Constant net connection required to play Assassin's Creed 2 on PC.

...

...

This one's a little weird I'd love to be able to play with my savegame in any computer, but again, I don't have more than 1 computer that could run it. We should analyze what are the pros and cons more deeply.

IMHO, they're trying to kill PC gaming. Steam helped a lot keeping the PC as a good platform, but the latest DRM is absurd.

Just look at Bioshock 2's DRM:

Steam DRM + SecuROM install limits + Games for Windows LIVE. You are required to pass both Steam and SecuROM checks, and you need to log in to GFWL to be able to even save your game. You have the installation limit(I think it's about 15 or so), and it can be restored by contacting Microsoft servers.

Thanks god I didn't like Assassin's Creed 1 at all.

Yeah, the first Bioshock also had installation limits even in the Steam version, something very criticized at its time (in theory Steam allows you to install games wherever you want, but adding an installation limit breaks this feature). It was removed in a later patch IIRC.

It's a pity they include this kind of DRM. I was interested in Settlers VII since I'm a fan of the series, I guess I'll have to pass. It's even more pity that pirates will be able to play these games flawlessly while legal consumers will get booted out if their connection fails. So yeah it looks like they're trying to promote pirating

I don't know, I guess I could just buy the game and then get a crack to play without these problems, but I don't want to support this kind of DRM so I don't think I'll do it :/

It just seems that with so ridiculous DRM, they're actually promoting piracy.

More DRM -> Less sales, piracy is delayed some days. If companies have less sales, they'll stop releasing the games for PC.
Boycott because of DRM -> No sales, no more PC Gaming.

Pirates won't buy the game just because of waiting 3 or 4 more days til it gets working flawlessly. They wouldn't have bought it anyway since they didn't have the money probably.

I'd hate if gaming became console exclusive. Maybe OnLive will be the only way to keep it alive?

"Boycott because of DRM -> No sales, no more PC Gaming."

Well if the big companies don't want us to play on PC, I still think it's a good idea to boycott.

But don't just boycott their PC games. Boycott all their games. If you only buy their console games they're gonna think you don't want to play on PC. So you have to stop buying their games completely and tell them why.

These companies don't make such great games anyway. Some of my favourite games have been made by upstart companies from Eastern Europe. These big game companies might be on the way down, which just means there is now an oppurtunity for fresh blood to get some meat.

That makes a lot of sense.
In recent news, Calvin Klein has started a new advertising campaign with the slogan "You're ugly, we don't want you putting on our clothes."

Just when you think that Steam was over the line with the need of an internet connection when you legally buy Half-Life 2 to play the game, something even worse comes around. I understand what they're trying to do, but they're doing it wrong.

Personally I don't like this new paradigm - everything online, so that your computer serves just as a terminal (not this case, but anyway). The connection can drop. Some fool can cut the cable when repairing waterpipes. Hell my modem likes to disconnect at random times and you have to manually reset it, because you can't even connect to it remotely. And finally I own a laptop, I take it with me to the country. If there's nothing else to do in the evenings I play games. There's no connection out there...

Luckily for me Assasin's creed doesn't interest me at all and Settlers ended for me with second installment.

It's been suggested (with data to back it) that first day piracy is the worst and that measures taken to delay piracy even a couple of days increases sales. It all comes down to greedy people that would rather download off the Internet then spend their money, but can afford to spend their money and will if they have to instead of waiting a couple of days.

Game developers do anything they can to prevent first day piracy. Some ways work and some ways don't. You can't fault them for trying. You can only fault the pirates for making it justified. Come up with a pirate proof mechanism that doesn't interfere with legitimate users and these problems will go away. Unfortunately, you can't (except for locked down platforms, like gaming consoles).

Pirates are killing PC gaming. They're the ones you have to blame. You could always start spreading fake cracks of games that are indistinguishable until they're actually running. Bonus points if they're actually serious viruses that cripple machines or burn out hardware. Flood the ecosystem with enough of these and piracy will suffer a great blow. Maybe this will be enough for game developers to relax.

Albeit, Steam is the saving grace, so I don't see why companies still insist on adding extra DRM on top of Steam'd games. Those companies can go to Hell.

This is a different problem with different interests. The PC is a platform that requires far more testing and quality assurance than a console. Just look at some of the folders in recent games, and you'll see tons of different shader files, for different hardware and configurations. Are the costs worth the PC sales?

More annoying DRM for the PC, and it makes you wonder if it'd be better to just play it on a console.

I wouldn't like to turn this thread into a Pirate Vs legit war(but that's expected from a DRM thread). Some people are greedy, some people can't afford them, and others grew up with it(what happened to me, since here in Argentina piracy is just common practice.). The problem with pirating is that most of the time you'd have problems like faulty cracks, fake cracks(virus) and who knows what else. With the newest DRM, the situation is reversing, giving pirates more pros vs the legits.

That isn't the problem. It's the publishers that force them to use this DRM, it has little to do with the quality of the game.

Allegro 6: Now with Steam DRM + SecuROM... play your games OUR way.

Yes, lots of people do it because they "don't know any better". So what do you expect game developers to do about it? Pirates defend their practices so the developers are doing what they can to make their business sustainable. Like I said, the pirates are to blame. Most pirates deny that they're doing any harm. They defend that their affect on the industry is negligible or that the industry is so rich that it does no harm, but you have to wonder why they go to the trouble of inconveniencing legitimate users so much if pirates weren't hurting them in the first place...

Not being able to afford something isn't an excuse to attain it without paying. Certainly not for luxury items like video games. Sure, they might not be able to buy it regardless, but why should they get it for free while I have to pay? At the same time, why save up to buy something when I can spend all of my money on other things and then use the "I can't afford it" excuse too?

Which is why I said the piracy channels should be flooded with too much malware to sift through. If it takes you 1000 downloads (and 20 reinstallations of Windows) before you find a legitimate copy most people are going to give up and just buy the game (or go without). When the pirates come up with a strategy to say "I have a legit copy over here", mimic their behavior with another 20 illegitimate copies. Fight fire with fire. It sucks for the pirates, but it's good for the legitimate consumers, which is what DRM is intended to actually achieve.

Of course, I never defended their excuses.

What I fear is that companies excuse themselves that the piracy is so strong, and use DRM to clear the last remaining of the legitimate PC users. Bye bye PC gaming, welcome next-gen exclusive console titles. And yes, I'm a conspiracy nut sometimes.

Still, I keep my hopes up PC gaming can't be killed, because companies like these will just go and make their games for consoles, and not annoy PC users with their faulty protections. Companies like Blizzard'll surely keep the PC as a good platform, because that's their audience, and they don't even need to make excessive protection to have good sales. WoW is a great example of this. Release the product freely, and offer good paid servers. Pirates have their own servers set up, but they get horrible speeds and bots. They get what they deserve.

I can't imagine how would you do this for something like a single-player game, but there's surely a good way around.

And speeding tickets should involve cutting of your finger. After 20 finger amputations, surely most people are going to give up speeding. Sucks for the speeders, but it's good for motorists that follow the law.

You really should stop making the same old argument, you hypocrite. Until you stop speeding, your arguments against the far far far more negligible crime of software piracy ring rather hollow.

Also...

Because they are idiots and want to turn legitimate users into pirates. Or... maybe by increasing piracy, they are hoping to reduce the effects of global warming... which would make them not so foolish after all

That's why they kept the LAN option in StarCraft II... oh wait...

Oh shit, forgot about that. I should keep up with the news more often. Then I have no good company to hope for

We've been over this. I don't bitch about cops pulling me over, least of all for speeding. I pay my fine.

I don't pirate games anymore because I think it's unethical. But I also don't do much PC gaming anymore, as I find the hardware cost prohibitive. DRM is a bummer, too, but not the biggest problem for me.

That's a pretty silly argument. "You do something wrong, therefore holding a belief that anything is wrong... is wrong!"

^ This. Thank you, Mokkan, for finding the words that I could not.

I don't think Assassins Creed for PC sold very well, so if I had to guess it looks like they are experimenting with new DRM to see how well it does to decide what gives better/worse sales. The push for future titles is going to be even more reliant on online stuff, so be prepared to see this more and more.

Assassins Creed is largely a console game, so it's not like it's a huge deal if you don't want to play the PC version. PC gamers will always have their own PC games that are better played on PCs. This isn't such a game, so what's the big deal? If it was a true PC game, I just wouldn't play it. It's not like there's a shortage of quality games or anything.

In any case it's not like all PC games are completely going to the extreme with anti piracy, Dragon Age and Mass Effect 2 are just a simple CD check for the most part. Broken Sword 4 when I picked it up didn't even have a CD check (pleasant surprise, after Broken Sword 3) and lots of new games don't either. Support those games if you feel so strongly about it.

So... paying a fine makes it okay? A fine is not a fee for a "license to speed". You are applying your logic inconsistently to the two crimes, making you a hypocrite. Both crimes are next to negligible, and both involve "something for nothing", time saved in case of speeding, that you can spend on other activities. What about people who don't speed, and therefore don't have that luxury of extra time? This is exactly like your money argument. You shouldn't get that extra time because you are breaking the law.

I wouldn't say that his argument is wrong because of that (although, his being inconsistent can be grounds for it). He's a hypocrite because of those things. I don't really care for the argument itself... it is of course no question that software piracy is illegal... but is software piracy morally "wrong"? You can't categorically say that without choosing a common moral foundation. I (and others, perhaps) refuse to take bammcaig's moral foundation, therefore preventing us from ever agreeing by definition. That said, inconsistently applied moral foundation is no foundation at all.

Is theft morally wrong? Because that's what software piracy is, when you boil it down.

I suppose she's paying her fine

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It's OK already if you do it safely and remain in control of your vehicle. As myself and others have told you in the past, speed limits are not some physical limitation of the vehicles or humans. It's an average to account for a certain amount of incompetence in some most operators. Those that are actually adept at driving and care about it can drive much faster completely safely. They're not allowed to because it's infeasible to enforce who is and isn't competent, but that doesn't make it wrong to do it. It just means the law can't account for it and needs to treat the competent like all others.

I'm not against piracy because it's illegal. I'm against it because I know that it is immoral. And I didn't even need anyone's God to tell me.

Company A pays Company B to do work with the intent to license the finished work to consumers who wish to use the work. This licensing is a way for Company A to first make the invested money back and then for both Company A and Company B to hopefully make a profit on top (the time, effort, and risk isn't worth making if there's no net gain in the end).

Obviously, the fewer people that license the work, the less successful the project will be. If too few people license the work then it will result in Company A losing money (and reduce Company A's incentive to invest in Company B in the future). Some projects are guaranteed to fail due to taking risks (you all insist that developers should take risks instead of making the same old games, but even the same old games are risk enough, let alone something completely new and different) that don't work out for whatever various reasons (pirates aside). Successful projects need to not only make up for their own expenses and risks, but also account for the losses incurred from failed projects in order for Company A to stay afloat (and since Company A funds most Company Bs, the Company Bs' futures also rely on the overwhelming success of some of their collective projects). In order to legally use the work, you are therefore required to license it at a price projected to maximize return.

Those that don't license it are not contributing to the industry that produced it, which is both unfair to the developers and publishers, but also to the paying customers that do license it. Essentially, if people don't license the work, there's no incentive for Company A nor Company B to produce it. The industry dies. This is how useless industries that nobody cares about go away. The gaming industry is no such industry. If you're pirating the work then you clearly do care about it. You're just not contributing your share to the production of the work. You are a mooch off of the publishers and consumers that do pay for the production. Are you saying that's right/moral?

I always find it humorous frightening how religious people have trouble distinguishing right from wrong. They basically need "God" to tell them... I've had sweet innocent young women tell me that if there was "hypothetically" no God then they might as well just steal and murder. To them, right and wrong are God-made. Without a God, they wouldn't believe in right and wrong.

I don't care much about AC too either. The problem is that Ubisoft is using this ugly DRM for Settlers VII too, which some of you might've been expecting or not. Also, I understand if this kind of DRM is on a Digital download release, but the boxed version has it too

That's something nice. And I support that you don't need such faulty DRM to stop piracy in the first place. Give privileges to the users that buy the game, don't hinder the process of installing an running it. It's rare that pirates get access to DLC services with a fake CD-Key. If DLCs were better, and actually free, you could keep your legit clients interested, and actually avoid the trade-in of games that some shops allow.

DLC as ridiculous of what I heard in Dragon Age: Origins is more insulting than useful

Not this discussion again please. It's hard to compare piracy against theft. Not every pirated download is a lost sale. If you're talking about copyright, I wouldn't compare it to theft.

Bull@shit, that's just propaganda IMO. There are cases of software pirates being caught, but they're free in a short time.

Freelance hackers are always smarter than employed engineers. Odd, but typically true. People and companies have tried what you propose ... it did not turn out too well. Why, precisely? Well, for one, most people just sort by most seeds on torrents. Fake torrents have few to no seeders. The people who download the fake torrents find out and don't seed. The good torrents get seeded.

True, Batman Arkham Asylum had a bugged leaked release. What irritated me about it though that every blog or magazine went praising "Ooooh, that's smart!!!". I think it's already been done before in other games, but I can't come up with a good example.

