As a disclaimer, I always pirate music/movies/games I know nothing about. If actually like the artist/movie/product, I'll buy it. For games, if there's a good demo version out I'll try that instead.
I'm not in the habit of giving people money for pigs in sacks, even if some shill "reviewer" tells me to.
This is just because many people want to play single player campaign and they don't have money to buy legal copies of games. Take in mind that in a lot of countries sc2 costs more than 10% of average monthly wage, so yea, you don't want to spend that kind of money on game which you won't play online.
I live in a country where the average pay is approximately RM6 (approximately 2USD) per hour (working in grocery stores, restaurants, etc). Now imagine to raise RM250 I'll have to work for 5 days. That's 5 days worth of pay into 1 game!
So if you ask me whether it's wrong to steal? Yes, it's wrong. But whether I understand why people are pirating instead of paying? Yes, I understand why they're doing it too. Unlike most of you from US or Canada, it's not just a 60 bucks game where you can buy from working 4-5 hours.
Before anyone of you decide to screw me over for my comments, I just wanna state that I bought Starcraft 2. I'm just saying that I do know how it feels like to spend so much on a game. It's not because they're extremely cheap people.. it's cause they can hardly afford it.
On November 16 2010 17:21 bLah. wrote: This is just because many people want to play single player campaign and they don't have money to buy legal copies of games. Take in mind that in a lot of countries sc2 costs more than 10% of average monthly wage, so yea, you don't want to spend that kind of money on game which you won't play online.
A legitimate question to this is, in countries where SC2 costs 10% of the monthly wage, how do they manage to find the 400$+ necessary to meet the bare minimum requirements to actually play ?
nearly Everyone here has at some point downloaded something illegally, more to the point not everyone wants to pay £40 for a game then find out it sucks..... i certainly wouldn't. I've torrented games fully aware (as do most who torrent) that there no online play, its like that for all game pretty much.
Alot of people who torrent actually buy the game if they enjoy it, those who don't aren't getting anything out it except for wasted bandwidth as the single player in SC2 isn't really all that worth having the game for. To fight this kind of "try before you buy" companies could simply give everyone a 10 day free trial from the day of release... i bet you'd see most of that piracy go away.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
I thought exactly the same. Funny how everyone makes the assumption that a torrented game instantly means a pirated game, especially when SC2 is to a big part distributed online.
On November 16 2010 17:24 emythrel wrote:To fight this kind of "try before you buy" companies could simply give everyone a 10 day free trial from the day of release... i bet you'd see most of that piracy go away.
That would have even worse effects on sales than piracy because people would feel "entitled" to try the products.
And, of course, since most of the production (art/music/games) is of horrible quality, sales would crash to an all-time record.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
Reading this thread while waiting for my new system to finish DLing Sc2. I should have thought of this, would have been so much faster .
On November 16 2010 17:21 bLah. wrote: This is just because many people want to play single player campaign and they don't have money to buy legal copies of games. Take in mind that in a lot of countries sc2 costs more than 10% of average monthly wage, so yea, you don't want to spend that kind of money on game which you won't play online.
A legitimate question to this is, in countries where SC2 costs 10% of the monthly wage, how do they manage to find the 400$+ necessary to meet the bare minimum requirements to actually play ?
you mean for computer, internet etc? well you can't really live without it. And that's a problem, all those things are really expensive so people don't really have money to buy games/movies etc so these companies wouldn't get money from these people anyway, because they just don't have it.
I mean, I'm not saying that downloading something illegaly is good, but people don't do it because they're dicks. They mostly do it because stuff is too expensive and they still want to see and play things like the rest of world.
Blizzard sells just CD keys online, so I honestly don't think they mind too much about the piracy of the game itself. The main focal point is the multiplayer, which can't be hacked, unless you hack bnet 2.0/blizzard itself.
In my situation the torrent helped to make the decision to buy the game that much faster.
My friend spent a few days downloading the torrent and getting it to work right (there is a work-around to get the single-player campaign working, but no multiplayer obviously) and then invited a few of us over to see how wicked-awesome SC2 is!
The next day, at least 3 of us went out to the stores and bought a copy of SC2 so we could all play the multiplayer game online.
So how about we assume for every 1 "illegal" download there is the possibility to spawn at least 3 "legit" retail copies sold...sounds like piracy is good for business!
I remember this was the same argument for when mp3 downloads became popular in the napster days. Once people could listen to the music they would be more enticed to go out and buy the album for their collection. Big business just has to embrace it, don't fight it (it won't go away)
On November 16 2010 12:06 Draconicfire wrote: Yea, the pirated copies are just essentially campaign. It's pretty dumb to pirate that IMO.
Why? I'd agree that it's multiplayer that makes it worth the money. I never would have paid the price for just the campaign.
And people, please don't make the mistake that industry loves and act as if without piracy all downloaders would be paying customers. That simply isn't true. Many people pirate because they don't care enough for a product to buy it, and if they couldn't get it for free, still wouldn't care enough to buy it and would simply not use it.
I think SC2 is well worth the money and I would encourage anyone who likes games to buy and play it, but I don't see a lot to QQ about here.
All this huff about torrents are so lame. the only difference between 1995 and 2010 is you no longer have to know someone who has the cd so you can burn it, you can just find it online cd free.
Why does it get so much attention? because we can put numbers to it, and see it happen on a global scale, as appose to how many people in your neighborhood have a burned copy of any said music, game, etc. etc. disk.
Remember, burning a music cd for a friend is just as illegal as torrenting that same album. If anything it just goes to show the progression of technology.
You only get single player campaign with the pirated version. Sales wise this won't hurt Blizzard; as most, if not all, of the people who pirated the game never had the intention of dropping $60 on a game. They would simply do without. Piracy isn't so much entitlement as it is people wanting a little taste of the culture without paying for it.
I've pirated several games that sold well, played them for an hour or two and deleted them. I wanted to see what the fuss was all about. I've pirated games like STALKER to trial them and then instantly bought them because I fell in love with them. Piracy isn't all the evil it is made out to be.
I think there is a big different in piracy between EU/US and Asia (or at least SEA).
For US/EU, many people pirate and if they like the game, buy the game from the store too. That would not hurt the industry so much and could be overlook in many cases.
However, in SEA countries, piracy is one of the culture. For example; in Thailand, I think more than 80% of gamers play pirated games and most of them might only play pirated version too. Many people also said that people who buy the legal copy of the game are stupid, or argue that they want to support local "(pirate) industry" (we have factory that pump out pirate games for sale).
Economy is also another factor, if the game is not produced locally, it could cost around 10 to 25% of the average salary here (SC2 was about 25% of my salary). But for some people, even they have a lot of money, they would still choose to pirate anyway.
What I want to say is that, also piracy seems not to be a big of a problem in the west, it is in Asia (or at least SEA). If you see that we have an IT mall with dozen of game retailers that sold "ONLY" pirated version of games/movies/music openly, I think you will see how serious the problem is.
I tried the single player pirated version first, then I payed 550 kr (around 90$) for the "full" game Ô_õ. Honestly thou with time considering what a piece of crap B.net 2.0 is, I regret it...
As said before, chances are quite high that a good chunk of these downloads are by honest customers with a key who are just annoyed with the download speed of the Blizzard client.
I don't see a problem with that. It even saves Blizzard bandwith from the direct download part in their client that isn't p2p-based. Wasn't there even a method to extract the .torrent-file from the Blizzard downloader (which quite frankly sucks) and use it with a torrent programm because the p2p-download without the client was much faster? You would still download from the official Blizzard share, but it would count to this statistic as "pirated".
On November 16 2010 12:05 schavoc wrote: They can't play online... And the campaign isn't that fun... so, yea they fail
Oh really? This might be the most ignorant comment I read for a very long time here... first of all it a private decision if u like the SP or not. I enjoyd it a lot. Also not everybody WANTS to play MP... but thats not the point of that Thread at all.
It doesnt matter what is fun or not 2.3 million copy are worse a shit ton of money, which got stolen from Blizzard. This is a crime.. and all u say is *Incontrol-Voice* "Oh yeah they stole it but they will not have thaaaaaat much fun with it. HA!"
@topic
Its really disguisting, there are really some companys which make their games worse any Euro I pay. Blizzard is definatly one of them and when I hear those numbers its like you hear a friend of your got betrayd by a lot of money. It feels shitty because u know he didnt deserve it.
On November 16 2010 16:04 Benshin88 wrote: Blizzard has made it so it's impossible to play online without a BNET account.
I'm not trying to single you out, because several people said similar things, but you're the most recent poster.
While it is currently not possible to play SC2 multiplayer without a bnet account, it is not entirely impossible, just HARDER than SC1. Back when SC1 was released, virtual networking was very rare and not used by many people. That meant the only way you could play multiplayer would be offline via LAN, which wasn't too common. (of course both these things changed with time)
What bothers me the most though, is my previous paragraph is ignoring the fact that you could have up to 8 OTHER COPIES OF STARCRAFT ON BATTLE NET FOR FRIENDS TO PLAY SIMULTANEOUSLY FOR FREE (LEGALLY) which were called spawn copies. It wasn't completely unrestricted play, as I think you could only play games with the spawn parent/host.
Anyway, like I was saying in paragraph 2, there will be a LAN/P2P crack for SC2 because SC2 is just using routed P2P technology for game hosting/playing. No server-side stuff going on at all (except the matchmaking system, which could be emulated anyway). If there was server-side tech, then not only would pirated multiplayer be close to impossible, but map hacking and disconnect hacking would be impossible. Seems like Blizzard is really skimpy with their resources though... I can only assume they have their reasons.
If it used the tech that you describe and thats it, there would definitely be a multiplayer crack out by now since you could easily create something that intercepts whatever SC2 sends and responds with the info that it wants, then just have it be connected to a virtual network/private network like iccup. The fact that there is nothing of the sort after around 8 months of work is insanely impressive.
On November 16 2010 19:11 Snowfield wrote: Sadly there are no numbers on the amount of people who downloaded the game but also bought it later.
This, I'll openly admit to pirating it, playing the campaign, seeing how it works but most of all, checking it ran smoothly on my PC.
Liked it, went out and happily paid $60 for it
I do this with a lot of games, as do a LOT of my friends. Amount of times I've gone "X LOOKS AMAZING" download and it's the worst game i've ever witnessed in my life and save myself $60.
this kind of pirating probably pays for itself or turns blizz a healthy profit due to the incompleteness of the pirated copy its essentially an extended demo. -you cant assume everyone who downloaded would have payed for it if there was no free option in fact i'd be willing to bet close to none would have payed. -lots of folks probably purchased after playing the campaign for multiplayer experience thereby acquiring purchases that probaby never would have occurred. -lastly it increases notoriety and the pirated version serves as marketing expanding the player base to 1.5-2million more people. which when they tell their friends is another potential 1-2million
im not blizzard but im willing to bet there Bnet 2.0 has almost completely marginalized piracy
On November 16 2010 12:14 Omigawa wrote: I can see both sides of the argument (not that there are only two sides); of course it's wrong to pirate, but why should a college kid have to pay $60 for a game he may or may not like because the developer won't let them demo the game?
I've been on forums where a lot of the users torrented Crysis just to see if their computer could run it.
