piracy, does it have a good solution?

[Eternal_24]

If they didn't charge £40 for every single game maybe I'd buy them but I'm a student. I don't have a job. How am I supposed to pay for multiple games, each priced at £40? I can't afford it. I mean, one game on its own isn't too bad but when you've got 2 games that's £80, 3 games is £120, 4 games is £160 and 5 games is £200... It's ridiculous.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

It puts a company in their place. If they treat a customer like a robber, let them be robbed. It's what they deserve.

 

[lwm3398]

Well, we know not to go to EA for advice.

 

[hugah]

I'm a pirate, but its all mostly music rather than games. Most people are probably going to assume this is some kind of excuse, but the reason I pirate games is because all the company's want to do at the moment is just make money, in the old days of SNES with awesome games like Sonic and Mario platformers I probably wouldn't dream of ripping off nintendo or sega, but now with all there gimmics to just re-hash the games they've allready created. All these companies designing games that look amazing in screenshots but take a mere couple of hours to complete all deserve to get there terrible excuses for games to be ripped off.
That and theres so many middle men in music and game industry that they should get rid of that would reduce the cost to the consumer and then I might feel like BUYING their products again.

But maybe I'm just shooting myself in the foot, I'm studying animation to get myself INTO the games industry.

 

[veloper]

The only way to battle piracy is through social pressure.

Good developers *deserve* money for their games and with that money they can continue the good work.
That means gamers and talented developers are in the same boat. Pirates then are the common enemy.

Some developers already have community forums where everyone can see which of their games you bought and registered. People who pirate (or simply don't register) only receive scorn on such forums.

I'm thinking something along these lines, but on a greater scale somehow.

The challenge would be making this ring of communities with online services, that is attractive enough that most gamers would want to join.
To start with this would require some big publishers and many popular gaming sites to agree to form this network.

Talk about your experiences with a game that you haven't registered? Withering scorn as a result.
We also need more developers to get into contact with their fans. No faceless corporations. You don't steal from somebody you personally respect.
Only the most anti-social fcktards would be willing to become pariah in such a scenario.

This will probably never happen ofcourse. Just some idle thought.

 

[Tom Phoenix]

Recently I found out that starcraft 2 wont be having LAN battles anymore. Blizzard or some other guy said that they are doing this to stop piracy.

StarCraft II will have Internet-authenticated LAN (sort of like how Steam handles LAN play). However, pure offline LAN is unlikely to return due to services such as Haofang and Garena abusing it to provide their services, make profit and avoid legal action (since LAN is a legitimate part of the game, they are not considered to be doing anything wrong).