You're stealing work instead of material. What's the difference? It's equivalent to hiring somebody to do a service (i.e., wash your car) and then not paying them. You haven't physically stolen anything from them, but you have effectively "stolen" their time and effort. Regardless of terminology, you've cheated them out of money.

You don't think it would be worthwhile to set up spoof networks with dynamic IPs to actually seed the downloads? It's certainly possible to mimic the "wild" in every way possible. The actual hackers might be able to figure out the difference, but the average pirate wouldn't. This could even be a third party service somebody could provide. Both produce the very real looking (yet very destructive) fakes and also seed them in a realistic way.

You are acquiring a product (in this case software) without paying the provider of that product, and without the permission of the provider of that product. How is that anything but theft?

Yes, those companies exist already. Yes, they do fail. Horribly.

No, I honestly don't think that will work. Everything you've thought of has been tried by the anti-torrent companies already. Everything that's legal, of course.

I meant it's hard to compare morally.

I don't mean to put piracy in the same example of the washed car. But if the person that washed your car did a bad job and just made the car's windows look worse with dirt? You agreed to pay him before a sum of money, and he washed your car. You just won't notice the bad job after some hours. Is it morally correct to hand over your money to someone when he did a bad job and just screwed you over?

Again, please don't put piracy in the same example, it can't be boiled down to a simple example.

EDIT: Wow, I'm slow for replying

EDIT2: That said, I'm not going to push this discussion any further. Put piracy in two situations. It's wrong legally. Whether it's wrong morally or not is too complex to simplify it comparing it to theft or such activities. Morality is really different from one person to another, and you just can't force someone to see the situation the same like you. I used to pirate games when I was younger. Mainly because it was and still is so radicated here that some people might even think it's legit. I'm not interested too much anymore in the 'new' generation of games, since they all tend to be recreations of classics because it seems they can't come up with new ideas, and hardly buy any games now. All I'm glad for is that the games I got legit, are great and were worth my time. Not the propaganda that is being sold these days.

Oh, and bamccaig, please put EDIT or something when you edit your posts. You tend to edit some your older posts, and then I get lost as hell of what did you say.

EDIT3: Shit, I'm really slow, I won't put another reply for the matter

Are you saying that it is ok to pirate games, so long as they're bad games?

I think he means the DRM is irritating, even if it doesn't trash your computer or brick your DVD recorder.

Slightly related:

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As you hinted to earlier, there are a lot of incompetent people in the world, many of them in software. That doesn't mean it isn't possible. It just means you need knowledgeable people to do their homework and get it right. People that have the technical knowledge and experience and bother to actually analyze what things make people prefer one download to another as well as what a sufficient approach will require hardware-wise.

If you simply agreed to pay them to wash your car without defining the quality you expect then you would be expected to pay them. Obviously, if they didn't even attempt to wash the car then it wouldn't be fair and that would be a moral judgment of your own (or tort court, if it came to that), but ultimately if you want to be sure you don't get screwed over then you need to be specific.

When it comes to games, there is no guarantee of quality from the game developer. In fact, almost all software explicitly states this in their license agreement. They've met this argument before. They don't guarantee that you'll enjoy the game or be satisfied with it. It is essentially a risk that you have to take (albeit, there is often enough of a taste to get an idea and the cost is pretty negligible^[1]). Almost every purchase is a risk, material or intellectual. So don't take the risk if you don't want to. That doesn't entitle you to pirate the software (as it doesn't entitle you to steal a car). It entitles you to go without.

I replied above. I won't write again since I ain't that used to writing in english and a copy+paste would look horrible.

@Arthur: Yep, that's what I meant. Even when renting movies it's really annoying, you've got to wait all those "You are a mean pirate if you do this" ads and then the hyped trailers. And those fading menus are surely annoying.

EDIT: Also, you could compare it with the dirt example. It won't break your car(unless he really does a bad job), but you've got to lose time fixing the problem(and fixing could be waiting for or fast forwarding those ads, or in the case of games, crappy DRM like Ubisoft is releasing).

I'm not comparing software piracy to theft. I'm saying it is theft. If you think it isn't theft then justify that stance (which you haven't done yet). Don't just tell me that it isn't theft, tell me why it isn't theft.

I tend to only mark edits that significantly alter what I was saying or when someone has already replied to it in a way that my edit conflicts with. It's not intended to be malicious or devious. It's merely an attempt to clarify without wasting another 5 posts. And "Edit-ladders" tend to be messy and harder to follow. I'm also a self-diagnosed obsessive-compulsive (actually, OCPD sounds like it fits better than OCD) and sometimes I find edit-disclaimers "imperfect".

EVERY movie does this. And the production company has every right do to it with their own intellectual property and DVDs. If you don't like it, stop watching movies. Most people are willing to put up with it and it probably does benefit the production companies' businesses. Unfortunately, they aren't our slaves whose lives revolve around our happiness. I agree it's annoying and sometimes it can be damn offputting, but there's ultimately nothing you can do about it aside from show them in business terms why producing more user-friendly discs would be better for their bottom-line. If you can't then you've got nothing worth saying to them. Blame the sheep that do more business because of it. Some people never willing watch previews, but will if you force them. I personally like to watch all of the previews from start to finish (I'll even restart DVDs that don't let me rewind previews that I've missed seconds of^[1]). That said, after I've seen them I don't care to see them again, so it can be frustrating when you're watching a DVD again. I'm specifying DVD only because I haven't seen enough BDs to say for certain that they are all the same, though I don't expect anything different.

Titan Quest? http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/03/thq-blames-pira/
<edit>
I know there are a lot more, this one is just interesting, because of what they have to say about piracy and the effect the drm had.

I have. Last time I was in a theater in 1991 was only because the very few cars outside hinted that it would be possible to actually hear the movie instead of a bunch of wise guys. The last DVD I bought wouldn't play with the DVD burner I had in my computer at the time, a new DVD player would play it, but how long will that last?

I never said it isn't theft. If you think it's theft morally, consider it like that. Look down on other people that don't have the same morality. After all, we're humans, we tend to think less of other people. I don't like such Black and White morality sometimes, so I tend to pick a neutral position sometimes.

What's my stance about piracy? It has changed over the years. At first, I bought only legitimate games, since I loved the feel of those big boxes, with manuals full of explanations of the game's content. Some years ago I bought some games legit that had outrageous prices(mainly because of the difference in the currency with the economic instability in my country). I was terribly disappointed with them(crappy plastic uninspired boxes, bad game content), and decided to try future games online. I wanted to act like "Try before buy", but I couldn't resist at that sensation of greediness and delight of not buying it. Again I got disappointed with these games after a while, and erased them.

Now I'm trying to correct myself and don't buy any games at all mainly because I've already been disappointed too much with the actual games industry. Of course, there've been exceptions for some good titles. And I'm actually looking forward to buying Fallout: New Vegas as soon as it's released, mainly because it's being developed by part of the original team of the series, and not those Bethestards.

It even disappoints me more that what I now think it's correct(buying legit), is being hindered with faulty DRM. So yeah, my morality has turned into a mess lately.

So, it might be theft legally. I can't say it isn't theft morally, because I'm the one who feels that's been robbed with their faulty products these years, but that's just my opinion.

You said several times that it is difficult to compare piracy to theft. I got the impression that you were saying it isn't theft.

I never said that piracy is theft morally. I said that it is theft. Morally, legally, whatever words you want to append are unimportant. Piracy is taking property from another person without that person's permission. I don't see how you can see it as anything else.

What? The law is the law, it must be obeyed no matter how much you think it does not apply to you. And you completely ignored my point about it being unfair to other (even competent) drivers who follow the law and suffer for it. It's never OK to break the law from a legal standpoint! Breaking laws is illegal. Moreover, breaking laws almost by definition treats all other people unfairly who are following the laws, no matter what the law.

And if any law covered some physical limitation of humans and vehicles, it wouldn't be a law in the first place because it would be unnecessary. It's like disallowing moving faster than the speed of light!

You are using some weird explanation to excuse your breaking the speed laws, and forbidding others for making a no less weird excuse for copyright infringement. That's hypocritical.

Who said anything about God?

I thought you didn't care about legality. Be consistent!

Oh, but now unfairness is an okay reason to criticize pirates? Why isn't it the same the case for the speeding drivers? Be consistent!

Who said anything about God?

You do not steal time when you pirate. If you disagree, tell me how much "time" I steal when I pirate a copy of a game. Time it has taken to develop? The only one piracy event per game would be possible, as all other subsequent piracies would go into the negatives. Some smaller number? How small? How much money do you steal? The price of the game? What if I pirated a game 1000 times that costs $20 per unit but cost $10000 to develop? Are the developers $10000 in the red?

When you do a service your time is spent, you cannot use that time again and again to rake in profit. When you make a game, you can use that time again and again to rake in profit, because the first is stealing and the second is copyright infringement.

Firstly, because the LAW says so. Those are two different crimes. But also, see the above paragraph and a whole slew of helpful images courtesy of Google.
http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&source=hp&q=piracy+is+not+theft

Insurance companies often pressure DOT to reduce speed limits "to increase safety". The real reason often is that ridiculously low speed limits cause people to ignore them and drive at a reasonable speed, which earns them tickets, which increases their car insurance premiums by hundreds of dollars a year each.

So... break the law to screw the system? Hey, that's what I do by pirating!

You seem to think laws are always paragons of justice and virtue. They're bought and sold like any other commodity. An honest congresscritter is one that stays bought. And laws were made for men, not the other way around.

I know right? That's why I pirate!

And?

^This

I don't say that piracy is theft because some faceless lawmaker tells me so. Even if the law did say piracy is theft, that wouldn't be enough to convince me it is true. I say that piracy is theft because it fits the definition of theft: taking a person's property without that person's permission.

There's more ways to look at the issue than in terms of morality. Logically, for example. Software companies aren't going to write software if nobody is going to buy it (or "buy licenses to use it" or whatever terminology you prefer). Many software companies write software I enjoy using, and I want them to continue writing software for me to enjoy. Therefore, it makes sense to support them monetarily.

OK, buy the game, set the shrink wrapped POS on the shelf, pirate something that works (you DID pay for it after all) and play it. No problem.

How is it making a copy of someone's property without permission the same as taking that person's property without permission? What definition of 'take' are you using?

Do you obtain possession, power or control over the original intellectual property when you make a copy of it? The last time I checked, the games were still sold even when pirated, the owners retained the original possession, power and control.

Why? The laws are made by congresscritters! Be consistent!

EDIT:

Precisely! I pirate games to drive those companies out of existence, by not supporting them monetarily.

I don't have to agree with the laws of a nation. I have to abide by them or else face the consequences. If I'm OK with paying fines when I get caught then so be it. Similarly, if pirates are OK with paying fines when they get caught, then go for it. Except they aren't. They whine and bitch about the law when they are caught, as if they think they can break the law and not get punished for it. It's one thing to dispute a law (there are channels to go through for that), but it's another to blatantly break them expecting to be above them.

There is a point for both man and machine where they can no longer reliably function. This point is different for each man and each machine. Under certain conditions, a car cannot be controlled by a human. Under certain conditions, a human cannot control a car. Both can be pushed beyond those points, however. I think the law is there, at least in part, to deter this from happening. Many people are unaware of their own limitations (let alone the limitations of their cars) and push past unless boundaries are set to guide them. At the same time, others are aware of the limitations involved and safely walk the line.

God goes along with the discussion of morals and ethics and right and wrong. Also, IIRC, you are a religious man, so it was somewhat of a cheap shot. I've in the past found it amusing how religious friends don't seem to have a moral compass. Their ideals for right and wrong were told to them. When it comes to thinking for themselves, they're lost or blatantly immoral. IMO, of course.

I think that's bad too. When you pirate a game and proceed talking about it with friends and on forums etc.. you're promoting that game and make more people buy it.

So if you really want to drive a company out of existence you shouldn't use their products in any way, shape or form. You need to completely deny that they exist at all.

I'm not Weak Atheism ftw.

Unless I'm helping them pirate it.

EDIT: Likely misinterpreted.

Theft:

As was said, but I believe not as clear, piracy does not deprive the Intellectual Property holders of their Intellectual Property, which is the only thing at stake here.

If you go into a store, grab a game off the shelf, and leave the store without paying, you've stolen material goods; "personal goods or property of another."

If you download a game off the internet, you've copied a game which is protected by copyrights and IP laws.

So, unless you want to rewrite the English language, please stop saying piracy is theft. It isn't. Use a different word, maybe, like piracy.

While this does not hold true for all countries, in the United States of America we are all above the law, including immigrants (illegal or otherwise)! Why?

Abraham Lincoln

Every man, woman, and child in this nation has the right to challenge our laws in a courtroom, all the way to the Supreme Court.

Obviously that doesn't mean you should go around breaking laws because you think you're better than them. I am just saying that it is dangerous to assume laws control people, and that you cannot disobey them without punishment. If a law is truly unjust, it is the American duty to challenge it.

Digital plagiarism?

Havent we been through this like 9000 times? We are not going to reach a consensus.

I'm glad that the law doesn't determine your morality. I would be kind of disappointed if that constant anti-piracy propaganda got in you.

We have. But what else could you expect from a DRM thread? I hoped someone wouldn't appear saying "Blame pirates!", but rather think of what could be more useful as a DRM. Look at the ridiculous example I posted about Assassin's Creed and Settlers. Wouldn't it be better to at least "pause" the game rather than making you lose your progress to the last checkpoint? It shouldn't save the game, I agree, because that would be cheesing(and the engine probably can't manage to save in another place than a checkpoint), but something better would be to at least pause the game.

