Beat The Pirates At Your Own Game

By Rob Fahey Published 2 March, 2008

GI.biz Editorial: Move beyond crippling anti-piracy measures.

Published as part of our sister-site GamesIndustry.biz' widely-read weekly newsletter, the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial offers analysis of one of the issues weighing on the minds of the people at the top of the games business. It appears on Eurogamer after it goes out to GI.biz newsletter subscribers.

In over a decade of writing about the videogames industry, I've noticed two questions that never seem to go away. The first, most recently resurrected only a couple of weeks ago, is: "Is PC gaming dying?" That one's an easy question - the answer is always "No", although the reasons for that answer do change from time to time.

The second question, which is somewhat related, is harder. It's a question that's never been far from the lips of the industry's top executives: "What are we going to do about piracy?"

One of the PC's top developers, Chris Taylor, has a fine idea in this regard. He talks about "secure" PC gaming, a new model where games need to be in contact with a server in order to work, as being the ultimate solution to the piracy problem. He sees the old model, where games are simply bought on a disc and run on a home PC, rapidly becoming obsolete, replaced with a system where games are either played on a server or authenticated via a server, thus cutting pirated copies out of the loop.

It's not actually a new idea, by any means. PC games have been authenticating their serial codes with central servers for years, after all, and the entire massively multiplayer market is a testament to the potential of having games which rely entirely on a client-server connection for their functionality. What Taylor seems to be suggesting, though, is a wholesale move to a secure model where every game is, in essence, a "thin" client on the user's PC, incapable of playing the game by itself, and a server to which it must connect in order to function properly.

Jolly Roger

Piracy is, of course, a huge challenge for the industry. It's most prevalent on the PC, but the PS2 (still a thriving platform) experiences widespread piracy, as do the PSP, the Nintendo DS and the Wii. Only the Xbox 360 and the PS3 have for the most part avoided the unwelcome attentions of software pirates.

Moreover, on most of those platforms, the commonly trumpeted concept of organised criminal gangs being behind piracy is simply false. While counterfeit PS2 and Wii games certainly make their way out into the market from relatively organised groups, especially in Asia, the vast bulk of piracy comes from people downloading CD, DVD, UMD and ROM images from the Internet. This kind of individual piracy creates no profits for anyone, and certainly funds no human trafficking, terrorism, drug dealing or any of the other horrors which anti-piracy efforts have tried to connect to it - to general derision from the public.

The response from the videogames industry to piracy has, thus far, been utterly asinine. Not, of course, that videogames should be singled out here - the music and movie businesses, too, have done their fair share of asinine things in the last five to ten years as they desperately struggle to understand the changes which internet piracy is causing to their market. Only the music business, which has been struck hardest by online, user-driven piracy, has begun to learn its lesson and adapt its business intelligently. It remains to be seen whether movies and games are condemned to repeat the same costly mistakes, or whether they can learn from their sibling industry and avoid the traps.

The core of the response of both games and movies (although our focus here is on games, obviously) to internet piracy - the response which leads me, with absolute confidence, to describe these efforts as being asinine - is to treat their legitimate users as though they were criminals. Almost every single effort which has been made by these industries to protect their products has had the result of inconveniencing, frustrating and disenfranchising honest, paying customers.

From installing nasty spyware software on the computers of users, to preventing them from copying legitimately purchased media onto portable players, through to forcing customers who have made the switch to digital, hard-drive-based media systems to buy legacy physical products for no good reason, the media businesses have treated their customers despicably in recent years. The damning result of this idiocy is that customers who pirate their products, downloading them for free, actually get a better user experience than those who pay for them. Even eliminating cost entirely from the equation, pirated media goods are better quality, more user-friendly and less restrictive than their legal, commercial equivalents.

The games business fares no better than any other. Pirate games on the PC could be played without the original CD in the drive; come to think of it, they worked on every CD and DVD drive, not just the ones that were compatible with the hideous proprietary "anti-copying" systems that were en vogue for PC games for many years. They didn't automatically assume that anyone with CD-burning software installed was a criminal for wanting to send a CD-ROM of photos to their granny.

Nowadays, pirates are even more sophisticated - which, like it or not, boils down to fixing the broken functionality of many other devices. Despite having a Memory Stick slot perfectly capable of playing games with smaller load times and better battery life than UMD titles, Sony won't let you download any PSP game you like and play it from Memory Stick. The pirates will. The DS won't let you download titles and stick multiple games on a memory card to avoid carrying around a sack of carts with you, but DS pirate devices like the infamous R4 will. Xbox and PlayStation 2 consoles didn't let you install your games to the hard drive for fast load times and fast access - the pirates did. The Wii won't let you play games from other global regions, but pirates have no such qualms.

Coming Storm

To describe this as a mounting crisis would be an understatement. In the hope of protecting its business from pirates, the industry has angered, frustrated and annoyed its legitimate consumers - just like Sony Music did when it installed a spyware "rootkit" on its audio CDs, or like countless movie companies have done by subjecting customers to awful, unskippable preaching about piracy at the beginning of every DVD or cinema screening they watch (despite the fact that they've paid to see the movie, and if they had pirated it, that offensive prattle wouldn't be there).

There will always be a core of people who can't or won't pay for things, and who will go to incredible lengths and inconvenience themselves awfully just in order to get stuff for free. However, it's a stupid and useless dogma to claim that all piracy happens because of that impulse. The reality is that when pirates are offering a better user experience than you are, your business model is broken - and rather than punishing your loyal customers, or whinging to national governments in the hope that they'll cover your backside with unpopular, civil liberties-infringing legislation, you need to fix your business model. Or find a new job.

The music business has learned this. We've come in a short space of years from the Sony rootkit debacle to a situation where restrictive, consumer-punishing DRM is being lifted from music downloads. Finally, the music business is offering a better user experience than the pirates - iTunes and its ilk are a more user-friendly, pleasant way to browse and search for music online than any pirate site, with faster downloads, and (in some cases - iTunes still lags behind here) good cross-compatibility between any devices you happen to own. Lo and behold, consumers aren't actually against paying reasonable prices for music - they're just against having to go out and buy CDs with spyware on them, or having to download tracks that are crippled, locked up and liable to be unplayable as soon as the company you bought them from goes bust.

How long will it take videogames to learn the same lesson? Chris Taylor's suggestion, at least, suggests that there's an understanding in some quarters about how the business models of the industry need to change. One part of his proposal is correct - games which depend on server-side interactions are a great solution to piracy. World of Warcraft and its ilk are the models for this; you're essentially turning your game from a product into a service, charging users for access to your servers on an ongoing basis rather than worrying about an up-front fee for the product. More and more games which follow this model will actually encourage "piracy" of their client - they'll give it away for free, and if it ends up on BitTorrent, then that's less bandwidth costs for the publisher.

However, companies need to be incredibly careful about implementing this. If your game has a major server-side component (like World of Warcraft), then turning it into a server-reliant game makes sense and will be accepted by consumers. If, on the other hand, you take what is essentially a single-player game and try to turn it into a service, or to tie it into an online server model, then that's nothing more than an extension of the old, broken and stupid copy-protection ideas the industry already uses.

Are you going to tell someone who brings a laptop on a flight that he can't play his new RTS game's single-player campaign because he can't connect to your server from the plane? I should certainly hope not, because it's fairly easy to tell what will happen as soon as his plane lands - he'll go online and find a pirate version of the game that won't treat him like a criminal, or a wayward child who needs to be kept on a short leash. Let's not pretend, either, that requiring server authentication or even keeping chunks of code on the server will prevent piracy - there will always be ways around such protection, and the pirates will always find them. Technological solutions to piracy have never worked in the long or even the medium term.

It's a bitter pill for some executives to swallow, but the only way forward in the fight against piracy is going to be to treat customers like adults, and to assume that they are honourable and honest. The music business, to its surprise, is discovering that when you stop treating users like criminals, they stop acting like criminals. Let's hope videogames can learn that lesson without having to go through the revenue-crippling ordeal music has experienced in the past decade.

For more views on the industry and to keep up to date with news relevant to the games business, read GamesIndustry.biz. You can sign up to the newsletter and receive the GamesIndustry.biz Editorial directly each Thursday afternoon.

Picture of Rob.

About Rob Fahey

Read more articles from Rob by visiting the Rob Fahey archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (116) Latest comment 4 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Cyclone #1 4 years ago

    Here, here. A well written article. I remember reading an interesting point in a games magazine a few years ago. It noted the correspondence between level of piracy and popularity of the system. Take the first Playstation for instance. It had a massive install base, with a similarly massive amount of piracy. The Xbox too, was renowned for being easily modified to play pirated games. While you could argue that the massive install base led to the massive amounts of piracy instead of vice versa, you can't deny that in some cases this ease of piracy did help increase their popularity.

    I'm not saying that piracy is a good thing (it's not). But even those customers (the die hard pirates) who buy a platform specifically because of its ease with piracy will eventually buy some legal software, putting money into the pockets of developers. Money they would not have had otherwise.

    As Rob says, the main reason for piracy for some customers is that the pirated versions of games give a better user experience. No authentication, no spyware, no rootkits. If the ease of use for legitimate games was increased, with the ease of obtaining pirated games decreased customers would gravitate more to the real versions. As far as I can see the best way to combat piracy would be to make it more irritating. Say Johnny Punter spends the guts of a day or 2 downloading a pirated copy of Battlefield 2, only to discover that the file itself is a dud; not spyware, or a phone home program but simply a waste of disk space. He's obviously not going to be thrilled. If the same thing happens to him a few times he'll eventually decide that this whole bit torrent thing the lads were telling him about is a waste of time. The hard core piracy crowd would find ways around this (rating files, etc.) but Johnny Punter would be entirely oblivious to that sort of thing.

    I remember back in the day that a friend of a friend spent a few days downloading the Matrix Reloaded over a 56kps modem. When he finally got the full thing off he pressed play. Everything was apparently fine. For the first 2 minutes; the rest of the film apparently was blank. Maybe it was simply corrupted, but I'm guessing that guy didn't bother trying to download too many films for a while after that.
    Edited by 2 at 02/03/08 @ 06:32

  • DoKtoR #2 4 years ago

    Argh me mateys! Lets sail the seven seas, there be a plundering to be had! Argh!

    Oh yeah, and I agree with what he said...
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 06:38

  • captain-future #3 4 years ago

    Nice article... although I'd like to see more solution than "just have to validate my copy of the game online"... how about making games smaller and cheaper?

    I absolutely agree that the industry treats its customers like criminals, although I have a modchip in my PS2 (an example!) I only use it to play legit imported games. Sony has learnt this and PS3 games are region-code free. NICE.
    BUT you can't ship PlayStation branded products from Play-Asia.com to Europe... WTF? So essentially Sony is screwing you, again.

    And Nintendo Wii isn't even region-code free... there's always the mod-less solution to buy FreeLoader but when will the next firmware update render this software obsolete.

    --

    Yes, I know many people use modchips for other reasons...homebrew for example is OK... but not pirating games - people, you've got to understand that you ruin the game makers. I know, I know, just because I'm an idealist and really buy all my stuff I'm an idiot? NO! I buy my games mostly months after release, and seldomly pay more than 1/2 of the original price, that's fine with me and I can only play so many games a year anyways.

    And let's not forget that the industry is lying about the numbers they "lose money to piracy"... I don't believe the numbers, so stay sceptic in that direction too.

    Again: If you got a pirated copy of game "for preview" and you actually like the game, at least have the decency to buy a retail copy... PROBLEM SOLVED! And dear publishers, please make all your games REGION-FREE and fuck-the-hell-off with stupid copy-protection mechanisms - they only cost a lot of money and don't work AND alienate customers - I've heard from a lot of people the bought a retail-version that was just awful to install etc.etc. and then they downloaded a cracked version just to run it from the HDD or whatever (just like described in the EG article).
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 07:04

  • nailerr #4 4 years ago



    Good write-up, sir. Although nothing new really explored.

    As life long gamer, once I had the means to support my passion with my own earned money I found that for one I became more critical of the product I was playing but I was (and am) fully willing to pay for it. Support what you love, when you can.

    I know enough people who still pirate their games but could pay for them, and they can claim no love for the medium; I also know people who would pay for their games if they possibly could but are struggling to stay alive in general. I'll not judge them. I'm lucky to be earning enough to support such a costly hobby on-top of every day life costs.
    Also let no one forget in EU we are wallet-raped at every opportunity which is something else that needs to be fixed if we are to stem piracy in general.

    Piracy however I hope is never eliminated completely simply because so many people get their start as skilled programmers by learning to crack software - those people often go on to use their skills for the enjoyment of all. On top of this it is only the threat of losing money that forces the industry on the whole to advance, and provide us with the means we desire to enjoy digital products.

    Ain't all bad.

  • teccrom #5 4 years ago

    "Only the Xbox 360 and the PS3 have for the most part avoided the unwelcome attentions of software pirates."
    Obviously you have never been to China, where pirated 360 games are widely available for less than 1 euro per disc.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 07:49

  • disso #6 4 years ago

    I wish Rob had made it more clear that Chris Taylor's idea completely sucks for single player games. Yes it's nice that he goes beyond the usual platitudes about how piracy is bad and don't do it and we're going to sic the lawyers on you, and instead explicitly recognizes that the business model is wrong and must change. But this online authentication/thin client idea, as Rob points out, completely sucks (for single player games). What's worse, it isn't a new idea, it's been done before in quite a few different ways, they all sucked and every time there is a matching public outcry about it. So, if this is going to be the next big thing (and clearly this is not a finished proposal, and I don't expect it to be implemented industry wide anyway) don't expect me to uninstall my bittorrent client.

    What nailerr points out is interesting as well on a more general level: closing off code and hardware against hacking is a really bad idea, first of all because it never works, secondly because the industry needs hackers. If we really were to arrive at a situation where people can only learn to code through certified programs, licensed schools and on certified hardware, all games would be written by people who are at heart accountants, and not the creative bunch of loonies who occasionally throw out a gem like we currently enjoy.

  • php_penguin #7 4 years ago

    very well written *claps*

    The only thing is that if companies make the game reliant on a server, then presumably the servers will have a limited lifespan - they won't ever make the game playable for the next 10 years, let alone 80.

    However, they can't merely abandon an old game, and so will probably release a patch to make it stop relying on the non-existant server - possibly as an auto-download from the server (ie a kill switch). This would mean the games have a built-in "stop treating the player like a crim" switch, and it really wouldn't be very long at all that some clever spark will make a program which triggers this prematurely.

    If one system is compromised, the publisher will move to another system, and once again the idiots are in an arms race they cannot win.

    This idea is bad for legitimate customers (as said) and it contains in itself the reason for it to escalate. Certainly, trying to make people pay for your games is good, but this is not a solution.

  • cjb110 #8 4 years ago

    Great and well written article.

  • mrharvest #9 4 years ago

    "Sony won't let you download any PSP game you like and play it from Memory Stick. The pirates will."

    Not pirates. Hackers. The two should never be confused. It's exactly what the media industries are trying to make you think.

  • lewiep #10 4 years ago

    Nicely written article.

    I just wrote a blog post discussing some similar things, like what type of things we as gamers, consumers and customers can do to prevent the doom and gloom predictions that people like Christ Taylor have been making for the PC games industry.

    So I hear PC gaming is dead - What can I do?

  • Ryuken #11 4 years ago

    I am also concerned about the secure server suggestion. Not only does it fail to be a reasonable alternative for singleplayer but it might also affect other features. Look at the removal of LAN play in Hellgate London, that was a real disgrace (especially since Diablo II on LAN is one of the best games ever).

    Also, if publishers decide to put in decent manuals and fluff into boxes instead of just the DVD and a keycode (what's the difference with downloading a pirated copy and a keygen huh?) then people might be more willing to give the legal copy a try. And no, Collector's Editions don't count, what you see in certain CE's today was standardfare eight years ago in PC games (until the wretched DVD plastic boxes came out).

  • Melan #12 4 years ago

    Today bought games are often to much of a hazzle. Hearing the dvd humming away (even though you made a full install), and the inconvinience to find the disk and put it in. It really takes some of the fun away from pc-gaming.

    Why dont the industry offer a "press and play" experience. Gaming without the damm cd/dvd. An extra plus is that when you buy a game you can be almost certain its virus/trojan free, which is not the case for pirated software.

    isnt that a selling point. Clean easy gaming. Install - play.

    I think galactic civ did that ??

  • shadaik #13 4 years ago

    "Not pirates. Hackers. The two should never be confused. It's exactly what the media industries are trying to make you think."
    Na, more like pirating hackers. It certainly is piracy, done by hackers. Which makes them pirates, too.

  • _Jamie #14 4 years ago

    Fake files wouldn't work. It only takes a few downloaders and a quick look at the comments to see whether or not it's real.

  • _Jamie #15 4 years ago

    'Today bought games are often to much of a hazzle. Hearing the dvd humming away (even though you made a full install), and the inconvinience to find the disk and put it in. It really takes some of the fun away from pc-gaming.'

    That's a rubbish reason to pirate. No DVD cracks can easily get past that, doesn't mean you can't buy the software too.

  • Schiraman #16 4 years ago

    Great article.

    And I think the success of Stardock really shows exactly how much point there is in adding copy-protection to your games - i.e. none whatsoever. Here's hoping their common sense spreads to the competition...

  • nailerr #17 4 years ago

    Mr Harvest has a good point too, although in this case sir you mean CRACKERS, and that should never be confused with Hackers. These people are cracking software and firmware.

    ;)

  • WrongShui #18 4 years ago

    Stardock and GalCiv2 are how things should be done.

  • Setaro #19 4 years ago

    Yeah, Stardock's approach is miles ahead of other companies. Bear in mind it would only work for PCs/360, something with a hard drive.

    Stardock simply release a game (GalCiv2) with ZERO copy protection. They then proceed to support said game with tons of regularly released content, mod tools, balance fixes etc, for which you require a authentic CD key and connection to Stardock's client based patching thing whose name i can't recall.

  • node #20 4 years ago

    You speak for us all. I think Bioshock got it half right - hold back some of the key game content (like the usually-small executable file) which you then have to download on release. Sure, it eventually got cracked, but not before it was on shelves which is when games sales are hit hardest. Shame they haven't removed the copy protection in the mean time as promised. I love id and Epic for doing that, without fail, a month or two after their game is out.

    Steam also gets it half right, and is wonderful when it works. However the "offline mode" is complete and utterly frustrating, badly designed worthless trash as any laptop or LAN party gamer will tell you. And yes, Stardock are bloody fantastic in their approach and an example to the entire industry.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 11:24

  • brainbird #21 4 years ago

    Excellent article.
    It basically boils down to "stop fucking your customers". Which should be common sense.

  • bad09 #22 4 years ago

    An excellent article which mirrors my view on piracy 100%. The sad truth is these music/movie/games companies offer very a bad deal compared to pirates. Sure piracy is illegal and people do know that but, as you say, people do get a better functioning product and for when it's for free it's hard to compete.

    Unfortunately, big business care about getting as much profit as poss rather than offer a great service at a good price which is why they alienate consumers with DRM and cry to governments to control our net use, like some police state.

    A good example of this I used the other day, Sky anytime. A great little download service with movies/sport and TV for a couple of quid per download and if you subscribe to Sky TV you get a lot for free. Not a bad service but you can only use it on one computer, you can't transfer to disk or portable device. Yet if I wanted to I could easily get a copy free of restrictions AND for free. And they really wonder why piracy is on the up?

    They need to compete with the pirates, if they offer a reasonably priced product without time/product/DRM restrictions people WILL pay for it. Just stop being so bloody greedy with the prices the way you have in retail prices for CD/DVD/games etc. We all know they huge amounts of money these people make out of us, TV networks, advertising etc.

    But of course as always there will be a minority who will never (or can't) pay. There has ALWAYS been black markets that's life but instead of ships the pirates now have computers. Argh!

