At the end of the day, the people who "do stuff" will always have the advantage over the people who "don't do stuff". Pirates are slowly motivating ever increasing levels of DRM and in time, I hate to say it, DRM is going to win. That's because the people motivated to make the DRM work (the people who do stuff) greatly outnumber the motivation of the people who don't do stuff.
One can easily picture a future in 5 years in which the telecoms, the PC makers, the OS makers, and the software makers have teamed up (and you only need any two of them to do so) to eliminate unauthorized usage of a given piece of IP. If you don't think it can be done, then you probably don't have much experience in writing software. The DRM and copy protection of today is piddly 1-party solutions.
The DRM of tomorrow will involve DRM parternships where one piece of protect IP can key itself off another. Thus, if even one item on your system is pirated (whether it be cracked or not) it will get foiled as long as there is one item in the system that you use that isn't cracked (whether it be the OS or something in your hardware or whatever). It will, as a practical matter, make piracy virtually impossible.
Computer games and video will likely be the first two targets because piracy of them is so rampant. A pirated copy of something doesn't mean it's a lost sale. But piracy does cause lost sales. Moreover, it's just incredibly frustrating to see people using the fruits of your labor as if they were somehow entitled to it.
I have long been and continue to be a big proponent of alternative ways to increase sales. I don't like piracy being blamed for the failure of a game because it tends to obscure more relevant issues which prevent us, as an industry, from improving what we do. But at the same time, I don't like pirates trying to rationalize away their behavior because they do cost sales. I've seen people in our forums over the years boldly admit they're pirating our game but that they are willing to buy it if we add X or Y to it -- as if it's a negotiation.
I don't like DRM. But the pirates are ensuring that our future is going to be full of it because at the end of the day, the people who make stuff are going to protect themselves. It's only a question of when and how intensive the DRM will get. And that's something only the pirates can change -- if you're using a pirated piece of software, either stop using it or buy it.
Not really, the topic is still idiocy.
I don't even play trivia games and I know vastly more than needed to just guess that trees outnumber people by a factorial. The estimated tree count as of 2007 was ~8 trillion. Get over it.
And even the disrespect towards copyrights hurts everyone protected by these laws.
Ok, the second part of this is just crap. If I piss on a copy of the local regs, no one gives a shit. If they do give a shit, it's their own fucking problem for being anal. Law, civil law in particular, is not some sacred thing. In most cases, it's a pile of crap written by idiots. This country was founded because of stupid laws pissing people off.
The first part is the summation of my argument. Just replace do with don't. For all you know, someone died today because of something you did or didn't do. Maybe you smiled at a pretty girl, got her distracted, and she was hit by a bus later. Fact is relevant, wishful thinking is irrelevant. You can't prove that internet piracy harms developers. You can't even prove that it costs them profits. All you can do is prove that people who didn't buy the game are still getting to play anyway. Until that changes, the copyright argument is a bunch of whiners trying to force something on the rest of society with no regard for the unintended side effects.
The music industry boomed when Napster was letting people "steal" their music on a massive scale. The logic is simple, it's as close to scientific fact as psychology gets. A person is more likely to purchase something when they have had some level of interaction with it before hand. This is why demo's exist, why songs are played across the airwaves, why samples are given away for new products in stores, why people bother to advertise in the first place. It's not an either or scenario and you're going to have to get over that minor detail if you ever want to be even marginally intelligent in your arguments.
So what gives you the right to write in english? I think you should have to come up with your own language, since the fact that it's been around for centuries and achieved saturation long ago is irrelevant.
You think in this little box that says "someone owns this because they say so" and completely ignore reality. The only reason someone owns Elvis' music is because that someone and a few other someones bribed a bunch of congressmen with the money they were making off of their copyright holdings they had nothing to do with creating in the first place. Copyright is arbitrary.
Could is not would. Could is could.