My fear is that they aren't morons who don't understand how to deal with piracy. I fear that what they're really trying to do is excuse behind piracy, and stop making ports for PC games.

Why would I buy an XBox 360 if most of their games can be ported to the PC? Because they might stop porting them arguing that the sales are so low(and they forced them to be low with their crappy protections), and make them consoles exclusive.

There's one game I was hoping for the last year, Brutal Legend, mainly because it was produced and designed by Tim Schaffer. Sadly, it didn't get a PC port. The reasons behind this are strange and obscure(and none of Tim's responses convinced me), since the PC community is the one who loved his games in the first place.

I bought a product. I expect the product to work, not to make me look for a cheap imitation.

Ummm, SiegeLord, what's your position with piracy? I don't see how would you help decrease their sales by pirating(unless you seeded torrents, or uploaded them yourself ) by downloading games. You play the games and you want the companies that made them disappear? Why, you were disappointed with their products, or it's some sort of punishment?

And the idea of reselling (like a book) bites the dust. Sony wants each secondhand buyer of the game to cough up an extra $20. What would people do if Ford did this to used car buyers? What would Congress do?

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/37605/Now-Sony-joins-pre-owned-offensive

[EDIT]

This is rather like Obama

<paraphrase>
"I'm sure the American people are 100% behind me that we need to waste billions of dollars against stuff that probably won't happen anyway"
</paraphrase>

[EDIT2]
And Valve wants to root your computer to "prevent cheating" (Well, that's probably true enough now)

http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gaming/steamed-valve-software-battles-videogame-cheaters

[EDIT3]
And an hour and a half ago I was adding to this when the ISP shut off the internet. I thought it was because in spite of hearing the words "5GB cap" when getting installed, but the main web site now says minimum cap is 100GB per month, I indulged in a half-hour of YouTube a couple hours earlier. But it turns out that the monthly payment had gotten lost in the shuffle during the Presidents Day holiday Now I'm too pissed off to remember what I was gonna write here.

[EDIT4]
AND NOW THE DAMNED POWER WENT OUT FOR SEVERAL SECONDS! (furtively looking out the window for black vans)

Thank goodness you weren't playing Assassin's Creed 2!

I'm curious why game development companies would be motivated to work exclusively on console games. I think a lot of people argue that it is easier, due to the stable platform. My counter-argument would be that it is just as difficult, because you can't design for only one console. Well, you can (and they do), but for the largest share of gamers you need a multi-platform release. I would imagine developing a game for both the PS3 and XBox 360, let alone the Wii (having a different controller), is just as complex if not more so than developing for the PC. Honestly, I'd prefer to develop PC only!

The only other reason I can think of, is that they believe the consoles have more protection against pirates. For single-player games, this isn't true at all. In fact, it's easier to pirate console games. Since the developers depend on the console's protection, the games themselves have no DRM. Once you've broken the console, the gates of freedom blow open and pirating is as simple as download->burn. Multiplayer is a bit more difficult, although the hackers are making it easier and easier to stealth 360 games (not sure about other consoles). Nevertheless, at least it's possible to play pirated console games online. It's impossible to do that with most PC games.

Well of course I don't think that... no sane person thinks that piracy is decreasing sales . They however think that, so I pirate ironically, or perhaps to spite them. Sure you might say, "They don't care about you spiting them, they don't know who you are"... well, that's my entire point.

I don't even play new games... heh.

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I wondered why they had a scarecrow, until it dawned on me that it's supposed to be a straw man instead.

I know next to nothing about DRM, I know especially little about what good DRM would be like. That's why I didn't say anything. It just bothers me when people try to justify immorality.

I vote with my wallet. That said, I'm voting quite frequently these days.

DRM is for suckers.

Speaking of DRM, Silent Hunter 5 will be released as well with online only playing. So what happens to UBIsoft? such as the company going broke and not having servers in the future? Will it mean this game will no longer play?
I can't imagine this game being playable 20 years from now even though the graphics look good enough even 100 years from now (judging by how companies in the computer industry go broke and don't support any game after wards, no profit) . Not that games will not be that much better; but still, its like chess with better graphics and people play that game a 1000 years later.
Heres a screen shot:

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I have a suggestion for all you who want to get rid of DRM.

Start buying games that don't use DRM, without caring about whether you'll actually play it. Just buy them because they don't have DRM.

I think that's the ultimate way to show the game industry what you want. Actually sacrificing your personal economy on crap products to get the point through their thick greedy heads.

What are you, women?! If you want to tell them you think DRM is bullshit then TELL THEM. Your bullshit games accomplish nothing. Honestly, sales need to improve for DRM to go away. That's fact. Keep pirating and say goodbye to PC gaming. That's just inevitable.

Actually, they need to realize that the only people are the alienating with intrusive DRMs are the customers. The pirates don't have to deal with them. That's fact. Or rather, my opinion. Just as that was your opinion (and not a fact).

Its a bit late, but here it goes.

At least pirating doesn't threaten anyones lives. You cant say the same about speeding now can you? What is more immoral?

Exactly. That's why I skipped over last two pages. Especially through those lengthy^[1] posts.

One more thing. If there's a speed limit set by the law, then you are obliged to obey it. If you do speed and are prepared to pay your fine, then it's good. Otherwise you'd be an asshole if you'd bitch about paying it. But still that doesn't removes the "douchebag stick" of your forehead.

As far as piracy goes, you are using somebody elses' work without giving him credit for it. If that's morally right for you, then fine. But just don't walk around and say you have right to do it, because you don't or any other bullshit like that making a world better place crap or anything like that. Be fair and admit that you're doing it, because you can.

On the other hand we can all agree, that apart from badly crafted cracks causing bugs, the pirates have somewhat better gaming expirience than legit players facing all kinds of DRM's and other means of protection. I don't say it's bad to use it. I just say that this kind of DRM is a step in the wrong way. So if you really want to make world a better place, then just don't play the game.

I wonder how difficult it could be to crack that system and also whether it would suffice to just remove the check calls from the code or whether it would be necessary to sniff the outgoing and incoming packets, write an emulator based on that and redirect the games phone home feature to connect to that.

Disclaimer: I'm not encouraging anyone to crack that system or to pirate that game. Just thinking about the technical side of this, because it hasn't been brought up yet.

More thoughts: If I were to develop a "constant connection needed" system like that I'd probably somehow personalize and encrypt the information that would get sent to my DRM servers, so that if anyone would get the silly idea of doing what I suggested above(packet emulator) I could at least tell by the data in the cracked copy with the emulator that is sure to surface on the web sooner or later, who I'd have to contact for legal countermeasures.

Hm, something like this is probably just going to be the next step: Personalized DRM, requirement to register with ID card, home address, fingerprint, DNA sample and you have to agree to have a webcam installed behind your back, which is on 24/7 and it will monitor everything you do on your computer just to make sure you're not doing anything silly with the game.

Why no, I'm not paranoid at all.

P.S.: Not going to buy that or any other game with that kind of intrusive copy protection.

Depends on how they go about it it. Removing the check might be a little more work then just that, becuase it sounds like they don't even support saving locally at all, and you'll need a way to browse local saves.

Now if they decided to go even further and embed some logic online, then yeah you're going to want to write a local server to emulate Ubisoft's, and redirect connections to you're local server (this might even be easier). Either way would work, and they are certainly doable.

There have been two addendums to the original article in the OP, one which says that games are saved locally and uploading them is optional, the other links to an interview with Ubi, which says they have a way to patch the DRM out of the games in case of emergency (servers taken down forever, company failure, etc.).

If they had some of the games logic online, there couldn't be a single patch programme to patch all of the games (and all future games to use the DRM system), unless there was a copy of the logic already included in the offline files. If there is some of the game logic online and a copy of that logic exists in the offline files though, it would be easy for an experienced cracker to find those bits and pieces and patch the system out of the games himself.

So I don't think there is currently any logic needed for the game, which is running only on their servers and it doesn't seem be an option (unless their patch programme needs additional files for each game).

However, the fact they say there is a patch means it has already been "cracked". Heh. It's just that it's theirs and pirates will either have to write their own or wait until it leaks.

Of course there could. The missing logic could be in the patch itself. Although I doubt they have any logic on the servers. It would limit the game experience even more than just checking if a connection is active, and it would put undue strain on Ubisoft's servers.

(Guess work): The game is packed; compressed, encrypted. All the DRM code is obfuscated. When the game launches it starts a separate thread which maintains a connection to Ubisoft. If that connection ever goes down it sets a flag. Throughout the game logic are obfuscated instances of code that checks that flag. If they ever see it, they exit back to the main menu. They also watch for the presence of that thread. If it goes down, they terminate the program.

So, pretty much the same thing Securom does, except one of the checks is a web connection to Ubisoft.

What? The whole point of a patch is to add and/or remove data. In the case of patching a program, the data is code. The remote checks can be removed and the online-only code added. If there are multiple binary releases, use SHA1SUMs or something to determine which version you're patching so you know which patches to apply. Simple.

Different games use different game logic, hence it is impossible to have a single patch ready at this point in time for all possible future games, unless the part of the game logic that was served online was also stored in some offline file which already comes with the game (unless, as I said, there will be different data files needed to patch the individual games).

Of course they'd patch each game separately...

Are you sure they have said they had a single patch ready to fix all the games? Saying they will patch games if the servers go down and saying they have it ready and working for every future title are two completely different things. From what I understand, what they have promised is if Ubisoft decides this version of DRM isn't worth pursuing, they will probably make patches to allow users to play the game. They have never said they have them ready, just that they have the ability to do so. And of course they can, they have access to the source code to do so very easily.

I just brought up the gameplay thing becuase they say they do transmit a fair amount of data constantly, and if I were going to implement such a system you might as well do it properly (I was actually toying with a couple ideas for a test project awhile back). Maybe I shouldn't give them any ideas :p.

Anyway this is all just hypothetical, it's entirely possibly they may back out and change their requirements prior to release. Who knows.

No I'm not sure about it. The interview said: "But Ubisoft have the ability to patch the DRM out of their games.". <- From this generic statement, I assumed that the DRM is completely separated from the games logic. My whole point was that I don't believe that they have any of the essential game logic hosted on their servers (yet).

Yes, it would be more effective if they did host essential pieces of the games mechanics online, because then it would be truly unplayable (unless someone would go through all the hassle of writing an emulator for their routines but that would have to be done on a per-game basis which would effectively render generic cracks useless and thus theoretically (not taking leaks into consideration) increase the time between release and re-release(by crackers), giving them a (hypothetical) chance to earn more money from paying customers who would have otherwise just pirated the game (whether those hypothetical customers actually have or don't have the money is an entirely different discussion, which is why I just don't buy the often brought up argument that every pirated copy is a lost sale for them).

I'm sure this will eventually become standard in DRM/copy protection stuff. It will be effective because in that case you can't simply eliminate the calls to the check routines because that will make the game unplayable.

It's likely that the DRM is implemented inside the binary as both a little routine that plinks the activation server every [x] minutes, and another couple of routines to support saving/loading across the net. Stripping the server check would likely be easy for someone with the proper tools and patience... the savegame thing is a little more murky and would likely require spoofing a server to 'catch' the save/load calls locally.

Either way, PC gaming sucks ass for so many reasons these days. It's just not worth it to play yet another fooking FPS, or a sh1tty Xbox port.

Interestingly enough, this would make it so that only the good games get pirated. The crackers would only put effort into games they feel were worth the effort. The cruddy games would never get bought nor pirated

So, should we have a little game where we guess the timeframe in which the game will be cracked?

I'd say a month, max.

A week from the first release date (March 5th), max.

Since I don't really care for the game, I hadn't taken the time to look at the release dates until now. The game was released for consoles 3 months before the PC release Three months!? I guess Ubisoft Montreal really does hate PC gaming.

Seems Ubisoft allowed downloading an official game back in 2008, and it was unplayable because there was no disk in the drive. They fixed it with a warez crack from the intranets.

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2008/07/ubisoft-drm-snafu-reminds-us-whats-wrong-with-pc-gaming.ars

Wow, that's really ironic. Nice find. I wonder if they even contacted Reloaded.

There is nothing moral nor immoral about speeding. And speeding doesn't always threaten lives anymore than not speeding. Me driving 75mph in a 65mph zone isn't immoral. It's a long straight road, and everyone else is speeding as well, so I'd go as far as to say it would be more dangerous for me to impede traffic flow and drive at 65 instead of 75, thereby being a larger threat to lives.

I do notice that people speed much more around town on Sunday night. It's a result of cruising at 80 mph for hours on 70 mph freeways for hours when returning from visiting home over the weekend (USMC), and when they suddenly find themselves in a 45 mph zone it seems like they're going so slow they could get out and walk faster.

It's very hard(if not impossible) today to make and distribute a major game without some finacial backing, this allows rich people to secure their income by contracing new developers, ofcourse, people who make a business out of games wants to take as little of a risk as possible, meaning making a game that will sell well in comparison to the work effort, effectivly reducing the chance of it being a innovative and content rich game.

To say that piracy is killing PC gaming is by lack of better words: fucking stupid.