I think the statistics are slightly misleading (can't play multiplayer, I doubt everyone who downloaded it actually played a significant portion of the game, etc), and in this case I don't think those 2M downloads automatically correlates to $180M in lost profits.
What do you mean? There's plenty of ways to demo SC2, it's just not an easy hand-out. Plus the game hasn't been out very long, Blizzard is already allowing Latin America to have 2 free days of play to demo it and more will come. 60$ is not a lot of money at all and it's the same collage kids who can't "afford" to pay for SC2 that go out and spend 60$ on a night of partying every day of the week.
oh yeah, just like everyone in amsterdam smokes pot..
there are people who can't afford the game out there, and i think it very idiotic of you to label those people as dead beats spending 60 dollars a day ($420 a week lucky number eh) on partying.
in other words i think you're dumb.
did all of you guys complain when somebody ILLEGALLY recorded a cassette tape for you to listen to? or recorded a live event that you didn't pay for? the more people who are exposed to the game the more people will end up purchasing the full product.
On November 16 2010 12:05 schavoc wrote: They can't play online... And the campaign isn't that fun... so, yea they fail
Oh really? This might be the most ignorant comment I read for a very long time here... first of all it a private decision if u like the SP or not. I enjoyd it a lot. Also not everybody WANTS to play MP... but thats not the point of that Thread at all.
It doesnt matter what is fun or not 2.3 million copy are worse a shit ton of money, which got stolen from Blizzard. This is a crime.. and all u say is *Incontrol-Voice* "Oh yeah they stole it but they will not have thaaaaaat much fun with it. HA!"
@topic
Its really disguisting, there are really some companys which make their games worse any Euro I pay. Blizzard is definatly one of them and when I hear those numbers its like you hear a friend of your got betrayd by a lot of money. It feels shitty because u know he didnt deserve it.
Yay, retarded anti-pirates. When you download something you don't steal it, you copy it. Tbh I think the amount of people who downloaded this game who would've bought it if downloading wasn't possible is neglible. What 99% is looking for in this game is the multiplayer, and for that you have to pay. You could say it's wrong from a moral standpoint, and it is really. But the amount of money blizzard loses cause people can download the singleplayer is not anywhere close to the price of 2.3 million copys.
On November 16 2010 19:28 johngalt90 wrote: this kind of pirating probably pays for itself or turns blizz a healthy profit due to the incompleteness of the pirated copy its essentially an extended demo. -you cant assume everyone who downloaded would have payed for it if there was no free option in fact i'd be willing to bet close to none would have payed. -lots of folks probably purchased after playing the campaign for multiplayer experience thereby acquiring purchases that probaby never would have occurred. -lastly it increases notoriety and the pirated version serves as marketing expanding the player base to 1.5-2million more people. which when they tell their friends is another potential 1-2million
im not blizzard but im willing to bet there Bnet 2.0 has almost completely marginalized piracy
I wonder why people always dumb down the numbers by a huge margin. You and others even say it may well pay off for Blizzard? It sure as hell doesn't and I guaranty, a lot of these players would buy the game if they weren't able to pirate it. Because one thing is sure already, the got interest in the game.
And folks, most people buy the game for the campaign mainly. Yeah on TeamLiquid we're all competitive and stuff but the 'casual' player is much, much more interested in the campaign. No need to mention that they outnumber the competitive crowd by a huge amount.
Same for the SC2 pirates. Most of them just want to play the campaign anyways. And unlike the casual players who actually buy the game they can do it for free.
Not only does it hurt Blizzards sales but it's plain and simple injustice. And every casual player that hear about all those other people actually playing the campaign for free feel very uncomfortable. So what happens? Next time some of them start pirating, too. I mean there aren't really and consequences by law and you safe money. "others do it, too" you know? Oh and "Blizzard god enough money anyways".
Another assumption is that duo to the fact that Blizzard is successful and makes quite some money, especially with WoW, they don't deserve to gain a lot more with other titles. High quality or not, people have just so fucked up thought processes it's not even funny.
An Indi developer meanwhile is loved because a) less people know them and b) the people that know them actually like their games. Oh and c) they probably didn't earn a lot money yet, so they must be innovative, cool guys. Blizzard meanwhile is now considered some evil corporation by the majority of gamers for no apparent VALID reason.
In short, fuck piracy. There's no excuse for this bullshit. If you think the game / service is bad then leave it alone, else pay your bucks.
On November 16 2010 19:48 Shockk wrote: This statistics is worthless.
It either shows that the anti-piracy measures didn't do their job and the game got copied anyway.
Or it shows that anti-piracy is once again defended by flawed statistics and it isn't the huge issue game companies make it sound like.
Really? The fact that Blizz allows guest accounts and free CD keys while removing LAN strongly suggests that their priority is cutting out multiplayer piracy while accepting that trying too hard to block SP piracy would be both futile and intrusive.
If I were a Blizzard shareholder I'd certainly see their anti-piracy model with Bnet 2.0 as a massive success, even in the light of these numbers.
On November 16 2010 19:12 TheRabidDeer wrote: If it used the tech that you describe and thats it, there would definitely be a multiplayer crack out by now since you could easily create something that intercepts whatever SC2 sends and responds with the info that it wants, then just have it be connected to a virtual network/private network like iccup. The fact that there is nothing of the sort after around 8 months of work is insanely impressive.
The tech is as I say it. That said, one would indeed THINK that there would be a crack out by now, but that is why I have been suprized. I suppose it shows that some things aren't as easy as they seem to achieve.
actually you can play it after torrenting it, my friend has a pirated copy and he somehow gets to play single player and with other people who pirated it. no idea how though.
I used a non-Blizzard torrent to download the game (including a crack which i DID NOT TRY). My intention was to install it and buy a license as soon as I was done (and I did just that).
On November 16 2010 12:14 Omigawa wrote: I think the statistics are slightly misleading (can't play multiplayer, I doubt everyone who downloaded it actually played a significant portion of the game, etc), and in this case I don't think those 2M downloads automatically correlates to $180M in lost profits revenue.
Fixed.
Also, I think Bnet 2.0 is already a draconian DRM. Having to sign up with your real data, all games on one accont so Blizz has knowledge of everyone's games... I really don't like this. As far as performance goes (or let's say bang for the buck), I tried to play vs AI a couple of times, but it just does NOT work, I get that spinning circle bullshit every single time. Bnet .02 is also slow as fuck and it annoys the hell out of me that whenever I want to look up someone's profile it takes about a minute. (My internet's fine.) No LAN for the normal user, no server selection,... there's no option to stop the countdown once a custom game has started and people start to leave, so unless I want to waste a lot of time I need to log out, which leads to SC2 bugging out so I need to restart... I am definitely not happy about all of this. And well, the campaign is ok, but definitely not worth the money if that's all you're going to be playing. I can understand why people would pirate it. I wasn't really interested in the campaign anyway, so no harm done there, but still.
Whats so hard about leaving the client to download the game overnight while you sleep? Can't say i had that problem though i just bought the DVD from the store , 7GB on a 25GB monthly limit is just way too much.
The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga - which at the time already had graphic desktop and were far superior to PCs - both died because it was sooo easy to pirate software and no one bought it. With no one buying the software the companies "died" or shut down their development for the platforms.
Piracy is not a smalltime crime to be ignored.
Dictatorial DRM like Steam or BNet arent the right way to go either because they are too close to Orwell and his 1984.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
Yes. I wanted to download the English Version and it took forever with the Blizzard Downloader-_-
On November 16 2010 19:47 Na_Dann_Ma_GoGo wrote: Blizzard meanwhile is now considered some evil corporation by the majority of gamers for no apparent VALID reason.
It's not Blizzard anymore but Activision.
No valid reason ?
Still waiting for lan/chat channels/LOL REALID !/simple control commands/ etc...
SC2 might be good but it's far from enough to excuse all the shit Blizzvizion has been throwing at players lately.
My brother bought a copy of the game. I'm fine with that, they made a good game, they get money. I'm not fine with having to buy another copy of the game just so I can play the ladder. If there was a working way of getting a pirated version, I'd do it in a blink of an eye.
Afaik, this is unprecedented in video game industry.You don't buy 2 movies for each person to watch. Almost anything you buy can be used by another person if you let them. SC2 is almost worthless for 1v1 unless you have a personal copy.
On November 16 2010 12:02 windsupernova wrote: This kind of stuff is why companies have started using Draconian DRM measures.this is of course my take on this news.
I'd say it was ridiculous notions that every download is a lost sale that causes companies to start using draconian (and utterly ineffective) DRM measures. In fact, if the videogame industry is anything like the music industry then those who download the most illegally also spend the most on legal copies.
I suspect many downloaders do so in order to trial games before buying, and so in that way, downloading can actually increase sales. I know for a fact that I wouldn't own some of the DVDs I do now if I hadn't illegally downloaded them first.
The Most Data Transferred The final record we will discuss is the torrent that has resulted in the transfer of the most data. This record goes to a release of Blizzard’s StarCraft 2 which came out three months ago. The most popular torrent file for this 7.19 GB game has been downloaded 2.3 million times, totalling a massive 15.77 Petabytes.
Interestingly, the legit copies of the game sold by Blizzard may have transferred even more data. All download copies of StarCraft 2 have been distributed through Blizzard’s very own BitTorrent downloader. Unfortunately Blizzard’s tracker doesn’t provide any stats so we don’t know if the official beats the illegitimate counterpart traffic wise.
This was taken directly from the torrentfreak article.
So there you have it the legal torrents probably dowloaded more and Sharing is Caring il add the link to the entire original article in a spoiler if anyone would like to look it up + Show Spoiler +
On November 16 2010 21:18 niteReloaded wrote: My brother bought a copy of the game. I'm fine with that, they made a good game, they get money. I'm not fine with having to buy another copy of the game just so I can play the ladder. If there was a working way of getting a pirated version, I'd do it in a blink of an eye.
Afaik, this is unprecedented in video game industry.You don't buy 2 movies for each person to watch. Almost anything you buy can be used by another person if you let them. SC2 is almost worthless for 1v1 unless you have a personal copy.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You can take turns laddering with your brother just like you can take turns watching a movie with your brother.
If you actually want to competitively ladder, in that you care about your ranking, then your movie comparison kind of falls apart. Do you buy one DVD and then watch it for 3-4 hours every night?
The game comes with a lifetime subscription to Battle.net multiplayer. To use your movie analogy, it's like the DVD came with a lifetime ticket to the movie theater, and you're complaining there's only one.
Actually, it's the Blizzard's installer file and isn't the pirated version. I downloaded my legal SC2 with a torrent because I didn't feel like installing from the DVD.
With the crack, it actually is possible to be played offline so if you are irritated that you can't play the campaign while not being connected, you might as well get the crack. I haven't used it since beta but yeah, not everyone does it to get a free game.
On November 16 2010 21:23 Railxp wrote: Has money to buy the game, buys the game >>> legitimate customer
Has money to buy the game, pirates the game >>> wouldn't have bought even if he couldn't pirate, no lost sales
Doesn't have money, doesnt pirate the game >>> no lost sales
Doesn't have money, pirates the game >>> again, no lost sales.