I could go buy a lottery ticket tomorrow, hit the jackpot, become a millionaire overnight, and buy a thousand games by Christmas. I could start shitting gold bricks instead, that's probably more likely. Would you guess that the odds are perhaps against either situation? My Christmas budget is looking to be about $400 to spread around my relatives, I can probably afford to make another purchase this year for myself without adding difficulty to my shopping task. Even if I go scrooge and send them coal instead, at max I'd buy around 10 games.
Reality is that I will make no more game purchases this year. It's not a maybe, it doesn't hinge on the availability of the products, there's nothing significantly attractive enough to make me tighten my budgetary constraints. If, tomorrow, I get a thousand games off the internet, who have I harmed? No lost sales, not even potential lost sales. Someone in return for nothing, with niether intent nor ability to procure it by other means regardless of the alternative. The worst case scenario for the game developer in such a case is that none of the games I take interest me enough to go out and buy them.
[quote]As if something forces you to buy their products...and if you cannot resist pirating it instead you should rather go to some therapy since you are obviously addicted.[quote]
Congratulations, you just wiped out copyright enforcement. Targetted discrimination against a mental illness violates anti-discrimination laws!
Logic and fact do not support the claim that piracy is harming the industry, shoving a stick up my ass does however. I've already blacklisted two game companies for giving me shit, and I'll buy Sony music when hell freezes over.
Exactly, piracy has potential for harm. As does every activity one does. You could kill yourself sitting up in the morning, break a clot loose and give yourself a heart attack. Going jogging to avoid the heart attack could burst a defective blood vessel in your brain. You could kill a whole bunch of people by driving a car and having an accident through no fault of your own. Will you get up and go about your life tomorrow morning? Potentially, thousands of people will be depressed by this paragraph and end their own lives in despair!
Potential is what kids have before they go through public school. Prove it.
You mean the item that I manufacture and distribute myself yet magically belongs to someone else because they bought an expiring copyright and bribed people to change the laws for them later? Yeah, it sucks, but you're not as dumb as bodyless so you might figure this out eventually.
Or maybe they deserve a straight jacket?
A matter of scale. $20 for a 40 year old movie, that, by original intent, should be public domain available for anyone to reproduce and costs cents to recreate, is an obscenity. With the original intent, we'd have remastered versions of Star Wars that don't have stupid horse shit like Han Solo waiting for the bounty hunter to shoot first. Competing remastered versions, the remastered copy would be copyrighted after all.
The potential effect of piracy is always being dragged about despite the evidence that says otherwise, yet the potential effect of copyright laws are irrelevant and have no bearing. Is that about right?
Oddly enough, that's exactly the case, I boycott companies that piss me off. Weird huh?
That last sentence of yours is just perfect. Think about it a while, you should be able to figure it out.
Maybe you could try to make some valid point instead of just throwing insults around. I know you hate a lot of people but that is no morale justification.
Even if there is only a small probability that someone who pirated the software would have buyed it otherwise with the number of illegal downloads there will be most certainly be an amount of lost sales. At least there is no way to prove that they didnt lost any profit either.
Also that "whiners" may just get pissed by pirates and stop producing at all. Good luck finding new games then, games with a budget to make all those shiny new technologies.
It new to me that the music industry boomed when napster was created.
Anyway, its a special case if you bought something after first pirating it. But not the general rule.
Ok maybe i should have written: "Because its someone else property". Good nitpicking.
Are we discusing paranoid conspiracy theories now?
No matter how low the probability is, the will be lost sales.
Again, special cases do not prove anything.
If that was discrimination then you would already go to jail for insults made in this forums.
Nonsense comparison. You can stop pirating without any risk. But not getting up at morning will likely make you starve.
Wow i didnt knew that you could read the mind of george lucas.
Evidence? What evidence?
"boycott is just as good a protest as pirating" means that "boycott is just as good a protest as pirating" not "boycott is just as good as pirating". Think about it a while.
I think what he meant was the converse: pirating is as good a protest as a boycott. It's not, but that's that your statement implied.
phychoak's argument is not that piracy doesn't cost a (relative) few sales, it's that piracy increases sales (by the preview factor) more than the sales it costs. Hell, he may even be right - I haven't seen numbers I trust one way or the other. I'm not even sure it's possible to get reasonably definite numbers on that - like in quantum mechanics, observing the event can influence the outcome.
He does discount the value of the bargin bin, though. Just because a person's not willing to pay full retail for a new release doesn't mean they won't pick it up 6 months later at discount - and it's still a lost sale.
Maybe you could not get your panties in a bunch? I may throw insults, but you choosing to be ignorant does not make my points invalid. Accept that you're less intelligent than you think and life will get a lot easier.
Are we saying congress is honest now? You can't possibly be that gullible, how often do they get censured by themselves for improprieties? They're as bought and paid for as it gets, the lot of them are crooked. Read this.
The industry comes out and says they lost a million sales to piracy on this or that game! It's terrible, the world is coming to an end! Then they do a study and come up with a number, 20%. Wait, so only 20% are lost sales? Well, that million just dropped to 200,000. It's all crap. They made it up, pure and simple.
20% of the download attempts on a torrent is probably close to the actual number of unique successful downloads. That might even be how they came up with the number, I read that particular study and all it does is reference internal estimates by the industry. I've gone through more than that just looking for a torrent that had a decent seeder ratio trying to watch a tv show I missed. Out of those, the numbers are not going to be anywhere near 20%. How do we know this? The studies that say 20% are flat out lying. This is a study that actually shows their numbers and how they got them. Now, what would you feel safe betting that less than one out of a thousand people who pirated first bought later?
I don't bury my head in the sand and pretend reality doesn't exist. The money to purchase the pirated materials doesn't exist in most cases. The drive to purchase the pirated materials doesn't exist in most cases. Anecdotal evidence supports this, statistics support this, facts discovered in every case ever brought to trial by the RIAA support this. My own urge to sample thousands of music cd's by downloading them off the internet in a vain attempt to find something interesting supports this. I could download them, but I can't afford them, and I haven't bought any in years despite my self control. Not once have I seen a study actually show anything even resembling the claims. They are always making absurd claims, such as every copy downloaded is a lost sale. You might as well argue that gay men cause piracy by buying too many clothes.
If I jump off a roof and hit the ground, is that a special case too? I tell you what, you find just one pirate that will claim he'd pay $50 for every one of the thousands of games he pirated if he just didn't have the internet, and I'll stop listing one absurd example after another that disproves the claims that downloads are lost sales.
No, they don't have a cyberbullying law in Oklahoma yet. You really suck at making absurd statements.
Tell that to the two thousand pound lardasses that haven't gotten out of bed in a decade. Have you no grasp of reality? There is risk in every single insignificant action taken. When risk is inconsequential, you ignore it. This is what the media industries fail to grasp. The actual negative effects of piracy are inconsequential, the actual negative effects of DRM are less inconsequential. The actual positive effects of piracy are inconsequential to some degree they refuse to investigate.
There's this thing, it's called a brain. You should get one. One does not make a shoot first, ask questions later scoundrel of a character that fights unfairly and takes the easy way out of a mess, and then rework him later to be some honorable moron that waits for the other guy to shoot. It looked like shit, played like shit, was entirely out of character, and a simple product of Lucas taking a massive overdose of stupid pills. That fucktard change screws his whole character up, it's shit.
RIAA trials showing that 12 year olds with no money stole thousands of dollars worth of merchandise they'd other wise have... um... wait, they don't have any money? The ten fold sales increases on the few games that have actually remained unbroken, like Rainbow Six:Lockdown!(what game was that?) Oh right, I forgot... No one knows what game that is because no one bought it! Their own studies that refute themselves, like the one I linked above where they guy is doing real time tracking of the sales and piracy statistics to see where they go.
Do you read anything besides game forums?
I told you to think about it a while because I knew it would take a while to get it. You obviously didn't.
It's a wonderfully dull saturday afternoon, so I might as well explain this one too. Switch the first and last word. Minus the engrish, it comes out to this; Pirating is just as good a protest as boycotting. Get it?
I know it's hard, but you need to stop worrying about making the fleas too hot and work that brain anyway. If you're too stupid to actually think this through, you wouldn't be capable of posting, so it's either laziness or willfull idiocy.
Well, quite a thread we have here.
Unfourtanetly I think piracy will always be one step ahead of DRM in the long run. Not throwing numbers here, just putting my 22 years of gaming as an example.
Today's games have been hurt by piracy and DRM, yet I dare say DRM does more harm than good. I kept hearing about how great Bioshock is for instance the other day, and I saw on the back of the box for the PC version about how it requires an Internet connection to activate. I promptly put the box back and passed. I don't trust online activation games since the Mass Effect fiasco (Where you had to activate your legitimate copy every 10 days). Same thing with Dead Space. I saw the Internet requirement and promptly bought it for PS3, then at least I don't have to deal with the joke that is DRM. Some of you may say different about the DRM or how it's changed, I don't care, that's not the point.
The point is that when DRM gets too intrusive, it no longer bears interest to the developer, because it makes me, the legit customer, not buy it out of the simple notion that I just don't want to deal with the prostate exam that is DRM these days. I don't like the idea of someone probing my computer to check and make sure I'm not a criminal. I have enough anal exams for my computer that are called 'Viruses' and 'Trojans,' I don't need a legitimate coporation that makes millions of dollars a year examining me to make sure I did pay in upwards of 50+ dollars. That's to me invasion of privacy and a sign that the company distrusts its own customers, I don't care how you word it.
The thing that pisses me off most about DRM is split into two main points. One, companies like EA could completely DRM-free their software and still make more money off of them than most developers do. Two, especially this, companies that spend all that time, energy, money, and profits could be using all that power to patching and updating the game before release. "We have 43 known bugs for X game. Should we fix it? No, we have to make sure that the DRM is implemented so that the pirates don't steal our software, even though it gets cracked in a few days time anyway!" Why put all that effort into a project that can and will be cracked in a short time? I know you want to protect your software but come on, eventually you're going to hash it so that only a government organization can unlock it, and where will your sales be then? People will retaliate and just not buy the game. The simple fact is that I sympathize with companies like Ironclad and Stardock, because their game gets stolen, who's doesn't, but they're in the business in where they're screwed either way; there's just no easy way out of the situation.
Just a note: that was the proposed DRM scheme on MEPC. But they got rid of that even before release due to the backlash when it was announced.
Don't get me wrong, I hate this type of DRM as much as you do and have boycotted MEPC, Red Alert 3, Dead Space, Far Cry2, and Spore because of it (I was burned by BioShock as I didn't know about the DRM when I bought it). I pretty much agree with everything you've said, but just wanted to point out the MEPC didn't have the recurring phone home every 10 days scheme on it. Of course, the DRM the did implement was every bit as bad (on-line activation and only 3 total activations allowed).
Lol of course everyone who repeated to not agree with you is ignorant.
No i didnt. But the US arent the only nation with copyright law either.
I dont like that they are blaming piracy for every commercial failure. But obviously lost sales by piracy exist according to what ypu have written.
I never said that every pirated copy is a lost sale. But only a few lost sales are enough to prove that piracy does *some* damage. Try to dispove that.
Does that mean that i hardly make any absurd statements?
Anyway, you do not need "cyberbullying" laws for insults to be illegal. Such laws exists and dont depend on the medium by which the insult was made.
Just because you cannot afford what you stole does not make the stealing legal.
It still means the same: if you want to protest you can aswell boycott it legally without pirating it illegally. And if you want the industry to respect the law you should better do that yourself.
If you used your brain you you should be able to prove it. But no, you just insult again which looks like that you jsut made the statement because you tried to make an argument and there is nothing beheind it.