There are 3 reasons people pirate:
1: They're greedy.
2: They don't have money.
3: They want to spend the little money they have on the "right" games.

Nobody likes the first option, but these people probably wouldn't spend much money on games if they couldn't pirate them.

The second option dosen't hurt anyone since no profit can be gained and there is no expense in the transfer of data.
For those of you who think that that the expense lies in the creation of the data should consider that that line of though would imply that the creator have a right to money before the consumer has had a chance to make a choice, i.e a demand for a piece of the pie no matter the result of the product.

The third option is in my opinion, the only thing that keeps gaming alive.
Allowing people to spend their money on what they want ensures that the money goes to what people really like, instead of making it a gamble and a battle of advertising, which helps small developers compete against the monster like competition.

Try to imagine how money and developement would flow without piracy...

It would be nightmare for games as art.

You left out the most popular reason:

4. They can get away with it.

The majority of people I know pirate, but can afford to take vacations to Mexico and the Caribbean or can afford all name brand clothing, etc. They can afford to pay and WOULD (like they did before piracy was so convenient) if they had no other choice. This is the largest group of pirates and the ones that the entertainment industry cares the most about. They'll defend that they "can't afford it", but if you look at all of the other luxury items in their lives then it becomes clear that they can and choose not to (because they can get away with it).

In any case, "intellectual property" (for lack of a better term that we can all agree on) laws exist to protect the artists. If those who can't pay don't have to then those that can pay (and are free to spend their money where ever they want) might as well spend the money they do have on other things so that they also can't pay anymore and can then just take it like the people that couldn't pay in the first place. That clearly doesn't work for the industry so it DOES matter whether or not people who can't pay get to have it for free or not. Not being able to pay isn't an excuse to take for free. It does do harm, even if that harm isn't as quantifiable as stealing material property is.

Piracy has nothing to do with allowing people to spend their money on what they want. That's the way a free market works. You have every right to choose to not spend your money on a game, but if you choose not to then you have no right to play it. It's that simple.

Everything you're saying is just an excuse.

It would be pretty amazing. Developers would see nobody playing their game when they do a bad job and would actually get paid when they do a good job. Imagine that...

Bull-fucking-shit. I'm really waiting until people stop being douchebags advocating piracy on moral stands or any other and be honest. And by that I mean standing upright and admitting that they are doing it, because they can.

Just as there are only few movies per year really worth watching. There are only few games really worth playing each year. What are those really depends on your taste. There's not much time to spend playing games so you have to carefully pick those, which might attract you. It's not like you have to play everything. It's about playing those classics you like, looking around and when you see some new gem grab it.

end-of-rant.

That's a rather hillarious statement. "It does harm, I can't say how or how much... but it does! Trust me! *speeds away on the car going above the speedlimit*"

I'm also waiting for people to stop explaining their actual reasons, and start saying stuff that supports MY point of view!

How much harm does murder do? Quantify it. I want numbers.

If you're murdered, you're 100.00% dead. Beaten half to death is assault.

IMHO good marketing and excessive PR sells the game well nowadays . Unless it's an unplayable POS, people'll buy it if they fell for it.

- -
You get three smileys for this one.

That's hardly relevant, isn't it? A better question would be: "How much harm does human cloning do?"

EDIT: Although irrelevant, that question is answerable. Murder costs at least the amount of people that died. If you want a monetary figure, then it's up to you how you figure that out, since for me the human life has infinite monetary value.

So because he speeds, piracy is ok?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_enforcement

That would describe the first option... and I still think those people would only spend(if) their money on the biggest advertising campaign,
if you're the kind of person who buys games

Ofcourse people pirate because they can , if everyone would end up like that poor mother from the UK nobody would dare pirate.

It might be a free market, but how would I know what to spend my money on? Rigged reviews? False promise of features? False impression demos? I've fallen for those more than enough in my life.

I really have a hard time believing that you've never bought a shitty game, especially since you don't pirate.

Are you telling me I'm lying to myself?

I know people are losing money because of piracy, I'm just saying I don't give a shit about some fat business guy who cries beacuse the "expected revenue" didn't turn up, I mean that's how they talk these days! it so damn arrogant to expect to make a certain amount of money before even releasing the game, that just shows what the business is like for them, they expect to take people money no matter what.

And no, I don't care much about the people who loses their jobs, I don't go into making games to have a steady income, It would be great if there where unlimited money going around but that would be impossible, I know there's a risk of enging up packing someones groceries, and I hope it will stay that way forever, it has to be that way.

How would that even be possible? People has to play the game before they know if it's good or not, it's the only way.

How would that work? You can't allow some people to pirate and some people to not.

Sigh, this really is an endless battle between people who think they have the right to know what they spend their money on and those who don't.
It's going to be interesing to see how it will turn out in the future.

The selective enforcement referred to speeding vs. pirating.

Theft is AKA stealing.

As for "IP", if you drew a cool battle tank and other kids in class drew battle tanks just like it, they are just copying you. Theft is the bully that comes up to you and snatches the drawing away from you. It is the difference between mv and cp.

So technically copyright infringement (that is *copy*ing in a way contrary to the copy rights (rules) that it was made available under) is NOT theft. Read it twice.

But they say that morally it is theft, because there is a lost sale that was stolen from them (well then, who ended up with that stolen sale?). Technically, in the land of reason and logic, this is not theft. It is something else.

What it really is, is that some of their market has drifted away from them, but is still playing around with various independent copies f the stuff that they created stuff. And they are all like "hey, you like it? Yeah, we made those. Come buy them". And everyone is too busy screwing around with their own copies that they have duplicated from each other and then moving on to something else, and they devs are just the unpopular kid in the corner and no attention to them, so they go around saying that everyone was stealing his stuff, but they didn't they just copied.

And so, because in most peoples natural mind, copying is nothing like stealing but in the dev's perspective it is a closer thing, and so they say this and they say that. Marketing gimmicks and propaganda for the effect that they want. But everyone already knows what the score is. There are a large number of things to complain about first in the life of yours before you get old and die, but do whatever you want.

And good luck to you, unless you are up to no good, in which case bad luck for you.

This thread has been up for more than 2 weeks! Someone put it out of its misery!

Again, excessive PR sells the game nowadays. Developers don't know if they're doing a good job, because they look at the sales. If the game is still being played after some years, that's how they know the did a good job.

A few points, just to totally bury this thread:

1. DRM doesn't work. Never has, never will. The "protecting first week sales" excuse is bullshit since all popular games are leaked well before release.

2. Piracy is not killing gaming; wildly escalating budgets are the culprit. Piracy has been around since the very first days of electronic gaming, and smart folks made reasonable attempts to slow it down, along with accounting for it when they worked up their budgets and forecasts.

3. In the BBS days, anyone who wanted a game and didn't want to pay for it had it within one week of its release. When a game was released, it would be leaked and hit BBSs about a week before the trucks arrived at stores with the boxed copy.

4. These days, piracy is almost always easier than being legit. That's the battle the industry needs to wage first.

You excluded them by saying that the greedy people wouldn't pay if they had to. You're wrong. They would.

I'm not entirely sure what you were trying to say here, but people buy games that they think are going to be great. Advertising is a major part of that. However, it's up to individuals to take advertisements with a grain of salt and do some research before buying, just like with every other product sold through advertising.

Exactly. Nobody's really pirating for a justified reason. They do it because they can. You know what else people do when they can get away with it? Murder. Take the law out of any region and see what happens. Suddenly people can do whatever they want and some do (those that are immoral, one would argue). What do you think the American "Wild West" was? A large nation with insufficient law enforcement. And lots of people did what they wanted because they could get away with it. Same thing happens in poor neighborhoods today.

The same way you know what cars and what computers and what food to spend your money on. You either do your research or you take a risk. The Internet, the very tool pirates use to get away with their deeds, is probably the best counter-argument here. The Internet allows ANYONE anywhere to publish their own opinions about a game so others can find it. It's not just the bribed reviewers anymore. Anyone can write a review and Google makes it easy to find them. Before I buy a game, I start by looking at all of the official advertisement material (screenshots, trailers, etc.). If it looks interesting, I'll check out what people have written on Wikipedia (sometimes I start with Wikipedia and then go to the official material). This typically includes a summary of review scores across the industry. I always take those with a grain of salt because even if the reviewers really like a game it doesn't mean I will. It doesn't necessary mean they're bought. In any case, then I start looking for the nameless reviewers on YouTube and blogs, etc. These are the people that will usually tell you if there are any serious problems or if the advertising is overly deceptive. YouTube also often has gameplay videos that show you exactly what it looks and sounds like to play the game. You can't get much more than that. On PlayStation 3, it's also incredibly easy to try out a demo for most games by downloading one free off of PSN. Steam occasionally releases free demos for certain titles also. All of this information, even with some of it missing (i.e., demo) is plenty of information to make an informed decision. Much more than you get with most products.

Ask yourself how much you can possibly learn about a car you're going to buy before you buy it? A car is so much more complicated that you can't possibly hope you learn everything about it. Look at Chris Katko, an obviously experienced car guy, and he ended up buying a VW that he's now afraid is going to blow up on him. It's only been what, 6 months?! Does that mean he has the right to steal the car? Obviously not. As the saying goes, Buyer Beware. If you can't afford to risk the money then you shouldn't be risking the money. If you have no other choice then you have no other choice. There are no guarantees. That is no excuse.

Of course I have. SOCOM: Confrontation is an example of that. Based on previous titles I thought it would be a lot of fun so I bought it, but it ended up sucking, IMHO. I haven't played it since that first time. And I'm happy to voice my opinion so the next guy hopefully doesn't bother and the developer gets the hint that they didn't do a very good job. I haven't bought a lot of crappy games because I'm very careful and go without games that I'm not sure I want. It's easy.

Moreso, I've bought my share of music CDs that suck (only a handful because I'm usually very careful before buying an album). It pisses me off to no end. These albums shouldn't even be in store and I hold it against the store that sold it to me that they're even stocking them. I actually just throw them away, brand new, when I find that I don't like the album as a whole. One good song on an album isn't enough for me. I throw the CD away to get it out of my collection^[1]. That still doesn't justify pirating the music though. Somebody spent a lot of money to write, compose, record, mix, master, and produce that music.

That's the only business model that makes sense to the entertainment industry right now. It isn't possible to build art that you know people are going to like. There is no formula yet. It's a lot of experimentation and revision and doing your best. Sometimes an idea that sounds awesome turns out to be no fun at all. Sometimes an idea that sound stupid can be the greatest thing you've ever played.

When a development studio first starts out they essentially have no money and need to hire programmers and artists and designers and writers and Foley artists and musicians, etc., etc., etc. These people need a salary because they have families to take care of, mortgages to pay, etc. So a development studio comes up with a game idea that they think is good and propose it to a publisher (who has lots of money to invest). Remember, we're talking multiple people at $50k-70k per year for each person hired, and most professional development studios require tens or twenties of each type of person. If the publisher likes the idea and thinks it will be profitable, they agree to pay the development studio so much money to develop it, which is enough for employee wages, development equipment (expensive computers and development kits), etc. In the end, the publisher needs to get all of that money back or it was equivalent to burning money. They get their money back by consumers licensing the game (or subscribing, for the MMO model). If you can show them a better way to do business I'm sure they'd happily do it, but I don't know that such a thing exists.

See above on screenshots, trailers, reviews (professional and amateur), gameplay videos, and free demos (unfortunately, free demos on PC often give pirates an early look at cracking the real game, so demos on PC have almost completely faded).

No, and I don't really care if it is okay or not. I am just lambasting the hypocrisy, fuzzy logic, grandstanding, over-generalization and other fallacies that pro-DRM people seem to always use. With friends like them (assuming I supported DRM) who needs enemies?

Like, look at this:

Here, we have a person confusing the reasons why an action is possible versus the reasons why the action is actually done. You know what else people can get away with? Dressing up as Nazis (well, not in Germany), shaving their heads, cutting off three of their fingers, wearing their clothing inside-out etc etc. It is mind-boggling to think that anyone would think that the possibility of an action constitutes the entirety of the cause of the action (unless we are talking some interpretations of quantum physics).

Pimped up.

Huh? Trailers rarely show gameplay these days, more like cinematic rendered videos.

I don't believe the reviewers are bribed very much, it's another situation. Magazines and gaming sites need to get some spot at "exclusive" previews and demos of games. If they don't get it, who would buy their mag? Also, who doesn't love being paid hotel, food, and treat you like kings just so you give them good scores? After all, reviews are another stage of advertising nowadays for hyped games.

As you said, demos are fading for the PC. Demos are the only source I'd ever consider for buying a game, if they don't look too pimped up of course.

Whoa, wait. That's a weird statement. We're talking about piracy, not taking someone else's life, which is a terrible sin, no matter how someone justifies it.

Why is murder bad? Because the victim can't finish his life, whether reading these forums, getting laid, or whatever. Spending a couple of years making a game or whatever instead of what you really want to do, only to have it fail to return the expected reward is a fraction of murder. The US tax code "murders" us about 1/3.

I know you weren't referring to me, but I want to be clear. I'm not pro-DRM, I'm anti-piracy. I agree with developers that piracy is bad, but I disagree with their solutions.

I never agreed with that.. I just said that people pirate beacuse they don't get caught, if they would get caught they would probably stop, but that dosen't mean it's the only reason they pirate.