  • Machetazo #23 4 years ago

    The lead goal ought to be to encourage a "A legitimate sale, that supports the scene" rather than encouraging the alternative, which is wholly undesirable. If that means permitting an import channel, then so be it. If some people importing would remove some of the pirate customer base, you'd think more platform holders would be encouraging that. Additionally, you'd have a situation where all the buzz of say, the US launch could be used to sell product.

    Come on, now! How much buzz EVER is made for a European release, compared to US...By the time games apologetically appear here, they're largely forgotten about, both in terms of advertising, and in some extent, anticipation. Usually the game sells less. If the Europeans could have bought and played the game when the hype machine were at its peak, how many more copies might be sold? Certainly important, in the way that so many games now feature greater emphasis on the multiplayer: outside of "heavy hitters" good luck sustaining a Europe-only community, to play against, now that US interest has waned...

    I think it's time the industry as a whole, readdressed their policies with regard to regions and importing. Things have clearly changed, and some platform holders have been slow to react, and take best advantage.
    Edited by 3 at 02/03/08 @ 12:37

  • paketep #24 4 years ago

    Wonderful article.

    Sins of a Solar Empire, a rather niche game, just sold 250,000 copies with NO PROTECTION. That blows any excuse about harassing customers with DRMs, and shows that any GOOD game will sell well (as opposed to UT3, CliffyB!).

    Also, any new game is cracked in 1-7 days. Assassin's Creed is already out and cracked. Protection is useless.

    I totally stopped buying games with StarForce. It crippled a burner in my machine and I decided it was enough.

    Valve is closest to the desired model: easy to buy, easy to play. Just two caveats: prices (did they notice that 1€ > 1.5$?) and the server validation. What if I want to play with my laptop and I forgot to mark Offline?.

    I hope that all those companies using ANY kind of DRM change or die a horrible horrible death. They've been treating us as thieves for too long.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 12:28

  • kestral #25 4 years ago

    Why not just make it that in order to download a game update you have to register with the publisher. Then in order to get to the update you need to know the user / pass and any serial can only be used once, but because of the logon once logged in downloaded several times. Server side monitoring can see that a certain login is used too much (say 20 times to download the same update) and then block the account until telephone support has unblocked it..

    Move the security from the game to the update. Noone likes playing a game when the update fixes things / improves performance / removes cd-check (if you make the 1.0 game have the cd-check and remove it with the first update - available from launch - then there's minimal hassle, especially if the same logon can be used across games)

  • Mr_Dodger #26 4 years ago

    I concur with the majority here - very good article which mirrors my own argument (though more articulately) precisely :)

  • Dragul #27 4 years ago

    Great article, really enjoyed reading it.

  • mrharvest #28 4 years ago

    "although in this case sir you mean CRACKERS, and that should never be confused with Hackers."
    Absolutely. They should never be confused. Hackers do hacks to make life better. Crackers break things for their own profit. And go nice with brie.

    At least any self-respecting hacker would object to being called a cracker, even if he occasionally does some necessary cracking to make things better.

  • BrokenSymmetry #29 4 years ago

    I have to go against the grain here, and say that I don't think this was a good article at all. All it says that current anti-piracy measures are bad. OK, but what about developers who have given years of their live to create a game, and then see the majority of people play it without paying? Don't developers and publishers have a right to defend their intellectual property?

    The article only gives the faintest hint of any solutions to the issue, and the proposed solution of making single-player games artificially have a validated online component has always proven to be very unpopular as well. Making the game completely free, and relying on voluntary payments may work for niche games, but so far has not been proven to be a long-term sustainable model. So this all seems to be a no-win situation for game developers and publishers, and we should have sympathy with these guys, and encourage them in all ways possible, instead of complaining loudly when they try to protect what they have worked years for to create.

  • Browser404 #30 4 years ago

    I just read "Beat The Pirates At Your Own Game" and I have to say thank you for being so sensible about a number of things and giving them the publicity that's long overdue. However with the proverbial brown nosing out of the way, that's deserved in this case, I have to have a quick rant about "Beat The Pirates At Your Own Game", some aspects of which are rather important especially if you plan on ever doing a followup or similar article.


    Firstly, Chris Taylor's idea, though there's nothing new about it in any way, has already been bypassed by pirates in a number of cases with Valve's Steam as a close example.

    He's simply taken an old idea to combat piracy, that's already failed, and wants to make it an even bigger pain for customers while further limiting the consumer base. For example, virtually all content will have to be loaded via the internet which begs the question what will people do during the loading screens. To oversimplify it, if anyone hates waiting to load over 500MB from a hard drive imaging loading it from the internet, download that while imagining you're staring at a loading screen, now imagine you have dial-up. All this bandwidth will also dramatically raise the cost of gaming without anything new to show for it, resulting in fewer customers. The problems for everyone with this method are gargantuan. The pirates of course will find a way around it, the data will have to be on the users PC at some point and simply stored for later use/distribution.

    Also does anyone have any idea how many game customers do not have internet access at home, this is a lenghy debate on it's own and no accurate numbers can't exist until a door-to-door census is done of every residence with electricity. Furthermore what of those that simply don't like the idea of companies being able to suddenly make their legitimate purchase useless at any time (as Valve has done), I have every Steam title I want and none of them require Steam or any activation (or anything other than installation), no thanks to Valve.

    It's not hard to conclude that "his" idea (Chris Taylor) has been thought of by most people trying to combat piracy though they have had enough sense to dismiss it before it reaches their lips. Some people really do need to have some sense literally knocked into them, and others reprimanded for giving something so ridiculous publicity, let alone positive publicity, without pointing out the obvious pitfalls. Note W.O.W is pirated and played on other servers.

    The bottom line is, piracy can only be beaten by making something easily obtainable, user friendly and affordable enough so people won't bother pirating it. Absolutely nothing else is able to stop it.


    Quote "Finally, the music business is offering a better user experience than the pirates - iTunes and its ilk are a more user-friendly, pleasant way to browse and search for music online than any pirate site, with faster downloads" End Quote - They aren't and never will, simply because it doesn't get any easier than "Save As..." without any risk, certainly none of revealing credit card numbers or something you don't want to, there isn't even so much as an advert or age verification to annoy you. Also, no offence, but you clearly don't have any idea of the bandwidth available to pirates or their skills, especially when it comes to something as simple as designing an efficient user friendly site. That statement you made is unfortunately very naive.

    Calling a rootkit a "rootkit" is irresponsible, as it is an actually term and they can be as insidious as any virus only more surreptitious. Referring to it as a "rootkit" with the quotation marks could make that seem contested or unfounded to those that don't know about it.


  • Krun #31 4 years ago

    I see the best defense against piracy is the social one. The companies now use their great media platform to paint people who use pirate copies as cheapskate losers, that other people find repulsive. This I think will have the best success.

    As a child I remember coping my friends spectrum games on Tape so i could play them. Now I'm an adult and can afford to buy my games, I'd feel like scum to steal them and see others who do so as people to scorn. So the media has worked, I hate people who pirate stuff, even though i did it while I was a kid.

  • Nithron #32 4 years ago

    I think anyone saying that new, stronger copy protection and screwing with download services(Online authentication and fake files, respectively) is missing the point entirely.

    The current problem is that the user experience of buying a game is just shite, due to copy protection, and expensive, also partially due to copy protection, so your solution is to make it even worse, then try and make the experience of pirating the game even worse, so that in fact you're just pissing everybody off, and still hoping people will shell out £40 for your products?

    No. The answer is not to make legitimate customers feel even more like criminals by shoving more arbitrary copy protection down their necks, the answer is to treat them fairly by producing region-free games, not restricting their import in any way, let people do what they want with the console they just paid you £300 for, not encumber it with expensive measures designed purely to control the end-user, and consequently lower your prices because you're no longer spending ridiculous amounts of money on copy protection that does not work.

    I mean, can you imagine if you bought a sofa, only to find that you couldn't sit on said sofa until you whacked a network jack into it and let it connect to DFS to make sure it wasn't stolen, then have to insert your receipt into a specially designed sofa-slot every time you wanted to use it, just in case you lent it to someone else?
    Oh, and heaven forbid you let someone from another country sit on it. What do you think this is, a region free peice of upholstery?
    Edited by 2 at 02/03/08 @ 14:00

  • dirigiblebill #33 4 years ago

    I concur to an extent with BrokenSymmetry. Exploitative or wrong-headed business practices notwithstanding, piracy is still theft mmm-kay, and theft doesn't suddenly become justifiable just because you'd rather not wait for something to install, or because you dislike logging into a server when you play single player games. The article comes close to promoting the idea that pirates are simply mistreated consumers seeking value for money, which is far from the case.

    This caveat aside, I agree with the argument that a reliance on legislation or user controls to beat piracy is counter-productive. Whether there are sensible alternatives to these measures is another debate entirely, of course.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 16:23

  • Grayvern #34 4 years ago

    A very sensible article, especially considering the amount of people who but a new PC and keep the old one to surf the net while keeping their new one pristine.

    As well as this im going to use the same old tired example eryone else does and thats Gallactic Civilisations 2.

  • Cylinder #35 4 years ago

    Hopefully over the next few years we'll see a greater number of titles being released on Steam. It seems to be the the only service that massively cuts piracy, while at the same time providing a better user experience than any pirate copy ever could.

  • murphy245 #36 4 years ago

    piracy cannot be stopped.

  • dryden555 #37 4 years ago

    This article, like many others on this issue, misses the point entirely. Pirating will become less popular when its easier to buy the game at a REASONABLE retail price, than go thru the not-insignificant process of downloading, un-raring, loading and booting a pirated game (this issue definately applies to pirating on all systems). It also bears mentioning that Oblivion for PC had no copy protection of any sort yet it sold retail in tons. Hence, take the copy protections off and sell games for no more than 30 USD bucks. There will be always be fringe pirates of course, but the average consumer wont pirate if the price is reasonable and the game works without fuss out of the box. 60 bucks USD for a game -- not reasonable.

