Apart from the fact that people would stop making games as they couldn't make money out of them, so yeah...dochmbi said:
Piracy Numbers
- Thread starter Shamus Young
- Start date
Good, then that's 49 people who have no right to be playing games, not playing games.zauxz said:
An iphone game has no reason whatsoever to be pirated other than to save money.
Where is the drm and install limit that you need to circumvent on an iphone game.
Its not only just an anektode, its a really bad one to begin with.
I wouldn´t have bothered to include that argument to prove your point.
It makes the article seem alot more like a guessing game than it actually is.
I would also have included some piracy numbers of regular games like mw2 etc, even though they have alot less extreme piracy numbers.
I agree with most of your arguments, but the empirical quality is even dodgier than necessary.
And I bet you have downloaded or burrowed and copied atleast one song in your life, you jerky pirated *g*
Another factor which would be hard to track: how many people hear about a game by word of mouth (and subsequently buy it) only because they know someone who pirated it? In other words, instead of "lost sales," should the video game industry look at piracy as free advertising? I can only speak anecdotally, but I know this has happened to me, and I doubt my experience is unique. Whether I see a game's advertising or not, I'm more likely to buy it if I know someone who has played it - and sometimes that person hasn't had a legal copy, but I decided to go get one.
Seems to work fine for League of Legends and Heroes of Newerth. It's just that Demigod sucked.Hopeless Bastard said:
Suggestion: make games actually worth playing online, and tie your account to a cd key. How many people pirate League of Legends? None. How many people pirate WoW? A very small amount. Stop cranking out single player games and wondering why they get pirated - not only is it super easy but the game doesn't offer enough to pay for it anyway.
Isn't that pretty much what DRM is designed for? I doubt that anyone with a sound mind would hope for these shemes to reduce piracy.Shamus Young said:
Lot's of publishers are trying to kill the used games market and DRM is like their William Wallace in this war...hopefully it'll find a gruesome death soon.
I still think the best was for a company to do anti piracy would be to flood the pirate sites with fake torrents for your product.
Okay Shamus, I have a question for you? What kind of logical fallacy it is when you take facts from one small segment of a population then it apply it to the remainder of the population? If you answered the distorted middle, you would be correct. Even though you used a few examples of it from real companies, you made sure that you say this applies to the rest of the gaming population. That is something that you have no reliable information to base it on, but you went ahead and did it anyway. You example of the I phone game is also misleading in parts. After you state it does not represent the industry as a whole, you also added, "Also Remember: None!" That means you still want to imply piracy on the whole industry even when you have no proof.
You are missing the point about piracy. Not all pirates are jerks. Sure most of them are jerks for not buying the game, movie, ip, or whatever, but what about the rest of them? I do not have numbers, but I guarantee that a sizeable minority only downloaded the game because it is illegal to do so and breaking the law is something young people do. I downloaded a ton of music from sites like Napster, Bearshare, and others when I was a teenager. I did it not because I was taking a principled stand against the tyrannical music industry like I wanted to delude myself back then, but because I thought it was kewl to do so.
You are missing the point about piracy. Not all pirates are jerks. Sure most of them are jerks for not buying the game, movie, ip, or whatever, but what about the rest of them? I do not have numbers, but I guarantee that a sizeable minority only downloaded the game because it is illegal to do so and breaking the law is something young people do. I downloaded a ton of music from sites like Napster, Bearshare, and others when I was a teenager. I did it not because I was taking a principled stand against the tyrannical music industry like I wanted to delude myself back then, but because I thought it was kewl to do so.
The do poison them , but since nobody would seed these poisoned torrents, or the comments would identify it then they dont get the popularity the "real" torrented file gets. The real torrent jumps to teh top of the list, new leeches join the larger torrent and the poisoned one gets lost to oblivion. The problem wih poisone dtorrents is you dont just have to trick one person, but a very large community. Even if you can sting 100 people, 100000 will continue on.coldshadow said:
Please don't say all of us Pirates are Jerks. Some of us only pirate because several gaming companies want to steal our money with shit merchandise. Besides,,, DRM causes a lot of trouble for those who try to make it back to buying the games... CC3 has very very bad loading-times without a no cd crack.
I am a pirate, I have been pirating since the Playstation days and before that I mostly rented games since my late super nintendo days (this also included my nintendo 64 days). I bought a Dreamcast second hand and all it's games second hand or pirated and although all my gamecube games are original, I bought them after the cube was dead, and as such, second hand market again. I'm a developers worst nightmare and the only thing that could make me even worse is if I cracked games myself.
Having left that clear. Piracy exists and it will continue to exist, so I'd recommend people to stop pretending like magically people will stop doing it, they are useless in this discussion. To put things bluntly, the industry has not learned yet that it is in the internet age, the same way most media hasn't got it either.