Murder? What are you talking about?

I don't kill just because I'm certain I can get away with it(and I'm very certain).
The same way people don't pirate just because they get away with it..
People are more complex than that, even if it dosen't seem like it sometimes .

Screenshots are often quite trustable, but they only show you the graphics, they don't tell you anything about the game.
Trailers are most often just a movie explaining what the game is about story wise.
Demos are both the best and worst reference material, while they provide the actuall engine and the idéa of the game they only provide a part of the content, and it's up to the user to decide if the rest of the game is as rich as the demo, the only problem is that this is a powerfull weapon in the hands of someone who wants to sell their game.

I remember playing the demo of dungeon siege and though that it was awesome(and it was), I was so hyped I was determined to save up some more money so that I could buy that game, the only problem was that all the content worth speaking of was crammed into the demo, making it look like the rest of the game was just as content rich, while in fact it was only endless running, uninspired enemies and almost half the game was just a desert.. and you didn't even know you had fought the last boss until the text "Thank you for playing this game"(or something similar) came up on the screen in white ordinary text.. and with money only for one or two games per year.. you can probably imagine how pissed I was.

True, these days I have access to the internet and I probably would be more suspicious of such demos these days, but I would still have to believe it and buy it to find out, but that is only if people actually made demos these days..

When you test drive a car you will know everything about it you would like to know except how it's going to hold up, which is why you have guarantees, something games does not have, in fact, when I buy games that dosen't work it's just tough shit.

What I'm saying is that no business model should be present, when you base your game on statistic of what sells it becomes a lame excuse for earning some extra cash, not something you've put your heart into and worked hard for, and I certain that's the only way game can become good. Who experiments?.. I've seen very very few games who dares to do something different without trying to make it a selling point.

Including people who have different tastes than you. Quite often I find movies and games that I enjoy, that most people don't like. And movies/games a lot of people like, that I can't stand. Sometimes I like what a given person likes, sometimes I like what that same person doesn't like.

It's very difficult to determine whether a game is enjoyable to you without experiencing it yourself. That's what demos are supposed to be for, but too many demos don't give a proper feel for the full game.

As for advertisement material, you need to consider that it's largely the publisher, not the developer, that handles that. Just like publishers can make crappy games look good, they can make good games look crappy (by not putting much care into the advertisement). There's also when the advertisement material doesn't even attempt to portray the actual game (I'm looking at you, Dragon Age).

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Well, so much for that BS. Told ya.

Well, this ain't Assassin's Creed, but it took less than a day? I'm pretty sure other Ubisoft games will be cracked this fast. No 1st day sales excuse now I suppose

The game uses the same DRM, so it applies to the discussion. It was released on March 2nd, and cracked on the 3rd. I kinda expected it to take 2-3 days, but I think some folks were out to make a point with this one, so...

Haha, damn, what was I thinking. Cant believe I said a month.

You said max, but you didn't specify a minimum, so you didn't lose. Still, 1 month max was a really wild guess, 3 days is enough for hackers these days.

Piracy, is above all, a move against the establishment. Otherwise lawful people pirate games because deep inside they have a disregard for the System. These people will break the law every time they can, because it makes them feel powerful against the System. When they can't break the law, they appear to be law abiding citizens.

Thanks for the opinion axilmar. I agree, sometimes it isn't about being greedy, it's about showing that you don't care in supporting them buying their product, because they don't care about your satisfaction as a consumer anymore.

But the problem is, this is mainly the fault from part of the publishers sometimes, and you want to try what the developers did. Demos and "shareware" games(I miss those really much ) were a great move for showing off their work.

What meaning of disregard do you mean? Generally, the way you just used it means a deliberate flouting of respect for something. In which case, I just have to say "Huh?" I've pirated my share of games in my time, and I have no idea what Establishment or or System I'm supposed to be rebelling against.

So in that manner, I'm disregarding it in the other sense of disregard, which is to be ignorant of.

Even when demos and shareware games were aplenty, piracy was rampant.

I miss the days of demos/shareware too. Too bad this practice has been abandoned.

PC gaming is slowly dying (or appears to) for variety of reasons, not only because of piracy.

I think there's a little angle to this whole "piracy -> DRM -> piracy" scenario that most folks overlook. Many of the publishers (not developers, in this case) are publicly traded corporations that have boards of directors and investors to answer to. That means when a game is released and it doesn't bring in the bacon, someone gets called to the carpet. I suspect the conversation goes something like this:

Exec: You just spent the last 18 months making "PokeMonsterGrabass Extreme", and it went on to sell 4000 copies last month, with no tail in sight. What's the deal?

Dev'r: (WANTS TO SAY) We shipped a crap title that no one really wanted.
Dev'r: (ACTUALLY SAYS) Those pesky pirates. Yeah, that's the ticket. Pirates.

Exec: Gadzooks! What can we do to fix this? Stronger DRM?

Dev'r: Uh... yeah, that sounds good. Sure. I still have a job, right?

Exec: Get on it!

Well, I'm here to say right now, I'm replaying Tomb Raider I for the first time in years thanks to a torrent. I still have the original disk, which doesn't work anymore. The latest Tomb Raider stuff of any kind was the Tomb Raider Legend demo, which wasn't any "more fun" than TR1, but when I found out this DEMO had DRM in it, I uninstalled it along with the weird hacks to get rid of the DRM and I haven't acquired any sort of recent game since. Most of them are more difficult than I consider entertaining anyway. My most recent game is Quake 3 Arena, which I enjoyed on the easiest mode available, but replaying the last level with Xero several times tended to turn him into an aimbot even though the difficulty was as low as it could go.

I think that's ridiculous. Firstly, the investors would be told how the business works and that failed projects are guaranteed. Not all games can do well. Indeed, many games from the same publisher are competing against each other for sales. Publishers don't need to concern themselves with the sales of a particular game so much as they do with all of the games they publish as a whole. In the end, the sales from all of the games need to make up for all of the investments they've made and risks they've taken. The sales of particular games would only influence their willingness to take a risk on a particular developer again.

The board of directors probably doesn't understand DRM at all. They probably do have minions look into the popularity of games and (these days) compare how many people are playing it versus sales. When they see that a game is super popular, but sales are lacking, that would tell them that they need to take precautions in future titles to protect them from piracy. And there's nothing wrong or malicious about that. That's a sensible strategy. They aren't all fat rich suits interesting in stealing your money. They're business men that care nothing about games and intend to make money. That's what they're supposed to do. The developers care about the games and the developers are paid by the publishers (indeed, the developers NEED these profit seeking business men to have jobs at all).

As consumers, we also rely on these profit seeking publishers for the industry to even exist. Get off your high horse.

Now now, there's no need to be uncivilized.

My point exactly. The #1 rule of corporate business is that profit must be made, and maximized. The #2 rule is that blame must always be assessed when failure is perceived. When a dev puts out a shite title that doesn't sell, blame must be assessed. It's far easier to pin the failure on an external source than an internal one. "Corrective measures" come into play, which at best do nothing to remedy the situation, but usually make things worse.

This is how bad ideas come to pass.

Also note that many publishers have internally developed titles to go with the external titles they publish. Whether internal or external, accountability has to come into play at the end of the process. If your title doesn't sell, you won't be doing business with them unless a good excuse is provided. If you're external, you don't get picked up for a sequel. If you're internal, you're out of a job. With the majority of titles failing to perform well, piracy is an all too convenient scapegoat.

There's a fairly old interview with Ubisoft spokesman.

I think Sirocco's comment is very close to the truth. Investors are greedy, and without the promise of profit, they wouldn't invest in the game; writing a successful video game is very hard, and the developer wants to work, so the result is exactly like Sirocco describes.

There is no safe copy protection. There will never be one. Instead of investing millions into new (pointless and useless) copy protection/DRM systems, which then have to be paid for by the customers who buy the games, they should invest some of that money into better programmers(or more training and research) and more QA, so that we(the players) might actually get to see some reasonably bug-free and good and fun games coming out.

Also, if they spent less money on pointless efforts like copy protection, they could sell the games for less, which I believe would enable a broader audience to afford the games, so they'd sell more copies and make more profit.

But the main reasons any company in the PC games market these days isn't selling all too many units of their dope isn't piracy, it's rather this:
It's always the same crap. People are tired of playing the same shit only with new graphics over and over again. It's boring. There's no innovation. There are too many too similar games. The market is quite saturated. If they keep complaining they can't sell anything they should at least have the guts to admit that it is because their games suck and because competitors have better stuff out there and they should just give up instead of finding lame excuses, like piracy.

The people who pirate games do that because they don't have the money to afford those games. So that money does not exist in the first place. Money that does not exist can't possibly be booked as a "loss" in anyones pocket.

Another thing: Maybe games are just not as important as a commodity as their producers would like to believe they are. Maybe games are dispensable and no one really needs them. Maybe they're just not worth much to most people.

and I want to add this:
I don't pirate games. Most games I play are either free-ware, are older titles that were made free by their original developers or are among the few full-price new games that I actually buy per year (and that's only 3 to 5 games).

I do know people who pirate games but they rarely ever finish any of them. I hear them talking about games all the time, about what they're currently downloading, what they're going to play next... truth is: Nobody actually has the time or the money to play all those games and the fact that most people who pirate those games only start playing them/testing them for a couple of hours then get bored and move on only proves that those games aren't worth playing.

Bottom line is: Good games will get bought and will live, bad or mediocre games will go down, with or without piracy. Piracy is not the reason that sucky games suck and that their producers are not making any or little profit.

That reminds of that experiment 2D Boy did with World of Goo. It was a great game, many people payed what was worth it to them(and others were greedy bastards ).

Thanks for the insight Dennis, I think it'd work if they stopped spending money on DRM, and concentrated on giving good products at a less price.

Games are not expensive. If you can't afford to buy the occasional game then you can't afford a computer or a car or a decent place to live (you must obviously be living in a crack house^[1]).

If the games weren't fun they wouldn't be pirated. Who would waste bandwidth and disk space on crap, sending developers the message that they are making worthwhile works, instead of leaving the games stale and untouched and sending the message that something is wrong? Pirates clearly do still enjoy the works. As do paying consumers, like myself.

The games are better than they ever have been, albeit in fewer numbers (it takes years to develop a decent game, and from the sound of it that hasn't change since the beginning). In terms of there being so many similar titles in existence, the first few titles don't even begin to get any idea or innovation right. It takes many iterations to improve upon the design before you start to really extract the full value from an idea. There are tons of first person shooters in existence and there are still improvements to be made. Eventually, the gameplay innovation curve will level off and change little, but as long as there is a griping story to go along with it players like myself will still enjoy playing them. For me, video games are like books or movies that I can experience for myself on some level. Books and movies have also been done over and over again. Hell, look in our very own depot to see clone upon clone of popular games from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Complaining about that is complaining about innovation. Reiteration is how things improve.

I've already been over this. That's a bullshit excuse. Most people who pirate games do so because they can. Nobody ever said you had the right or expectation to play every game ever made. If all you can afford is one game every year (which is less than a penny^[2] dollar a day!) then that's plenty to afford a game. You can't complain that games are too expensive. They're not. Unless you're living above your means.

Then why pirate them? Why bother? More bullshit excuses.

No, it proves that those people have short attention spans or, as you said, access to so many works that they can't stay on one very long or they'll never keep up. These people sound like the social type that play games to be part of a crowd, like smokers of past generations. They don't really enjoy playing the games, but it's one of the things to do to fit in. I have a cousin who is the same way. He usually can't play a game for more than an hour without getting bored. Even though the game is lots of fun. He's the same with music. Can't keep a music library for more than a week. His "taste" changes constantly because fads come and go that quickly.

Essentially, you're saying that only the best 5% of any class of author deserves to get paid for their efforts. Even though people experience the work, they should only pay when the work is AWESOME. That other 95% (the majority of the members of this forum, probably) should have to just hand their works over? Indeed, the top 5% were part of the bottom 95% for years while they honed their skills and innovated their practices. They probably couldn't have reached that 5% without support from players.

Paying only for what you enjoy isn't how creativity works, or any industry really. Imagine: you only have to pay if you like it! Shhhiiitt, a lot of people would dislike everything.

People need the ability to be creative and that means occasionally you will be paying people for their mistakes, but people learn from their mistakes and that's how great things come about.

YES. This is a major point is almost always gets ignored when these types of discussions come around. Gamefly is insanely popular because it works like an all-you-can-eat buffet for gamers. You plunk down X units of currency per month, and get to play as many games as you can during that period. Given how short games have become in the last decade, it's a wonder anyone buys them at all outside of certain genres that lean heavily on online multiplayer.

What? I saw Modern Warfare 2 more expensive here than a printer.

EDIT:

That's just rage talking.

EDIT2: And why the hell are you calling Dennis an addict of something

Yes you have. But hardly anyone actually buys your logic. It makes less sense than the pirate's. At least Dennis not only isn't a pirate, he's even provided a reasonable sane argument. And yet you continue to group him with the pirates, but gloss over anything he said because you can't bother to see any idea outside of your limited horizons.

I didn't call Dennis a pirate nor an addict. I said if you..., which is basically hypothetically addressing the reader.