Just thought i'd throw this out there for devil's advocate.
nice logic there. Basically, according to you, there's no way in the universe that pirating affects sales?
HINT: Your #2 claim has no logical connection whatsoever.
Claim #2 is perfectly logical. All of those scenarios can and will happen.
There are also other scenarios, i.e. "Pirated but would have bought otherwise".
The anti-piracy dipshits pretend the latter is the only scenario that ever happens. Sure, piracy might hurt sales a little, but certainly not by these astronomical amounts quoted by the aforementioned dipshits.
On November 16 2010 20:33 Rabiator wrote: The Atari ST and Commodore Amiga - which at the time already had graphic desktop and were far superior to PCs - both died because it was sooo easy to pirate software and no one bought it. With no one buying the software the companies "died" or shut down their development for the platforms.
They were both led by idiotic companies. For example Commodore released 3 different Amiga models in one year , had too many prototypes that were never going to achieve anything (C65) and released some poor systems that harmed the brand (C-16 , C64GS).
Atari , well you know where they went.The only time they made any money in the 90's was when they sued sega for 'copying' their patent joystick adapter on the genesis and saturn consoles (basically used by every microcomputer in the 80s including commodore models).I don't think jaguar flopped because of piracy , do you?.Playstation games were far far more pirated than N64 games and playstation ended up with 70% or so market share by the end of that generation.FF7 is still the top selling FF game.
Atari and Sega announced a ninety million dollar settlement in their patent infringement lawsuit. Sega would pay fifty million dollars minus its own attorney fees in royalties to Atari in exchange for licenses to over seventy patents and another forty million for 4.7 million shares of Atari.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
Precisely. Back when I played World of Warcraft, my copy of Burning Crusade's DVD did not work. At the time, Blizzard didn't have fast download speeds for their stuff, so I just torrented BC.
Yeah. I downloaded SC2 off a torrent site a while back. Running concurrently, the unofficial download finished when the official download was still at about 40% (and I started the unofficial download after the official).
With a digital game like SC2, you can't just say "oh, it's on a torrent site, so everyone who downloaded it stole it."
i downloaded this game before i bought it just to check it out im new to the starcraft series i wouldnt have bought it if i haddent downloaded it first as i simply didnt know the game was any good theres so much shite released these days in the last year i have played many games most were uninstaled within the first day starcraft 2 is a solid game so i went out and bought it im sure im not the pnly person who does this the person who uploaded it may have generated significant sales for blizard
as for 2.3 million downloads does not meen 2.3 million illegal copys people may download multiple copys trying to find one that works people may not like it and delete it and also how many people had the game on order and installed a pirate copy whilst they waited for there copy to arive from amazon
Havent been a game out for years I've been intrested in buying except SC2, I pirated dragonage, didnt like i, threw it away after a mere 2 hours thats the extent of games that could've been fun and that I could've bought. As usual, trying the full version and finding out its actually crap before giving the company $$$ for their product I'am not gonna bother with is a good thing; y
Musicians and artists not being able to live on their work because of piracy? Its realy bad that it no longer works selling a plastic disc for outrageous money for two good tracks that you hear on the radio all the time, damn shame the artist have to spend time on the road, singing and playing as in the past. All in all, the people who are creative will create because it is in their nature, does not matter if they live on a dime. By piracy we are spreading culture and doing free marketing; it is a bad thing for record companies. Suddenly the most marketing budget does not decide what people listen to. Spend 10 M $ to make sexy hot chicks #164 and #173 into 'The next thing people!', well the people say '164/173 is crap dont buy their shit, here listen to this girl on youtube, damn I wish I could send her some cash or watch her play live because she got some nice tunes'.
That a sexy body, a voice not entirely bad, tracks produced for you and alot of marketing making you a perceived 'good artist' is not working out so well is good thing as this will hopefully let ARTISTS forward. Bob dylan wouldnt have risen fame in todays world, he would've been drowned by boobs and pretty faces singing songs about nothing, and Id say we are poorer thanks to how todays record companies run things, profit profit profit. Style, creativity, originality but no real looks? How are we gonna market you, move along you dont have what it takes to be an artist, get some plastic done, lose 20 pounds and then we'll talk.
I, and nobody I know came anywhere near buying this game for the single player alone - we all wanted to get on battle.net and play each other and ladder games.
So really, it sadly justified Blizzard's LAN stance.
We don't know if it's actually negative for Blizzard. I mean, the campaign is not what SC2 is about and it might make people buy the game for multiplayer.
here's a question, if activision-blizzard makes like 100 million dollars off the game (3 million * 60 dollars is 180 so minus advertising, distribution and development costs and it's not that unreasonable) do they care how many people pirate it?
if I told any local business I would give them 100 million dollars but they might not sell anything for the next 20 years I bet they would take me up on it.
60 dollars for a single player game (which is what those shitty COD games are to me) is preposterous. Im not getting 60 dollars worth of fun out of those games. SC2? I've already played through the single player once and played about 100 games and that's just since the middle of October when I got it. Not to mention like 200 games during the beta. And I can continue to play the game and not be bored since people will come up with new strategies and hopefully we'll get new maps.
My suspicion is the majority of the people who pirated the game wanted to play the single player and then go on to the next game and didn't want to pay 60 dollars for a pc game.
I was so pissed off at Blizzard for no-LAN, no cross realm play and so on that I was pretty damn close to not buying the game and just pirating it for the campaign.
I wish we had all pirated the game until Blizzard gave us LAN That would have been good for everyone, for us and for Blizzard because they would've sold even more copies afterward.
On November 16 2010 22:54 red_b wrote: here's a question, if activision-blizzard makes like 100 million dollars off the game (3 million * 60 dollars is 180 so minus advertising, distribution and development costs and it's not that unreasonable) do they care how many people pirate it?
Exactly. These companies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, and yet they still bleat and whine that piracy is killing the industry. It's the same shit we've heard time and time again since the record companies claimed that cassette tapes would ruin everything. The simple fact is that piracy is rampant, and yet software and games companies still make huge profits. Either they would make bank-level money in the abscence of piracy, or their stance is idiotic.
On November 16 2010 22:54 red_b wrote: here's a question, if activision-blizzard makes like 100 million dollars off the game (3 million * 60 dollars is 180 so minus advertising, distribution and development costs and it's not that unreasonable) do they care how many people pirate it?
Exactly. These companies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, and yet they still bleat and whine that piracy is killing the industry. It's the same shit we've heard time and time again since the record companies claimed that cassette tapes would ruin everything. The simple fact is that piracy is rampant, and yet software and games companies still make huge profits. Either they would make bank-level money in the abscence of piracy, or their stance is idiotic.
Thats a ton of money that was essentially stolen from them, they should have a right to be pissed, regardless of how much was stolen.
On November 16 2010 22:54 red_b wrote: here's a question, if activision-blizzard makes like 100 million dollars off the game (3 million * 60 dollars is 180 so minus advertising, distribution and development costs and it's not that unreasonable) do they care how many people pirate it?
Exactly. These companies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, and yet they still bleat and whine that piracy is killing the industry. It's the same shit we've heard time and time again since the record companies claimed that cassette tapes would ruin everything. The simple fact is that piracy is rampant, and yet software and games companies still make huge profits. Either they would make bank-level money in the abscence of piracy, or their stance is idiotic.
Thats a ton of money that was essentially stolen from them, they should have a right to be pissed, regardless of how much was stolen.
Stolen? Are you calling this theft?
That money was nowhere near stolen from them. Three million download copies != three million missed sales.
Pirating is obviously wrong but I can understand that other people do it considering how ridiculously little content you get for a huge ammount of money now adays. Personally my solution is not to get those games at all but some choose to pirate. But Starcraft 2 is clearly one of those games who has a huge ammount of content (or playability rather) for the ammount you spend. I don't think anyone can argue that the game is not worth bying unless they are very ill informed.
If i hadn't pirated the game i would not have bought it.
Srsly, if actiblizzard is pissed bcause people have realised that a bnet 2.0, nolan game is full of shit they should try improving their quality, not blame "pirates" whose only crime is having common sense and being aware that their money has some worth.
I would somehow agree with blizzard if the game had a) LAN b) Bnet similar to w3 c) cross-region play d) stats deletion
Piracy is a reaction to companies bullying customers with shitty policies, over priced - low quality goods.
Fuck those bastards in the arse.
Yes, im mad about it.
Do you know how may potential customers they have lost bcause of NO LAN POLICY?. For what i see with my friends is that they are not interested on buying the game because they can't test multiplayer battles out. If they had free-pirated lan, and had enjoyed the game they would actually buy the game. I can't imagine how much people they are loosing on a no-lan party policy. God dammit close-minded a-holes.
I'm a game developer/programmer and I support torrents. It has led me to either buy the game or invest in the sequels of the game. I dont have the time and money. But having the torrent lets me demo the game long enough to make the buying decision.
On November 16 2010 22:31 Kaasflipje wrote: We don't know if it's actually negative for Blizzard. I mean, the campaign is not what SC2 is about and it might make people buy the game for multiplayer.
Its not, Blizzard is happy with the current numbers. One of my links talks about this.
On November 16 2010 22:54 red_b wrote: here's a question, if activision-blizzard makes like 100 million dollars off the game (3 million * 60 dollars is 180 so minus advertising, distribution and development costs and it's not that unreasonable) do they care how many people pirate it?
Exactly. These companies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, and yet they still bleat and whine that piracy is killing the industry. It's the same shit we've heard time and time again since the record companies claimed that cassette tapes would ruin everything. The simple fact is that piracy is rampant, and yet software and games companies still make huge profits. Either they would make bank-level money in the abscence of piracy, or their stance is idiotic.
That us flawed logic. Its like saying that its fine to steal(I know that piracy!= stealing) from rich people because they have a huge income.
As I have said, the numbers are obviously exaggerated but that doesn't mean that piracy doesn't cut into some copies.Blizzard invested a lot in this game so I think they care about getting something out of it.
As of how much Piracy is hurting the industry, we don't really have anything to prove either case.
DRM and required logins hurt the customers not the pirates. The pirates just laugh and wait a week for a crack. Perhaps had game industries charged appropriate prices for the games they release, there'd be significantly less pirating.
On November 16 2010 22:54 red_b wrote: here's a question, if activision-blizzard makes like 100 million dollars off the game (3 million * 60 dollars is 180 so minus advertising, distribution and development costs and it's not that unreasonable) do they care how many people pirate it?
Exactly. These companies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, and yet they still bleat and whine that piracy is killing the industry. It's the same shit we've heard time and time again since the record companies claimed that cassette tapes would ruin everything. The simple fact is that piracy is rampant, and yet software and games companies still make huge profits. Either they would make bank-level money in the abscence of piracy, or their stance is idiotic.
Thats a ton of money that was essentially stolen from them, they should have a right to be pissed, regardless of how much was stolen.
In order to make this statement, you have to back it up with evidence that X% of downloads would otherwise be sales. So far all I've ever seen, from any source, is the the assumption that this would be the case. It's an assumption that flies in the face of not only logic, but also the evidence that those who download more, also spend more.
Hi there, I'm going to ahead and avoid this whole debate about morality and piracy.
/AVOIDED!/
I'm just surprised that this number isn't higher. 2.3 million is is big number, but compared to others, it's surprisingly small.