  • LazyDan #38 4 years ago

    No no no no NO. The server-authentication-for-all model is NOT a fine idea. Yes internet connections are abundant these days, but that doesn't mean to say there aren't times where people are left without connections for whatever reason. And when the internet's down, what else can a nerd do to while away the hours? Play a game! Except, oh no none of the games you've bought can be played because it won't go online.

    Absolute failure of an idea. People will go for whatever is most convenient for them - the answer to piracy is the industry not being so greedy and charging £40-50 for a game, improving the speed, usability and ease of downloadable games, and removing restrictions like the CD needing to be in to play and silly things like not being able to play if you can't go online to authenticate.

  • Veracity #39 4 years ago

    Yet another +1, good piece. Although it's pretty much a polemic, if you're going to throw around fairly inflammatory statements like '[publishers are installing] nasty spyware' I think you ought to cite specific examples - otherwise, you're somewhat open to dismissal on the grounds you're just mirroring the human trafficking/international terrorism FUDmongers, albeit less outrageously. Though I can also see you don't want to get sued, and 'nasty spyware' is sufficiently open to interpretation that if you go specifically naming, say, Wild Tangent, they might get rather cross.

    Echoing others' sentiments, Stardock has proved that costly, intrusive DRM can be dropped altogether without leading to overnight bankruptcy. Apart from a couple of products purchased from them and the occasional game with an important server-side component, I don't remember when I last installed a game without immediately cracking it just as a matter of course - I don't even look to see what DRM it uses any more, since experience has shown the risk of malware infection from third party cracks is utterly insignificant set against the more convenient user experience they all but invariably offer.

    You touch briefly on the relationship between piracy/hacking and the import market, but don't much acknowledge imports as another thing to which manufacturers and publishers have often been quite strongly opposed. They're all over the global market when it entails outsourcing manufacturing to China and code drudgery to India, but let their customers attempt to reap some similar benefits from insane region pricing and release schedule disparities, and they shut down Lik-Sang and prevent play-asia shipping to Europe by sending in the heavies to inform them they're next if they don't shape up. This seems to be relaxing somewhat now, and gi.biz might've covered it some time when I wasn't paying attention, but maybe worth a follow-up article?

    On pricing: game prices have undershot inflation more often than not for years. I'm thoroughly bored with entitlement-orientated muppets bewailing the 'greed' of an industry allegedly over-charging for products that routinely fail to break even at their current price points. Sure, charging less might make for enough more sales to be worthwhile, and the industry could probably do with some navel-gazing regarding the wisdom of its enormous development budgets. There are multiple ways things could change for the better with regard to prices, but I don't think it's remotely fair to publishers to oversimplify to the extent you're accusing them of simple gouging.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 16:02

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #40 4 years ago

    "piracy is still theft"

    No it fucking isn't, you illiterate halfwit. If you're going to join in with the adults' conversation, at least have half a clue what you're talking about.

    Excellent article, by the way. Nice to see everyone else finally catching up with what I've been writing for the last decade.

  • dirigiblebill #41 4 years ago

    Always nice to rub shoulders with coherent, sympathetic members of the press, Rev. Care to elaborate?

  • SniperZoz #42 4 years ago

    Good article ... altho' pirates are one thing and hackers are another ... there's a lot of value to be had on an open system - something which hackers have made possible on the PSP ... like emulators for old systems, youtube ... the list is infinite really! I think ppl want 2 things - open systems (homebrew) something which always helps ppl embrace the hardware, and cheaper games! I know that games are becoming increasingly expensive to make - some compare them to movies ... but would you pay £39.99 to go to the cinema ?! I think not!
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 17:35

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #43 4 years ago

    http://worldofstuart.excellentcontent.co...

  • dirigiblebill #44 4 years ago

    The only way you can turn your infringement of my copyright into a criminal offence is if you start selling this article to people for money. But then you're not guilty of the crime of theft, you're guilty of trading standards offences, and it's the trading standards people who will come after you.

    In ethical terms, I would still call this theft. In legal terms, I take your point. It's just a shame you were unable to communicate it without waving your dick around like it's the property of Jesus H. Christ.

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #45 4 years ago

    *shrug*

    After 20 years of listening to idiots spouting the same old crap, my patience is long gone. If you don't want to be shouted at, don't be stupid and wrong.

  • dirigiblebill #46 4 years ago

    As we appear to agree that trading standards offences are reprehensible (while quibbling over the terminology) it seems I am not wrong.

    Might I suggest you spend the next twenty years working out how to contribute to a debate without behaving like a spoilt brat?

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #47 4 years ago

    No, you might not. Fuck off.

  • mukki #48 4 years ago

    very good write up,

    totally agree with your points
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 18:38

  • dirigiblebill #49 4 years ago

    Fair enough. You too.

  • Sickb0y77 #50 4 years ago

    Great article.

    Surely the problem is that people have no concept of reality.

    "oh, they charge £40 for a game!, that's why I pirate games..."

    NO. Either buy a game, for real money, or be a grown up and admit to pirating games because you simply don't want to pay for them. The justifications for pirating are such bollocks. I can't afford a porsche - should I steal one, because the purchase price is simply too expensive??
    If you don't have the money, then you can't play it. If you decide to download a cracked copy, don't bleat on that it's because you simply can't stand the ethics behind a copy protection system If you are that precious about your personal security - don't use a fucking computer.
    Get a fucking grip. Every week I read about games publishers going bust. The reason is because so many people steal their products. And in turn, this raises the retail price, and the amount lost on production.
    Admit it for what it is: Theft. I've done it, for no other reason than I wanted a free game. It's bad, it's wrong, and it pushes businesses into bankrupcy - but have the courage of your convictions, and the stones, to admit it.

  • Nithron #51 4 years ago

    Sickboy: It aint theft if i'm not taking anything from anybody.
    Let's say I, hypothetically, cannot afford Gears of War. I copy Gears of War instead of not playing it at all. I get a game, and nobody loses profits because I would not have bought it.
    Who loses in this scenario? I suppose Baby Jesus might cry because i've violated some universal law of ethics that you apparently adhere to, but in material terms, nobody has lost anything and so there is no theft.

    If I copy it instead of buying it because i'm a tightwad then you could argue that reduces profits and therefore is a form of theft and, either way, is fairly morally dubious. I agree with you in that instance, but not all piracy fits into that narrow margin.

    Also, telling people to grow up, then proceeding to spout off your ridiculously infantile black and white view of right and wrong is fairly absurd.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 19:24

  • Sickb0y77 #52 4 years ago

    No.

    You are still using a product developed by a company. The very fact you are playing the game, means you are using a product, without having paid for it - sorry, but your argument is moribund - that is theft.

    Sorry to sound like a grandad - but it is true - if you download and play it, without having paid for it - you are stealing it. simple.

    "nobody has lost anything and so there is no theft"

    They have. If someone wants to play 'Bioshock' then they have to pay for it. If someone is playing it, without having paid for it, then that is a lost sale, a theft.

    Don't call me childish if your counter-arguments are so simplistically flawed.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 19:43

  • Katsumoto #53 4 years ago

    I'm afraid, at least in England, he's right. It's not theft.

    Section 1, subsection 1, Theft Act 1968 - A person is guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 22:51

  • Sickb0y77 #54 4 years ago

    You'll probably find the law has been updated since 1968 - intellectual property, and copyright violations aside - there is an implicit trade agreement between the producer/creator of a product, and the user.

    Semantics aside - if you download it off of BitTorrent - then you are nicking it, aren't you? That's the only point I'm trying to make - people seem to try to find every excuse to justify it, rather than simply admitting it.
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 19:52

  • Katsumoto #55 4 years ago

    Heh, you're right there are a lot of new IP related crimes, but the basic fact is it's not theft - the Theft Act from 1968 remains good law. It is illegal in many ways, but it isn't theft :)

    /law student

  • Katsumoto #56 4 years ago

    RE: your edit: Oh yeah don't get the idea i'm NOT trying to justify it, i'm just arguing legally because i'm doing a law course and am an arsehole :) It's twatterius maximus, but it TECHNICALLY isn't theft. :)
    Edited by 2 at 02/03/08 @ 19:56

  • Sickb0y77 #57 4 years ago

    You are right,

    It's just the excuses, or reasons that some people give for copying games are, technically, utter bollocks :)

  • Katsumoto #58 4 years ago

    Lol, yup i'm with you there 100%. There aren't really any valid excuses, unless terrorists have taken your family hostage and are going to kill them unless you download torrents of House M.D. series 3 and Quake 4. I think that's justifiable.

  • scratzin #59 4 years ago

    Very good article!

  • dryden555 #60 4 years ago

    Companies want to tell you pirates are criminals and thieves but that's not the real story is it? Its actually Timmy down the street with a broadband connection and someone told him about how to use DiskMagic 2.0. Game content is shrinking, prices went up, and many "average" consumers started looking at how they could find and use pirated versions. Bring the prices down to earth and Timmy wont bother with the hassle of using pirated versions. Again. many folks here are missing the point. Consumers will buy games at retail if the price is _reasonable_.

  • Commodore75 #61 4 years ago

    Things hurting the gaming scene:
    (in no perticular order, and all "IMO";)
    * People who think its a good idea to treat customers like thier worst enemy. (I'm not limiting this to Nintendo of Europe.)
    I'm tired of buying ridiculous amounts of games only to be treated like a criminal who should be gratefull they the dev/pulisher have granted me this opportunity to play thier (sometimes bug-ridden/broken) game.
    I have moved away from PC gaming because of this. (Only PC game I've baught in 2008 is the Heroes of Might & Magic Complete Edition box at reduced price.)
    But I've also noticed that I've cut down on my console game purchases. Mainly because I feel bitter and taken advantage of by the entire industry...
    (I still game about as much as before, which to me means that I haven't lost my faith in gaming.:))

    * People who insist on engaging in Piracy-discussions and claim that [piracy=theft]. If we can't have an intelligent discussion about it, don't expect us to reach any intelligent conclusions. (We should be happy if we even reach a "Piracy is bad"-consensus while these 'tards are involved.

