*looks at topic title*Flac00 said:
/headdesk + facepalm x 10 000
OH LOOK. IT'S THAT THREAD AGAIN.
First off, Search bar. Use it. I don't care how suddenly peeved you are with the issue of piracy and how much you'd like to make your voice be heard, but the fact is that there isn't anything that hasn't been said about the matter already. Lemme bullet-point that out for ya:
- piracy is motivated by sales. Games are becoming ungodly expensive to make for AAA publishers, and they *have* to ensure that they get some returning revenues. DRM is to be included in the same box as Day One DLC or on-disc DLC. Your average AAA publisher will do everything in its power to ensure that sales are maintained and that the loss to pirates remains negligible. In order to *make* a sixty-million dollar megaproject requiring years of effort and a team numbering in the hundreds, money is required. Anything that hurts the cash flow becomes the project's death knell.
- piracy CANNOT be stopped, by any means whatsoever. What is made by human hands can always be unmade by human hands. No matter if Ubisoft takes to using always-on Internet DRM, there's always some genius who's going to figure out how to emulate the authentication server for Assassin's Creed II's PC version on Hamachi or Tunngle. Giving incentive to purchasers only goes so far, as the cherry on the sundae you're providing isn't part of the core experience. Some people just won't care about your preorder bonus weapon or map or whatever else!
If one leak is plugged, another one forms. You've probably noticed how even after Napster was taken down, the sharing of entire discographies didn't stop. I don't care if they use COICA or SOPA as a means to prevent access to these sites, the fact remains that these bills only apply within American jurisdiction. Being Canadian, it won't stop me from accessing Demonoid in any way whatsoever. Even if it *did*, all I have to do is memorize the blocked site's IP address and type it in manually. Voilà, problem solved.
- piracy has always existed. It's not out of control, it isn't rampant, and it isn't burning through EA, Ubisoft or any of the Hollywood studios' pockets, like they'd like us to believe. Before the Internet, people shared stuff on floppy discs. We heard the same tired discourse from the publishers and majors. "Don't copy that floppy!" they'd say, as though politely asking the pirates with the means to do so would work. Even with the inclusion of primitive DRM like code wheels, there was always a good Samaritan out there with a complete online, document-based grid translation of that wheel. You could even print out copies of the code wheel on cardboard if you needed to, and make yourself one!
- piracy WILL always exist. I don't care if I wake up one day to realize that the Internet has turned into some sort of virtual manifestation of Ingsoc; there will ALWAYS be Intranet servers, separate BBSes, IRC channels and a treasure trove's worth of developing technologies and counter-techs designed to facilitate the free and illegal distribution of data.
In short, nothing can be done. Nothing COULD possibly be done to stop piracy, since you'd have to perform some sort of pinpoint trepanation on the brains of every last one of us. You'd have to excise the very idea of thievery out of our minds, which is plainly impossible. At least, not without some crazy Sci-Fi tech and a complete disregard for laws that enforce and protect personal liberties. Thievery feeds on the cracks of the supply-and-demand system, which itself rests on the fact that developers might not always invest their millions into worthwhile projects.
- piracy is not the Devil. Let's be honest here, we've all cracked games once before. We've all been starved students scraping our money for textbooks and yet still hungrily eyeing the latest releases. I'm at a point in my life where I don't really need to worry about my day-to-day finances, but any sixty bucks I plop on a game has to be worth it. I've known Hungry Cow years where the only way I could conceivably get my fix was by turning to peer-to-peer sites. Did I indulge in that because I consciously knew I was hurting the developers? Of course not. I felt like an ass on most occasions for doing so.
You have to remember that gaming isn't solely a First World activity. Plenty of people play games in countries that have close to no access to the open market. Plenty of people pirate games because it's the only damn way they can play, after laying down several years' worth of their undervalued cash for a halfway-decent rig or a previous-generation system.
So please, do understand that you're not stating anything new. The PC platform isn't quite so dead yet and there's still plenty of people willing and able to pay for their entertainment with cold, hard cash. The only viable options the publishers have are to release content that's actually worth the damned sixty bucks, or pare down their price point to something more manageable, in the hopes that this will make the product more attractive and could produce more sales.
In short:
I, sir, may very well be in love. Might I have your spawn?The-Epicly-Named-Man said:
