LATEST NEWS
LATEST CHEATS
LATEST VIDEOS
- Sleeping Dogs
Trailer - Batman: Arkham City
BTS 'Hamil' Trailer - Far Cry 3
'Insane Edition' Trailer - The Cave
Trailer - Metro: Last Light
Live Action Trailer - Dark
Teaser - Transformers: Fall of Cybertron
'Dinbots' Trailer
LATEST FILES
- Might & Magic Heroes VI
Patch 1.3 - Crusader Kings 2
v1.05c Hotfix - Crusader Kings 2
v1.04 Patch - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Patch 1.4.3 - Eng. GB - StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty
Patch 1.4.3 - Eng. US - Anno 2070
v1.03 Patch - Driver: San Francisco
v1.04 Patch
CONTACT US
How Do You Feel About Piracy?
Uros "Vader" Pavlovic
04:50 am EDT @ February 14th, 2011
As video game publishers continue their desperate struggle against that foul
whore piracy, gamers often find themselves on the receiving end of crappy anti-piracy
measures such as Ubisoft disastrous DRM scheme. But like many foul whores, piracy
also serves its purpose when the going gets tough. What's more, gamers are increasingly
complaining about steep game prices and if they can't afford their favorite
games, piracy might be their only option. We are not supporting piracy, but
we're not condemning it at this point either, because even if piracy is a crime
it's impossible to deny that some of the largest game communities were created
thanks to piracy (a lot of gamers just don't have the money to buy games and
if they still appreciate games the way they are supposed to, but don't have
the means to acquire them, then we say: pirate your assess off!).
Anyway, people have different views on piracy and we'd like to hear your thoughts on it:
All things considered, piracy is:
- Good, because games are too expensive.
- Bad, because it's a fucking crime and it ruins the industry.
- Handy when publishers dish out a DRM nightmare.
- A disease that can only be cured by DRM.
Vote away (the voting poll is to the left of the AT news feed).
38 post(s)
Reader Comments| COMMENTS PAGE 1 |
POST A COMMENT
BACK TO TOP
TOP VIDEOS
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
VOTING POLL
Single-player RPG or MMORPG?
TOP SCREENSHOTS
 |
 |
|
TOP COMICS
I feel bad about the good games I've pirated and haven't bought afterwards, but the salaries I had in my life equaled the price of 3 to 5 games. And I had good, comfortable office jobs (mostly). That's the kind of world I live in, and I really don't feel like letting others have all the fun, simply because they were lucky to be born in more civilized places.
What developers and publishers don't like to acknowledge, is that many of us pirate games that we would/could never have bought in the first place. If we come across something good, we DO try to buy it, and if it's just another turd, we end up saving money and shit studios go out of business. Everybody wins.
Most games still don't have demos and we aren't stupid enough to buy into hype, so we try to make an informed decision before spending $60. It's a little different than losing a couple of bucks on some shitty movie. As a PC gamer, I can't rely on reviews when most games are multi-platform and they are tested only on consoles.
The money that's lost because of piracy is far less than they like to believe. If piracy would be completely eradicated, the only real loss would be on the poor kids' side, who normally are able to buy 1 or 2 games per year. Of course, our good good friends in the industry don't give a fuck about kids in developing countries. Their rich brats should enjoy their childhood, but the rest can be content with watching mouth watering commercials and then go back to playing fucking hopscotch. Pardon me if I don't think game developers in general are artists.
Of course, there are assholes who can afford to buy games, yet they pirate them for the hell of it. What can you do ? It's a dirty world, it's every man for himself. I see no solution, except lowering the price of games. If only the "artists" would be a little more selfless.
hmm, this may be a hint that i need a secretary ?
so, anyone fond of pantihose here ?
From the publishers / developer's pov: What is the guarantee that some one downloaded the pirated game and liked it, would actually shell out 60 quids to buy it. Think about it, once you have finished the pirated game, the argument to go out and buy it is far less compelling. How many of us played the pirated version for a couple of hours, only to delete it from our HDD and go out and buy the damn thing.