    * People who just don't want to pay (semi-)large sums of money up front.
    But don't mind paying for a 24Mbit connection that could be replaced with a much cheaper 8Mbit connection if they didn't "need" to download all those .iso-files and .rar-libraries. (Since all they do otherwise is read e-mails and browse facebook.)
    And who don't mind wasting time looking for a good d/l of the movie/game/CD. (Time has a value to some people. One would hope most people found thier time to be of value...)
    I'm not taking about people who can't afford the games. I'm talking about the people who want to feel smart and clever for figuring out a way around having to pay for the product/service. (These are the people who regurarily get take to the cleaners but feel good about it because they think they got a good deal.)

    * People who think artificial regions are a good idea. Language barriers can do the job, if you really feel it's needed.
    Most of us don't want to wait a couple of months for that three page pamflet in Swedish. The game is still in English/Spanish so who cares about your awfull translation from English to Swedish. (Yeah, I'm from Sweden so I'll use that as an example. It's not only UK:ers who are tired of waiting for the localization.)
    I ended up importing a NA NGC because I was tired of how Nintendo of Europe would handle (read "delay";) the European releases of games. And peripheral, but once I had figured out how to import a console and the games, then the other HW was just as easy. Only cheaper.
    Trying to make it illegal to import stuff is simply a bad idea. Trying to make it inconvenient simply prvoes that you are a greedy doushbag.
    But I guess as long as people want it... (I never figured out why eveyone thought it was such a great idea with Blue-Ray, it's not like it's going to be the same as with DVDs.)

    * People who just want to be able that they have seen the movie, heard the CD, played the game. I'm talking about the people who don't mind watching a movie on a low-rez "shot with my mobile phone" version of the latest USA movies, just as long as they can say "Yeah, I'v seen it". "Luckily" for them, early releases of games to the warez scene usually don't suffer from the problem of lower quality that the movies have. But either way, these aren't the enthusiasts. These are just the people who wan't to be able to say that they have played the game, and how cool/crappy it was. They would be happy with just the first and last act/chapter/mission in the game, and probably wouldn't notice that the rest was missing. They'd probably just be happy that it didn't take so much time to get through.
    Now these people would probably not pay for the games, if that was thier only option, so in that sense they don't cost the industry much money (directly) but they do help keep the warez/piracy scene alive. And in some cases spread the word.

  • Commodore75 #62 4 years ago

    P.S. Rev. Stuart Campbell, thanks for the link.
    Though it's a pitty people can't make it to the last two sentences...

  • Nithron #63 4 years ago

    Sickboy: Your argument is flawless, as long as the company in question is being deprived of a sale. If someone plays a copied game instead of not playing it at all, then no sale has been lost. Therefore, nobody is losing anything.

    Granted, it's illegal. However, laws change, and illegal does not equal wrong.

  • Waffleaber #64 4 years ago

    Good article. First thing I did when I bought Medieval Total War 2 and Football Manager was download a No-CD crack just for convienience sake.

    I also remember when my mate bought half life 2 only to find steam needed internet access download install files so he had to cart his pc round mine in order to activate it, inconvienient to say the least.

    Oh and Nintendo you best have read this, i don't want to chip my wii but if you don't announce a Smash Bros date soon I swear to God...

  • Krun #65 4 years ago

    Nithron you cannot use that "instead of not playing it at all" argument in court. Why? Because then we can ALL claim that we had no intention to buy the things we want. The Fact that you have a pirate copy shows you want it, therefore you would buy, but CHOOSE not to. QED you Stole it.

    And stealing someones work IS wrong. I'm an artist and if you copy my work your a scumbag.If everyone lived like pirates it would spell the end to all things creative. Maybe you want to live in a dull grey world with no entertainment,art, films, music or games?
    Edited by 1 at 02/03/08 @ 23:14

  • dryden555 #66 4 years ago

    Piracy is a problem that needs fixing, granted, but saying "its against the law" is truly utterly 100% pointless. And naive. These piracy laws are made by corporations and the average consumer is NOT going to jail for breaking these "laws." If you buy games on ethical principle, then corporations have trained you well.

  • YourMessageHere #67 4 years ago

    If Hollywood can make movies that cost ten times more than even the costliest game to make, then sell them on DVD at half or less of the price of most games, and sustain this business model, something needs doing about the game industry.

    Also, can we simply acknowledge that piracy is bad, irrespective of whether it's technically stealing or not? That's spectacularly beside the point.

  • php_penguin #68 4 years ago

    I can't afford a porsche - should I steal one, because the purchase price is simply too expensive

    This is an incorrect analogy - pirating a game is not theft because the game still exists and is saleable, whereas stealing the porsche stops it being sold.

    Pirating is equivalent to making a 1:1 copy of the porsche (including badges) - if you did this you would not get arrested, fined, sued, or anything - this would only happen if you then attempted to sell the vehicle and claimed it to be a Porsche.

    If I like a game, I will buy it - however, I have on occasion downloaded a "pirate" version when there is no demo available - if the game is any good, I will willingly hand over the very reasonable asking price. Considering the amount of entertainment a game provides a would be happy to pay up to £60 for it (with the usual price drops after release), but then again I am quite well of atm.

    The fact at the moment is that the pros and cons of a legitimate game are unbalanced:
    PROS
    - garuanteed to work
    - garuanteed to continue to work after patches
    - that is actually it... basically "peace of mind"
    CONS
    - costs money (which I agree with, but it's still a con)
    - often requires online activation to work
    - often includes restrictive DRM
    - provides a poor user experience due to the oft-used line : "manual included as PDF on disc"

    If the games companies stopped arseing about with DRM and online activation, and included a decent set of paperwork/manuals with the games, I would be even more inclined to buy a game which I am unsure of.

  • php_penguin #69 4 years ago

    If everyone lived like pirates it would spell the end to all things creative. Maybe you want to live in a dull grey world with no entertainment,art, films, music or games?

    simply untrue - art prevails regardless of reward. The music industry in Africa is a prime example of this - piracy is so commonplace over there that the artists can usually find their work on BT before they can find it in the shops.

    In order to recieve payment for their work, they have moved to a performance-based payment - some of the best artists recieve £10,000 a night for performing a 30 minute set.

    My point here is that there will always be a supply, and always be a demand - the method used to link the two needs to change in response to market forces, and the current industry is heavily resistant to that change.

  • UncleLou #70 4 years ago

    "piracy is still theft"

    No it fucking isn't, you illiterate halfwit. If you're going to join in with the adults' conversation, at least have half a clue what you're talking about.

    Oh yes, it pretty much is. It's criminologically a related crime. Absolutely nothing wrong about calling it theft even if you speak in more formal legal terms. Of course it requires that you're able to have a fucking clue what theft actually is, and requires you to look beyond pure sematics. Nothing I would expect of you, in other words.

  • Krun #71 4 years ago

    @ php_penguin

    You believe an artist should make you art without payment? Why should they do this great service for you? Sure they'll make it even if you don't pay, but WHY should they let you have any of it. And you think all the African Artists who don't see 1 penny from their work are happy about it, just because some with backing manage to put on concerts for a few thousand pounds.

    which btw if you didn't pay to go and see and just went in and listened (once again the "I'm not stealing, because no ones hurt by my selfish actions" augment) they wouldn't make any money to provide you with your ART.

    What kind of world do you think you live in where your entitled to your pay for a days work, yet you feel its okay to let the people who provide your entertainment go without.

    Fine. Lets raise the tax on income to 100% and we can all get everything for free. I wonder how long that would work? I reckon about 40 years tops, but I bet no one will make much art or do much work. But we can all play Tetris.

    The other augment here is "the price is too high" well why not play some of those cheaper games. You know the ones; made by one guy in his bedroom. Or better still why not just make them yourself, after all £50 is a lot to spend, I'm sure you could knock something up in a day or two that would be far better...(sarcasm)
    Edited by 2 at 03/03/08 @ 01:26

  • thewolfiv #72 4 years ago

    nice work!

    i say low the prices of games, the increase in sales would cover any losses caused by the price drop. People won't need to pirate games - 70 euros for a game, is not within everyones reach.

  • MGG #73 4 years ago

    @LazyDan
    "No no no no NO. The server-authentication-for-all model is NOT a fine idea. Yes internet connections are abundant these days, but that doesn't mean to say there aren't times where people are left without connections for whatever reason. And when the internet's down, what else can a nerd do to while away the hours? Play a game! Except, oh no none of the games you've bought can be played because it won't go online.

    Absolute failure of an idea. People will go for whatever is most convenient for them - the answer to piracy is the industry not being so greedy and charging £40-50 for a game, improving the speed, usability and ease of downloadable games, and removing restrictions like the CD needing to be in to play and silly things like not being able to play if you can't go online to authenticate. "

    Right, just a couple of points - one, you haven't bought the game, you have bought licensed permission to play a game. Also to add to this point, I dont believe the answer is for a single player game to have to validate itself every time you play - as long as it validates itself once every X days/games would be enough. So you would have to be very unlucky that your BB was down *and* your game was "due" to validate itself, but its a valid concern if the games companies were to choose to go down this route.

    Secondly - the points in your 2nd paragraph. I have made this point over and over again - games will always cost more to consume than films or music. Why? Because AAA games cost as much to make as films (and a hell of a lot more than music), but only have 1 revenue stream to make their money back (as the games rental market is tiny), as opposed to films which have four (cinema, rental, purchases, TV). So while consumers may not like it, they can't have their cake and eat it - demanding lower prices *and* better graphics, sound, storyline etc cannot happen. The people who make games have a right to earn a living - and its usually a pretty poor living as it is, if the equation gets even slightly worse for the developers, then I forsee a lot of people leaving the industry for good. Then you will be left with only EA, Ninty and MS for your gaming needs.

    What can improve the costs and the profits is the removal of the current publisher/developer model, in favour of a more developer-centric model helped by investor money, in addition to using more services such as Steam, XBLA, PSN, etc to reach as many customers as possible in the cheapest way possible. But as others have said, this has to go hand in hand with more global releases and something approaching the actual currency exchange rates at the day of purchase, instead of the insane USD1 = UKP1 = EUR 1 that we have had to put up with for too long.

