Atari Founder: PC Piracy About to be Eradicated

[Girlysprite]

Deja, I do not think that everyone that runs into problems with games has handled the games wrong. It can just happen whenever you a not so standard setup, and that's a think that quite some gaming geeks have.

also this:

Mayby I'm just the one lone person on the earth who actualy use my games properly (aka does'nt systematicly break the bioshock installation and throw the computer in a river 3 times since last september)

This is no way to debate, You try to maake the opponent in debate look like an idiot, and not go into details of his argument. You assume he did something wrong; what if he did not?


I have had some problems with games verifications too; this is because I install my games on another disk partition then my windows is on. Some games don't work well if they are on disk D. Go figure.

The problem with this whole discussion is the lack of statistics. We all assume things; that either the publishers loose money over it or don't, but it can't really be prooved, because it's impossible to get good research on it.

 

[Anniko]

You should have uninstalled the game properly. Everytime you uninstall it the game calls home and restores you "installation point"

Way to miss the point.

I am unable to install the game because they took down their activation servers. I have installed it exactly one time. I then uninstalled it as I needed the hard drive space. Now that I've cleaned some crap off my drives, I felt like playing it again. I go to install it and it can't activate because their activation servers are down.

 

[theshadowslth]

Here's hoping this copy protection method works!

If they can get a good, working anti-piracy scheme in place then it could revitalize the PC gaming industry. The biggest argument as to why consoles get games and get games first (beyond the standardized hardware of consoles) has been "we lose PC sales due to piracy." This causes some people to buy a console for a particular game (GTA IV, Guitar Hero 3, Mass Effect) or wait patiently and, in some cases, with little hope of ever seeing the PC release.

Is it true that piracy kills sales? Certainly some sales. But that's akin to Adobe saying "every time someone downloads an illegal copy of Photoshop, we lose the $900 they should be paying us!" No, the bulk of pirates, and certainly USA domestic pirates in particular, aren't going to be purchasing a game at any price.

No, there are two major reasons that a real and non-invasive anti-piracy scheme (as this appears to be) would revitalize the industry. Firstly, without the threat of "OMG PIRATES GOTZ OUR SALES!!!111!!" developers can and likely will release games on the PC coninciding with console releases, instead of months (GTA3 through 4, KotOR 1 and 2) or even years (Jade Empire) later. Additionally, I can imagine that some games lacking a PC release gaining one, like the Force Unleashed.

More importantly, however, publishers will not lose sales to overly invasive DRM. I've been patinetly awating the release of the PC version of Mass Effect, browsing through forums for details, checking around for the best price. Most of the forum posts I've been seeing for the last few days regarding the Mass Effect PC release are along the lines of "DRM is way too invasive, canceling pre-order."

The publishers need to go away from this line of thinking: "Hey, lets make the game phone home every time it's launched and if it can't for 10 days then we'll just disable it entirely. Oh, and you can only install it 3 times. Oh, and it's a single player game, so it shouldn't even need the internet, but who cares? Let's tell people that they won't need the CD to play, at least. That'll smooth them over." What next? A rectal exam to verify DNA every 20 minutes (Yes, I shamelessly paraphrase Penny Arcade)? Even though they dialed it back significantly, the fact that it's a consideration is terrifying. Move towards: "Hey, let's require a CD-Key and a disc and if the game is good people will still buy it!" I commonly hear "Look at StarCraft!" in response to such ridiculous DRM. Old game, still selling at least marginally well years later, well loved, and in it's heyday a true block-buster. And the only copy protection was the old "CD-key and play with the disc in" method. We're happy to play with the discs in!

I'm a PC gamer. I'll be buying Mass Effect in spite of the DRM. But it's also the first game I'm likely to pirate as well, so I don't have to deal with crazy DRM shenanigans. Let's move to something that at least theoretically works and won't be cracked in 24 hours, and maybe usher in a new era of PC games. That having been said this system will be cracked, eventually. It's always just a matter of time.

 

[smallharmlesskitten]

my turn my turn!!!

i would like to paraphrase MC Lars

Bioware's up in my face, like dont steal my game Lars.
But Sony sells the Burners that are burning the games Bioware.

my solution, make it unpossible to even open the games software and can only be installed into an unaccesable folder


I know bad spelling but that seems like a good solution

 

[Blayze]

Most of the forum posts I've been seeing for the last few days regarding the Mass Effect PC release are along the lines of "DRM is way too invasive, canceling pre-order."

It was incredible seeing the number of posts about the subject on the Bioware forums just... *explode*. Topic after topic expanded to the max and then got locked down by the mods as they created a new one. Had I the time, I'd read through all of them.

I hope to see the day when game companies no longer have the crutch of crying "PIRACY!", and they then have to admit that their game didn't sell because it was *shit*.

Some games don't work well if they are on disk D. Go figure.

Agreed. Indeed, some games don't work at all. Neverwinter Nights 2 can't even be installed on a drive other than C. It's not a stretch of the imagination to assume there's a reason why (It won't work at all?), given that it's the only game I've ever seen that restricts you in that manner. Logically, there must be games that don't restrict you but still won't work properly.

 

[Markness]

The people who won't pay for it and will download it.
Who the fuck cares about these guys? They're not giving you money, therefore, you don't care about them.

The people who will download it and will buy it if it's good.
These guys need a good game to impress them. If it's good, chances are, they'll buy it. If they don't buy it, then they're not in this group, they're in group #1.

The people who will buy it regardless.

Does group 1 include the people who will buy a game, but won't if there is piracy available? Game companies do need to care about these people because this is the only place piracy is making an impact.

Edit: Also, I think cheese pavilian raised a very good point about re-selling games being a cost to the industry. Now that I think about it, could this cost game devolopers more than piracy?

