Atari Founder: PC Piracy About to be Eradicated

[Incandescence]

So someone want's to take another step towards preventing theft and all of a sudden they are the villian? How did that happen?

It's not so much that Bushnell is a villian for advocating an anti-piracy position, but that he's a little misguided for perpetuating the tit-for-tat technology game that companies have been playing with pirates for years, and losing for years.

Quite aside from the fact that Nolan Bushnell is a bit crazy, he's clearly underestimating the ingenuity of the scumbag demographic. There will always be douchepits who can rationalize their behaviour, and as a result, there will always be piracy.

I find it interesting that a natural response to rising game prices, especially considering the wide availability and ease of use of a relatively-risk free alternative, makes people into "scumbags" and "douchepits" who feel the need need to "rationalize their behavior." I might call a legitimate consumer "honest" in comparison to a pirate, but I would not degrade a pirate's behavior to such an insulting level for choosing free games over costly games; or even free games over no games, if the situation is such.

I think it's really too bad that there's so much focus on making pirates the enemy of game companies and legitimate consumers when the gauge of a game's success doesn't have to rely on sales numbers. Instead of making and selling games with gross profit in mind, companies could make and sell games with exposure in mind; then, pirates could be their friends instead of their enemies. After all, a developer isn't so interested in sales numbers as a form of direct income as they are in seeing it as an estimate of how many people are playing their game. Then they can take that number to their next investor and say "this many people are playing our game, give us money to make another one." If only companies were friendly enough with pirates that they could get access to the number of illegally distributed copies, developers could also say to publishers and retailers, "this many people are playing our game but not paying for it. If you lowered your retail prices and made piracy just a little more irksome to bother with, maybe they'll pay for the next one." Plus, it's just a more impressive number if you have a more thorough estimate of exposure than straight sales numbers.

Yes, it's a pipedream to hope for a world where some central pirate leadership says to the game company "we stole this many copies of your game this month," only to have the company say "well, what can we do to convince you to pay for them?" And hell, it leads to an even more utopian vision where developers get government grants so they can put games out for free because games should be played by everyone, damnit, and played heavily.

But it's still a lot more productive than waving the latest technogizmo that will be obsolete in three months and shouting "hah, we've got you now, pirates!"

 

[Dejawesp]

The problem is that a stock market listed company does'nt get to choose a goal like "prettyness" over making money.

You have thousands or even millions of people who own stock and expect a return on their investment. Their vote is what makes and breaks a CEO of a company. It's like if you had an election in a country and the leader promised to stop spending money on infrastructure and to instead use the money on building statues.

The pirates are not some revolutionary militia of rugged heroes that fight for justice and equality for everyone. They are theives and cheapscates who would rather steal than have to pay for a product. The reason that this is so widely tolerated amoung the public is that the victim is some corporation to it's easier to dismiss their plight. Unlike some poor old lady geting her wallet stolen. But it's still the same thing. Theft is theft.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

The problem is that a stock market listed company does'nt get to choose a goal like "prettyness" over making money.

You have thousands or even millions of people who own stock and expect a return on their investment. Their vote is what makes and breaks a CEO of a company. It's like if you had an election in a country and the leader promised to stop spending money on infrastructure and to instead use the money on building statues.

The pirates are not some revolutionary militia of rugged heroes that fight for justice and equality for everyone. They are theives and cheapscates who would rather steal than have to pay for a product. The reason that this is so widely tolerated amoung the public is that the victim is some corporation to it's easier to dismiss their plight. Unlike some poor old lady geting her wallet stolen. But it's still the same thing. Theft is theft.

Would you be willing to pay, on average, $120 for a game? I'm not saying that pirating is all right, but there is a large difference between "cheapskate" and "unwilling to pay what is obviously ridiculous price gouging."

 

[Dejawesp]

The price is what the market can handle. Obviously alot of people are willing to pay what the games currently cost or game sales would drop and so would the prices.

One can allways complain about prices. Especialy as a consumer but you can't really debate it because the way the market works; any unresonably priced items will lose shares to competitors.

At the same time games take more time and money to develope. It's no longer pixelated screens with music made intirely on a keyboard. Now you need a small army of Japanese scientists to make a game.

 

[Incandescence]

The problem is that a stock market listed company does'nt get to choose a goal like "prettyness" over making money.

You have thousands or even millions of people who own stock and expect a return on their investment. Their vote is what makes and breaks a CEO of a company. It's like if you had an election in a country and the leader promised to stop spending money on infrastructure and to instead use the money on building statues.

The pirates are not some revolutionary militia of rugged heroes that fight for justice and equality for everyone. They are theives and cheapscates who would rather steal than have to pay for a product. The reason that this is so widely tolerated amoung the public is that the victim is some corporation to it's easier to dismiss their plight. Unlike some poor old lady geting her wallet stolen. But it's still the same thing. Theft is theft.

Actually, companies tend not to be democracies where the leader has to rationalize his goals to the voting population, because companies are designed more like hierarchical oligarchies in which the powerful tend to stay in power unless they displease a small echelon of decision-makers at the top. CEOs are not at the mercy of their employees or their investors--it is often a board of executives that holds sway over their fate. While the board of executives is usually very concerned with what investors want, investors don't run a company. Investors only have two choices: to invest money or not to invest money. The extent of their communication with the company generally does not extend beyond that, and while a company ideally wants to make money in order to attract investors, it is not as simple as "more profit equals more investors." Companies can make promises to their investors. They can lie to them. They can lead them on when they aren't really making profit, and investors will stay on anyway because the nature of the stock market is deeply rooted in the suspension of disbelief--since you're not trading based on current profits, you're basing your decisions on what the company will be instead of what it is.

So, yes, a publicly traded company can choose goals other than immediate profit if they can convince their investors it will result in a positive turnaround at some point in the future. And, yes, a CEO is indirectly at the mercy of the quantity of investment being made in the company he runs, but there is the very important middleman of the board of executives who can and will keep a CEO in power if they believe and their investors believe the CEO's actions will result in profit. In a stock market, money is only the language, not the currency. Confidence is the currency of the stock market.

Besides, game developers are rarely publicly traded and tend not to follow a corporate structure. For the most part, they're just people that want to make a living off of making games, because they're good at it and they enjoy it. They have just one investor--their publisher--and while that investor might very well have a corporate organization, there's not exactly a lot of fervent speculation as to where the company is headed. Leave that for the established industries where people think they have the patterns figured out. A young industry like the game industry, confronted with a problem like piracy, has loads of options for dealing with such a perceived problem because they are relatively in control of their own direction. The best result would be accepting the presence of piracy as an inevitability, and then finding out how to turn the disadvantage into an advantage.

Finally, I'm not quite sure if or how you garnered a characterization of pirates as a "revolutionary militia of rugged heroes that fight for justice and equality" out of my post, but know that as much as I might be in awe of pirates for their ability to circumvent all sorts of security measures, in the bigger picture they're really nothing more than a variable in an economic equation. So, no, they're not internet superheroes, but they are an inevitability.

 

[Razzle Bathbone]

(the standard pro-DRM party line)

We'll see how you feel the first time you're unable to run a piece of software you purchased legitimately.

Law-and-order types always buy that "only the guilty need to fear" bullshit, hook line and sinker. As if nobody in the entire course of human history has ever been accused of a crime they didn't commit.

Once again: companies that treat paying customers like criminals deserve to die an excruciating death by bankruptcy. If you give a damn about justice, don't give them one penny of your hard-earned cash.

(NOTE: I do not practise or condone piracy.)

 

[the_tramp]

Well why have they told us this? Just don't buy this new board, it won't work if we don't have it.

 

[UpInSmoke]

Sega thought that the GD-rom (or whatever their proprietary disc was called) would absolutely prevent all piracy on the Dreamcast.

I remember Windows Vista was also supposed to signal the end of all piracy.

People are always confident about their new security doodads until they actually get put to the test.

Nobody wants to address he real problem... the army of Soviet trained computer-children bred during the cold war to think and speak in binary. After the collapse of the USSR, their tracking program fell apart, and they spread all over Eastern Europe. They can hack anything with their thoughts, and we have no idea how many of them are left. You can only spot them when the red LED lights under their nipples start to glow during exposure to electrical current.

Stop the cyborgs, stop the piracy. duh.

 

[Andy Chalk]

I find it interesting that a natural response to rising game prices, especially considering the wide availability and ease of use of a relatively-risk free alternative, makes people into "scumbags" and "douchepits" who feel the need need to "rationalize their behavior." I might call a legitimate consumer "honest" in comparison to a pirate, but I would not degrade a pirate's behavior to such an insulting level for choosing free games over costly games; or even free games over no games, if the situation is such.

The fundamental flaw in your argument, of course, being that the games aren't free.

 

[Feragore]

As others have said, the chip will need to have a software component in the games that implement it and at that point it starts to remind me of Starforce, just now supposedly hack-proof.