Outcome: Publishers would either avoid the PC platform OR use DRM or similar mechanisms (with poor effect), OR use Piracy as an escape goat for their shitty game having shitty sales.
Solution: Either introduce Game 'Bundles' with a value price tag, or offer cheaper Direct2Drive solutions a la Steam.
Of course, everything may not always be so black and white, and I do largely agree with what un om bun said above.
I'm happy to pay for games aslong as its worth it, don't see why I have to just believe the marketing bullshit and some review from some random website...just cause they like it don't mean I will.
I had Bulletstorm pre-ordered but since they said no demo for PC I cancelled it, and shall DL it and try b4 I buy. and if Bioware decide to pull Dragon Age 2 demo I shall be cancelling my pre-order on that until I've tried it.
secondly, not everybody in the world gets paid 10+ dollars per hour ok? Games and music are played in every country, in most parts of the world 60 dollars IS A WHOLE LOTTA MONEY. There are many people out there who's monthly salary doesn't exceed $ 150
thirdly, I've yet to see devs and publisher employees going on a strike, or starving or setting themselves on fire to express their dire situation. There are many hard working people that don't get anywhere near the amount of money they deserve for their work. Game developers and publishers aren't among them! the video game industry is growing fast, in fact they prolly get paid too much if you ask me. Also, don't forget that a well made game is always appreciated and always brings profit even with all the piracy in the world, they still make a lot of money for making a popular franchise.
and yes there are many people who have too much money, they have no excuse for pirating
But I've come up with some pirating principles:
1)if it only last as long as a movie with no replay value then go to a movie and pirate the game.
2)if it's buggy and unpolished, pirate!
3)Look at it from a pure economic stand point (cost, utility and trade off). If it provide less entertainment than other products while costing more, then pirate!
I do know that piracy is wrong, but I just have a flexible moral and have no problem pirating, some of us are just born to be bad lol.
Some people say smart men don't cheat, I say smart men just don't get caught.
they should immediately kill drm on the PC, it's a waste of time.
shareware worked see: Duke Nukem/Wolfenstein/Quake etc (they were good for millions, allot of modern pc games don't bring-in as much as they did...)
That is, the lack thereof.
Look folks, you can pirate games, and fancy yourself a rebel doing so, and rationalize it by claiming they're too expensive, overpriced, too buggy, the DRM is annoying, etc. and so forth.
BUT IF YOU DO, YOU ARE FOREGOING ANY RIGHT TO COMPLAIN ABOUT THE GAMES' QUALITY.
You can't bitch about something you didn't sacrifice anything for. Not without being a a massive, throbbing hyprocrite, that is.
And therein lies my problem with many of you, because you pirate everything and then bitch, whine, and moan about how the games aren't good enough for you.
Freeloaders and leeches don't have a right to an opinion about all the free shit they get.
What I really would like to do is a live face to face/skype conference call debating this subject!
Since that probably isn't going to happen I'm Gonna be short about it!
Piracy is bad/good
Piracy is benefiting some games/non of the games
Piracy's effect is underrated/overrated
Piracy is done by cheap ass dumb people/people who are smart and like to get to know the games they are about to invest in, because there aren't any demos out there!
Piracy kills development studios/helps to sort the valid developers from shitty ones! aka The fittest survive!
I can go on and on and on! There always be 2 sides of the coin!
I tend to agree with the other side!
Thank you!
I would just like to add that the prices of games in countries in development not only are the same as in those with much higher standards, but ofter shamelessly surpass them. Be it because of the costs of shipment or the greediness of local distributing companies, it's still one of the reasons why piracy is popular.
Also what ChristmasInJuly said, it's not stealing if you don't take anything away from them.
If I pirate 20 games I'm still going to be poorer than an average western European/American who bought those 20 games.
If I don't pirate those 20 games, they still wouldn't have get that money from me because I probably wouldn't have it.
And I have an office job, a part-time office job and a part-time job as a tech support.
In countries with lower standards it's considered wasting money when you use it on something as trivial and non-essential as video games (which is quite hypocritical, considering on what kind of shit people give away their money).
One basically feels the need to hide the original games one has in order not to be considered a snob.