In 2009, the game 'Prototype' was downloaded 2.35 million times, according to the same source. The 'Sims 3' got 3.2 million downloads and 'Modern Warfare' got 4.1 million.
That means 'StarCraft 2' was downloaded fewer times than 'Prototype.' I don't have hard sales numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that 'StarCraft 2' has sold far more copies on PC than 'Prototype' has.
So while that 2.3 million looks huge, it does give a bit of evidence that Blizzard's anti-piracy measures like Battle.Net and the guest passes are working.
On November 16 2010 12:05 schavoc wrote: They can't play online... And the campaign isn't that fun... so, yea they fail
Oh really? This might be the most ignorant comment I read for a very long time here... first of all it a private decision if u like the SP or not. I enjoyd it a lot. Also not everybody WANTS to play MP... but thats not the point of that Thread at all.
It doesnt matter what is fun or not 2.3 million copy are worse a shit ton of money, which got stolen from Blizzard. This is a crime.. and all u say is *Incontrol-Voice* "Oh yeah they stole it but they will not have thaaaaaat much fun with it. HA!"
@topic
Its really disguisting, there are really some companys which make their games worse any Euro I pay. Blizzard is definatly one of them and when I hear those numbers its like you hear a friend of your got betrayd by a lot of money. It feels shitty because u know he didnt deserve it.
Yay, retarded anti-pirates. When you download something you don't steal it, you copy it. Tbh I think the amount of people who downloaded this game who would've bought it if downloading wasn't possible is neglible. What 99% is looking for in this game is the multiplayer, and for that you have to pay. You could say it's wrong from a moral standpoint, and it is really. But the amount of money blizzard loses cause people can download the singleplayer is not anywhere close to the price of 2.3 million copys.
I know that they didnt loose the money they would have made with 2.3 millions more copies sold. If u really dont like the word steeling (also it really fits the action very good), call it copying like the Chinese copy everything... the effect is the same. The victim suffers heavy financial losses. Pretty meh to argue about sth. like that. Where do u get your numbers with 99%? Making up numbers wont help. Anyway your post doesnt say anything u have no standpoint and no argument...
On November 16 2010 22:54 red_b wrote: here's a question, if activision-blizzard makes like 100 million dollars off the game (3 million * 60 dollars is 180 so minus advertising, distribution and development costs and it's not that unreasonable) do they care how many people pirate it?
Exactly. These companies make hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, and yet they still bleat and whine that piracy is killing the industry. It's the same shit we've heard time and time again since the record companies claimed that cassette tapes would ruin everything. The simple fact is that piracy is rampant, and yet software and games companies still make huge profits. Either they would make bank-level money in the abscence of piracy, or their stance is idiotic.
That us flawed logic. Its like saying that its fine to steal(I know that piracy!= stealing) from rich people because they have a huge income.
That's (probably unintentionally) distorting what I'm saying. I don't think that it's ok to download because Blizz makes money. What I was saying was that the argument Blizzard (or hypothetical software/movie/music companies in general) use - that piracy must be stopped because it is harmful to the industry - is bullshit. As I already linked, evidence from the music industry suggests that those who download the most also buy the most. My own personal experience is that downloading movies has indeed led to me buying DVDs. And history shows that claims of piracy ruining the industry were being made as early as the 1980s, and those industries are still going strong. There's also the example of the author who pirated his own book and sales subsequently increased by a factor of over 1,000!
My argument is not that downloading is ok because Blizzard makes enough money despite piracy - it is that there is evidence that piracy actually contributes to sales, and thus the battle against piracy is not only futile (because DRM is almost always cracked within a few days of release), but is in fact counterproductive.
Yeah I downloaded via illicit torrent because of problems with blizz downloader. I'm surprised gameinformer bothered implying that people who illegally downloaded it could play online... If that has occurred at all I'm sure its extremely rare (and kind of impressive).
I have bought the game since day1 and i have still downloaded it from trackers that aren't blizzard's because i accidently downloaded the german version ( i don't speak german ) and didn't have time to wait for the slow blizz download to finish (again) for the english one. Downloaded it and waited for my copy, sadly the game came the day my internet stopped working so all the prepwork wasn't usefull.
id be more inclined to buy games if i could return them if i didnt like it... but that's not possible, so i download them via torrents to try out. unless its something really big like SC2 or diablo3... which i know i will like, then i just buy it without trying
On November 17 2010 01:56 Noob4hire wrote: Blizz tries to prevent this by denying LAN andthey end up punishing the people who paid X(
I think it's safe to assume the primary reason they denied LAN was to control the esports aspect, which is more important than piracy. But I don't find it all that punishing either.
On November 17 2010 01:13 Offhand wrote: Perhaps had game industries charged appropriate prices for the games they release, there'd be significantly less pirating.
On November 17 2010 02:02 AmaZing wrote: with or without lan it is getting pirated. Why not just enable it....
With LAN comes Hamachi and with Hamachi comes the opportunity to play people around the world on a pirated version. I know alot of communities that have 'in house' gaming in certain games where they rely on Hamachi for the hosting.
I've downloaded it from TPB three times so far, even though I pre-ordered the game. Also, research after research have proven that people who tend to pirate music, films, books and games tend to buy more music, films, books and games. Fail OP - and fail anti-piracy propaganda.
On November 16 2010 21:18 niteReloaded wrote: My brother bought a copy of the game. I'm fine with that, they made a good game, they get money. I'm not fine with having to buy another copy of the game just so I can play the ladder. If there was a working way of getting a pirated version, I'd do it in a blink of an eye.
Afaik, this is unprecedented in video game industry.You don't buy 2 movies for each person to watch. Almost anything you buy can be used by another person if you let them. SC2 is almost worthless for 1v1 unless you have a personal copy.
That's a ridiculous comparison. You can take turns laddering with your brother just like you can take turns watching a movie with your brother.
If you actually want to competitively ladder, in that you care about your ranking, then your movie comparison kind of falls apart. Do you buy one DVD and then watch it for 3-4 hours every night?
The game comes with a lifetime subscription to Battle.net multiplayer. To use your movie analogy, it's like the DVD came with a lifetime ticket to the movie theater, and you're complaining there's only one.
I won't take turns laddering, because sometimes I play for a few days straight and sometimes he does. It doesn't work.
When I buy the DVD, I can watch it all I want, whenever I want. Whoever I lend it to can watch it all they want. Even tho the analogy isn't perfect, it conveys my point and you'll understand it unless you're in "debating mode" like so many TLers are.
SC2 without battle.net is like a movie with only sound and no picture. Without battle.net, SC2 wouldn't have sold 1% of the copies it sold, so don't argue that Battle.net is some kind of bonus.
On November 16 2010 21:23 Railxp wrote: Has money to buy the game, buys the game >>> legitimate customer
Has money to buy the game, pirates the game >>> wouldn't have bought even if he couldn't pirate, no lost sales
Doesn't have money, doesnt pirate the game >>> no lost sales
Doesn't have money, pirates the game >>> again, no lost sales.
Just thought i'd throw this out there for devil's advocate.
nice logic there. Basically, according to you, there's no way in the universe that pirating affects sales?
HINT: Your #2 claim has no logical connection whatsoever.
Claim #2 is perfectly logical. All of those scenarios can and will happen.
There are also other scenarios, i.e. "Pirated but would have bought otherwise".
The anti-piracy dipshits pretend the latter is the only scenario that ever happens. Sure, piracy might hurt sales a little, but certainly not by these astronomical amounts quoted by the aforementioned dipshits.
Claim #2 is not perfectly logical (it focuses only on the part that's beneficial for the point he's trying to prove). It's plain obvious that there ARE people who would buy the game if there wasn't a way to pirate it.
I only bought SC:BW to be able to play on BNet after I tried all conventional methods of pirating it.
On November 17 2010 02:13 xtfftc wrote: I've downloaded it from TPB three times so far, even though I pre-ordered the game. Also, research after research have proven that people who tend to pirate music, films, books and games tend to buy more music, films, books and games. Fail OP - and fail anti-piracy propaganda.
Not always true, at least not in my country... Blizz could not just look at US/EU market in this case. They need to look at SEA, Taiwan and China too.
Well, we are one of the countries with the biggest piracy anyway.
haha so many against piracy in this thread, didn't expect that.
Im one of those who first pirated the game for the singelplayer, then later bought the game. I don't see the problem with that. If people like the game they'll eventully buy it.
EDIT: I was also one of those who downloaded/pirated the client just becouse it was SO much faster
On November 17 2010 01:29 Gonzodamus wrote: Hi there, I'm going to ahead and avoid this whole debate about morality and piracy.
/AVOIDED!/
I'm just surprised that this number isn't higher. 2.3 million is is big number, but compared to others, it's surprisingly small.
In 2009, the game 'Prototype' was downloaded 2.35 million times, according to the same source. The 'Sims 3' got 3.2 million downloads and 'Modern Warfare' got 4.1 million.
That means 'StarCraft 2' was downloaded fewer times than 'Prototype.' I don't have hard sales numbers, but I'd be willing to bet that 'StarCraft 2' has sold far more copies on PC than 'Prototype' has.
So while that 2.3 million looks huge, it does give a bit of evidence that Blizzard's anti-piracy measures like Battle.Net and the guest passes are working.
ofcourse battlenet works as anti piracy. people want to play the multiplayer. yeah the asian dota crowd pirated a shitton playing on those lan services but other then that blizz titles always did well. the by far best anti pirating measure is still providing a great multiplayer.
but something like prototype is just perfect for pirating. you miss zero "content" since there is no multiplayer, the game isnt good enough to spend 50$ on it but it sure is super fun to throw some cars around for 3-4 hours which makes it worth a dl.
but ya its a very very small number. esp considering how many of that are "legit" downloaders that had problems with the blizzloader or guys that first pirated and then bought the game for bnet.
On November 17 2010 02:13 xtfftc wrote: Also, research after research have proven that people who tend to pirate music, films, books and games tend to buy more music, films, books and games.
These researches should be always taken with a pinch of salt. I'm guessing this fall into sociology or something like that? Well, in Croatia, people who study those disciplines are usually terribad with Math/statistics etc. which means they're prone to making 'unhealthy' correlations.
On that specific example: People who steal(pirate) music are music listeners, they're bound to be more likely to spend $$$ on music than the average Joe who just listens to whatever's on the radio on his way to work.
The problem we should focus on is whether they'd spend EVEN MORE on music if there wasn't a way to steal it. I'd be interested to see the actual premises and numbers behind that research.
On November 16 2010 23:40 misaTO wrote: Oh yeah, i forgot, retarded LANGUAGE POLICY. Can't play the game in english cuz blizzard thinks im an illiterate spic.
Download the English version... log in, play... where's the prob?
In 2009, the game 'Prototype' was downloaded 2.35 million times, according to the same source. The 'Sims 3' got 3.2 million downloads and 'Modern Warfare' got 4.1 million.
Those numbers should be reversed... Prototype was awesome for the 10-20 hrs I played it. Gore, action, wallclimbing, gliding... great gaming experience. Then again, maybe more people bought it?