    Oh yeah, and for the developers to stop pursuing the out-dated "studio" model that they currently use, and head more for the film-making model where there is a much heavier reliance on contracted developers (earning slightly more pro-rata) to keep the between-projects costs to an absolute minimum.

    /my 2p worth.

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #74 4 years ago

    "Oh yes, it pretty much is."

    WORST. PANTOMIME. EVER.

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #75 4 years ago

    Do you begin to see, dirigiblebill? Do you begin to see how 20 years of listening to complete fucking idiocy such as that found on this page of comments might lead one to get a little short-tempered and irritable? The first page was pretty sensible and intelligent and measured, but as soon as someone says "piracy is theft" it all goes to fuck, and you can guarantee that within minutes some complete arsehole will be along saying "Wah wah wah if I can't afford a Porsche would it be okay to steal one wah wah wah?" because they're too catastrophically stupid to understand the difference - both moral and legal - between taking something away from somebody else, and making a copy of it.

    This thread isn't even ABOUT whether piracy is bad or not, but these tools somehow think it's important for them to come wading in like little wannabe moral guardians and tell everyone what to do, and pretty soon we've completely lost the thread of what was an interesting and well-argued article and back to the same tedious circular arguments we've all had a million times before. And it all starts with "piracy is theft".

  • hjarg #76 4 years ago

    "Get a fucking grip. Every week I read about games publishers going bust. The reason is because so many people steal their products. And in turn, this raises the retail price, and the amount lost on production."

    Erm. Nope. Half-Life, Half-Life 2, expansions and stuff, they have all been pirated. Still, Valve isn't going bankrupt. Go figure... As mentioned before, Stardock made GC2 with no copy protection and the company is still around... Same with Paradox Interactive for example- maker of niche strategy games. None of their games have copy protection, and they're still around. Lately, they have started using CD-keys- but only to grant access to their special forums, like mods and tech support and MP and stuff. And the list goes on and on. You know why?

    It's the developers/publishers who make *shitty* games that no-one wants to buy go bankrupt. If they would have made a good game, spent some time on marketing stuff etc etc, the company would still be around. But it is easier to blame the poor pirates then actually go and make a proper game.

    I'm a half-time pirate... meaning that i download the game, try it and if i like it, i buy the original. Better couple of gigs of bandwith lost then 40€ given to company that makes pure garbage instead of games. The best example for it was Turning Point: Fall of Liberty for PC- i would have cried if i had spent even fivepence on it, but now i just giggled over the utter crapiness the game was, deleted it and lived on happily. AND- if the game would have been any good (honestly, it isn't. Don't waste your money on it), i would have bought it.

  • Royal Fool #77 4 years ago

    I'm afraid that the example of Stardock won't really work for big budget, "AAA product" games. The main reason that Galactic Civilizations II and Sins of a Solar Empire sold so many copies was because fans helped fuel the hype machine with constant discussions on the net. Now, I'm not saying more commercial games don't also have fans and hype (especially the media itself), but rather that the demographics are different.

    Johnny 14-year-old won't care about this sort of game, but he will care about the latest FPS or racing game and will be downloading it as soon as its out. Yes, kids have easy net access these days and form a decent-sized part of the piracy circles.

    Not only that, but a game's popularity greatly affects how it is distributed through the piracy networks. People will often be less inclined to distribute these things around if they don't look very interesting or exciting, which in turn leads to less exposure and changes how many total copies get pirated. The PC versions of Bioshock and Call of Duty 4 would most likely have sold less if there were no CD-keys or authentication systems, since people would have been able to grab them off the net that much more easily.

    In short, releasing games unprotected is not a solution... it may work as good PR but it won't hinder the piracy rates from increasing even further.

  • crozon #78 4 years ago

    question people here are saying that they would buy games if it was cheaper.

    ok UT3 is only £20 in game, go buy it!!!

  • Rodney #79 4 years ago

    hjarg

    I think you should download demos

    I have a bit of an idea. basically the problem is price uniformity trying to sell to very different demographics.

    I would wager alot of of piracy/downloading is carried out by teenagers who do not have the expendible income to buy games at £40. I know this is what I did back in the day. now I never download pirated material.

    I think part of the solution could be price targeting.

    If developers/publishers reduce the price from £40 they will miss out on the sales the otherwise would have made at that price point, meaning many people in their 20's 30's are happy to spend that much money on games so its a fair price.

    unfortunately, 14 year olds are not happy to spend that much money on games because they dont have that kind of expendible income.

    So, rather than reducing the price of all games, they should discount games for under 18 year olds and perhaps NUS card holders.

    This will allow them to target both demographics rather than one at the expense of the other.

    This would be better for some consumers and better for developer profits, so win win.


    This would solve the problem completely of course, but I think it would go a way in reducing it and probably a model worth looking into.

    anyone else think this is a sensible idea?

  • BrokenSymmetry #80 4 years ago

    Piracy = theft. However the pirates (or legal nitpickers) may want to spin it, you're taking something that someone else has worked had for to create, without paying for it. That's theft to me.

  • Rev.StuartCampbell #81 4 years ago

    Really? Well to me, and anyone who understands both English and the law of the land, you're a shit-thick cretin.

  • hjarg #82 4 years ago

    Rodney- for example, is there a demo for Turning Point- Fall of Liberty? And about your idea... well, i would send my kid to buy me games then :p Doesn't work and is a bit unfair.

    Royal Fool- and big commercial titles also manage to make profit, right? Even though the copy protection is more a joke then protection and aforementioned 14-year old kids can manage such a mind-numbing task as to copy crack to game directory. It's the older people who have trouble with that thing :p

  • mingster #83 4 years ago

    I want to add my +3 for the Stardock method.
    No protection just a serial number needed for installation and updates works perfectly for me.

  • Setaro #84 4 years ago

    For the record, Piracy /= Theft. Never has (except if you're on a boat and in the Caribbean) and never will. Anyone who says it does is brainwashed by those inane PIRACY FUNDS TERRORISM!!1 videos that front end films at the cinema and DVD.

    Anyway, there are 2 things that piracy can be 'beaten' by:

    1. Good legit-copy only content. For example the bonus content of GalCiv2, or many games' multiplayer aspects of FPSs/RTSs, etc. If it's a single player based game, you've gotta go for price and >>> BOX CONTENT. I remember when games (especially PC games) had bible-sized manuals full of artwork, background books, charts, etc. You really felt you were getting your money's worth. Nowadays you're lucky if you get a single sheet insert telling you the installation instructions (like we're fucking half wits who don't know how to install a program on a PC, even WITH a installation wizard.)

    2. PRICE. Call of Duty 4 (PC) came out 9th November. Priced pretty much £30 (or more) everywhere on the high street and online. I couldn't afford it, so I downloaded the torrent. Loved the single player, finished it, then uninstalled it. Couple of weeks before christmas, I saw COD4 Collectors/Limited Ed. on (Sale) sale at £22.99 or some such, I think it was in GAME, and I bought it. £7 can make a world of difference to a poor student, it can literally pay for my Bus to University for a week. Installed that, immense fun on multiplayer. On saturday I went into town to find Persona 3, £29.99 in HMV, £29.99 in Game, £25 in Virgin, so minus 2.50 for student, 22.50 for a brand new game, RELEASED THE DAY BEFORE. Now if ALL games were priced in that fashion, I imagine piracy would be lessened. The sad thing is with the 360/PS3, game prices have gone back up to the bad old days of NES/SNES, when the a NES copy of Chip 'n fucking Dale: Rescue Rangers was £39.99/44.99.
    Edited by 1 at 03/03/08 @ 10:57

  • HyZepher #85 4 years ago

    We all know that piracy is an issue as it removes profits from developers and publishers. I would be interested to learn whether piracy takes more profit away then 2nd hand game sales - which imo is becoming a bigger threat to the gaming industry than piracy.

    More and more retail outlets provide growing floor space to the second hand market and as we know the developers/publishers get 0% revenue from these sales. So there are 100s of games being sold legitimately each week that feed £0 back to the creators.

    Whether you believe that someone who cant afford to buy a game but downloads it effects the profitability of the game, or not - it's pretty much clear that second hand games directly effect profitability as the customer has actually parted with cash - it's just that thrcash goes into the retailer's pocket instead.

    I do realise that this is more of a console issue tna PC but I think it's all relevant
    Edited by 1 at 03/03/08 @ 11:22

  • Penguinzoot #86 4 years ago

    it's just that thrcash goes into the retailer's pocket instead

    That's true, it does. Thing is though, the second hand market is a bit of a money-go-round. The trade-in world is not completely self-contained with people only trading in games in exchange for other traded-in games. Some of the cash made by people when they trade-in games will go towards paying for new, full price game releases - i.e. games which may not get bought at all if the money made from trade-ins were not available.

    For example, I plan to trade-in 2-3 completed games this weekend to pick up Bully Scholarship Edition, brand new. If the ability to trade-in games were not available, my purchase would either have to wait, or be postponed completely. Over the course of a year that could mean I would have purchased maybe 3-4 brand new games less than I may be able to if I can trade-in my old games.

    So in that sense, the 2nd-hand market is actually part and parcel of the full price retail market, and stimulates full price sales. The difference is of course that the retailers pocket all the profit from the sale of a traded-in game. It would be interesting to know how many full-price games sales would be potentially be lost if trade-ins were to disappear. Anyway, this is all off-topic.
    Edited by 1 at 03/03/08 @ 11:41

  • [menace] #87 4 years ago

    So what happens if you buy a game and need server authentication but the company has gone bust.. (no servers running anymore). Imagine a game like KickOff or Sensible that 15 years after it's release still have thriving communities that holds world cups and other tournaments. If Valve suddenly collapsed I wouldn't be able to play TF2 anymore I guess...

  • Cylinder #88 4 years ago

    @Setaro
    Price is NEVER an excuse for piracy. Good games offer amazing value for money. I rarely pay more than £22 for a new PC release and never more than £25. Call of Duty 4 for instance - it was available for £20.49 delivered from CD-WOW! for a good month after release. You just have to look around.