I want to thanks Dennis because he perfectly said what I have in my head about piracy.

bambam, as usual on that kind of topic, you deserve my 43, you're a bloody retarded stereotyped/brainwashed guy. Stop watching the fox, for god's sakes !

Edit: And even if I can be considered as a pirate because I've already downloaded a couple of game, I bought more than the average asshole who serves me the common brainwashed talk.

How many game did you already bought, bambam ? How much do your parents earn for you to be able to buy each thing you like ?

Life isn't that easy. Money isn't growing on three, and I am more than bored to pay an average 65 euros for a game that will last less than 10 hours of play.

Edit 2: I give you a picture of me for the possible next time you'll want to post such insanity, maybe it'll make you turn your tong seven time in the garbage that you use as a mouth.

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My opinions are my own based on considering the viewpoints of the authors and consumers. Of course consumers think they deserve it for free. It doesn't work that way.

I don't even watch the news, be it Fox or any other network.

I've always been relatively poor and went through my childhood getting considerably less toys and games than the peers around me. Throughout my entire childhood, I got maybe 20 games, and that's collectively between my brother and I, and including gifts from extended family. Generally only about 3 or 6 games per platform, and a platform generally lasted me 6 or more years. My parents never really liked me playing games, and additionally couldn't afford to get my very many games, so when I did get a game it usually had to entertain me for a year or three. And they did. I know a little bit about going without.

Now that I'm working and still living at home, I can afford to buy games for myself, and I do because it's something that I love. I'm not rich by any means. I make just under $CAD17/hour. When I move into my own apartment, which hopefully becomes available in the next month or two, I'll probably buy substantially fewer games. Even then, I only buy games that I think are really good and worth playing. I've only gotten 12 PS3 games in the 3 years since I've had a PS3. Add another handful of PC games to that. And I have plenty of savings that I could spent on more games if I chose to. I prefer to save my money and only play the games that really interest me.

It's like I said: if you can't afford the occasional game then you're living above your means. If a game is only fun to you for a few hours then you shouldn't be buying it. That's why they have video game rentals. Which, BTW, is the legitimate way to try before you buy. It's more expensive than just buying the game, but less expensive if you learn that you don't want to buy most games in the first place.

I'd consider myself an experienced gamer (playing for almost 20 years) and generally don't have trouble with games. The games that I buy generally last me at least 30 hours, but generally closer to 40 or 50 hours. Some of them probably last longer than that. And they're such great games that I can replay them time and time again and still enjoy them. Maybe that comes from going without throughout my childhood, but I can easily play the same games or listen to the same music repeatedly for months at a time.

Modern games aren't like the old repetitive games of the 80s and 90s either. The levels aren't just a matter of placing a couple of blocks differently. They're very complicated 3D worlds with increasing realism and distance. It takes years just to build a 40 hour game that modern day gamers like myself expect. So you can't expect to get 100+ hours out of most games. Games today are intended to be enjoyed like a movie. They aren't like Pac-Man where you did essentially the same thing 255 times before you could say you beat the game. Of course there were a lot of hours in older games like that, but it all looked essentially the same with difficulty increasing by the speed and effectiveness of your enemies increasing or the speed and effectiveness of yourself decreasing. They didn't have the capacity to give you a unique experience every level so they had to extend the games with little tweaks to make things different. I've never enjoyed repetitive games like that.

Knowing what you've just said, I fear that you don't download pirated software because you lack of a good bandwidth ^^

(And I think that was my third attempt to make you run out of nerves, but it looks like you're hyped with some special valium blood ;-) )

Anyway I give you a 10/10 in serenity ability

Edit: Was it THAT obvious that I was trying to hide my smile when taking that picture ? Meh, I should work my rageous face more than that !

Wait, weren't games intended from the first place to be interactive, unlike books or movies? (Well, there's also those books where you choose a story.)

But it was a true achievement if you did it!

The best way to get that amount of time out of a game is by making it replayable or challenging. I think I've played Fallout 2 with more than 15 different characters. And the game was developed in less than an year.

Anyway, I won't nitpick any longer your rant about how great modern games are(ugh).

What happened to your hand? Looks like 2 big teeth, ouch!

Hahaha, nononono, I didn't hurt anyone with that hand ^^
That was just a door (or me falling from my bike, choose the one you prefer).

Oh I think they have something similar here in Germany. I remember seeing an offer like that at Saturn. Still only works for people who have enough time to play.

Don't worry. I didn't take anything you said like that. I did get that most of the times you used "you", it must in fact have been a general "you", meaning not me specifically but rather "someone".
I'm also using that general you in this post a lot.

Whether someone perceives something as expensive or cheap, is purely based on the weight of that someones purse (assuming that heavier means there's more money in it, not stones or something else that's heavy but effectively worthless in the context of that figure of speech).

Wrong. You might already have decent computer from earlier savings or from times when you had the money to buy one or maybe got it as a gift from someone, a roof over your head and food in your mouth and after that no money left to participate in public cultural living.

So you may indeed be able to afford all your basic needs(warm place to sleep + food) and then still feel a need for something for which you don't have any money left. If in that case you can aquire that something without paying for it but also without depriving someone else of it (which is the case with making a digital copy of something|not the same as stealing, because with stealing you actually take something away from someone so it becomes inaccessible to that someone) you're not generating a loss for that other someone, because what that other someone could have gotten in return for it, didn't exist to begin with (your non-existant money).

What now? Do people pirate games just because they can, or do they pirate games because they're fun?

But they DO leave the games stale and untouched as soon as they realize that the games aren't worth playing. Sure there are Demo versions but those are usually crippled up to a point where it's impossible to determine whether the full game is actually any fun or not.
Most pirates I know use pirated copies as extended demos and they do buy the games they like afterwards (given they can afford them).

I think people pirate games mainly because they want to be a part of cultural living, yet can't afford to buy the games. Are only rich people allowed to have a part of cultural living?
Other people pirate games out of curiosity or for competition: crackers take pride in being the first ones to crack a new copy protection, it's a sport for them.

That's entirely your own subjective perception. I agree that the good games among todays games are indeed very good compared to games of similar genres from the eighties or nineties (but not nearly all of them).

It is the task of the original designers, QA, thorough testing, tweaking and balancing to do those iterations before the supposed triple A game is thrown out at the players.
Paying customers should not be (ab)used as betatesters.

Not comparable. Most projects in the depot where created by hobbyists for a learning purpose or for fun and without them being in it for the money.
Also, when a hobbyist game developer creates a clone of a popular classic, it is because the hobbyist developer is still learning the basics and/or is curious to find out whether he's capable of creating a clone of his favourite childhood memory or just doing it for the fun of development.
Reiteration is only one way, the cheapes of all ways, to improve something that is already there. Other ways are recombination, reinvention or the hardest of all to come up with something truly unique and new.

In any case except the last mentioned, it is just not right to complain if what you created doesn't sell and blame it on piracy. People are not stupid (though the industry would certainly love them to be dumbed down enough so they can sell the same crap every year with only minor adjustments), they see that that supposedly new game is basically the same old one in a new dress and they're just not willing to pay for it or even play it.

Even though I'm sure that's a general you there too, I want to say this: I could currently safely afford 10 new full price games a month without starving to death or not being able to pay any of my other monthly essentials but I'm not buying that many games.
Why? Because I don't think there are that many good games worth buying and also I don't have the time playing that many games.

I'm sure I'm not the only one thinking that way. The problem that games aren't bought isn't piracy, it is, as I already said, a saturated market, lack of quality, lack of time and in most cases a lack of money on the side of those who play the games. I'll gladly repeat what I said: Money that isn't there, isn't a loss for anyone.
If you're in game development for the money and you think you're not making enough profit, find another industry to invest your money to.

Games have always been a field for enthusiasts, they're dispensable. If you can't produce good enough games that sell, you're obviously doing it wrong or there is no market for your games because people need other things first or already bought a better game from one of your competitors who were capable enough to produce a quality game that people liked and bought.

News just in: Most people actually ARE social beings who like to be a part of their community. That's essential instinctive behaviour. In past times, not being accepted by your tribe usually meant you had to make it on your own out in the wild and you'd probably be dead soon without their support.

They do enjoy the good games, they discontinue to play the bad ones. Neither way, if they couldn't afford the game to begin with, whether or not they play it through til the end doesn't matter, still the copy can't be considered a loss for the producer (and this is what producers are complaining about when they point their finger towards piracy, they say that every pirated copy is their loss and that's ridiculous and wrong).

Sounds like the average fairly young teen. Most teens(unless they have rich parents who give them a lot of allowance) don't have much money at their hands to spend on anything. I wouldn't be surprised if your cousin would pirate games.

Who said that only 5% of all games are good?

They shouldn't have to hand their works over no. They just shouldn't complain about piracy when clearly the real reason their games aren't bought is because they suck (and I'm not addressing the members of this forum with this but rather the money hungry producers who pay developers to develop crappy games, expect those crap games to sell and when they don't wonder why...).

Paying for what you don't enjoy is stupid. Also, it's not like pirates continue to use/play the stuff they don't like. They have no reason at all to do so. They buy what they like if they can afford it.

Being creative is a luxury pastime for most people. Most people are creative because they can. Nobody ever said you had the right or expectation to have the ability to be creative.

And that's the very root of the problem. The expectation that creativity can be industrialized, bottled and sold is totally fucked up. It works up to a certain point but as soon as the market is saturated and people get fed up with mediocricy, you can't expect to continue to sell anything that is not cream of the crop.

See. Don't you think most people think and act that way? At least the two of us do.
So crap games do go down with or without piracy, because they're simply not getting bought.
I can't stress enough how market saturation makes this even more of a "problem" to the producers, because people do have a choice to buy only the best games.

Disclaimer: I do not glorify nor endorse piracy. All I'm saying is that I think it's a bullshit argument to say that piracy is responsible for company failures in the games market.

Maybe not in Canada, but they sure are over here. I'm certainly not willing to spend $100+ on a game that if I don't like, I can't return, and would only be able to resell for $10-$20. I've bought a few bargain games for $20, but most of these only because I'd already been playing them after having downloading them.

Less than $3.65 for a game? For some insipidly boring (in my opinion) bejeweled clone you download for a cell-hpone maybe. Nothing I would want to play comes anywhere near that cheaply.

That's just silly. You don't know if the game will be fun or not, until after you've downloaded them. 90% of the games I've downloaded, I've played once, decided they suck, and never played again.

Nice over-generalization. I'm one of those people Dennis describes, and I pretty much only ever play games when I'm sitting home alone. I rarely even play games online, as I don't like playing with other people.

Only if you prefer hype over substance. The newest game that I play regularly is seven years old (C&C Generals). Perhaps it's a genre thing, I play almost exclusively RTS games, and I've found that pretty much everything since then is a stale rehashing of earlier games. The latest 3D RTS offerings are an abomination.

Only for 20 years? I'm about three months off the 30th anniversary of my introduction to computer games. You n00b.

That's the biggest problem right there. If I want a movie, I'll watch a movie. When I want to play a game, I go back to my old favourites that were released when they still knew the value of gameplay.

I'm the same. Mostly because once you had the basic strategy correct, all the games end up testing is your reaction speed and dexterity (of which I've never had either). But between the games of the late 70's/early 80's and now, there have been thousands of great games that didn't rely on mindless repetition.

You play FPS games mostly, don't you bamccaig? If you boil it down, they're very repetitive too - move, duck/weave, shoot, move, duck/weave, shoot. I watch friends play modern FPS games, and I can't tell the difference between any of them. And then there's driving games, which are the most insanely repetitive games in the world.

I agree that somebody that can't afford to license intellectual property isn't necessarily generating a loss by pirating it. However, they are making it unfair to the people that did have to pay. They are probably also going to influence whether or not someone does pay. If you tell your friend (who say, can afford to pay) that you can get it for free, is he going to pay or is he going to spend that money on something else? Essentially, this is what it all comes down to. A "not really" lost sale can still result in lost sales. You can't guarantee that your actions won't influence sales unless you are sure to pay as soon as you're able and you don't enable anyone else that can indeed pay. Keep in mind that if you would have bought something had you been able to pay, but were left with pirating it, and were later able to pay, but had since gotten tired of playing it; you WOULD be affecting sales.

BOTH, if you want to nitpick.

Yes, indeed, only the "rich" are allowed to have a part of "cultural living". That's the way it's supposed to be. Those that aren't rich are supposed to work to get rich so they too can enjoy luxuries. Their work should help society and in turn everybody benefits. Nothing is supposed to be handed out. We all want to live in big mansions with sports cars and servants, but that costs money. There is a very good reason for that. People essentially only do what they "need to do". That might be limited to survival or it might be expanded to comfort or luxury. However one defines their needs, that is what influences their actions.

Take, for example, a rich snobby child who is born into wealth. What do they generally contribute to society in their lifetimes? Not much, if we're to believe popular media and popular opinion. They have everything they could ever want and generally don't need to work for anything (assuming their parents give it to them); and don't.

Compare that to an average child born into an average family. He'll generally need to find work and make a living for himself. If he wants to have luxuries in his life, he'll have to get a decent education and "move up the ladder", so to speak. A burger maker at McDonald's won't cut it.

This is what drives a collaborative free market society. If everyone was handed luxuries there would be no incentive to work hard. Modern "developed" societies would fall apart.