I remember when I pirated CoD4. I got to the end of the first act when I suddenly quit the game, logged onto Steam and bought it immediately. That game was worth absolutely every cent, in my opinion.
The one thing I hate about DRM is how absolutely inconvenient it can be. I legally bought Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory when it came out. I couldn't play it on my new 64 bit computer, because of Starforce. But on the flipside, take Steam. Steam is absolutely the BEST DRM I have ever seen. If everything moved over to Steam, piracy of PC games would come to a near-dead halt, in my opinion. Steam is probably the only convenient DRM I have ever seen.
But I digress. I think this needs more of a gray area than those four options you provide. Piracy has its merits, but games worth the price tag should be bought.
they are tracking just about everything you do.
CoD 4 sold 13 mil copies, 50$ a piece and you end up with 650 million profit.
call me a sceptic but i somehow doubt the price of investment was even remotely close.
reminds me of a clip from Top Gear, ford focus wing = 20 dollars, lamborghini wing = 300 dollars. same material, same colour, same QUALITY, different prices.
@ Cheddar- i wholeheartedly agree with the idea but as a side-thought analogy: though i haven't bought a single painting of Andy Warhol....i reserve myself the right to say his works are a waste of canvas, fecal matter spread like butter on a rotten piece of toast.
the problem with INFORMATION, which movies, games, books, music is these days, is that you cannot make their existence concrete.
if you copy a song in 10 different folders, have you stolen it 10 times ?
Regarding DRM; I find the efforts so far to be horrible. The game industry in this regard is as backwards as the music industry. I don't have the ultimate answer to how this should be solved, but I know that DRMs that makes games don't start, break them or even break computers are bad.
People STEAL, they do it every day, they steal from others and they steal from YOU. It's how some people get rich, it's how some people get poor, it's how some get killed over.
Ever bought a big bag of chips from the market and when you opened it, the bag was only half full with chips? You've just been ripped off, in a somewhat sophisticated way.
So stop being so fucking weak. This world wasn't created by Disney.
The definition of Piracy (in this instance) is the loss of POTENTIAL sales. Because, as many have pointed out, when pirating, one is effectively making a copy, which precludes all publishing cost; not stealing an "original" copy (I know, I know - conundrum, but...roll with it). (And, yeah - the brunt of the potential "loss" is from the publishers - the creators have [hopefully!] already been paid by the publisher) So the problem is, how do you measure a potentiality? And how do you track those of us (myself included) who have pirated a game, only then to decide to purchase it afterwards? How do you track those who don't, and simply pirate, period?
@Un-Om-Bum: I agree with most of what you said at top...except: does it matter whether or not you call game creators artists? Or plumbers? Or quasars? The fact is, they got hired, used their skills, and worked to create that product, good or bad. They toiled to earn a wage, so insofar as that specificity goes, they deserve to be paid, whether or not we enjoy their end-product.
@Cheddar: damn, brother, whence all the hatred and vitriol? Other people have testified (good, bad, or in-between), so I will, too: I pirate games all the time, mostly those I know I'll enjoy; I later buy, perhaps, 90% of them, but I always wait - mostly for patches and such to assure the game is more as it was intended, minus bugs and stability issues (Also, FUCK for-pay downloadable content - all that shit is is content excised from the original release that they figure we'll pay extra for, so [Dragon Age, for example] a given game ends up costing well over $100. Fuck that shit).
And...I was gonna go on, but (lucky for y'all!), I'm being called away.
Have a great day, y'all!
Game on! :D
I am an old school PC guy. Back in the day quality PC titles only cost $35 or so. X-wing, Tie fighter, etc etc. I don't remember EVER spending more than $40 on a pc game. I'll leave it to your own conclusions as to why the prices have gone to $50 and up. And it rhymes with "greed".
SO. Want to end PC piracy? Here are some suggestions:
1) Make the games refundable within 24-48 hours. If the game sucks, people will take it back.... OR
2) Release functional demos AHEAD OF TIME. Consoles already get this, why not PC?