    @Hjarg
    "It's the developers/publishers who make *shitty* games that no-one wants to buy who go bankrupt."
    You're living in a dream world mate.

  • flippet #89 4 years ago

    I can remember having to pirate half life 2 soon after it first came out, because it wouldn't allow LAN games without an internet connection - not very good when you're attending a lanparty in a village hall without a phoneline.

  • mkreku #90 4 years ago

    One thing to remember though: games cost a lot of money to make. Why? Do you think a games programmer makes the same money as a mechanic, for example? Nope. They make ten times more. When gaming started in someone's basement with two nerds coding for dear life, they were coders and artists. Now they consider themselves rockstars and demand offices made of pure marble and gold (see Ion Storm).

    Games cost £50 (in Sweden), game developers whine about piracy and laugh all the way to the bank, game publishers moan about games costing billions of dollars to make because of piracy. There's not one party at fault here.

  • Setaro #91 4 years ago

    @Cylinder

    I just looked on CD WOW for the last 3 games I bought; COD4, Advance Wars: DC and Persona 3, and none are listed on that site.

    Anyway, I don't say that I pirate anything, because I don't, but many people in a similar position to mine (Students, be it school, college or University, or just less well off people in general) do not have the means to buy expensive games. If 13/17/23 Year old Joe Bloggs from Poorsville, Poorshire, wants to play Gears of War and thus gets a pirate copy for £5, it's not a lost sale.

    If Joseph Bloggs in a cushy job in Middleclassville pirates Gears of War but blows £50 a week on luxury chocolates (silly example, but you get the point) then that's a lost sale.

    Which gets me back to the point of the article. The industry offers a less of a service these days than cracked/pirated software.
    "Even eliminating cost entirely from the equation, pirated media goods are better quality, more user-friendly and less restrictive than their legal, commercial equivalents."

    The industry needs to remove all these artificial barriers it has put up. These barriers include high prices, inability to play games from other territories, CD-key authentication (just to install a game), pointless delays in localisation/release dates, etc.

    When I buy a justifiably priced (PC) game that I don't intend to play Online or if it can't be played online (e.g Dawn of War, Command and Conquer 3, Sims 2 etc) then I will install the game, go through the annoying process of typing in the damn CD key, then I will go and download a NO-CD crack straight away, because the industry making us have a CD in the tray in order just to play the game is a fucking joke. Steam is a HUGE step forward in respect to this. As long as an internet connection is there, I have access to Half Life 2, TF2, Portal, a HUGE number of games, from any place on the planet . If I move to the middle of the Amazon Jungle with my Laptop, and a magical broadband connection happens to be growing out of a tree, I can just log into my account, download, and play my completely legal games.

    So when I buy Dawn of War: Soulstorm (which is very cheap on Amazon I might add) in a few weeks, wouldn't it be nice if I could install it, register the CD key to my email/account, then be able to download it (torrent style, to save bandwith costs to the devs/publisher, if needs be) anywhere on the planet, with no need for a CD or disk in the fucking tray.

    Right now, if in such a situation where I am away from home for an extended period of time, yet want to play said game, I'll have to either carry around the damn CD/Box with me, or I can just download a cracked pirate version and install it that way. Which makes a mockery of the industry.

  • witchdrash #92 4 years ago

    So here's the reality of the situation, a lot of people are arguing the high and mighty argument that people shouldn't do it, and you know what, you're right, your argument still simply does not change the fact that because it is a nicer experience to jump on the pirate's bay and grab a torrent for X app or Y game than it is to go out to a store and piss around with 101 drm systems they do.

    Regardless of how it should be the companies have to exist in the real world, as a result they need to do 1 of 2 things:
    1 - Go bust
    2 - Compete with pirated products.

    The easy way to compete with pirated products is to make yours more attractive, if you can't do that you will lose and go out of business and no amount of legislation with prevent that. Lots of things happen that aren't "right" this is one of those.

  • AbyssUK #93 4 years ago

    @whoever said download the demo

    Demos = lies

    reviews = lies, it'll never be your point of view

    Now;

    piracy = the result of all the bullshit the games industry has put us through

    blame = the games industry

    solution = evolve or die

    the future = cloudy

  • dsmx #94 4 years ago

    The efforts to wipe out piracy will only succeed in driving more people to piracy. It happened in the music industry, it happened in the film industry, the reason why game developers think it will be any different for them eludes me.

  • Dillinger #95 4 years ago

    crozon:

    question people here are saying that they would buy games if it was cheaper.

    ok UT3 is only £20 in game, go buy it!!!
    ----

    oddly enough- I did, for exactly that reason. ive played it twice and i dont really like it. But, because it was 20 quid it was an impulse buy. whereas on PS3 or 360 i find it really,really hard to part with 40 quid for a game.
    I'd never have bought Skate for 40 quid, but for 17.99 its quite jolly. Even if these were available as a hooky download im not sure i'd have bothered as they would be massive downloads.

  • Silvervein #96 4 years ago

    First off, it was very nice article that touched on most points important to the issue of piracy and gaming.

    I'd like to rise a point that I didn't see discussed yet, other than mention by mrkreku.

    When representatives of big companies claim that Stardock's approach to piracy is 'not sustainable in the long term', I wonder what does it mean, exactly. What's the difference between Stardock and EA, for example? Obvious answer would be, size.
    Now, in the case of stardock, I suppose most employees are actively engaged in production of games, and not with major goal of being able to ride solid gold ferrari in a month.
    Now, EA? I wonder what's the proportion of people who *make* games, there, and people falling into support personnel caterogy. Lots of executives, each one with secretary and office. Whole buildings filled with law branch of EA, public relations, advertisement, accounting. How do they contribute to making games? They don't. But they still have to be paid. Buying EA games supports all those people. Sad fact, huge corporations don't make games for fun, but for revenue, the bigger, the better. They are not about games or gamers, but their shareholders.

    And this is, I think, the true reason why we, gaming public, are treated to such sparkling pearls of wisdom as 'Stardock's model is not sustainable long term' and 'costs of game productions rise exponentially, forcing us to increase price tag of our producs (games)'.
    When people see games as means of striking gold vein, and not something they enjoy themselves and want others to share that, we get situation where, I cite 'Gaming market stagnates and requires radical change of direction' and (not citing) 'Rampant piracy on PC platform is a burning thorn in our side'. It all translates into simple 'Our financial analysts predict that revenue for first quarter of fiscal year 200X might fall below expected 3000% compared to this period last year, therefore shareholders might demand our heads'. What does it have to do with games? Nothing. It's just example of what happens when people who make games can't say when enough is...enough.
    Edited by 1 at 03/03/08 @ 14:05

  • thesombrerokid #97 4 years ago

    "Only the Xbox 360 and the PS3 have for the most part avoided the unwelcome attentions of software pirates."
    Obviously you have never been to China, where pirated 360 games are widely available for less than 1 euro per disc.

    or the UK were everyone and his dog downloads 360 games for free

  • Lawlost #98 4 years ago

    There appears to be some confusion as to whether pirating is theft. Technically and legally it is not theft.

    Theft is 'the dishonest appropriation of property belonging to another with the intention to permanently deprive' It is the last part which is important. As the act of copying does not permanently deprive it is not theft. It is however a breach of copyright. Breaches of copyright in most circumstances would enable the copyright holder a civil action against the infringer i.e. the right to sue. There are however elements of the CPDA (Copyright, Patents and Designs Act) that can incur criminal penalties for the most part these attach only to where a person is making a commerical gain from the infringing act.

    Hope this has clarified things.

  • thesombrerokid #99 4 years ago

    also btw WOW is the biggest impact on the games industry instead of buying a game every three months people pay blizzard for a game they bought a year and a half ago to suck thier life away, this is REAL LOST REVENUE someone downloading a game after spending thier monthly budget on real games that they never intended to buy whether they could pirate it or not is not harming anyone

    and Publishers don't go bust developers do & it's nothing to do with piracy it's publishers starving them of money they're due till they go into liquidation or near enough and the publisher gets the IP they said the developer could keep.

  • Nithron #100 4 years ago

    We're stuck in kind of a vicious circle here where really, piracy is pretty much morally reprehensible, but at the same time it's difficult to feel at all guilty about it when the games industry treats us like shit.

    As gamers we're subjected to ridiculous copy protection methods and as UK citizens are charged a premium for the priviledge of playing games sometimes 9 months later than our mates in the good ol' USA.

    This doesn't necessarily make it right, however, it makes it a lot harder to feel guilty about doing it than, say, if the people we're "ripping off" were genuinely producing good products for a fair price.

    ...Also, Krun, your suggestion that anyone who pirated a game automatically therefore has the ability and will to buy it, doesn't make any sense whatsoever. There are actual people, alive, on this particular planet, who don't have the money to spend £40 on a game. Lots of them.

    Edited by 1 at 03/03/08 @ 14:50

  • Rodney #101 4 years ago

    hjarg

    yeah you could get your child to buy your games for you, just like you could download pirate games now if you really wanted and you if you are uner 18 you can hang around outside shops and ask walkers by to buy you some cider.

    the point is, prices which exclude some gamers, because they are teenagers, generate no revenue from these potential customers. Targetting the teenage gaming demographic with affordable prices, like cinemas do, generates revenue that would otherwise would have been wasted.

    I know I wouldnt go to the bother of befriending an under 18 just to get me a discounted games

  • Rodney #102 4 years ago

    anecdotal I know, Im just throwing it out there

  • dryden555 #103 4 years ago

    If I were a game console company, I would make a new console every 4 years with different protection tech: it takes 2 years for a _good_ reliable crack to be made. Another 2 years later, no would care about the crack because a new console is out. It would greatly curb piracy "at the root". Of course I'm a consumer, and that scenario sucks for gamers.

  • bf #104 4 years ago

    I cant do anything but agree with the author. The twohundred+ games on the shelf behind me are not there because I couldnt pirate them, they are there because I wanted to buy them. Some are there to honour developers who trust their customers, ie no usage prevention tech, even though its not games that I would usually play. Other games are missing because their developers thought I wouldnt mind rubbish like Starforce, they where wrong.

