Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

This only gave grief

3 (6.1%)

Grakelin is not stupid

6 (12.2%)

Are you happier now?

1 (2%)

------ Haiku, the encore -----

17 (34.7%)

Disagreeing, Fine

0 (0%)

Why you make a fuzz 'bout it?

3 (6.1%)

Lets just be happy

19 (38.8%)

Total Members Voted: 48

[Soulwynd]

Meh. Ubisoft has been basically making console games and trying to sell them on the PC, off course the pc sales will be lower.

From what I've heard from friends that have both a pc and an xbox, they prefer console games on the console.

[Cthulhu]

I just dont understand how a company can so completely mis-read its customers. I can only assume that they're just trying to see what they can get away with, gradually weening everyone onto DRM piece by piece untill eventually you'll pay 40 quid for a game, itll work on one machine, for one hour, and all you get is the tutorial level (the rest of the game comes as DLC). You'll have to install 10+ different programs to monitor your computer, make sure you're not running and video capture software (those images are owned by ubisoft/ea/etc) or talking about the game in a negative manner with friends. You'll probobly have to buy some sort of USB dongle too, which will enable you to access the ubisoft network, otherwise you cant save your games.

Meanwhile the pirated version will be cracked on release day, feature complete, with all the levels intact and available, and doesn't require anything aside from the system requirements to run.

They're intentionally crippling their products, blaming it on the pirates, then crippling it more because noone bought the last DRM-ridden piece of crap, blaming it on pirates again.

Hilarious slippery slope.  DRM sucks but it isn't the end of the world.  Don't buy the game, don't pirate the game, tell them how you feel with your wallet and maybe they'll ease up if they see people spitting blood and cancelling preorders.

[Draco18s]

Hilarious slippery slope.  DRM sucks but it isn't the end of the world.  Don't buy the game, don't pirate the game, tell them how you feel with your wallet and maybe they'll ease up if they see people spitting blood and cancelling preorders.

See, the funny thing about pirates is that if they play the game and like it, they buy it.  Piracy actually increases sales, because they simply wouldn't buy it in the first place if they didn't think it was worth it, which is why they pirate it.  Most of them will find a gem they didn't expect and then support it by buying a legal copy.

If piracy somehow simply stopped working overnight you would not see an increase in sales.

[mendonca]

If piracy somehow simply stopped working overnight you would not see an increase in sales.

so simply put, yet so true.

[fenrif]

It's not the end of the world, but it's indicative of the problem with modern game publishers. Its the same problem that plagues the movie and music industry. They make crap products in an attempt to appeal to the lowest common denominator, then complain that no one will buy it and so they make it crappier.

Nowadays the pirated version is nearly always better than the retail. DRM doesn't effect pirates at all, only paying customers. The fact that the publishers are willfully ignorant of this speaks loudly of the way videogames are heading.

You cant effectivly vote with your wallet with stuff like this, they'd have to loose hundreds of thousands of people for them to even notice, and even then they're just going to blame it on piracy, or crappy marketing, or the game being just plain bad before they admit people are avoiding their products because of DRM. To even get to that stage you have to convince the millions of uninformed gamers, who dont read up on what goes on in the industry, that this is bad. Most of them will buy the game, find its got crappy drm, and make a few posts on a forum. They still bought the game.

[Cthulhu]

Hilarious slippery slope.  DRM sucks but it isn't the end of the world.  Don't buy the game, don't pirate the game, tell them how you feel with your wallet and maybe they'll ease up if they see people spitting blood and cancelling preorders.

See, the funny thing about pirates is that if they play the game and like it, they buy it.

Statistics?

[GlyphGryph]

The funny thing about game companies - If you vote with your wallet by not buying the game, they will just blame it on pirating and assume you're pirating it anyways.

[Draco18s]

Hilarious slippery slope.  DRM sucks but it isn't the end of the world.  Don't buy the game, don't pirate the game, tell them how you feel with your wallet and maybe they'll ease up if they see people spitting blood and cancelling preorders.

See, the funny thing about pirates is that if they play the game and like it, they buy it.

Statistics?

There aren't any, as far as I know.  And I doubt you could even collect meaningful data on it.

But everyone I know who torrents games has that outlook (heck, at least one of them won't ever pirate an indie game).

