PC makers see piracy as "hidden benefit" Comments by Games Industry.biz

quick, everyone pirate Id games!

Well they certainly haven't made anything worth paying for lately.

I guess that's a fair point, even Virgin Media (the one that sends filesharing warnings) keeps telling me how fast i can download a 5mb music track on their connection

"Well they certainly haven't made anything worth paying for lately."

They haven't made anything lately.

True dat. Doom 3 was rubbish though.

I'm not saying there's some conspiracy or something like that

I wonder what's going on in his mind then... reading his verbal diarrhea makes me think that he's got issues. not just with the Hardware industry

why should they make anything?

if i was making games, i wouldn't touch the pc platform with a ten foot poll

Hmm ok but what the hell is nvidia supposed to do about piracy for example ? Does industry expect them to put special DRM chips on everything they have ?

To put it simply make good games and don't sell them at rediculus prices.

Also as for ID games while it's sad to say they haven't made anything worth buying since Q3 Arena.

Try telling the cunts at Davenport Lyons that, please.

I'm a fan of Id and BOUGHT most of their stuff but Hollenshead and his constant whining is really getting on my nerves lately.
Especially the fact that he always tells you only half of the truth.
Sony is doing the exact same thing. They're making lots of money with blank cd/dvd discs and burners while complaining about pirates at the same time.

What are hardware manufacturers supposed to do about piracy? Make their network cards verify the legality of the content that goes through them?

Oh, and I really liked Doom 3.

an ibm-manager said some time ago: "the content industry is like a pimple on the ass of an elephant"

this is exactly right for me. It's the reason I have a PC.

I only have a PC because of work (well and a bunch of non-ludic reasons).
I realy don't like Id much.
Liked Doom 3 a lot though.
And yes, ISP's and PC makers usually advertice their items like a way to get free stuff which isn't really free.

He's right, of course. Although it's not just PC hardware - MP3 players, blank media, ISPs, software programmes, smartphones, games websites and tons of other products all profit from piracy.

The age of free content is here, whether legal or not, so companies are going to sell that benefit.

Why not make games that run well on old hardware so that people can afford them instead of forking out a fortune for hardware that can run it in the first place...

Simple solution is to release everything for Steam. Make sure you use a Mass Effect style internet verification thingy. There are solutions.

Why not make games that run well on old hardware so that people can afford them instead of forking out a fortune for hardware that can run it in the first place...

Most games do. It's just that people don't know this and continue to perpetuate the myth that PC gaming requires a £3k uber-system.

"Why not make games that run well on old hardware so that people can afford them instead of forking out a fortune for hardware that can run it in the first place..."

How is that related to piracy? If your PC is too underpowered to run a game, you aren't going to get the game from any source, right?

It's true, people spend hundreds of pounds on nVidia hardware so they can get a good framerate in their downloaded copy of Crysis.

Ive not even bothered to pirate any ID games recently, and its not like you can pirate Quake Wars as its only playable online, and still no one bought that, so hows about you focus less on whinging, more on making a game that is good?

If only we could torrent more RAM!

PSP benefits tons from piracy. Custom Firmware makes it possible to do lots of stuff for the psp for free and I think secretly Sony are loving it. It's sold the psp really. If Dark Alex hadn't come along and created Custom firware then most likely quite a lot of people wouldn't have bought a psp. I agree with what everyone else is saying about the price of games. They're far too expensive. Why would i go out and pay £30 for a game when I can just download it for free. If you download 10 games that would of cost £30 each then you've saved yourself £300. Now if the games had only been about £5 - 10 each then maybe more people would actually of bought them.

"How is that related to piracy? If your PC is too underpowered to run a game, you aren't going to get the game from any source, right?"

What I mean is you're less likely to want to part with money for games when you've just spent your savings on a new PC. People have to spend money on the PC to play with all the latest bells and whistles, but they don't have to pay for the games. If you don't have to spend a fortune on hardware to play the latest games, then you're going to have more to spend on the games themselves.

Also, id in particular are probably the worst for releasing what basically amount to interactive tech demos. People want to see the amazing graphics but they don't want to pay for the shitty to average games.

I have an old PC, and I will probably buy Spore if the requirements are true. If I have to upgrade just to play it reasonably, I'm not going to be paying for it - either because I won't upgrade or I won't have any spare cash after I do.

Internet service providers, blank media companies and server hosting firms are all equally guilty. Wonder if he has ever owned a tape recorder or VCR, because that's exactly the same; clearly these technologies did their respective industries no end of harm. I think it's highly likely that a great proportion of the PC gaming market, or to put that differently, iD's main customer/fan base at least to date, are in that market in the first place due to piracy. Certainly my legit copy of Ultimate Doom was ultimately bought because originally my friend gave me a bunch of floppies with Doom on in 1996 which I played incessantly instead of revising for GCSEs.

I think he's spot-on. Take Apple - for years they've been making iPods with bigger and bigger hard drives. Who can afford to legally fill them? Even before iTunes started selling video content, it was still difficult to fill an 8 or even 4gb hard drive with legally obtained media. Yet Apple, and others, kept manufacturing them. Why? Because Napster had shown how easy it was to build a library of thousands of songs, not even albums, and that there was a need for a simple way to organise them.