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
QFT. I had to download it like this for my laptop since the disc drive is broke.
you could have just downloaded it from blizzards site, but instead you chose to be a number on this websites asshole list
I want to start off this post by saying that I buy A LOT of video games... between me and my gf, my computer, wii, and ds I spend close to $1,000CND a year on video games. From full retail prices (metro 2033) to games on sale (go go steam summer sale, good deal on border lands), to indi games (minecraft = amazing), to subscription games (EvE online.)
Games are expensive and take up A LOT of my disposable income. I am a student, I spend most of my money on tuition, books, rent, food, clothes, and bills. What disposable income I do have, I spend either going out with friends or on video games.
The problem I see is how expensive video games are. $60 for a pc game, $40 for a ds game... 20 games is about the max I justify in a year. But many more than 20 games come out in a year, so what do I do?
I pirate games to try them out. To me, its sort of like blockbuster... but free. I rent a game, to see if I like it. If I do, I buy it (bioshock, L4D, Fallout3), if i don't i do not buy it (Legenday, Oblivion).
If I cannot try out a game I would never have bought it (too much DRM on bioshock to justify buying it and not being good, L4D didn't look amazing to me, and Fallout was a new world and I was told it wasn't as good as 1 or 2).
This would turn into me either buying fewer games over all and trying to just stay interested in the ones I do own (time to level up my like 200th lvl 90 in D2). Or buying games that are simply bad (thank god I didn't waste my money on prototype).
I think that I act like an average western pirate. I buy to try, if I don't like it I toss it away in a few hours of playing. If I do like it, I stop playing the pirated version and go out and buy the game to support a good developer.
I've been pirating less as of late thanks to steam sales. If I game costs $5 then I can justify buying it even if it is bad. I've grown my library of games by about 50 games this year simply due to saving money with steam. I also bought minecraft with no thought to it simply because it was $10, no big deal if its terrible...
If SC2 was bad, wasting $60 is a lot to me, and its hard to justify. Games cost too much for me to just buy everything that looks good, do you seriously buy every game that looks good on paper with no research? If you do... well good for you having tens of thousands of dollars in disposable income to blow on video games.
I have a lot of games on my "want to try" list and a lot on my "want to buy list"... Without pirating, one list would be non-existent and the other would most likely have 1 - 2 games on it not 10 - 20.
Pirating increases sales, at least when regarding consumers like me, and well I act like 90% of my friends do regarded the gaming industry...
- - - - - - - -
As well, just throwing it out there... but DRM is the only reason I would ever pirate something and simply just play the torrent. As I do not support DRM practices that simply hurt consumers... if the game as too much DRM then I simply don't buy the game and will pirate it. Its the way I protest, and I do it with my wallet, they do lose my sales with DRM, maybe next time they will loosen their policies and I will reward them with my wallet, but until then...
Although to be fair, as of now I have yet to find a game that I wanted to try with a lot of DRM. I find most games with DRM are terrible while ones that are good useless DRM simply because they know they will sell (I'm looking at you SC2, Civ 5, and CoD: black ops) while popular games have some DRM it isn't like "omg, have to fill in 68 forms with different codes and put 98 programs on my comp in order to prove I'm not pirating this game".
- - - - - - - -
TL;DR: So far... my pirating escapades have resulted in a gain in sales, not a loss. Only DRM would cause companies to loose my business.
If movie/music/gaming industries want to get rid of a lot of pirates, simply offer a way to play the full version of a game for a period of time to try the game/movie/music out and then see how people spend money.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
QFT. I had to download it like this for my laptop since the disc drive is broke.
you could have just downloaded it from blizzards site, but instead you chose to be a number on this websites asshole list
Blizzards site did take me about 24 hours on my phenomenally fast internet, I can see why some people are opposed to that.
Some people just play for the campaigns i guess, to be honest when SC2 was announcedin 2007, I knew right away that the prize of the game could have been 120 dollars and it'd still be worth it due to the quality and lifespan of their games. That said, pirating their games is just a shame. 2.3 million copies, to think how many of those guys would have just bought the game and even more records could have been broken for # of sales.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
QFT. I had to download it like this for my laptop since the disc drive is broke.
you could have just downloaded it from blizzards site, but instead you chose to be a number on this websites asshole list
Nothing wrong with downloading it "illegaly" if you've bought it, if anything you're saving blizz money by saving them bandwidth.
On November 17 2010 02:02 AmaZing wrote: with or without lan it is getting pirated. Why not just enable it....
With LAN comes Hamachi and with Hamachi comes the opportunity to play people around the world on a pirated version. I know alot of communities that have 'in house' gaming in certain games where they rely on Hamachi for the hosting.
but i bought the game and want to play people around the world lol... still waiting for someone to figure that out. as its quite unreasonably priced to get multiple copies to play the same game...
Another thing i havent seen mentioned anyway, is majority of games that are pirated by people that do not wish to play online anyway. Pirates are mostly the SP casual crowd.
Pirating is theft and is wrong, that's all there is to it. Playing video games is not some human right you deserve, whether it's a serious past-time, profession, or on a very casual basis. Starcraft 2 might have cost less if they weren't planning on pirating. Blizzard might have more money for future games if people don't steal from them. I have no illusions that Blizzard is pure and holy; surely they are getting rich over their successes and would probably like to fight pirating in order to line their pockets with gold as much as to make better games. That doesn't justify stealing from them. It's not Robin Hood where he was stealing from the rich to give to the poor, in the sense that the poor were already robbed by the rich. It's more like robbing a rich man who gave you 10 dollars for a windshield wash, because you felt he should have given you more because you're special.
Also, I really hope they can implement LAN without opening the door to pirating the multiplayer experience.
I was FORCED to download the version from piratebay because the blizzard downloader deactivited my whole internet once it started. this was a known issue in combination with my isp and blizzard didn't reply to a forum thread and there was no helpfull reply to my 2 emails sent to the customer support.
Apart from that I believe a lot of people downloaded the version, cracked it for singleplayer and scirmish, got hooked and bought it for multiplayer.
On November 17 2010 03:43 Ansinjunger wrote: Playing video games is not some human right you deserve, whether it's a serious past-time, profession, or on a very casual basis.
Yeah, it's something you get access to when you get a PC and the internet. I always find it funny when people act like these "pirates" have some sort of entitled mentality when it is really just people making use of what is available and not having to go a butt hair out of the way to do it. It's just too quick and easy, people will do it. Copying is also not the same thing as stealing, and pirating is copying.
Some people like to assume that every downloaded copy is a lost sale, but there are actually quite a lot of people who download the game to try it out and them end up buying. Then there are other people who download it and never run it once. I have known plenty of pirates who download and hoard almost everything they possibly can yet use almost none of it. The truth is there is no way of knowing for sure how piracy effects sales but there is just as much evidence saying it helps sales as it does hurt them. You might say 'that doesn't make it right', what makes anything right?
No it's not like robbing a rich man. It's like taking a copy of something a rich man made, that someone else put online. lol
On November 17 2010 04:00 LittleAtari wrote: 3 million copies sold
2.5 million copies pirated......
2.5/3
...
THAT IS A LOT. Come on guys. Really?
$150,000,000 worth of product stolen.
Yet $0 in terms of lost inventory. Hmmm.
It still means that the game could be sold more. Might not be as high as 2.5 but still it reduce the number of game being sold.
And there's no guarantee that the games in the inventory would be sold. It could be that they will be sold all, some of them will be sold, or only a few of them will be sold in the future. Selling things in the present is still more important than relying on the future.
On November 17 2010 04:00 LittleAtari wrote: 3 million copies sold
2.5 million copies pirated......
2.5/3
...
THAT IS A LOT. Come on guys. Really?
$150,000,000 worth of product stolen.
Yet $0 in terms of lost inventory. Hmmm.
A you saying that it doesn't really matter if stolen product is not a physically produced object? The cost of production expands way beyond the 50 cents it takes to make a CD and put it in a box.
I wonder how many of these downloads were people who couldn't get the beta so they downloaded it to play while they waited to buy the full retail version? I was lucky enough to get a beta key after a month but during that waiting time I would have loved to play even the crappy easiest ai they had in the vs comp back then. If I had to wait another three months to play the game I would have been very tempted to download it and play dark or greentea matches.
On November 17 2010 04:00 LittleAtari wrote: 3 million copies sold
2.5 million copies pirated......
2.5/3
...
THAT IS A LOT. Come on guys. Really?
$150,000,000 worth of product stolen.
Yet $0 in terms of lost inventory. Hmmm.
It still means that the game could be sold more. Might not be as high as 2.5 but still it reduce the number of game being sold.
And there's no guarantee that the games in the inventory would be sold. It could be that they will be sold all, some of them will be sold, or only a few of them will be sold in the future. Selling things in the present is still more important than relying on the future.
There is also no guarantee that the people who downloaded the game would have purchased it if they download wasn't available. It's just an assumption that tries to predict human behavior.
On November 17 2010 04:00 LittleAtari wrote: 3 million copies sold
2.5 million copies pirated......
2.5/3
...
THAT IS A LOT. Come on guys. Really?
$150,000,000 worth of product stolen.
Yet $0 in terms of lost inventory. Hmmm.
A you saying that it doesn't really matter if stolen product is not a physically produced object? The cost of production expands way beyond the 50 cents it takes to make a CD and put it in a box.
I'm saying it's not the same thing. In terms of Starcraft 2, no it doesn't matter because they game is still very profitable.
On November 17 2010 04:00 LittleAtari wrote: 3 million copies sold
2.5 million copies pirated......
2.5/3
...
THAT IS A LOT. Come on guys. Really?
$150,000,000 worth of product stolen.
Yet $0 in terms of lost inventory. Hmmm.
It still means that the game could be sold more. Might not be as high as 2.5 but still it reduce the number of game being sold.
And there's no guarantee that the games in the inventory would be sold. It could be that they will be sold all, some of them will be sold, or only a few of them will be sold in the future. Selling things in the present is still more important than relying on the future.
There is also no guarantee that the people who downloaded the game would have purchased it if they download wasn't available. It's just an assumption that tries to predict human behavior.
There are two types of pirate people who don't want their waste their money, is common in both
1 is don't want to spend money on crappy things 2 is just doesn't want to spend money on things. IE want something for nothing.
I'm pretty sure most of them are number 2.
Ofc there are times when it's early leaks which entices more people to pirate who may have planned to buy it anyways but the early leak is too much to wait for.
Also 0 inventory lost so i guess it's coo to sneak into movies you didn't pay for too? The entertainment business is built on little to no inventory costs
THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
On November 17 2010 04:00 LittleAtari wrote: 3 million copies sold
2.5 million copies pirated......
2.5/3
...
THAT IS A LOT. Come on guys. Really?
$150,000,000 worth of product stolen.
Yet $0 in terms of lost inventory. Hmmm.
It still means that the game could be sold more. Might not be as high as 2.5 but still it reduce the number of game being sold.
And there's no guarantee that the games in the inventory would be sold. It could be that they will be sold all, some of them will be sold, or only a few of them will be sold in the future. Selling things in the present is still more important than relying on the future.
There is also no guarantee that the people who downloaded the game would have purchased it if they download wasn't available. It's just an assumption that tries to predict human behavior.
There are two types of pirate people who don't want their waste their money, is common in both
1 is don't want to spend money on crappy things 2 is just doesn't want to spend money on things. IE want something for nothing.
