Piracy rarely affects the multiplayer usage of video games, meaning most people are pirating single player games, or at least the single player part of them. I can only believe that the people who pirate single player games only do so in order to play a single player experience. From here, we can conclude that people only pirate because they don't believe that the single player experience is worth 50-60 dollars. If Valve were to implement a rental system, either similar to gamefly or blockbuster 7$ for a week, I think a lot of piracy would be stopped. People don't ENJOY going through the hassle of pirating a game if they could buy it, but they don't want to pay 60$ for a 10 hour experience. I think that if steam could put time locks on the game (like they do there free weekends) a lot of the piracy issues would stop. Pirating a game isn't a fun thing for the consumer, but it's more fun than feeling like you wasted your money.
How Valve could stop pirating
- Thread starter ConfusedCrib
- Start date
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An interesting theory but there's a huge hole in it - you're attributing this to preferences instead of availability. Fact is that most cracked games simply will not work on official game servers (although there's an amusing little trick you can pull with GFWL titles but even then that's more a swap around of online access than a crack) because, without getting into technical details, it's easier to hide the fact you're running dodgy code when that code isn't interacting with several instances of the non-dodgy version.ConfusedCrib said:
With Valve titles, for example, it's far, far, far easier to crack a game in a way that tells it 'yes, Steam is running and yes, Steam says the game is authentic' than it is to crack a game and Steam together in a way that will fool all the server-side authentication tools.