[fenrif]

Hilarious slippery slope.  DRM sucks but it isn't the end of the world.  Don't buy the game, don't pirate the game, tell them how you feel with your wallet and maybe they'll ease up if they see people spitting blood and cancelling preorders.

See, the funny thing about pirates is that if they play the game and like it, they buy it.

Statistics?

There aren't any. Just like theres none to prove the contrary. Pretty much every gamer has a wealth of anecdotal evidence to support his position though.

There have been studies done to show that music piracy increases cd sales however:

http://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ippd-dppi.nsf/eng/h_ip01456.html

Obviously this doesnt apply exactly to games, but it shows that pirates still buy media, which was the point he was making.

[Cthulhu]

Anecdotes are not evidence.  Just because all of your friends are like that doesn't mean a significant number of people are like that.

Go to any piracy site and look at the ratio of leechers to seeders.  The first few torrents for AVP3 had over 10,000 people downloading the game but contributing nothing to their peers.  Do you think they'll help the developer, if they won't even help their fellow pirates?

[GlyphGryph]

Also, what is this SC2 that people keep mentioning?

Star Control 2?
Soul Calibur 2?
Star Craft 2?

[Soulwynd]

Hilarious slippery slope.  DRM sucks but it isn't the end of the world.  Don't buy the game, don't pirate the game, tell them how you feel with your wallet and maybe they'll ease up if they see people spitting blood and cancelling preorders.

See, the funny thing about pirates is that if they play the game and like it, they buy it.

Statistics?

Well, I still want to make that questionnaire and see how it goes. At least it should give some data on how us b12ers think about this. I've started it, but I have yet to finish. It's probably gonna end up huge.

[fenrif]

Anecdotes are not evidence.  Just because all of your friends are like that doesn't mean a significant number of people are like that.

Go to any piracy site and look at the ratio of leechers to seeders.  The first few torrents for AVP3 had over 10,000 people downloading the game but contributing nothing to their peers.  Do you think they'll help the developer, if they won't even help their fellow pirates?

Thats good logic. Ever think that maybe people leech untill they have the game, then seed for a while, then stop? so it rotates out? Is it possible that the game has 10,000 leachers because it had just been released, and people didnt have it yet to seed? Nah easier to just assume anyone who ever pirated anything is some sort of sociopathic force of evil.

Course, you seeing something on a website once is kinda anecdotal evidence itself, so you cant really infer that a significant number of pirates are like that, or that it applies to a significant number of games.

I posted you a link that proved people who pirate things buy them too. But as we're ignoring that, my question to you is "why should we help the devs?" Since when is it the responsability of the consumer to ensure the devs get what they want? Shouldn't it be the other way around? If they make good games, their games sell. If their publishers start screwing over their own customers then they'll fail.

The publishers are deliberatly crippling their own products, knowing it has no impact on the pirates, to control their consumers. Then blaming it on piracy when it doesn't sell millions upon millions of copies. Why else would they have limited installations in their DRM? Pirates dont have the DRM to deal with, so why are they telling me i can only install my game 3 times before i have to buy it again?

[Sean Mirrsen]

Anecdotes are not evidence.  Just because all of your friends are like that doesn't mean a significant number of people are like that.

Go to any piracy site and look at the ratio of leechers to seeders.  The first few torrents for AVP3 had over 10,000 people downloading the game but contributing nothing to their peers.  Do you think they'll help the developer, if they won't even help their fellow pirates?

We have a file sharing net set up by our local ISP. Completely free, high-speed, available on even the cheapest accounts. And there's still one seeder per fifty downloads, at most. People just don't like to run file sharing software and spend traffic on something they'd prefer to use themselves - like online games.

[Draco18s]

Do you think they'll help the developer, if they won't even help their fellow pirates?

You realize of course that just because someone is a "leech" does not mean they're not uploading.  In fact, its quite the contrary.  Every peer/leech in a p2p swarm is uploading what data they do have, and if they're not they'll be quickly blacklisted (99% of all torrent programs force you to upload and will local-blacklist any peer who is found to be downloading, but not uploading, or at the very least throttle their speed down to a crawl*)

*This is why the first few minutes of a torrent download your download speed is very slow.  As soon as you have a full chunk that you can reupload your speed increases dramatically.