That is just an assumption, there are all kinds of pirates. Some people like to try before they buy. Some people like to just have it. I'm sure there are countless reasons to do something as easy as downloading a video game.
But honestly, who doesn't want something for nothing? When you see $5 on the sidewalk, do you think "fuck, DO NOT WANT, DID NOT EARN". Seriously.
90% of pirates wouldnt buy the end product either way, by having them DL it, they are making free propaganda of your product and increasing the exposure to people who might actually buy one day.
Pirates help spread knowledge and culture to the less well off, without them, worldly progress would be slower, and more poor people would suffer without good TV shows, games, or even programs they use to do work like photoshop.
We need to support pirates daily, and help them make our world a better place, one illegal download at a time.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is a good point, I used to pirate all the time when I was in high school and had no income. Yet some people will say this was "lost sales" when in reality I had no way of buying games.
I bought it. Maybe shouldn't have because there is no lan and bnet is slow every single day and has really bad moments very often. Can't watch my matchup stats anywhere. Iccup works better.
So maybe many of the pirates just wanted to see if the campaign alone is worth paying for it before buying?
I downloaded the client too sometimes. When I didn't yet have an account, you could watch replays with the client without having an account. I suppose that the large majority isn't pirating. Is there even the possibility to play the campaign offline? afaik there is no crack for SC2, especially not for playing multiplayer...
Even ea actionvision and the biggies already said they dont care too much for piracy but for used games ... most people that pirate doesnt buy anyway ...
Post warning edit: Since you chose warn me for this "youtube comment" (that spoilered vid was obviously the most important part of my comment), I should probably add a little content. I just believe DJ Roomba brought up a important point regarding this issue. The fact that a cracked game has capabilities that the retail doesn't (except for being free of course) is something I've literally never seen from in an RTS game. Basically, Blizzard should be careful not to have superior cracked versions of their retail edition available for free download.
Pirating is wrong. Having said that I'm still waiting for a group to release a multiplayer hack so that I and a whole slew of friends can play with minimal latency and without having to depend on the stability of our internet connection or that of Blizzard's servers. If you don't do it for your fans, Blizzard they'll turn to some hacking group and you'll lose face. Regulating how the lan portion is unlocked can filter out those who've pirated the games from the honest buyers.
iCCup has gone legit, they aren't looking to run a sc2 server. Someone else will carry the torch soon enough.
as far as I know the pirates bay version is no different than the free SC2 download on blizzards own site. both versions let you play the campaign for free, and require you to log onto bnet to play the multiplayer. so essentially the "pirates" are just "pirating" something they could've gotten for free, so it's not some moral dilemnia where we need a huge discussion about how wrong piracy is. I really hate these people who find every opportunity to bitch about piracy and act self rightous, like the guy who made this topic. seriously, your opinions don't matter and the arguements from both side are old and steril, why there is still such a big controversy over the matter is just dumbfounding to me.
On November 17 2010 04:43 kariido wrote: Pirating is wrong. Having said that I'm still waiting for a group to release a multiplayer hack so that I and a whole slew of friends can play with minimal latency and without having to depend on the stability of our internet connection or that of Blizzard's servers. If you don't do it for your fans, Blizzard they'll turn to some hacking group and you'll lose face. Regulating how the lan portion is unlocked can filter out those who've pirated the games from the honest buyers.
iCCup has gone legit, they aren't looking to run a sc2 server. Someone else will carry the torch soon enough.
or friends being separated by region locking. its sad when legit customers are waiting for something like that though...
while i do want a regioneless hacked server to play with other legit users that bought the game, id rather blizzard just fix it themselves and save everyone the trouble. but i doubt ill ever get to play with my EU and korean friends legitimately with the current direction blizzard is going in regards to this issue though =/ even if had the money to buy several copies i still have no idea how i would get into the korean server especially if david kim cant get in lol...
In my humble opinion, Internet Piracy - or file sharing as I would prefer to call it - should be put into a larger perspective. It seems to be easy to draw the conclusion that; "Stealing is wrong, don't steal, don't download!", but the obvious mistake is of course that the first is not the same crime as the last. A copy is just that, a copy.
The music and video history has a huge history of fighting against technology, the argument has always been the same; we lose sales! Some might remember the: "Home Taping Is Killing Music-campaign", did it? The fear is of course most about losing power, in a digital world, there is no longer a need for CD-distributors. Will artist survive? - Yes. Will the CD-industry? - perhaps not.
Internet is revolutionary in many ways, history might regard it in similar ways as we regard the printing press and the following "illumination". The essence of Internet is, and always has been, the sharing of information, thoughts and content. And yes, in many cases the information and content is copyrighted.
From a macroeconomic perspective, we should probably ask our self why we desire music, videos, games or culture in the first place? The consumption of culture, seems to be somewhat overlooked, imagine an endless bibliotech of music, videos and games at everyone's disposal, what is that if not welfare? Yes, there must probably be some incitement to create culture as well, and I do believe that there is and will be, copyright has a roll - for commercial purpose.
During the Napster era, CD sales were high, the correlation between file sharing of music and sales has not been proven, however I've seen research pointing at the opposite. I myself no longer download music, I stream it from the legal service Spotify and so does most of my friends, file sharing is not killing the music industry.
Blizzard is a company who haven't been fighting technology, nor should they. When you buy Starcraft 2, you are not really buying the game, but rather the license to play it, and for the service that they provide along with it. The smart move from Blizzard would be to try their best to improve these services as much as possible, that's what they sell, and that is what we pay for.
On November 16 2010 12:13 Plexa wrote: I would bet that a number of those illegal downloads are actually people just annoyed with the speed of the blizzard dl
Yup! 100%, I was away from my main computer (which meant no disc) and the blizz dl'er was slow as hell... So, i got a torrent and had it in ~1 hour!
EDIT: I think that this should be almost required reading whenever starting any piracy debate. http://notch.tumblr.com/post/1121596044/how-piracy-works When I was trying to convince my friends to buy SC2, I told them to torrent it, and after they did, the almost immediately (the next day) told me they were picking it up by the end of the week...
I downloaded the game from torent...i wanted to see what is like as i didn't play the beta.The only way i managed to play the game was to also download the crack...after playing about 1 hour of single player campaign i decided to buy it...i mostly wanted to see how it runs on my pc...
And yes people from countries with a medium income of more then 2000 dolars a month should spare the rest of the world from their judgment ..you are the minority in a very poor world, and no it's not because you work so hard to achieve that.
I never downloaded Starcraft 2 illegally, I was happy with the "Beta" which I consider pretty much a demo, and was really excited about the game, so of course I went a spent 60 dollars on the game, this game I would be fine spending 120$ on. However for all of you saying that downloading games are "wrong" I kind of feel your being too harsh on people, without understanding the situation... there are plenty of times I've "downloaded" games just to see if I want to buy it. I don't have infinite income.. I will pay for something if I'm gonna spend time playing it, and Im going to get something out of it. This usually means multiplayer.. I rarely rarely care for single player/single player games so that isnt a problem for me, but I can see how some people might steal games and play through games...
Also, on another note, if i can get a lan version of SC2, I will get it, even if that means "Stealing" it.. I already payed for the game, I think its ridiculous I cant play lan.
On November 16 2010 23:40 misaTO wrote: Oh yeah, i forgot, retarded LANGUAGE POLICY. Can't play the game in english cuz blizzard thinks im an illiterate spic.
Download the English version... log in, play... where's the prob?
There is no easy way to get a hard copy of the game in english in my country. Could have been easily solved with a built in language option as every modern game has.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
Also this.
In america for a minimum wage you can afford the game at 50 US dolars. Where i live, spending that % of a salary for a game doesn't allow you to spend any more money on leisure during the rest of the month. Of course, that is, if u still plan on eating.
I demand 2 things from blizzard. Higher Quality & Local prices.
On November 17 2010 07:57 misaTO wrote: There is no easy way to get a hard copy of the game in english in my country. Could have been easily solved with a built in language option as every modern game has.
You're supposing the angry legion of 14 years olds Blizz' was aiming at with SC2 (from WOW) are smart enough to speak another language...
For instance on the EU version I frequently get raged at in obscure languages. That and the fact that the translations are friggin atrocious, as usual...
On November 17 2010 07:57 misaTO wrote: There is no easy way to get a hard copy of the game in english in my country. Could have been easily solved with a built in language option as every modern game has.
You're supposing the angry legion of 14 years olds Blizz' was aiming at with SC2 (from WOW) are smart enough to speak another language...
For instance on the EU version I frequently get raged at in obscure languages. That and the fact that the translations are friggin atrocious, as usual...
That's cuz you did not get the "neutral" spanish translation shovelled down your throat.
Reaper = Yum - Ki Mil. WTF THATS NOT EVEN SPANISH LOL
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is a good point, I used to pirate all the time when I was in high school and had no income. Yet some people will say this was "lost sales" when in reality I had no way of buying games.
Companies need to stop touting piracy figures as 'potential sales' or 'money lost.' The reality is that 99% of the time, the person would never have bought the game in the first place.
I pirated starcraft way way long ago. I had zero intentions of buying the game because i had no interest in RTS and i had no money.
Anyways, me and my friends installed starcraft on all our high school computer lab computers, and a TON of people ( hundreds) started playing. I know for a fact at least 50% of those people bought the game for personal use at home, and later on i purchased a digital copy of broodwar, because it was just convenient to have.
I downloaded Broodwar two times from those "illegal" sources since my original Broodwar-CD commited suicide and at that time you couldn't legally download it. I image that quite a few ppl did the same with SC2.
Well, I don't know if these numbers include the beta version of it, because a lot of people dl'ed the beta to play against AI before to get invited into the beta, as they couldn't wait another minute to try the game...
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
Thing is though that games are not a right, but a luxury. If you want to download games and movies then do so, but don't try to convince yourself that you have any kind of justifiable right to do so. And I'm not trying to put myself on some kind of moral high-ground here because I have downloaded plenty of games and movies, I just don't try to justify it.
I think that, while being obviously illegal, in some cases piracy might even help videogames. This is different from movies and music, because nowadays games usually block many of their features from pirated copies, in SC2 it is multiplayer, in Civ5 the game sometimes crashes, some games' performance is horrible compared to the retail version, etc. This means that the pirate version sometimes acts as the now forgotten "demo", and the person the proceeds to buy the game. Obviously this applies for a limited amount of pirate game users, but I'm pretty sure game companies know and use this to their advantage. In music and movies it's a whole different deal, since you won't be playing those movies/music that many times, and you ain't missing on anything when compared to the retail product.
You could download the game through pirate to get it sooner incase you're waiting for your own copy which essantially is only a bnet account with the licence and a link to download the game.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
I'd pirate the game in a second if there was cross realm play and lower latency in the pirated version.
And also, if you live somewhere poor, pirating is one of the only real ways you have to play a lot of games/watch films etc. Only people in rich countries are going to be indignant about this.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
Yea, you are so right. Also, if you are not born in the USA and do not have the largest military in the world to back up whatever you want to do who fucking cares about you.... basically what you are saying is who cares you were born in a poor county, next life be born in a richer one SUCKER?!