    Fun fact. SecuROM expects ~5% of paying customers to not be able to play a game "protected" with their tech and considers this to be OK. Isnt it nice to know that they care about you?

  • UncleLou #105 4 years ago

    It is the last part which is important. As the act of copying does not permanently deprive it is not theft

    But it does, in a way. That is the point. If someone goes to the market to sell 10 apples and you steal thse apples, he's permanently deprived, that much is clear.

    However if someone is on that same market to sell a book he's written, and you copy the book and give it to the potential customers that visit the market, he of course and indeed still has his 10 books while the apple merchant doesn't have his apples anymore, but they're deprived of the value (of being able to sell them on to his potential customers) - and this is why the "you wouldn't steal a car" slogan is particularly silly and confuses some people, because the car isn't a good comparison at all.

    The net result for the apple merchant and the bookseller in my example is very much the same, and there are other similarities between copyright infirngement and theft of a physical object, which is exactly why legal science does see them as very related crimes, and why the term "copyright theft" is, while not 100% exact, perfectly valid, and not an invention of the evil record or whatever companies.

    Besides, if you shoplift a game, the material value you steal is minimal. A few cents at best. What you steal and do not pay for is the content, of which the physical object is just the carrier.

    So we have several parallels: result for the victim (at least in many cases), gain for the one who does it, object of the crime (content), and mainly one obvious difference. Although in times of mass production and infinite reproducibility of almost everything, it could be argued if theft of a mass market article really deprives anyone of such an object permanently.

    So, is there a difference between stealing someone's car and downloading a game? But of course. Is there a big difference between downloading a game and shoplifting it? Not so much. I'd even argue that in the latter case, at least just the store/insurance company has the damage, while the content creator will already have been paid. That's a result I find at least a little less unpleasant.
    Edited by 3 at 03/03/08 @ 17:11

  • Lawlost #106 4 years ago

    @ UncleLou. I understand your point, what I want to clarify is that in the eyes of the law there is a distinction between theft and copyright infringement. If you look at your car example, there is a parallel. A joyrider takes your car, drives it round and dumps it 10 miles away, in your eyes they stole it. In the eyes of the law, they have not permanently deprived you of the car and therefore it is not theft. If the police catch the person responsible they will charge them with a different offence ‘taking a vehicle without the owner's consent’ (TWOCing). If the same joyrider at the end of his jaunt sets fire to your car then he has permanently deprived you of the car and it would be a charge of theft + criminal damage etc etc.

    My point is that the law distinguishes between different offences and this is certainly one of them. I am not defending the distinction as I understand why you feel there should be no distinction. I am merely saying there is one.
    Edited by 2 at 03/03/08 @ 17:35

  • UncleLou #107 4 years ago

    A joyrider takes your car, drives it round and dumps it 10 miles away, in your eyes they stole it. In the eyes of the law, they have not permanently deprived you of the car and therefore it is not theft.

    Well, they did not really steal it in my eyes, either, in your example, I've studied law and have been working as a lawyer specialised on Intellectual Property for a few years. ;-) I never said copyright infringement and theft are exactly the same, I just said they are closely related from various perspectives, enough so that getting one's knickers in a twist if someone uses the term "copyright theft" is rather silly and usually (not always) the result of a superficial approach to the issue, concentrating on the difference of the permanent deprival of a physical object, which in many cases doesn't really matter all that much.

    As you mention TWOCing, it's a related crime as well - I have the suspicion I am not telling you anythng new when I say that the difference between TWOCing and theft is a very blurry one - use the car for an hour, then park it somewhere where it won't be found (or won't be found for a substantial time), and it's quickly becoming theft in the eyes of the law.

    edit:

    I still can't bloody type.
    Edited by 2 at 03/03/08 @ 18:11

  • Lawlost #108 4 years ago

    @Uncle Lou ditto qualified lawyer working solely in IP. I think it is worth distinguishing between an infringing act and theft. I would agree that in certain circumstances the difference between them can become very slim. The reason I believe it is worth making the distinction is that technically every time you rip a cd using iTunes you commit an infringing act when you then transfer it onto you ipod you commit another infringing act. I would not want to think that this was 'copyright theft'. The government have recognised this and the CDPA is being revised to ensure that consumers no longer falsl foul of this legislation. Having said that the person who mass copies commercial software and sells them I would agree comes as close to theft as you can but the CDPA is drafted in such a way that such an offence incurs criminal penalties. Anyway we have moved away from the original article eveyone else has left........ and you and I are now mooting, takes me back to the ole days at law school.
    Edited by 2 at 03/03/08 @ 20:44

  • UncleLou #109 4 years ago

    The reason I believe it is worth making the distinction is that technically every time you rip a cd using iTunes you commit an infringing act when you then transfer it onto you ipod you commit another infringing act. I would not want to think that this was 'copyright theft'.

    Well yeah, that's definitely a good point, I'd only make the analogy to theft with the first act, really, while the copyright infringement act is a lot broader and includes a lot more. Bear with me though that I am not an expert on the British CDPA, I am German. :)

    Anyway we have moved away from the original article eveyone else has left.

    Hehe, yes, though we keep noone from discussing the article. I blame the immature kid who tried to shout people down. Stupidity often provoces a reaction from me.

  • Penguinzoot #110 4 years ago

    @UncleLou and Lawlost

    Reasoned and well-informed discussion on the comments page, whatever next, eh? :D

    Seriously, I have learned something as a result. I only hope one or two of the earlier contributors are still reading. If they were maybe they could learn a thing or two from you guys ;-)

  • secombe #111 4 years ago

    As an artist (photographer) I would see it as stealing if you took one of my images and used it in some way. I don't care if you would never have bought it anyway, that's not really the point is it?

  • Les #112 4 years ago

    "This kind of individual piracy creates no profits for anyone, and certainly funds no human trafficking, terrorism, drug dealing or any of the other horrors which anti-piracy efforts have tried to connect to it - to general derision from the public."

    This is the core of the problem: Most people don't feel they're doing something wrong to another person when they illegally copy movies, music, games, etc. There are few people however that don't get they're doing something wrong when they steal from a shop or person. Laws that don't correspond to human intuition are often fruitless unless enforced with immense resources (e.g. war on drugs).
    Edited by 1 at 04/03/08 @ 19:19

  • MGG #113 4 years ago

    @Nithron "There are actual people, alive, on this particular planet, who don't have the money to spend £40 on a game. Lots of them. "

    And therefore, they don't get to play the games. Simple really - its how our economy works (unless you live in a Communist country of course, where everyone is equal. Just some are more equal than others, eh comrade?).

    Pirating games "cos I couldn't afford to buy them" is no excuse - its stealing (yes I know the arguments, yes I know the law, yadda yadda, yes I don't listen to Campbell, never have.). And no, I don't write them off as soneone who would not have bought the game anyway - I see them as someone who is getting free entertainment that others have to pay for, and someone worked hard to make. Thats theft, whichever way people spin it.

  • MGG #114 4 years ago

    @Lawlost "technically every time you rip a cd using iTunes you commit an infringing act when you then transfer it onto you ipod you commit another infringing act."

    I hate to argue law with a lawyer, but since when was that infringing any act? Under UK law (I am presuming you are British, I know UncleLou isn't) but isn't there the right to play any music you legally own on any medium, short of broadcasting? Not to mention the legal right to make back-up copies - or have the RIAA petitioned to have that removed too? Doesn't any DRM on the CD/DVD/Game simply stop you, the legal consumer, from exercising your rights as a consumer?


    (Thats right: I am a developer that is anti-piracy, but anti-DRM and pro-consumer. This may be why I am not yet rich. Ho-hum.)

  • Lawlost #115 4 years ago

    @MGG I am British. I agree with your argument that consumers ought to be able to play music on personal devices of their choice. At the moment (to my knowledge) there is nothing in law yet that allows this. In my example above when you rip a CD you copy the music from your CD onto you computer. By making a copy you commit an infringing act. When you transfer the music from your computer to your ipod you make another copy, a further infringing act. Unless the record company in their license permits you to do this, it is an infringement of their copyright. I have not, as yet, seen a CD where the record company allows you to do this. You are correct in that the CDPA allows you to make a backup copy, as such you could argue that you could copy a music CD onto a CDR for backup purposes. You then put it in the cupboard until the original no longer works?

    I understand that the UK government have recognised that at the moment a large proportion of the UK population falls foul of the current legislation and that this probably was not their intention when the CDPA was drafted. With the speed of technological change at the moment the legislators cannot keep up.

    It could be argued that DRM does stop you from making a legitimate backup and that in some respects the legislation is conflicting. I am allowed to make a backup but to do so I need to break the DRM, if I break the DRM I have circumvented the copy protection mechanism which also is also illegal under the CDPA.

    The music industry is slowly coming round to allowing consumers to purchase downloads with no DRM but it has taken 10 years. I am not so sure the film and games industry will be as quick to follow. For the film industry they are doing well out of the technological progress, upgrade from VHS to DVD to BlueRay. Download to own from iTunes and it only allows you to play the film on your pc, ipod and Apple TV. If you extend the principal that you should be able to play music on any device to film I believe the studios will strongly resist it. I am not sure the analogy can be extended to games. Video games with the exception of pcs are already on a proprietary system which extends a degree of protection anyway.

  • MightyMouse #116 4 years ago

    No one seems to have considered alternative methods of funding games, yet a lot of services aren't funded by the user paying directly. Look at google for example - an absolutely vast company, but the things that most people use it for are provided free. There's no reason to suppose that free-to-play games will stay small and gimmicky, especially when the market they cater for is so huge. Battlefield heroes is a larger version, and surely in the future these things will continue to grow; I'm not saying this is a definite, but it's a definite possibility.

    I'd agree with the article that eliminating anti-piracy measures will only increase sales, but whilst that could help minimise piracy it will never stop it altogether. To do that the games need to be free at the point of delivery, though this may not always be possible. On a side note I do feel that equating potential lost revenue to actual is a slight fallacy (without supporting piracy), and that the fundamental reason why developers go out of business is that they produce bad games.