"There is risk in every single insignificant action taken" including not getting out of the bed. But what risk is in not pirating a game? Maybe getting bored but risking lost lsales of others instead means egoism.
And before we continue to make more quotetastic posts try to prove that no copyright system would be better than any current one. Else you will certainly come to the conclusion that outlawing piracy is still the better option than making the gaming industry dependent purely on the honest of the consumers or on steam like DRM systems. And that supporting the copyright law actually has benefits.
Anyone ever follow the Taiwanese computer gaming scene? In the 90s, they had ALOT of good singler player CRPGs. However, as piracy in Taiwan and China reached critical heights, developers realized that no matter what DRM they used, they just can't keep up with the professional pirates. So, they switched to making on-line MMORPGs that require you to buy time and always connect to the companies' servers.
So now days, the Taiwanese domestic computer gaming market is 90% on-line MMORPGs and 10% big ticket sequels that will sell enough to make a profit in spite of rampant piracy. Regrettably, this kills any domestic innovation in new computer RPGS for single players as well as any single player computer games.
That's what piracy does in the real world. Software companies got to make money to pay their bills, just like the rest of us. If priacy makes the market untenable, they'll switch to another market where piracy isn't an issue. I'd rather have so type of workable DRMs instead of seeing U.S. computer games go the way of Taiwan.
Circular reasoning, it's illegal thus it's bad, it's bad, thus it's illegal. If you can't use your brain even to watch Star Wars and work through that absurd hatchet job of a butchered scene, you're truly beyond hope. Lucas himself, the fucking idiot, has even stated that he wanted to "soften" his character. That way the original trilogy fits better with the retarded emo crap 1-3 movies.
My parting shot. Billions are spent on advertising every year, internet piracy is free of charge. Pretend you won, I'm done bothering.
Dark, that's a substantially different case. Commercial piracy in a country where copyright doesn't exist is an entirely different animal.
It takes one click to pirate. Or a lengthy process of purchasing and dealing with copy protection and lotsa other issues. This isnt even a contest. Im not approving what pirates are doing, but you cant blame them either. They only use common sense, and not throw money away. Yes it hurts software devs, but change the above scheme. People are willing to pay, and console games sales are showing it. But ppl are not willing to throw money away, and thats the key issue.
Btw restricting duplicating legal software is very easy, you just have to build in some hardware checks, like in consoles, again. But the point is - hardware makers are not interested in that kind of thing. Less software, less hardware sold, less profit for them. Thats a very simple equation. Why do you think Steve Jobs is for DRM-free music. cause he sells ipods! More music more ipods sold. Actual pirates have nothing to do with that again.
sorry for doublepost.
Becuase his agressive pro-DRM push failed miserably, so now he claims to be the opposite.
The thing is, if a new way to stop pirates is invented, a new way to circumvent that protection will be created by the pirates. SecuROM was suppose to end all piracy, instead pirates just take out the SecuROM. Every format used today(DVD, Blu Ray, HD DVD) was all advertised as uncrackable. Well that didn't last very long, did it? Calling something uncrackable is like putting a million dollar bounty on cracking it. All of a sudden all the hackers try to see who can crack it first.
The sad thing is, Pirates will always get what they want, no matter what. Developers are just gonna have to learn to live with it and do what Stardock did; If you can prove you bought the game, you get extra bonuses(patches)
Picracy will be in every medium we come across, but where the sales occur are where great games and movies are made. Ok, once again, not throwing sources or numbers, but remember Halo 2 when it was pirated months before its release? It's still one of the top selling games out there, because it's a good game. I'm pretty neutral on Halo myself, it's ok, but its sales figures are worth noting even though it was pirated before it came out. Must've been worth buying, because the sales were through the roof. Plus, games ruined by piracy don't make sequels. Halo 3? Nah, must've been imagining it. That was pirated too and still sold well.