I'm sure murderers and rapists also consider their actions a "sport", but that doesn't make them acceptable. Besides, merely cracking copy protection in itself doesn't have to do any harm either. There is such a thing as "white hat" hackers. There's no reason there couldn't be "white hat" crackers as well. They could still enjoy the sport without actually hurting anyone (indeed, they could be helping the developers and publishers instead of hurting them).

If you were to take the time to track down and play every game released every year in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, you would find that the market has always been full of crap; or at least games that you don't enjoy. Not only does every individual person have their own differing tastes (which change), but anyone is free to produce their own intellectual property, whether or not they actually have talent or creative ability. It's inevitable that a lot of garbage is going to flood the market. It's up to you to take that into consideration before buying. Either that, or come up with a quality assurance strategy for the industry to use to filter works (that doesn't cripple the industry or innovation).

They're not abusing you. They just aren't gods. They don't know what you'll enjoy. If they did, they'd just make the one perfect game that suits everyone and never need to make another.

Art is like that. Does every musician just automatically know what the audience enjoys or do they take risks sometimes that disappoint? In order for the things that we truly love to be discovered, a lot of things we hate need to be produced. Beautiful art is largely discovered by mistake. Even so, ignoring the artistic side of gaming, engineering is itself a complex process that requires failure to attain success.

You may be an exception, but according to you you aren't even a pirate so nobody is accusing you of being the problem. The actual pirates clearly do enjoy the games and clearly do take pleasure in playing them. Why the fsck else would they do it? The truth is there aren't very many good games made in a year (it's probably a handful or at most two). I don't think that's changed at all since the gaming industry began. There never was that many good games. Maybe in the beginning there were more considered good because it was a completely new idea and people were easier to impress, but these days it takes a lot of artistic, intelligent, and skillful people to produce something "good". They're still people though and can't guarantee a home run every time.

He's not a teen anymore. He's only a couple of years younger than me, which should put him in his 20s. Regardless, nobody ever entitled teenagers to whatever they want. Did you have everything you wanted when you were a teenager? I sure didn't.

All of his life he's had tons of toys and luxuries, etc. Far more than I ever had. His family can either afford it or are living above their means. Could he afford to buy every song or album and every movie and every game? No, of course not. Does he need all of that stuff? No, of course not.

And I don't hold anything against my cousin. He's awesome. I just know that it wouldn't hurt him^[1] if he didn't have access to all of this intellectual property and it would help a lot of companies that produce music, movies, and games if he actually paid for some of this stuff.

A lot of pirates say they pay for the things they like, but how many do you think actually do? My guess is less than 15% of them. They already have it and are free to spend their money on whatever else they want. If that means getting name brand clothing so they can be "cooler" then so be it. They'd rather do that then pay for a game when they "aren't even hurting anyone by pirating".

So what you're saying is that entertainment should be abolished? Creativity requires time to grow and be expressed. If people have to work a full time job they aren't going to have the energy to be fully creative. Risk their house on releasing an album? Shit, no, they have a mortgage and kids to put through college.

The games that I think are good and worth playing are few and far between. I usually know this long before I buy the game. Why don't you? Why don't pirates? It's bullshit.

The arguments pirates give are reasonable. They just want to know what they're getting before they pay. Fine. Except that there's no way for anyone to know how much enjoyment they actually get out of a game or movie or album. They can, and human nature would encourage them to, lie. They can get away with more that way. The only thing that stands in the way is their own personal code of ethics, and we all know that the majority of people are not ethical. All you have to do is look at how many people liter, and cheat, and steal, and abuse one another. The law wouldn't be necessary if we could rely on each individual being ethical.

Absolutely crappy games are going to go down with or without piracy. It's the not crap games that are getting pirated 10000x more than the crap games that is the problem. And no publisher in their right mind would complain about sales for a crappy game because everyone, pirates and legitimate consumers, would tell them to their face how crappy the game is. They complain about the games that don't suck. The thing is that measures of piracy show a major increase for popular games, but sales don't show the same increase. Clearly, not all pirates that enjoy the games are paying for them. The majority are not (as we would expect; see above).

NZD$100 is only about CAD$70, which is about the same as I pay after taxes (CAD$60 + 13% = CAD$68).

I meant dollar. Fixed.

And if you ask my opinion, I'll say all RTSs suck. So that doesn't say anything for the quality of today's games. GTA IV and Uncharted are examples of recent games that are teh awesome. Maybe the genres that you enjoy are falling off of the map, but then there aren't very many RTSs released in a year so you can't be pirating too many games now can you?

What do you expect? I'm only 23^[2], you dinosaur.

They're repetitive on a much higher level. There is a lot that changes in a modern FPS from "level" to "level". Weapons are introduced with complex differences in fire rate, capacity, accuracy and range. On top of that, the levels themselves generally vary greatly. And gameplay is only part of the game. There is also a griping story that you get to participate in. Driving games are the same. It's the same basic actions that you control to drive, but the cars, conditions, and either streets or track are constantly changing. Driving physics alone leave you with a lot to experiment with. Games like Driver and GTA also offer you the freedom to choose how you want to drive. On the sidewalk like a n00b, 20 km/h like a grandma, or pedal to the medal, handbrake corners, etc. There are also variations of gameplay, like chasing people, getting chased by people, racing against time or other drivers, or transporting goods. In racing games like Gran Turismo, the skills involved in actually succeeding require lots of practice and are very enjoyable for those that like it. People love to joke about how boring Nascar is ("it's just a bunch of guys driving in a cirlce!"), but the actual enthusiasts that love it know that it's a lot more complicated and interesting then that. Modern games are repetitive in the same sense, but far more variable than say Pac-Man levels.

There are a lot of games that have fun gameplay that I continue to enjoy and all I want is more story to go with the gameplay (i.e., more "levels" or "missions"). Though there are enhancements, that's essentially what HL2 and GTA IV episodes are. The games are already great and players just want more of them.

The PC is the home platform of RTS. Consoles aren't suited for that type of gameplay. If the home platform is dying...

Will you stop generalizing every example with something much more simple? That doesn't make it seem like you're trying to explain what's the problem with piracy, but rather hide from the details.

Again with examples of ending someone else's life? And who said their actions are bad? I've used many NO-CD cracks for some of my legit games to stop taking the CD out of its box. If anyone's buying these latest Ubisoft games, they can avoid that faulty DRM easily. See, from a different viewpoint, the work of crackers can help the PC community, it's pirates that take advantage of the situation. Kind of like a double-edged sword.

He's talking about how bug-plagued games are released lately, especially because the publishers put narrow deadlines, and the product is shipped really half-assed. The legitimate costumers suddenly turn into beta testers for some days.

Not entirely true. RPGs have been from the first generations of games, and many of the ones released in the 90s have been acclaimed as master pieces, evolving from the concept.

Also, it doesn't take such a great deal of people to produce something good. I think everyone would agree here that World of Goo, produced only by 2 people, was a major success, an incredible game I'd say. It had some great gameplay innovation ideas, a nice art style, and a good method of distribution.

Complex? Changing single numbers is complex?

Depends mostly on the game. If it's the classical cheesy hollywood story games get lately, then it's repetitive.

Again, this is repeated and taken from older games, where they focused on each one of the things you say. Games are mostly mixing genres now, and few of them do it well. Others just get an unorganized mess.

See, if I boil down every one of your arguments as simply as it seems you do with others, what you wrote is totally different from what I'm sure you meant(as your signature clearly states.)

QFT. I think society is looking to blend games, movies, books into one single entertainment, because they're lazy to decide what they want to use.

EDIT: Wow, thread growth, I wonder how much longer it'll live

This is no doubt an opinional matter, but I've never come across a game that has a story that could be considered anything close to gripping. In my case, it's probably because I'm more into literature than games (I probably spend at least ten times more time reading books than I do playing games).

Certainly some modern games I've seen (Mass Effect and Bioshock are two examples), have interesting worlds, but I find myself unable to form any emotional attachment with the characters. Game dialogue is also usually badly written and contrived, and in some cases poorly translated into English. This is one of the reasons I stopped playing RPG games, as they started becoming too dialogue driven, and the poor writing quality turned me right off. I prefer the Darklands/Pool of Radiance era RPGs myself.

To bring this back on topic, the copy protection in those games was much better than DRM as well. It was always physical - for Pool of Radiance, there were two cardboard wheels riveted together, the bottom slightly larger than the top one, with the top one having squares cut out of it. The game would ask you at certain points to match up two of the symbols and tell it which third symbol would appear in a marked square. Many other games would ask you to type in a word from the manual.

Agreed. One of the best pieces we got in this area is Planescape: Torment. If you've never played it, I'd recommend playing it. The descriptions about each character are detailed like a book. You can probably find it on GoG for sure, and I think Steam is selling it as well.

The PC platform is disappearing because of pirates. This makes absolute sense. Other platforms (predominantly consoles) aren't pirated nearly as often as PC and those platforms are thriving. Disputing this would be ridiculous. The technical challenges of developing for PC aren't much different from consoles (indeed, PC SDKs are probably more plentiful and mature). Many of us here have developed games for the PC, whereas far fewer of us have developed games for consoles. Developers have no reason (other than piracy) to wander away from the PC. I guess the "righteous" actions of pirates are a double-edged sword.

I can agree with you to some extent, although there have always been buggy games and I personally haven't noticed a significant change. What I have noticed is that PS3 games are often patched by the time you buy them (even if you buy it close to release) which suggests that they might be shipping an "unfinished" product. You can make the argument that it's a bad thing, but on the other hand it enabled them to ship it faster and also enables them to fix things that slipped by the testers later. I'm not sure there's a problem at all. Buggy or unfun games will suffer in sales as they should, as soon as people who have played them warn all of their friends and the Internetz.

World of Goo is an exception to the rule. It exists in a much smaller market space than GTA or FF. If there was as much competition for WoG as there is for GTA or FF then it wouldn't have been nearly as successful. 2D Boy essentially found themselves a niche market to exploit and they did it well. I hope they find themselves just as successful with their next game, but the truth is that the industry is a gamble for indie developers. One month you're getting by and the next month you've lost everything. Good luck raising a family with that kind of career. I can't speak for 2D Boy, but I bet if you asked them they'd say they've faced many challenges and continue to face challenges every day.

Take, for example, Counter-Strike: Source. The glock and USP have completely different characteristics. Similarly, the MP5 and UMP have completely different characteristics. As a general rule, at modern day levels of complexity, a seemingly minor change on the surface is a lot more complicated under the surface and can have adverse affects on the resulting gameplay.

The same is true of movies and books. The characters are still unique and have their own combinations of qualities and traits that sets them apart and ultimately drives the story differently.

I think that's pretty much what consumers want. It's definitely what I want. Give me a game where I can do all of the things I love in one. There are finite possibilities^[1] for game ideas (or indeed, story ideas). Sooner or later you have to just innovate on what's already been done. If you have completely new ideas I'm sure we'd all love to hear them. Until then, keep giving me improvements on the existing ideas.

I'm sure that nobody of those people who buy their games thinks "it's so unfair, others didn't have to pay for this". I certainly don't care if others pirate stuff while I "have" to buy it.

They most certainly do.
In fact the pirates that I know (of whome I told you earlier) talk so much about the good games that it's free mouth to mouth advertisement for the company. I have bought a lot of stuff(music, movies, some games) because of hearing about it from them (of course I didn't just buy it without reading other reviews first and deciding that it matches my tastes).

So basically, what you're saying is this: People who are poor are not allowed to have fun and rich people should be insanely mad and pissed if the poor people try to get a piece of the fun by making illegit copies.
I think most rich people don't give a rats ass about that (an exception might be the producers of crappy/buggy games who whine about piracy...).

And the poor people are supposed to work/slave their asses off for those who are sitting on the money and who never intend to share their wealth by for example paying reasonable wages or letting those who actually do all the hard work have a part of the profits (this is how the average worker/boss or developer/producer relationship works these days (or maybe it has always been like that)).

However, I don't agree that poor people should be forced to do work that benefits society as a whole. By that logic, we should start putting them in camps... :X (yes, you compare piracy with murder and rape, I take the freedom to compare your ridiculous statement with labor-camps and yes it is madly stupid to make this type of comparison, so I'm apologizing right away but I want you to think about what you're saying when you condemn the poor people to a life of wage-slavery like that).

I completely agree that nothing comes free in life. It's just that those who use money to control others and let them do all the hard work for them don't seem to agree. They seem to think it's ok to push for insane deadlines, pay low wages and avoid ever looking at the real problems or coming up with ways to fix them. If you invest into a creative field like game development by paying others to do the hard creative work, you should bring enough money to be able to fund it until it works flawlessly and is polished as good as it can possibly be.

If you can't bring that much money, drive developers into burnout and into suicidal thoughts, then shoot out bug ridden and crappy software and you still blame piracy for being the reason of YOUR failures, you're just this: stupid. Find a different field for your investments in that case, one that isn't as nebulous and high-risk as basically any creative branch is, one that can generate tried and true revenues from things that people actually need.

I don't think that most people have such aspirations.

