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[Rooster]

Personally I don't like piracy and don't support it. If I don't have the money (And I don't all the time) I won't download a commercial game. Instead I'll download these neat freeware games. Fun for free huzah!

But there are cases of piracy I'll alow such as:
-You certainly have the CD somewhere in your home. You just can't find it now. Downloading stuff you already own is ok.
-If it's out of curiosity. For example you heard about a book that's uber-neat. It's in the store. But you would waste money if out of the sudden you find out the book was bad. So you download the book, read a few pages, and buy it.
-Stuff is impossible to get. You searched everywhere buy can't find it. There are online stores, but what if the game is long since forgotten by most stores you can find? It's a lot easier to download it no?

Recently I came to te horrifing conclusion that people don't want you to have fun anymore. They want your money. Games are way dumb, the graphic engines suddenly become the weapons in the arms race. Your favourite pay to play mmo is pure grinding. I just can't settle with that, so I download freewares. Problem solved. Youtube is my television.

[Shades]

Recently I came to te horrifing conclusion that people don't want you to have fun anymore. They want your money. Games are way dumb, the graphic engines suddenly become the weapons in the arms race. Your favourite pay to play mmo is pure grinding. I just can't settle with that, so I download freewares. Problem solved. Youtube is my television.

Tell me about it :/ I'm trying very hard to stop this happening where I work, but when the guys holding the purse strings are only going to be around a year or so before moving on all they care about is how big their bonus are its easy to see where this is going it's really quite depressing.

[Rooster]

But don't despair fair folk of Bay12!
We are the proof of superiority of fun!
Tarn Adams is the proof you can still care about fun!
Toady one is the proof you can still live off donations!
Armok is the proof you can still play good games and not pay for them!

[Cthulhu]

Hey look, it's this thread again.

[Jimmy]

Yes it is. Feel free to add your opinion on the issue of piracy.

Ubisoft recently made news with their new DRM which prevents you from playing without a stable internet connection.. A few hours after the game was released, a cracked version was published on pirate sites.

What do you all think?

[Realmfighter]

That there making it easier to just pirate the game than it already is.

[Rooster]

That's why you should make games that are free to download, but you have to pay for an account or something

[Agdune]

Personally I'm a big fan of the 'download if you can't get the game legitimately or refuse to buy for some reason' approach. If there's a cool game that you want to buy but can't get a hold of because it's an almost unheard of title? well then, you don't have much option. See: penumbra black plague. Never ever heard of it until I read about it here. (oh. Just checked steam and there it is! Future purchase when I have money for luxury goods)

Ubisoft though, they can go to hell. I don't care about their profits because they've got a long record of being dicks and are being bigger dicks lately. Even though their stated reason that they aren't going to rely on steam for their games is "LOL but they get cracked so fast, steam sucks!", they are just going to persevere with their new, intrusive scheme regardless of the fact that their got cracked just as fast. What publisher will be next to take the hint and apply a new level of inconvenience to gaming?

I tend to ask myself - if a corporation that produces games purely for the sake of money (like for example, Activision) and who don't care at all about putting real effort into creating something fun, do they actually deserve my support in remaining in existance? Companies who don't care about their product/consumer base die all the time and not even the super-capitalist-fanbois bat an eyelid, why suddenly do so when the (stated) reason for these companies losing business is that people don't want to buy their stuff? I'm sure that companies do lose some business to piracy, but nowhere near as much as they want to believe. Maybe it really is because their games are generally mindless shit.

Edit: I'm not saying I'm a regular downloader of shit though either, I'm under no illusion that I'm some moral guardian of the soul of gaming or anything. Too many people are totally polarized about this issue, being rampant 'pay the gaming company for every single piece of code!' or 'pirate everything! Information wanna be free!' types. I don't want to be lumped in with either, I'm just saying that I think 2/3rds of the piracy debate is hype/scapegoating and that I don't care about the remaining 1/3rd as 'the downfall of gaming' because that was well underway when all we had were CD checks and CD keys. Y'know, symptom and not a cause. The real cause of PC gaming turning dormant again is because of increased commercialization and profit-gouging by publishers (and a few dev studios) in it for the job/profit, not the product. I almost entirely play mods of the few games I've bought (Darthmod for empire total war lately), niche games with no frills but lots of meat (Hearts of Iron 3) or Indie games like dwarf fortress. The real mainstream games aren't even worth downloading anymore, being devoid of enjoyable content, too simplistic and are hollow-feeling. I'd probably want people to pay the Darthmod guys money were it not illegal however, since it feels like they put more effort into their modding than the original devs put into their game.