Starforce too paints everyone under the same picture of a criminal and rewards legitimate buyers with copy-protection that eventually destroys your CD/DVD drive (especially bad if its a laptop drive as its not as simple as fitting a new one). The pirates work out how to remove it and all that happens is more people are turned to piracy.

This will merely provide massive restrictions on the target market to 'People who bought a new motherboard in the last month' but the similarities are there. All we need now is an Atari employee to post links to some torrent site to a game that chose not to use the chip-software and we have a perfect match*.

*Before I get flamed for this, there was a big news storm a few years back where a Starforce emplyee posted a torrent link to Galactic Civilizations 2 because it didn't use copy-protection.

 

[Incandescence]

I find it interesting that a natural response to rising game prices...

The fundamental flaw in your argument, of course, being that the games aren't free.

I admit to being a little confused over why this fact is a fundamental flaw in my point of view. I'd like to hear more.

 

[Dejawesp]

What the pirates do is both imoral and illegal. I dont see why we need to pull any punches when it comes to classifying them.

 

[Lt. Sera]

I'll stay away from the usual chitchat about piracy and simply say this: Even if it's possible for that particular chip to act as a DRM lock, it'll just get hacked and/or modded, like any other piece of DRM.

In the end, the only ones who are really affected by DRM are the people using their product legit. They are the ones who're getting limited/restricted use from their copies, not the pirates.

 

[Crusnik]

Well why have they told us this? Just don't buy this new board, it won't work if we don't have it.

That would be entrapment. It's the same reason you can ask anyone if they are a cop, and, by law, they are required to answer in the affirmative if they are.

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

Well why have they told us this? Just don't buy this new board, it won't work if we don't have it.

That would be entrapment. It's the same reason you can ask anyone if they are a cop, and, by law, they are required to answer in the affirmative if they are.

...Actually, that's an urban legend. See? [http://www.snopes.com/risque/hookers/cop.asp]

 

[Chaos Marine]

Every piece of hardware requires a driver to run it. Come on, man! Do you really think hackers aren't going to decode the damned driver and make their own versions?

 

[QuantumStorm]

Considering that the video game industry is the ONLY market that hasn't been affected by the economic slow down/recession of the United States I really don't think that video game piracy has much of an effect on it. Especially when the industry is racking in over 1.4 billion a year in profit.

 

[ASBands]

What the pirates do is both imoral and illegal. I dont see why we need to pull any punches when it comes to classifying them.

I absolutely disagree with you. I am a pirate. No, I don't download software illegally, but what I do is illegal. Why am I a pirate? Well, I have multiple reasons.

You see, I build and mod my own computers. And not in a small sense, I really like to make major changes to my box. You'd think it wouldn't be a big deal, but, for whatever reason, most games with copy protection do not work on my PC and I have yet to identify the root cause (granted, I don't really care to, as the problem is completely artificial).

I absolutely hate having to find CDs and put them in the drive. Thanks, but I have a PC, not a console and this is one of the reasons. Especially considering that there isn't actually any data loaded off the CD for gameplay aside from what is needed to check to make sure the CD is legitimate. If you need data, I'll save a disk image for you.

How can I solve these problems? I try to find the game availible on Steam. If the publisher is stupid and not publishing through Steam, I use Alcohol 120 to work around copy protection and save disk images to my hard drives where I can and no-CD cracks for everything else. Even though I bought the games legitimately, it is illegal and technically pirating for me to actually play the games.

So to me, what pirates do is not immoral, it allows me to actually play the games I legitimately purchased.

 

[fierydemise]

What I'm interested in is how they plan to use the TPM to encrypt games because theoretically private key encryption is uncrackable short of a quantum computer. My hunch is they would use the TPM to authenticate the game (since each TPM has a unique key built into it), the obvious problem is that it would effectively tie the game to a specific motherboard which would mean calling every game company who implements this after you change motherboards.

On the general issue of piracy the biggest issue isn't cost but convenience, certainly there are some people who will pirate something no matter what but for most if it is more convenient to buy the game then pirate it then people will buy it. I believe thats why Steam is doing so well, it provides a simple interface for searching for games, checking reviews, buying and almost immediately playing said game. This is where DRM becomes a problem, if it becomes more convenient to pirate the game because the DRM is particularly onerous (like this TPM based DRM likely will be) then more people will pirate he game.

 

[Andy Chalk]

I admit to being a little confused over why this fact is a fundamental flaw in my point of view. I'd like to hear more.

You suggest that developers aren't interested in game sales as a source of income, that demonstrably high rates of piracy would somehow be attractive to future investors, equate "stolen" with "free," and then seriously expect me to explain it to you?

Come on.