One way they could end up contributing is this: They grow up thinking that everything in life is free and that they never should have to work for anything. Then when they're grown ups themselves, their daddies long dead, they end up sitting on that huge pile of money. They never learned the value of work from their own experience, nor do they have any experience themselves because they never had to work... so they go out and find others to do the work, perhaps for games.
They had plenty of time to play games all their life because they didn't have to work to survive, so they might think: Hey I should be making games, I know all about games. They also think: Hey I'm stupid and I can't do anything right so my inherited money is probably gone soon unless I use it to make others create games which will then sell big time and double or triple my money... I'm such a genius and I don't even have to do any work.

So you're saying that some people have to suffer and slave off their whole life for survival, working for others (those who sit on the money), so that the fucked up free market society can continue to (in a weirdly twisted and disfunctional way) work?
And you're also saying that if you're born poor you're supposed to be a slave to the broken system, so that those who were fortunate enough to benefit from it through previous generations achievements can continue to be lazy ass snobs, letting others do the work for them, while they are in control of everything?
(Note: That's an overgeneralization. I know there are good people out there who have money and are not controlling-scheming-money-hungry bastards. People who do care about their workers and who share the profits with them.)

Or are you perhaps suggesting that upon birth each child should be treated independent of their parents wealth, just getting some sort of "Welcome To This World" money to be used for a pick and spade and then be sent away to work in the coal mines until they can afford some luxury (like clothes and sturdy boots for example) for themselves?

Are you blaming piracy for the economic crisis?

Who said that piracy was acceptable? Besides that, a pirated copy of a game does not kill or rape anyone, so it's not comparable.

I've played many many many games in the eighties and nineties and yes many of them were crap or unenjoyable. Also, I had access to all those games(C64 and Amiga era) because of piracy. We were kids, we shared games at school, at home, had copy parties played and shared. None of us had parents who could afford those games for us. I started to buy games for myself in the later Amiga days when I had some money to do so or waited for my birthday and christmas to get a good game that I really wanted to play.

Absolutely. Everybody does have that right but it's not right to blame something else (piracy in this discussion) for your failure when the real reason is that you're stuff just wasn't good enough to be considered worth paying for by anyone. If you need financial safety you go work/invest into a different field and leave the creative work to the enthusiasts who can afford it(or who stay relatively poor while spending their little free time being creative after they slaved off for someone else the whole day just to be able to survive) and who enjoy it regardless of profits (I firmly believe that profit will be a natural consequence if what you're capable of producing is good enough to be accepted by your targetted audience).

Yes, they do not and that's why they shouldn't whine and complain about piracy for being the reason of their failure and instead concentrate on making better and unbroken games that sell.
(Ironically it's often the copy protection system(due to bugs in it) that prevents legit customers from playing the games.)

Maybe but nobody with half a sane and intact braincell can expect us to pay for the things we hate.

Agreed. Still, blame the right reasons (incapable engineers/programmers lack of money and time spent on education/training/research, properly done prototypes, user(player) acceptance tests, bug free subsystems) instead of always coming up with the same lame fake excuse(piracy) for your own shortcomings. (with "you", producers and deadline bugged developers are adressed in that last sentence... the deadline bugged developers can't be blamed as much as the greedy/impatient/technically and creatively clueless buggers that are the producers though)

Yes, and sadly noone expects them to produce good stuff anymore, because they keep fucking up and giving us bug-ridden "experiences" and have shown (for example with gazillions of WWII or StarWars games) that they can't be innovative and creative anymore. Instead of complaining that their sales figures are dropping and blaming it to piracy, maybe they should switch careers or go back to producing some quality stuff and maybe even optimize that stuff so that it doesn't require a costs-an-arm-and-a-leg PC to run.

Many people don't care enough about (todays) games to always have the latest and greatest hardware. If you want to sell stuff with huge profit you're supposed to do market research first. Find out what most people who you expect to buy your games have available as their hardware, then find out what they enjoy and give them that in a working, non-crippled and finished state.

And also, the fact that times have changed and that it is harder to satisfy potential customers in this market now is still no excuse to blame something else for being the fake reason that it is hard to sell games now.

No, nobody did. They also shouldn't be raised as braindead zombie slave sheep to the system though who buy every crap that is shown them, no matter how dumb it is without questioning its value and then made believe that their peers who don't pay for it are evil. It's stuff like that which creates social tension and allows those in control to stay in control. If we're already comparing (software)pirates with murderers and rapists, allow me to compare producers with drug dealers and the software industry with a police state.

It's a game of Divide Et Impera. You seperate them, even better make them hate each other and watch while they're busy fighting each other instead of attacking their real problem, which is you who tries to control every aspect of their life to make/keep you rich and powerful, while you sit back and enjoy life on your lazy ass.
(again, "you" here is directed at our supposed police state heads)

I don't see how this is relevant. In the context of piracy, yes, nobody needs all that stuff and fact is that nobody does indeed play/watch and listen to all the crap they pirate. So it just rots around and the producers are not losing anything because of it, because the pirate isn't even using it without paying but he's just not using it.

Those who can afford it, do pay for it. All the ones I know do that at least, so my observation, based on acquaintances is that 100% of them do.
As stated earlier in this post, sometimes they even get other people to buy their own copy as well who would otherwise probably not even know of the existance of a product.

No to the first one. Agree on the second one. I was merely rephrasing two of your sentences, just replacing a few words to make a point.
My point was that just as you see having luxury goods as supposed to being a highly valued privilege. You should also see that by that same logic, being creative would be a highly valued privilege too and not a right.
Just as a pirate doesn't have a right to complain about buggy software he pirated(and they usually don't, they just forget about it and move on), a vendor doesn't have a right to complain about their stuff not getting bought if it's not good enough to attract potential customers and/or buggy (but they do complain just about how they can't sell their crap and blame piracy for it).

No the ones who are doing the creative work aren't the ones who are running the risk in the producer/developer relationship. The risk is entirely on the producers who are providing the money. Sure they have a right to be pissed if their investment fails to make profit but they should be pissed for the right reasons. Besides, they know that it is always risk to invest in creative endeavours. There simply is no guarantee for anything creative to be successful. It depends a lot on peoples tastes, current fads and other exterior factors which are completely outside of anyones control. It's silly to blame a single phenomenon such as piracy to be the reason for a failed creative project.

It's funny how everyone always claims to be the best example for morale and high ethics, yet everyone also denies others (the so called majority aka everyone else) those qualities.

Could be a hint that those so called popular games are overly hyped and don't live up to the expectations, so the increase in piracy can be easily explained by the hype and all the public exposure, because people usually are the most curious about the things that everyone talks about. But then there is the reality hit when people realize the game isn't at all what the hype suggested and word of this makes the round a lot faster in the age of the internet and everyones ability to freely express their opinion about everything everywhere leads to people not buying it because it obviously sucks.

Correction: Those who can afford it, usually do. Those who can not, don't. I think it is true though that the majority of pirates is composed of those who can not afford it, so it's not surprising if the majority of pirates do not pay for the games they enjoy.

No, if anything (I actually do not see it disappearing) it's disappearing because of hardware becoming more complex and diverse, because people are tired of buying a new 1300 USD PC or 400 USD graphics card every two years and because of games being increasingly rushed to finish and coming out full of bugs and errors which make them unenjoyable.
They are rushed to finish because the production costs have increased, due to the hardware becoming more complex and diverse and the investors are (understandably to some extend) not willing to pump ever more money into unpromising projects.

To lower production costs and to be able to get back to creating quality games in time and on budget, the industry has to come up with real solutions to the problem. For example by standardizing a minimum set of hardware capabilities required for games of generation xyz and also standardizing programming interfaces, so developers can safely rely on/assume the existance of certain features to develop according to those standards.

I could carry on but I'd mostly just be repeating myself (as I seem to already be doing a lot).

It's the factorial interactions of umpteen jillion possible combinations of hardware that's the problem? An Xbox 360 has just so many screen modes, with some standard sound hardware, etc. And no half-done ATI graphic drivers. Also there's a recent problem with a new Nvidia driver shutting down the cooling fans when playing certain games unless you manually set fan speed to 100% in the control panel.

This is getting exhausting because the pro-piracy arguments are based on the opinion that the games suck and aren't selling because of that. I know this to be false, but I clearly can't convince you of that if your mind is closed on the subject. The people I know who pirate do like the games they pirate (it's why they fscking pirate) and they generally don't pay for them, even though they have many luxuries in their lives that they don't need. They do it because they can. Not because the games suck, which is sort of a ridiculous argument.

With that said, I know we aren't going to come to some agreement because pirates and pro-pirates all have their "poor-me/victim" shirts on. I suggest you take the time to read through TweakedGuides.com - PC Game Piracy Examined if you haven't already.

With that, I'll leave you with an update from said guide:

One more time:

QFT.

No, you believe it to be false. There is a difference.

I find this ironic, since from what I've seen, you're the one who closes his mind to hear other people's reasons on this subject.

I haven't played it, but surely the lack of dedicated servers is AWESOME. From what I've heard, everyone that tried it through buying it or pirating it went back to playing modern warfare 1.

QFT.

When you are outnumbered by the people who are arguing against you, you really need to consider who is being close-minded.

I know that I am now repeating myself here, but don't they have to pirate the game first before they can play it and decide they like it? I know that for me, I usually like to play a game before I decide what I think of it.

I think the only "poor me" statement in this thread has been this one: I've always been relatively poor and went through my childhood getting considerably less toys and games than the peers around me

I know I certainly don't pirate because I'm a victim. I can easily afford to pay for games, I just don't as I don't feel the price for them is justified. Well, ok I do sometimes buy them, but not until they get to bargain-bin prices.

I don't buy into most of the righteous arguments for piracy either. I'm pretty sure most people who claim they are taking some sort of moral stand are just trying to make themselves sound good (though no doubt some people really do feel that way). My reasons for piracy are a blend of both the reasons that you and Dennis are claiming people are doing it for. I do think most games suck too much to pay the price they demand for them. If they were going for a reasonable price, I would buy more of them. But I also do pirate them because I can. If I didn't know that I could get away with it without any consequences, I wouldn't. maybe this makes me a bad person, but I don't think so. At least no worse than people who choose to drive fuel-inefficient cars or who drive around wasting fuel for no other reason than they think it makes them look cool, or people who throw reclyclables out with the garbage because they're too lazy to do it properly.

I've never saw such a silly comment.
Give me your source man !

I am pretty sure any console like the DS or the Wii, the playstation 1/2 Xbox will beat the PC when it come to pirated games used.

Ever heard of linkers for DS ?
Ever heard of inserting a microcontroler inside your box ?
Ever took a look at the most downloaded torrent games ?

You really are a noob when it come to video games. I am sure you also never heard of the old twilight compilation, haaaaa, I am nostalgic !

Back in the old country every single game I bought for my PSX was pirated In fact it was easier to buy genuine stuff for the PC than genuine stuff for the consoles, hah. Good old times.

It's only silly because PC gaming isn't dying.

Give me your source man !

I honestly couldn't say either way. It's obviously a lot easier to pirate games for the PC than a console, as there's no hardware adjustments required, but there are probably more console owners out there. Mind you, I suppose it goes by the number of console owners who are willing to risk voiding their warranties/getting booted off online platforms for modifying their consoles.

The servers have gone down for 10 hours already

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98927-Ubisoft-DRM-Authentication-Servers-Go-Down

Ubisoft servers are normally this shitty or someone probably sabotaged them? I call the latter, it seems too convenient after the release of many of their games.

I am a pirate, mind you ;-p

Show me your eye patch and your pirate laugh.

Careful! He'll make you walk the plank.

Done ;-)

{"name":"600671","src":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/a\/aa2a42dd359481ac5256a8adcac1f78c.jpg","w":640,"h":480,"tn":"\/\/djungxnpq2nug.cloudfront.net\/image\/cache\/a\/a\/aa2a42dd359481ac5256a8adcac1f78c"}

To the fact I am a pirate, you should also take in account that I am a French pirate.

Edit: meh , can't embed wma. Just a minute I make it a mp3 ;-) (done)

That explains why you have the handle in your mouth instead of the blade Cheers for the pic, though!

I can see DDOSing being a major problem for this type of DRM... along with the people trying to play Assassin's Creed 2 right now.

Sirocco, if I was having the blade in my mouth, how would you expect me to cut people while using my hands for taking out their intestines ?

Hehe, hillarious Gull, cheers for the pic and the mp3. I won't fight with someone that's able to cut you with a knife without using his hands. Maybe Ubisoft will ask you to be in Assassin's Creed 3, taking place in France.

Hahaha, Gull you are THE PIRATE!

Héhé, thanks you all ^^

Edit:

I admit that I took that idea from Roronoa Zorro, a guy from the manga One Piece.

Ps: I may have made the thread gone off topic...

Don't worry, I was surprised it didn't derail too much after 6 pages.

EDIT: Actually, I pushed you to it

An illustration

Ubisoft claims it was an attack to their servers. Now THEY said it and I don't believe it , their servers must be crappy actually.

The last piece makes me laugh a bit:

Yeaaaah, sure...

Awesome.

RPS said it best:

EDIT:
Part 1:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMfBSq8x2-M
Part 2:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu-Vgi5H3FA
Part 3: (lack of subtitles is on purpose)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUgS24uSFSk

Kitty Kat: nice

GullRaDriel: kudos for a pirate

Slightly related: OnLive launches June 17th.

So the DRM was only a preview of what's to come?

At least through OnLive it won't send you to the menu when your connection drops a bit. Either you'll see one big glitch or nothing at all