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
Jesus christ. It also isn't a persons right to have anything in life other then this
You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to protect the status quo for American stockholders?
Though honestly, that doesn't really vindicate responsibility from the pirates, mostly because most of them weren't born in areas with less privileged countries where money has less purchasing power on foreign goods. At least half of the pirates were probably stupid spoiled kids in an American suburbia somewhere. Seriously, get a job you fuckers.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is a good point, I used to pirate all the time when I was in high school and had no income. Yet some people will say this was "lost sales" when in reality I had no way of buying games.
It is "lost sales". They might have lost your sale, but I am sure 1 person out the 2.3 million would have bought it if pirating was not an option. And even 1 person is a lost sale. To put it in perspective, say 5% of the people would have bought it if they couldn't get it for free: 2.3 million x 60 x .05 = 6.9 million in lost revenue. That is pretty significant.
Here in Croatia the average salary is around 800$ a month, the game does not cost 60$ but 85$, and thats not the collectors edition, im not saying that makes it right to pirate the game, nor did I pirate it since I cant even run it, but I can see how people would.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
Yea, you are so right. Also, if you are not born in the USA and do not have the largest military in the world to back up whatever you want to do who fucking cares about you.... basically what you are saying is who cares you were born in a poor county, next life be born in a richer one SUCKER?!
Are you crazy? We're talking about a fucking VIDEO GAME.
There are people out there who download HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS worth of games, movies and music. Who cares what country they're from? The chances of them actually having that much money to spend are basically zero. But it doesn't matter, because the amount of money you have to spend at any given time impacts the debate exactly zero. It's a product. If you want it, you're supposed to pay for it.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to (but incredibly ineffective at) protect the investments of American stockholders?
Yes, it is unfair. Doesn't make it right though. He can do whatever he wants, there's not much stopping him, but it doesn't change that fact that it should be against the law.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
Yea, you are so right. Also, if you are not born in the USA and do not have the largest military in the world to back up whatever you want to do who fucking cares about you.... basically what you are saying is who cares you were born in a poor county, next life be born in a richer one SUCKER?!
Are you crazy? We're talking about a fucking VIDEO GAME.
There are people out there who download HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS worth of games, movies and music. Who cares what country they're from? The chances of them actually having that much money to spend are basically zero. But it doesn't matter, because the amount of money you have to spend at any given time impacts the debate exactly zero. It's a product. If you want it, you're supposed to pay for it.
I'm glad you get that you realize the law is meant to protect the status quo, not even the direct profits of said stockholders.
Yes, it is unfair. Doesn't make it right though. He can do whatever he wants, there's not much stopping him, but it doesn't change that fact that it should be against the law.
What the fuck does being against the law have anything to do with it? Heres an example. I don't smoke weed, but plenty of people do (in this country, America). Now, here, Smoking Weed is "against the law". Do you morally condemn those who smoke weed just because it is against the law? Do you come up to friends smoking weed and start yelling at them how bad of a person they are?
Laws are not ethical guidelines. They have a tendency to correlate with them, but they are not the same.
On November 16 2010 12:09 seaofsaturn wrote: Well, a lot of people who actually bought the game probably used a torrent to download the client because the blizzard downloader is slow as balls.
Yeah, I used torrent to get the game down since I couldnt find a download for it on battle.net and I dont havea DVD player for my computer so couldnt use the CD's to install it so last option was to take it via torrent. I guess that's what most people have done.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
Yea, you are so right. Also, if you are not born in the USA and do not have the largest military in the world to back up whatever you want to do who fucking cares about you.... basically what you are saying is who cares you were born in a poor county, next life be born in a richer one SUCKER?!
Are you crazy? We're talking about a fucking VIDEO GAME.
There are people out there who download HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS worth of games, movies and music. Who cares what country they're from? The chances of them actually having that much money to spend are basically zero. But it doesn't matter, because the amount of money you have to spend at any given time impacts the debate exactly zero. It's a product. If you want it, you're supposed to pay for it.
I'm glad you get that you realize the law is meant to protect the status quo, not even the direct profits of said stockholders.
Yes, it is unfair. Doesn't make it right though. He can do whatever he wants, there's not much stopping him, but it doesn't change that fact that it should be against the law.
What the fuck does being against the law have anything to do with it? Heres an example. I don't smoke weed, but plenty of people do (in this country, America). Smoking Weed is against the law. Do you morally condemn those who smoke weed just because it is against the law?
The difference here is that smoking weed shouldn't be against the law.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
Yea, you are so right. Also, if you are not born in the USA and do not have the largest military in the world to back up whatever you want to do who fucking cares about you.... basically what you are saying is who cares you were born in a poor county, next life be born in a richer one SUCKER?!
Are you crazy? We're talking about a fucking VIDEO GAME.
There are people out there who download HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS worth of games, movies and music. Who cares what country they're from? The chances of them actually having that much money to spend are basically zero. But it doesn't matter, because the amount of money you have to spend at any given time impacts the debate exactly zero. It's a product. If you want it, you're supposed to pay for it.
I'm glad you get that you realize the law is meant to protect the status quo, not even the direct profits of said stockholders.
Yes, it is unfair. Doesn't make it right though. He can do whatever he wants, there's not much stopping him, but it doesn't change that fact that it should be against the law.
What the fuck does being against the law have anything to do with it? Heres an example. I don't smoke weed, but plenty of people do (in this country, America). Smoking Weed is against the law. Do you morally condemn those who smoke weed just because it is against the law?
The difference here is that smoking weed shouldn't be against the law.
HUrrr what I were to disagree with you? (I don't)
Its the Law for a reason. Because individual opinions do not matter. They are meant to protect some standard in society. Sometimes, an individual, other times, a group, other times, a ideal, a symbol, a quo. Thats why they are "laws".
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to protect the status quo for American stockholders?
Living a less fortunate life and trying to improve by questionable means is NOT the same as stealing a video game. It's only a video game! It's not the same as say, stealing food for your table. Games are privelages, and you can't justify pirating by saying you're too poor to buy the game legally. Also, how exactly did he afford a computer that can play all these games? Surely if he could save up that money, he could save up 60 bucks to buy a game. Not being able to afford a brand new game on release day does not entitle you to stealing it.
On November 21 2010 02:35 Half wrote: You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to protect the status quo for American stockholders?
What do video games have to do with standard of living? Nobody is being criticized for being poor. They're being criticized for wanting expensive products for free.
I can understand why so many people in lower income countries are frustrated with video game prices. It's true that they are often higher in those places and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But if you're going to steal the stuff you want then don't try to justify it by saying that you want it so so much but not enough to save up for a while or make sacrifices. It's just a video game.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to protect the status quo for American stockholders?
Living a less fortunate life and trying to improve by questionable means is NOT the same as stealing a video game. It's only a video game! It's not the same as say, stealing food for your table. Games are privelages, and you can't justify pirating by saying you're too poor to buy the game legally. Also, how exactly did he afford a computer that can play all these games? Surely if he could save up that money, he could save up 60 bucks to buy a game. Not being able to afford a brand new game on release day does not entitle you to stealing it.
Most things in life are privileges. I'm not saying there is no principal difference between electicity and video games (both "privileges)", but I'm saying its arbitrary to condemn something on the sole principal of it being a privilege.
I can understand why so many people in lower income countries are frustrated with video game prices. It's true that they are often higher in those places and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But if you're going to steal the stuff you want then don't try to justify it by saying that you want it so so much but not enough to save up for a while or make sacrifices. It's just a video game.
Of course you can't understand. I mean, how could someone justify themselves ethically by having a video game without paying for it????
Thats statement is a reflection of our countries status quo. Your ethics and morals are shaped by the economic and political environment you are raised in. And your right, in this country, they are entirely valid judgments.
The only thing your imposition of your ethical guidelines on another country with a different economic environment does is impose your status quo onto there lives, much to the chagrin of stockholders everywhere.
I haven't heard of a single Chinese friend (living in China) condemn someone for buying pirate stuff of the street. Obviously, there it isn't a ethical wrongdoing for them, though in America, it may very well be. What, does your ethical guidelines (shaped by money and power) supersede theirs?
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to protect the status quo for American stockholders?
Living a less fortunate life and trying to improve by questionable means is NOT the same as stealing a video game. It's only a video game! It's not the same as say, stealing food for your table. Games are privelages, and you can't justify pirating by saying you're too poor to buy the game legally. Also, how exactly did he afford a computer that can play all these games? Surely if he could save up that money, he could save up 60 bucks to buy a game. Not being able to afford a brand new game on release day does not entitle you to stealing it.
Most things in life are privileges. I'm not saying there is no principal difference between electicity and video games (both "privileges)", but I'm saying its arbitrary to condemn something on the sole principal of it being a privilege.
How about we draw a line between "privileges" and "frivolous privileges"? Electricity for your home, a car to get to a job, those are privileges but certainly borderline necessities. A video game is purely for entertainment and can not be considered necessary in any sense.
It's not arbitrary to condemn someone based on this difference. I can understand and agree with someone stealing to put food on their table. I can not do the same for someone stealing just to have a fancy new toy while complaining that it's because they are too poor to afford it under normal circumstances.
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to protect the status quo for American stockholders?
Living a less fortunate life and trying to improve by questionable means is NOT the same as stealing a video game. It's only a video game! It's not the same as say, stealing food for your table. Games are privelages, and you can't justify pirating by saying you're too poor to buy the game legally. Also, how exactly did he afford a computer that can play all these games? Surely if he could save up that money, he could save up 60 bucks to buy a game. Not being able to afford a brand new game on release day does not entitle you to stealing it.
Most things in life are privileges. I'm not saying there is no principal difference between electicity and video games (both "privileges)", but I'm saying its arbitrary to condemn something on the sole principal of it being a privilege.
How about we draw a line between "privileges" and "frivolous privileges"? Electricity for your home, a car to get to a job, those are privileges but certainly borderline necessities. A video game is purely for entertainment and can not be considered necessary in any sense.
They are immutable because what we are talking about here has nothing to do with the frivolity of the privilege, but purchasing power of the individual attaining them. The purchasing power of Crotian currency applied to electricity is just, because its been shaped by developed, Croatian industry, suited towards there economic situation. As opposed by American stockholders trying to impose there status quo in lieu of any sort of developed, internal system.
Second of all, while I would never argue that video games aren't a frivolous privilege, its kind of funny how you view things like Cars a "borderline necessity". lol.
It's not arbitrary to condemn someone based on this difference. I can understand and agree with someone stealing to put food on their table. I can not do the same for someone stealing just to have a fancy new toy while complaining that it's because they are too poor to afford it under normal circumstances.
There's a huge distinction to be made between stealing physical goods and piracy. I know many people would want you to believe there the same, but there aren't. Stealing violates a greater, and more universally applicable guideline. Physical theft requires scarcity, and it involves consumer rivalry. Simply put, when I take something, someone else has less of it.
Now I'm not going to say piracy is an arbitrarily illegitimate, but its illegal for a very different reason. When I pirate media, I don't steal from anyone, there isn't any less of it, but I hurt the status quo. I diminish the value of those who did purchase it legitimately, thus disincentizing further purchase. The question to be asked here is that whether the American status quo for media is really applicable to fucking Croatia, and whether a breakdown of said status quo in Croatia really negatively effects anyone in America, or anywhere else.
