My name is Wordsmith, and I pirate games.sleeperhit79 said:Of course no one will admit to ever pirating a game
Hexenwolf said:If they can find a way to make it difficult for pirates to pirate games without severely inconveniencing legitimate consumers, then I will support it.
That's just plain false.Zephirius said:My stance on copy protection is that it serves its purpose overall, which is delaying pirates from gaining access to a stable, working version for the first week or two of sales, or much longer in the case of less advertised games.
Yeah right, when was the last time a game wasn't cracked on or before release date?Zephirius said:My stance on copy protection is that it serves its purpose overall, which is delaying pirates from gaining access to a stable, working version for the first week or two of sales, or much longer in the case of less advertised games.
Må den mäktiga Mjölner mala dig till stoft!Simriel said:LIES!!!!!!!!!! As Thor, God of Thunder (seriously should I stop making these claims?)
Chinatown wars wasn't a piracy victim. Not sure about Demigod, but my guess would be that as they're not releasing it in Europe until the end of May, a load of European gamers downloaded it so they could actually play it online, instead of having to wait til everyone else had gotten bored & moved on to something elsesleeperhit79 said:I have thought about it and after hearing about demigod being pirated over 100,000 copies and chinatown wars not selling and the whole crysis thing not to mention all the psps being sold and no games being sold, it got me thinking maybe there does need to be copy protection in games."
Quality assurance. When a developer says something about a game and we know with confidence that what they've said is actually true. When we get screenshots that aren't treated. When we get system requirements that aren't made up. When trailers are about the same game they're selling us. When next-gen withers and dies. When we know what we're buying.Chipperz said:OK, let's turn this around. If DRM doesn't work to deter pirates, what WOULD? I'm actually very interested in what people think about this.
The idea for Steam is sound, however Valve implements it poorly.Chipperz said:OK, let's turn this around. If DRM doesn't work to deter pirates, what WOULD? I'm actually very interested in what people think about this.
I'm thinking Valve has got the right idea. Steam helps immensly with getting people cheap games quickly and easily, and it also means they can put a world-wide release into effect to placate places like Australia and Russia, who don't seem to get games until at least 12 months after their release date in the rest of the world for some reason. Discuss.
JediMB said:That's just plain false.
A lot of the time you'll read about fully cracked copies of DRM-protected games being torrented before the game is even in most stores.
The games of which you speak are the pretty big-name titles or those which use older versions of DRM. Try to find anything that hasn't had the shit advertised out of it, and you'd be lucky to find a well-working version that has more than 10 seeds (on or close to release day).DragunovHUN said:Yeah right, when was the last time a game wasn't cracked on or before release date?
Pay for your games, boneheads.In the wake of developer Iron Lore's closing, Michael Fitch, director of creative management at THQ, has strongly attacked PC piracy and hardware vendors which make developing for the platform "a freaking nightmare".
"It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games," Fitch wrote in a post on the Quarter To Three forums following the announcement that Iron Lore, developer of THQ-published PC RPG Titan Quest, was closing its doors. "Trying to make it on a PC product is even tougher, and here's why... Piracy.
"Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today.
"You can ***** all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact."
Fitch also noted that for games lacking a "Madden-sized advertising budget... word of mouth is your biggest hope". He said that Titan Quest's sales had been negatively impacted by a botched pirated copy of the game that was littered with bugs and prone to crashing.
"So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of shit on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy."
Fitch then criticized hardware vendors who make trying to develop PC games "a freaking nightmare... Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.
"Making PC products is not all fun and games", Fitch concluded. "It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy."
The Entertainment Software Association recently filed a "Special 301 Report" highlighting the ongoing battle against software piracy in a number of countries. It urged a number of nations where piracy is rife to clean up their act by bringing their copyright and enforcement regimes up to international standards and opening their markets to legitimate products as a matter of urgency, warning that countries that failed to combat piracy could be subject to "damaging trade sanctions".
Seriously, man? That's a pathetic argument. Your only "protection" is piracy? We all know adverts are meant to promote, so read reviews, look on forums, get user feedback before you buy. Hell, isn't that the entire point of half Escapist forums?Lord_Jaroh said:The only protection I have right now as a customer, is piracy, and try before you buy.