Sins has absolutely no protection on the disc and look how many it sold. Quality games pay off for both the dev and consumer. Good game, means game is bought. Pirates are always going to be there, and you'll always get a 12 year old kid who downloaded a game just because he could. I have known people who downloaded so much crap from everywhere, and they don't even use it. Movies, music, games, they don't download it to use it, they download it to, well, just say they could. I don't understand that, but whatever.
People on this fourm are right, people are willing to buy games, look at console sales, but it needs to be worth buying. I bought sins because it was less than 50 bucks. Now that's a deal compared to these 60 dollar games nowadays. What a joke. See, this is part of the reason people pirate games, because they're so expensive. Don't give me the 'but they're expensive because it was expensive to make LOL!' speech. Sins came out for 40 bucks brand new, and they must be making money, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this.
Companies want to make more money with their games? Here's a secret from the consumer, free of charge: Sell your games at a lower price, that way more people will buy them, hence the money revenue goes up. I don't have a degree in business, but I've worked in retail for enough years to know that's how it works.
Thats totally not true. There are many working and not cracked protections fully operational as of today. Look at satellite receivers card protections. Look at consoles. Yes they can be cracked, and some of them are, but the amount of piracy is minimal cause its hard to do. The only thing which is needed for PC games is hardware makers playing along. But they are not interested, it causes less profit. Simple as cake.
Piracy is only a problem if people make it a problem, over hyping your game and plugging your game full of DRM isn't gonna protect your game, All drm does is challenge pirates, you build a wall and some ass hole is gonna wanna tear it down. Seriously, many successful games don't have heavy copy protection and you don't hear them whining constantly about piracy.
Just make a good game and let people play it. Look at spore, they threw on bucket loads of DRM, over hyped the game and didn't actually make a good game and its probably the most pirated game in history. Yet even though it was pirated alot I bet Egotistical Arseholes (EA) made shit loads of money off it.
For me, it's all about the preview factor. If a game has a demo available, I'll download it to try it out. If not, I'll find a "free" copy and try it out. If the game is good (IMHO), then I ALWAYS buy a copy. I want to support the things I feel are worthwhile, but please give me a demo. If the game sucks, then I don't feel bad about the copy, and toss it in the digital trash.
My bottom line thinking, is that great games will attract gamers and their money!
If the text I quoted wasn't a justification for piracy, then it didn't really address the stuff you quoted before it.
If it was a justification for piracy, then that means that piracy is justified as a protest for DRM. That would mean that not buying a game and instead downloading it is a more effective protest than not buying the game (piracy being just as effective as boycotting would mean that the justification for piracy must come from somewhere else). That would mean that downloading the game does affect the company, which goes against what you have said earlier.
This deals mainly in morality, where it is impossible to make any arguement or statement without contradictimg yourself.
I am no robin hood. On occasion, I steal, lie and cheat for no purpose noble. The arguments put forth by pirates in this thread are embarrassing. the problem with the theft of a creative work is that you are not stealing a physical product, but rather the potential for an experience. a computer game and a song are not far removed. if you hear the song on the radio, or play the game at your friends house, the expierience is limited and subsidized. the radio and your friend have both payed money to have access to the expierience. if you borrow a cd (music or game, take your pick) from said friend, you are in theory deparving them of the expireience of it's use.
to me the grey zone occurs when something like youtube comes along. when someone uploads a song whos only vidoe is a picture of the cover of the album (ex, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBbyITzbKh8), does it fall under the radio category because you cannot distrubute the media, or the CD, because you can listen to it whenever you please? if it is CD, then I have just engaged in an act of mass piracy, and ifit is radio, I just engaged in an act of piracy because I distributed it to you, who would presumeably not have access to this experience. whoops.
that being said, I do delibertly pirate some things, or seek freeware alternatives. I have a pirated copy of Alcohol 120% because it makes me laugh. I have a pirated copy of Vampire THe Masquerades Bloodlines, which I have not seen in a store for over a year. I visit Abandonware sites. For me, piracy is a means to acquire things I would not otherwise be able to find. except for the copy of Alcohol, which I keep for irony's sake. I love how stardock treats its customers, and disprove of Luckmann abusing their hospitality.