[Aqizzar]

I tend to ask myself - if a corporation that produces games purely for the sake of money (like for example, Activision) and who don't care at all about putting real effort into creating something fun, do they actually deserve my support in remaining in existance? Companies who don't care about their product/consumer base die all the time and not even the super-capitalist-fanbois bat an eyelid, why suddenly do so when the (stated) reason for these companies losing business is that people don't want to buy their stuff? I'm sure that companies do lose some business to piracy, but nowhere near as much as they want to believe. Maybe it really is because their games are generally mindless shit.

The obvious question here being, why would you want to download a game you believe to be crap (based on it's producer apparently) in the first place?  What if that Activision game turns out to be really fun?  Are you actually going to say with a straight face that you'd then go out and support the market process by paying money for a game you already possess?

[Luke_Prowler]

While I'll keep my stance on Piracy to myself, I think anti-piracy is what causes a lot of problems. These companies are so dumbfounded scared of losing a little profit that they put these anti-piracy programs into the games, and they end up screwing up the people that buy these game. They don't defer piracy, they promote it.

[LegoLord]

To those of you who think copyright is bad:
If it didn't exist, it would be nigh impossible for a lot of people to make any money off of their intellectual property.  They could put lots of effort into writing, but why publish if it's not going to make money?  Currently, this is actually what will be paying for my college education, and I'm sure I'm not the only kid getting that sort of college funding.  What would I do, eh?  "No college for you, kiddo, sorry - you don't get to professionally develop your artistic talent, so you have to go and get some crappy job you probably won't like to make a living."  On top of that, how would I be able to make a living as any sort of artist whose product can't be verified as an original piece?  Paintings, digital models, etc - no money for me.

[Agdune]

Aqizzar - I've done that a fair bit, but I'm aware that I'm the exception to the rule, most people who support the approach do tend to be hypocrites. I ignore most mass-marketed games completely but occasionally I hear of one that *might* be something I'd want to play and decide to take the time to get a hold of it. Sometimes it was worth the bandwidth (Damn Australian ISPs universally providing only shaped internet!), more often than not, it was not worth the download. Sadly, most of the time my preconceptions are pretty spot-on. If it's a game I genuinely enjoy, like was the case with Mass Effect, I buy it later when I have funds available.

Also, judging the quality of a game by who's publishing it isn't totally crazy, since they all meddle in the development of games in the dev studios they control. Again, there are plenty of exceptions but with a few major publishers you can generally guess how it's going to come out.

[Bauglir]

-snip-

[Shades]

Probably something closer to a million copies, plus or minus a few hundred thousand.

Although your maths on number of sales for triple AAA titles to make profit is accurate to what I've experienced I have to point out few games make these sale numbers. Most games don't actually make a return on investment, apparently it's about 1 in 20 (or 5%). The successful ones tend to be very successful though so publishers use them to support the ones making the loss.

Just for numbers the average sales per game for x360 is around 210k and for ps3 is 190k (although I'm going by numbers at least a year of out date here)

I'm not trying to defend the clearly flawed system of churning out crap games just trying to point out the profit margin is hard to reach.

... Ubisoft ... DRM ...

The most amusing thing, although due to an illegal act, was the ddosing of one UBI servers meaning one title was unplayable for something like 48 hours after day of release, and as you mentioned a cracked one was available much sooner.

While I'll keep my stance on Piracy to myself, I think anti-piracy is what causes a lot of problems. These companies are so dumbfounded scared of losing a little profit that they put these anti-piracy programs into the games, and they end up screwing up the people that buy these game. They don't defer piracy, they promote it.

Agreed, in fact because protect tends to be removed within hours of release it means not only does it only effect legitimate customers it also doesn't do anything to stop piracy and costs a lot more money. In fact on some titles the DRM is a significant cost of the final product. There are a number of developers (most notably Stardock) who don't use DRM and have stated they've not noticed any drop in sales, I've yet to see any evidence they are wrong.

[MrWiggles]

How can it be dumb to be worried about losing profit?

I like to eat. I need money to eat. I gain money from making Product X. I loose money if Person Y steals Product X. Therefore I should delimit person Y ability to steal Product X.

That is a simplification, hopefully to serve why its not unfounded for producers of content to fight piracy.

Entities should be allowed to make money from their own Intellectual Property.  Entities of ownership should be allowed to protect their Intellectual Properties. Entities of ownership should be allowed to what happens with their Intellectual Property.
--

I'm in favor of Copy Write laws and Trademark. The current standing of Copy Write law and Trademark (though trademark not so much), is that its outmoded by the digital age. They need to be wholly replaced, with international accords. (And the United Kingdom has to stop being a fucking asshat about Fairuse rights!)

Piracy is wrong and unethical. How much it hurts the industry is unquantifiable at this time. It does hurt, as it hurts all industries of media. This cannot be denied.

The formula to stop pirating is simple really. The protection has to be hard enough to disable to be beyond the resources of those nefarious groups wishing to; in balance to hardship of the legal consumer that happen because of the protection.

This hasn't been reached yet.