Today, the moment something hits the net, no matter how little you like it, it stops being yours. This isn't me exaggerating, this has been proved time and time again. This has also happened to films and music, and now comes the catch 22, films and music can live with it because a lot of their income from the cinemas and concerts. The losses generated by piracy are acceptable on those terms because their money comes from other sources. Videogames don't have this privilege, it's not like they put games half a year earlier in Arcades and they rock peoples worlds, they go directly to the platform outlet, be it PC, X-box or DS, all of them have been pirated and are pirated constantly.
Another sector that suffers a similar fate to videogames are television series, but some of them have understood that they are playing with new rules. South Park are my peak example here; I used to see their episodes in south park zone, but now that they host them in their own page, I go there to see them, my benefit being that I get to see them in better quality and with extras, their benefit, that they can show for real that people are watching.
The key for videogames is not to threat people like thieves, because thieves like me don't give a damn about their tricks. Last games I paid were MMOs and Team Fortress because I wanted good internet service, but what do you do with single player games, those that don't have any reason to force you into a server?
Here it all comes down to where I want to get to. The publishers should reward those that devotedly still support them, not make them feel like crooks. Screw the DRM, after the spore fiasco it became very clear that with just the minimum money wasted on it, you are golden. But here comes the thing, what benefit do you get, compared to me, who will probably just download it? This is where the incentives come, like for example, each game comes with a key that allows you to subscribe to the official support page of game X, there you can get content that only you can access, along with support, services and other stuff.
I know this idea is halfassed because I don't really know what stuff could be added or how it can be assure that only the paying costumer will benefit. I even have my doubts that the market would increase much thanks to something like this, I know I wouldn't have played most of the games I have if I had to pay for them, but at least you are making your player base feel appreciated, and that right there is a lot.
Having left that clear. Piracy exists and it will continue to exist, so I'd recommend people to stop pretending like magically people will stop doing it, they are useless in this discussion. To put things bluntly, the industry has not learned yet that it is in the internet age, the same way most media hasn't got it either.
Today, the moment something hits the net, no matter how little you like it, it stops being yours. This isn't me exaggerating, this has been proved time and time again. This has also happened to films and music, and now comes the catch 22, films and music can live with it because a lot of their income from the cinemas and concerts. The losses generated by piracy are acceptable on those terms because their money comes from other sources. Videogames don't have this privilege, it's not like they put games half a year earlier in Arcades and they rock peoples worlds, they go directly to the platform outlet, be it PC, X-box or DS, all of them have been pirated and are pirated constantly.
Another sector that suffers a similar fate to videogames are television series, but some of them have understood that they are playing with new rules. South Park are my peak example here; I used to see their episodes in south park zone, but now that they host them in their own page, I go there to see them, my benefit being that I get to see them in better quality and with extras, their benefit, that they can show for real that people are watching.
The key for videogames is not to threat people like thieves, because thieves like me don't give a damn about their tricks. Last games I paid were MMOs and Team Fortress because I wanted good internet service, but what do you do with single player games, those that don't have any reason to force you into a server?
Here it all comes down to where I want to get to. The publishers should reward those that devotedly still support them, not make them feel like crooks. Screw the DRM, after the spore fiasco it became very clear that with just the minimum money wasted on it, you are golden. But here comes the thing, what benefit do you get, compared to me, who will probably just download it? This is where the incentives come, like for example, each game comes with a key that allows you to subscribe to the official support page of game X, there you can get content that only you can access, along with support, services and other stuff.
I know this idea is halfassed because I don't really know what stuff could be added or how it can be assure that only the paying costumer will benefit. I even have my doubts that the market would increase much thanks to something like this, I know I wouldn't have played most of the games I have if I had to pay for them, but at least you are making your player base feel appreciated, and that right there is a lot.
"You"? I never said I was a pirate...?veloper said:
Although, I do support piracy. The only reason that I don't download things is because my Internet-connection is slow.
I also find it hilarious that it's ALWAYS the non-pirates who act like jerks, in discussions like these...
And this is the other part of the discussion that amuses me to no end, the angry guy that almost seems like he is more pissed because he isn't playing things for free than because I'm using without authorization the IP of a group of developers. It's like the whole Tiger Woods fiasco where the people seem more pissed that they can't be like Tiger than his actions being morally debatable.Cryo84R said:
I would like to pose a question to the pirates, is Assassins Creed 2 with its much hated online play idea available on pirating websites?
If so, it only goes to show just how futile it is to spend lots of money coming up with a variety of methods to stop people pirating stuff.
I mean, really the only way to actually stop pirating is to fight dirty, perhaps they should hire teams of hackers to dedicate their time to destroying pirating websites? Sure, its a job that'd never get finished, for every site destroyed another will just take its place, but wouldn't making piracy less convenient make piracy less prevalent?
If so, it only goes to show just how futile it is to spend lots of money coming up with a variety of methods to stop people pirating stuff.
I mean, really the only way to actually stop pirating is to fight dirty, perhaps they should hire teams of hackers to dedicate their time to destroying pirating websites? Sure, its a job that'd never get finished, for every site destroyed another will just take its place, but wouldn't making piracy less convenient make piracy less prevalent?