Im not saying its easy. But thats not a user problem, really. Console protection doens always work. You can install Linux on xbox.. xbox360 is cracked too.. nonetheless it is hard to pirate, so people dont bother. Viaccess still isnt cracked in like 4 years. Computer hardware.. there are only 2 companies who are responsible for 99% computers in the world. Namely AMD and Intel. They dont change. And thats less than in console market ironically.
The only reason consoles don't get pirated as much is that the games for them all suck, once more and more dev teams run away like lil pussies with their tails between their legs we'll see a substantial increase in piracy.
News flash, people: console games DO get pirated. In the Philippines, the only reason the PS and the Xbox sell at all is because pirated game are available - otherwise they would be high-end luxury items with very low volume.
That doesn't mean that legit games don't sell here, but they cater to a different market altogether. I stand by what I say because I see it everyday in practice. When you make a good game, people will want to buy it legit, even at a small premium compared to the pirated version, just for the prestige of owning a legit copy and in gratitude for making such a great game - they're essentially paying you to make more.
I've known people who bought several copies of legit games to give around to people they know have pirated copies, just because the game was that good, their friends couldn't afford it, and they wanted the devs to make money.
It goes without question that some form of copyright encourages the production of creative work, but the current form the US uses doesn't seem to be doing only that, it's implemented unevenly on an international level, and it serves to further the goals of the powerful more than the good of the people in certain circumstances. It's no longer purely for the encouragement of creative work - in fact, the latter is practically just a side-effect.
For the record, Taiwan and South Korea have some of the best software support and MMORPGs in the world. Yes, that's because copyright laws are a joke around here, but that doesn't then mean that you can't generate a quality expereince on a computer game. Heck, some Koreans have to be reminded to eat so that they stay alive - that's how good these games are.
In the current situation, I don't believe that the philosophy behind DRM is correct. There is a way that works, but no one believes it or listens to it.
You HAVE to make DRM according to the following principles. If you do, they will work:
1. It has to be invisible to the user, and not take up residence. He should be able to use the intellectual product in similar manners as a book or physical CD copy, because that's the standard people expect.
2. It has to NEVER inconvenience a legit user. A 1 in a million problem caused by DRM is unacceptable. If you have to weaken it to ensure a lower incidence of problems, do so.
3. It does not have to have 100% operation against pirated games. A 25% incidence of causing pirated copies significant problems is enough. The aim is not to shut down pirated copies. The aim is to make pirated copies unreliable enough that it becomes a significant economic price - enough to discourage people from getting it.
That's it. Ironically, current DRMs are ass-end backwards. Pirated copies run better and have less problems whereas legit copies get issues. This is a failure on so epic a level that it borders on Shakeperean comedy. If you want DRM to work, it's got to do the EXACT OPPOSITE THING that it's currently doing.
Here's another look at the Asian market for PC games:
As far as I know, Asian game developers are the only developers in the world to offer MMOPRG software for free. In fact, a substantial number of Asian games can be played ALSO FOR FREE. When your system software is free for everyone, it can't be pirated. Simple and effective. In fact, you WANT pirates to host your software platform on their servers so you can approach as close to 100% gamer saturation as possible.
So how do you make money?
Well, there's pay-to-play, but that approach is so old school, and still prone to the delivery of widespread cracks and hacks. The new wave involve games that are completely free to play - no costs. But you get product placement of sponsored company products in-game. You also usually will need to pay real money for virtual items - better swords, guns, clothes and such. You can still play the core experience for free, but the premiums cost, and the companies make money.
In our local LAN shop, WOW is hardly ever played. It's not considered an entertaining enough venue.
Imagine this: what if, just speculating, Galactic Civilizations 2, DA, and ToA were all made available for free? Wouldn't that be awesome?