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Let's face it: when it comes to the average person, this is way more like using a VCR or your TiVo to skip commercials than anything else.

I've heard this argument before. It goes along the line of "Well, it's alright to steal from them because they've got lots of money."

What is Copyright?

Copyright is a property right, essentially giving the copyright owner the exclusive rights to produce copies, control or perform an original literary, musical, dramatic or artistic work. In the United Kingdom, copyright is legally defined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Computer software is defined in the Act as a 'literary work' and is therefore protected by the Act.

What is Copyright Infringement?

If anything is done with a literary, dramatic, musical or artistic work without the permission of the copyright owner and restricted by copyright as defined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, then it could well be an infringement of the owners copyright. For example, if a software program is copied without the copyright owner's authorisation that is an infringement.

What are the penalties for copyright infringement?

If copyright infringement is proven in a criminal court, on indictment the defendant could receive an unlimited fine and up to ten years imprisonment per offence.

Now given that that's the legal definition. I'd say that ten years imprisonment counts it as legally equal to Class B Felony.

 

[Digikid]

Do you hear that sound?

'Tis the sound of a billion pirates laughing their collective asses off.

Bushnell doesn't know his asshole from his armpit; there is no such thing as 'piracy-proofing'. This will last for as long as it takes someone to find a workaround; no longer.

I am no pirate....but I will agreee that they are wasting their time and resources on this. NOTHING that they try will work and they need to accept that....which they will alos never learn.

 

[protogenxl]

I have a solution it's called a DeSoldering Station easy to buy and use.

 

[Fenixius]

"Just because they make it hack-proof don't mean we ain't going to hack it."

Hahaha, QFT.

 

[Dejawesp]

Dude, that's a crap argument. We may been buying millions of games every year, but that doesn't mean the pricing is right. Here in England, a new game can cost in the region of 50 quid! And that's nothing compared to the poor sods in Australia.

A "fair" price is not the price you preffer it to be. That would be unfair to the people selling games. The very definition of the word fair is "free from bias" and you are incredibly biased when it comes to the price.

It comes down to 3 views. How much the seller wants. How much the buy wants to pay and then the middle ground (the actual price)

If I could choose what games cost then they would all be free. If the companies could choose then games could cost all my worldy posessions. Does that mean that a fair price is free? ofcourse not. Neither is what the seller wants. But the middle ground which is the actual price that they are sold for in the store is the "fair price" because it's the marked, through competition generated price.

Now I'm going to have a little fun her.

Dude, that's a crap argument.

Yeah I'm going to take advice on debating from someone who starts a sentence with the word dude. But more to the point. You need to realise that "fair" is not "what I want" it's the middle ground between what you want and what they want.

Madonna has sold more records than any other female artist, but it would be foolish to assume that she's the best. Similarly, games often do sell in the millions, but it would be very silly to assume that because of this, games are cheap enough as is. Who knows, if games were priced similarly to films, maybe sales would take off properly into the billions.

Rock solid argument there.

The prices are exactly what they should be. What people are prepared to pay for them.

Mayby we should look at this from an entertainment perspective. If you buy the latest diehard movie when it was released it cost about half as much as a videogame and the movie is 2 hours long. How many times can you watch it before it loses it's entertainment vallue. 3 times? That's 6 hours of entertainment. How many hours of entertainment do you get from a game? A linear singleplayer FPS. About 20 hours. Then you have the multiplayer (CS anyone?) Or mayby battlefield 1942.

A movie does'nt last a fraction of the time a game does for entertainment. Some RPG games go up in the hundreds and even thousands of hours of entertainment.

 

[DrmChsr0]

So, when are we going to shoot people in order to protect things that don't really exist?

After all, fear of death is the greatest motivator of not doing something.

 

[Nugoo]

The problem with this whole discussion is the lack of statistics. We all assume things; that either the publishers loose money over it or don't, but it can't really be prooved, because it's impossible to get good research on it.

Agreed. The only evidence we have in this debate is our own experiences, motivations and anecdotes. Even commenting on the motivations of other pirates is speculation.

 

[mwhite67]

PC games are stupid anyway. Why buy a 3000-7000 dollar system for the maybe 2 or 3 good games that come out each year for it. Just hack a Wii or a 360 it's way cheaper.

Also if games were 15 bucks instead of 60 I would buy 32 games a year instead of 8

 

[Chromed]

As has been mentioned, the TPM chip is also used for Bitlocker drive encryption in Vista. That's designed such that if it isn't Windows being booted up, there's no way to decrypt the disk. It's a really, really tough cookie.

You know how they broke Bitlocker? You cut the power to the machine, get the machine open really, really fast, spray compressed air onto the RAM to cool it down to prevent the information stored on the RAM degrading, and then boot into another OS to sniff the encryption key out of the RAM.

It's not actually the TPM that's getting cracked, it's a flaw in the implementation of Bitlocker. The pirates are really going to have their work cut out for them to figure this one out.

I just had to reply to this one.

It sounds like motherboards with a TPM chip will only work with Windows, and vice versa (inevitably). This just reeks of a lawsuit involving the word "monopoly".

Also, DRM is pushed by publishers more than developers. Online distribution is the way forwards - Not packaged games. Online distribution drastically cuts down on the costs of making the DVD's, manuals, boxes and shipping, and splits the money only between the service and the developer, rather than all kinds of companies involved in the process.

One Steam and equivalent services take off properly, you'll have a hard time finding games in a shop. Which is too bad for collector's (such as myself), but it will offset pirating by a great deal. Games being cheaper on online services also helps (sometimes... CoD4 is still expensive for Europeans on Steam for some reason).

 

[Chromed]

The prices are exactly what they should be. What people are prepared to pay for them.

Actually, that's exactly the reason for all the pirating.

Just pointing that out.