On November 16 2010 12:07 mufin wrote: you could also flip the coin and argue why did blizzard try to fight pirating in the first place and simply give its community what they wanted (lan, cross-region etc...)
if that many people dl'ed it for just campaign, if lan was included (and hence non b.net online servers) how many more people would not have bought it?
blizzard does have staff to pay after all.
you could have a lan system where you have to sign in online once instead of constantly being online
On November 17 2010 04:15 Dagon wrote: THIS IS STUPID! People keep saying that it îs wrong to dowlnoad games.. Well, yes! When a game costs 60 bucks and your sallary îs 2000$, sure.. Fucking buy the game!!
However, Take Romania for example! The medium salary îs fucking 300 bucks, and the games STILL cost 60..
I bought sc2, because i want to play multiplayer, but i download a lot of games that i can play through hamachi or Garena..
It îs just not feasible to purchase every game i want to play here.. Plus, there îs no renting system for games. I don't want to spend 1/4 of my sallary to buy a game that i will play for 20 hours..
This is such warped thinking. It's not your right to have every game you want. I mean seriously, this line of thinking is immature beyond belief. If you can't afford it, then tough. That's life.
You honestly willing to condemn a man because hes seeking a similar standard of living albeit being born in a less privileged country, violating no law or other person besides one meant to protect the status quo for American stockholders?
Living a less fortunate life and trying to improve by questionable means is NOT the same as stealing a video game. It's only a video game! It's not the same as say, stealing food for your table. Games are privelages, and you can't justify pirating by saying you're too poor to buy the game legally. Also, how exactly did he afford a computer that can play all these games? Surely if he could save up that money, he could save up 60 bucks to buy a game. Not being able to afford a brand new game on release day does not entitle you to stealing it.
Most things in life are privileges. I'm not saying there is no principal difference between electicity and video games (both "privileges)", but I'm saying its arbitrary to condemn something on the sole principal of it being a privilege.
How about we draw a line between "privileges" and "frivolous privileges"? Electricity for your home, a car to get to a job, those are privileges but certainly borderline necessities. A video game is purely for entertainment and can not be considered necessary in any sense.
They are immutable because what we are talking about here has nothing to do with the frivolity of the privilege, but purchasing power of the individual attaining them. The purchasing power of Crotian currency applied to electricity is just, because its been shaped by developed, Croatian industry, suited towards there economic situation. As opposed by American stockholders trying to impose there status quo in lieu of any sort of developed, internal system.
Second of all, while I would never argue that video games aren't a frivolous privilege, its kind of funny how you view things like Cars a "borderline necessity". lol.
I used the example a car to get to a job. I think having a means of getting to your job so you can actually work is probably close to a necessity. And these big, bad American Stockholders you keep talking about, they don't have the responsibility to ensure their product can be afforded by the average Romanian. They set the prices based on an American purchasing audience, and this price is then set to the rest of the markets because to have different prices in different regions would end up causing loss of revenue and confusion. Not saying it's right, but don't paint it as though there's just a group of old white men in suits sitting in a dark boardroom trying to decide the newest way to ruin the life of a kid in some eastern european country.
I haven't heard of a single Chinese friend (living in China) condemn someone for buying pirate stuff of the street. Obviously, there it isn't a ethical wrongdoing for them, though in America, it may very well be. What, does your ethical guidelines (shaped by money and power) supersede theirs?
Your friends may not condemn you for purchasing a stolen product, but your friends don't decide the laws. Use their support all you want, but at the end of the day you're buying stolen property and it's not your friends you have to convince, it's a judge.
Your friends may not condemn you for purchasing a stolen product, but your friends don't decide the laws. Use their support all you want, but at the end of the day you're buying stolen property and it's not your friends you have to convince, it's a judge.
I'm aware its against the law (for the record, that law is effectively meaningless in China)
As I said earlier, law=/=Ethics
What the fuck does being against the law have anything to do with it? Heres an example. I don't smoke weed, but plenty of people do (in this country, America). Now, here, Smoking Weed is "against the law". Do you morally condemn those who smoke weed just because it is against the law? Do you come up to friends smoking weed and start yelling at them how bad of a person they are?
Laws are not ethical guidelines. They have a tendency to correlate with them, but they are not the same.
---------------
And these...American Stockholders you keep talking about, they don't have the responsibility to ensure their product can be afforded by the average Romanian. They set the prices based on an American purchasing audience, and this price is then set to the rest of the markets because to have different prices in different regions would end up causing loss of revenue and confusion. Not saying it's right.
That's basically my point. I'm not saying piracy should be legal, I'm saying its hard to condemn that guy for a moral wrong for the crime of piracy.
I can understand why so many people in lower income countries are frustrated with video game prices. It's true that they are often higher in those places and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. But if you're going to steal the stuff you want then don't try to justify it by saying that you want it so so much but not enough to save up for a while or make sacrifices. It's just a video game.
Of course you can't understand. I mean, how could someone justify themselves ethically by having a video game without paying for it????
Thats statement is a reflection of our countries status quo. Your ethics and morals are shaped by the economic and political environment you are raised in. And your right, in this country, they are entirely valid judgments.
The only thing your imposition of your ethical guidelines on another country with a different economic environment does is impose your status quo onto there lives, much to the chagrin of stockholders everywhere.
I haven't heard of a single Chinese friend (living in China) condemn someone for buying pirate stuff of the street. Obviously, there it isn't a ethical wrongdoing for them, though in America, it may very well be. What, does your ethical guidelines (shaped by money and power) supersede theirs?
I hope you realize the degree to which this sounds like "blah blah blah, Mr. Freeman". I'm not going to get into an obtuse debate with you about cultural relativism. People next door to me do things I disagree with.
On November 21 2010 02:46 Cpadolf wrote: Yes, it is unfair. Doesn't make it right though. He can do whatever he wants, there's not much stopping him, but it doesn't change that fact that it should be against the law.
It is wrong, but there is such a thing as a victimless crime. Piracy is blown out of proportion by corporations to get more corporatist laws passed to enhance their profits, it has much less to do with the lost profits than you would be led to think.
On topic, I pirated SC2 (not from TPB though) and then activated it with the key from my purchased boxed copy. I know a lot of people who did this because they were WoW players with firsthand experience on how terrible Blizzard's downloaders can be, so that could be artificially inflating the piracy counts.
I pirated the game and enjoyed playing the SP for a bit. It looked like fun so I bought it after like two or so days, and now I'm playing it every day.
On November 21 2010 02:46 Cpadolf wrote: Yes, it is unfair. Doesn't make it right though. He can do whatever he wants, there's not much stopping him, but it doesn't change that fact that it should be against the law.
It is wrong, but there is such a thing as a victimless crime. Piracy is blown out of proportion by corporations to get more corporatist laws passed to enhance their profits, it has much less to do with the lost profits than you would be led to think.
On topic, I pirated SC2 (not from TPB though) and then activated it with the key from my purchased boxed copy. I know a lot of people who did this because they were WoW players with firsthand experience on how terrible Blizzard's downloaders can be, so that could be artificially inflating the piracy counts.
This discussion has taken a stupid turn. Why every single thread turn in to a argument about something stupid that will never be resolved in this thread
On November 21 2010 03:51 megagoten wrote: wow, your internet is faster than your dvd rom??
Whoops, I meant digital copy. Dunno what the hell I was talking about there. Though, plenty of people pirated the game before it came out so they could then activate it with boxed cd keys on launch days, so there ya go.
This data is completely meaningless. People may have pirated after buying the game. Plus, the majority of software pirates aren't people who would normally purchase it -- they download it to try it out and see what the fuss is.
1 million pirated downloads doesn't even mean Blizzard lost 100 sales.
On November 21 2010 02:46 Cpadolf wrote: Yes, it is unfair. Doesn't make it right though. He can do whatever he wants, there's not much stopping him, but it doesn't change that fact that it should be against the law.
It is wrong, but there is such a thing as a victimless crime. Piracy is blown out of proportion by corporations to get more corporatist laws passed to enhance their profits, it has much less to do with the lost profits than you would be led to think.
Thing is though that it's not just super rich companies that make games, Indie developers are the ones who can really suffer. I remember reading that World of Goo (amazing game developed by two EA "dropouts") was only bought about 10% of the time for the PC version. And sure not everyone of those 90% would have bought the game otherwise, but I think it is pretty ignorant to say, as some have, that only a few percent of them would have done so.
And of course it's not "right" when it happens to big companies either. Just because they made a 100 million on a game doesn't mean they are not entitled to the other millions they would have made without piracy. Because It's their game.
I'm not saying piracy is the most despicable thing in the world or anything, I'm just saying that while it may not be morally reprehensible to pirate a game 100% of the time, you don't really have any moral grounds to justify it either, and it can't be considered to be "right" by any means.
On November 21 2010 04:22 Cpadolf wrote: Thing is though that it's not just super rich companies that make games, Indie developers are the ones who can really suffer. I remember reading that World of Goo (amazing game developed by two EA "dropouts") was only bought about 10% of the time for the PC version. And sure not everyone of those 90% would have bought the game otherwise, but I think it is pretty ignorant to say, as some have, that only a few percent of them would have done so.
And of course it's not "right" when it happens to big companies either. Just because they made a 100 million on a game doesn't mean they are not entitled to the other millions they would have made without piracy. Because It's their game.
I'm not saying piracy is the most despicable thing in the world or anything, I'm just saying that while it may not be morally reprehensible to pirate a game 100% of the time, you don't really have any moral grounds to justify it either, and it can't be considered to be "right" by any means.
No I agree with you, it's certainly a stretch to try to pretend it's "right" or morally justifiable, but it's a small, almost insignificant evil. The majority of people who pirate, ie poor teenagers and college age people, are not hurting anyone with these activities. And certainly their crimes are not appropriate for this massive backlash of litigation and sweeping laws.
I would certainly agree it's reasonable to believe that out of a huge number of pirates, some portion of them would have legitimately bought the game if they could not pirate, but not only is that not a valid enough legal reason to prosecute anyone much less justify massive trade agreement laws, but using this kind of hypothetical argument opens the door to too many other problems.
My whole point, and this is not directed at you, is that piracy is a much smaller problem than people are led to believe by the corporations. Whether you think it's morally reprehensible or just a small thing not worth dealing with, your bigger concern should be the laws these corporations are trying to get passed via scapegoating piracy.
Can't help but feel that perhaps people need to be a bit more utilitarian when considering the morals of piracy. In a situation where a person doesn't have the money or interest in a game to actually pay for it, downloading it to try it out carries only a net positive. The developer/publisher in this case has not lost out on any money. On the contrary, he's gotten a potential fan, who could turn into a customer.
The morals of piracy are quite different from the legality of it. In my opinion, if you don't have the money to buy a video-game, pirate the shit out of it! And if you like it, try to scrape together some money to buy it.
I'll continue to purchase as many good games as can fit in my budget, but I'll also likely pirate many of them first, to see if they're worth getting.
I kind of feel like an illegal DL of starcraft is just free advertising for blizzard. Anyone who cares enough to torrent a 7BG file will probably buy the game once they play it a little.
EPT
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