Yes, but how would Brad pay the bills? He would include a basic package of ship styles in the game reminiscent of Star Trek and Star Wars. Or perhaps he creates technologies that recall Nokia or Honda products. Aside from that, he puts up other ship styles for download at $3 apiece. Sure, fans could make their own styles, but frankly, there aren't that many out there that are any good. He could sweeten the deal by including custom parts with each sale - suited to each style.
He can sell additional races, tech trees, mods, and scenarios individually, while distributing the exact same content the game already has for free. Yes, it would entail more work, but this is fundamentall different: it's the add-ons that generate the income, so income generation is continuous so long as the game remains fresh and interesting. Heck, he can even sell custom robots for the tech screen, custom interface looks and adjustments - those wouldn't take a long time to code and he would still make a ton of money by leeching you dry of a few bucks here and there. Before you know it, you've spent over a hundred dollars on the game over just a year, but you'd be happy because you have a great game, and you'd customized it so it reflects your tastes and personality - the Starbucks of galatic conquest.
If it comes to it, he can even sell the actual expansions for a small fraction of the price - say, $10 for each expansion. You want a modified spy system? Yours for $3. Worth it, right? So cheap. Spankin new weapons with spankin new animation? $3. Worth it, right?
If Brad's platform game is popular enough with the gaming crowd and he delivers and reports on a large enough fan base, he can now approach Lucas with a proposition: I have market penetration. I will sell you a campaign-version of Clone Wars, to be hosted on my site, for less advertising dollars than nationwide billboards - and your market will be playing it everyday until your movie debuts!
That's practically an irresistable offer! You WILL have primetime attention glued to your product advertisement for weeks, and underground publicity like no one's business. You can even hold tournaments based on the mod to generate even more publicity.
Then Brad can turn around and offer the very same campaign to us for $3 a download, and we'd bite, of course, since it's so cheap. Money on both ends.
If I boycott a company for writing clauses into their games that give them a legel right to steal from me, would returning the favor be wrong or justice?
Do explain how pirating instead of just boycotting harms them. Yet another victimless act, the flaw in the piracy argument.
There's hope after all!
It's simple economics, everything has a cost, and most of them aren't monetary. If I can get something for free and feel like shit for doing it, I haven't actually gotten something for free have I? Thus the doom they invite on themselves by pissing me off. Oh look, no more guilt. Pirating EA would be like getting paid at this point.
Asian copyright collapsed because Asians didn't give a shit about it. Commercial piracy only thrives when the population accepts it, it would never fly here because we'd shut it down. They haven't convinced themselves of the use yet, when they do it will be a fringe activity. Us dumbfuck westerners on the other hand are trying really hard to get rid of it by pissing everyone off. The RIAA and MPAA have pissed so many people off they might as well be handing out flyers telling people where to get the stuff.
They're like the assholes that fuck with wild animals, and then bitch about getting fed through a tube when they get their face ripped off. What they should be doing is treating it like advertising. It's a couple cents a viewer for a thirty second tv spot. At a 1/1000 rate of sales loss, even the full price for a new game only breaks down to 5 cents a person.
Too boring. Now pointing out that he personally fits his own statement by being "special" and not proving anything, that would be fun. I've gone way past my quota of asshole comments in this thread though. I'm trying to stick to obvious ones at this point, calling the little vomit factory retarded in a way he wont be able to figure out is just too cruel. Then he'll just spew the same shit out again regardless, and I'll want to nuke his whole country all over again to make sure he doesn't breed. That and cut Lucas' balls off for raping his creation.
Also, the consoles are all cracked. So are the Satellite recievers. They update continuously trying to stay ahead of the curve these days. Occasionally one of the providers will screw up and fry some of their own chips with an intentionally damaging attack meant to target modified recievers. It's fucking hilarious.
If you've ever heard of a little game called dwarf fortress, then you know the power of free games.
Toady_one the dev of Dwarf fortress makes so much money off of donations that he was able to quit is day job.
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