3) No PC game over $40. I mean, really. We already have to shell out for the cost of the PC and the never ending cpu + graphics card upgrades. If you buy a console you're good hardware wise until the next generation console comes out, 5-6 years at least. (RRoD not withstanding) If you're a PC gamer you are buying a new video card every other year and probably new CPU/RAM etc. Does a new $150 video card make my spreadsheets faster? No.
4) Go ALL IN for digital distribution, like a Steam method and also #3 regarding pricing. Steam is making a killing re-selling us older games at a good discount. And also selling smaller indie games that never make it to the store. However, I feel that Steam needs....
5) ...Steam needs to allow you to do something with the game you paid for and finished or didn't like. Partial credit refund? At least the ability to gift the game to someone else that might like it, with say a $3 re-registration fee?
6) RELEASE PRODUCT THAT WORKS! I paid $60 for SC2 and it had some bugs at launch but was playable. I also paid full price for Civ 5 at launch and it's just now becoming playable after patches, 5 months later? Still has a way to go. Go back to point #2 - release demos/beta's ahead of time. People playing them might actually BENEFIT the product via playtesting.
I had more but I will leave it at that. Make it cheaper / give us demos / do it all online / give us shit that works.
Some pirates don't care about being dishonest. My argument isn't aimed at them. But if you think that it's somehow justified then read on..
i) Pirating games is justified because games are too expensive.
This is the easiest argument to counter because it's the dumbest. If you think this then logic really isn't your strong point. Stealing a Lexus because it's too expensive a car for you to buy doesn't make it right. The seller chooses the price. If you don't like the price you don't buy it. If it was just price you'd be playing old games which are always _much_ cheaper only a couple of years down the line.
ii) Pirating games isn't like theft because it's only harming big rich publishing houses.
This is like people who say stealing from warehouses is OK as it's not like breaking into someone's house. It's not a great argument. It's still someone elses property - in this case property rights and those profits trickle down to everyone who worked on a game or shareholders of the publishing house which are usually dominated by pension companies. That's right: you're stealing from pensioners.
iii) But Pirating games isn't like theft because it's just a digital copy. What difference does one more person playing a game make?
OK. I can at least understand why people think this. It's true that priracy isn't much like stealing sweets. It's more like insurance fraud. Your failure to pay pumps the price up for everyone else. If everyone was like you there'd be NO games. None that cost any money to make. So you're not really a thief more of a parasite. Congratulations.
The above was written more in jest than it probably reads. Do I think it's a major crime? No. Do I think that big companies should go after students playing the odd pirated game and threaten them with massive fines or internet disconnection? Of course not. But do I think piracy is wrong? Well yes, it obviously is. Pretty low down on my personal list of wrongness though.
To the point, my beef now is with IP law and it's abuse. Seriously it's fucked. The idea is, that if I... say write a novel, nobody can copy it to say it's their work and sell it. But shiiit if those assholes take this definition broadly and you end up with ridiculous circumstances.
For instance, there's this stupid government agency that monitors everything that is played on everything from radio to restaurants, then they somehow count how many times each song was played and they collect their money and distribute it to the artists... only if they've paid commissions, else they keep the money. I am not making this one up. Absolutely unnecessary people get money for unwanted services. I call those people jews, I know most of them aren't, but I'm a nazi sympathiser and I eat babies.
BTW: fun fact - do you know how the oldest piracy institution is called? Library.
P.S. Almost forgot. Can please everybody stop fucking comparing bloody PHYSICAL objects to intellectual property. For fucks sake - do you grasp the difference between a car and a collection of chords?
The devs do it to themselves, if a game is awesome, people will buy it. Look at what stardock/ironclad do. ALL their games are DRM free. But if you want the updates to the game, you got to buy it. And 99% of the time their games are awesome (Sins of a Solar Empire, galactic civilizations, etc). And no one EVER does demos anymore. Think the last demo I played was for call of duty 2 (one of the few cods that was amazing)
Games like call of duty, which are just reskinned from the previous game with maybe 1 or 2 "new features". The games are POS on the PC. Black Ops is still a buggy mess. And the full mod tools that were promised are still MIA. Who wants to buy that?
That just means, as a developer, I have to help make a game that people feel is worth buying. Sometimes that's not easy though, when considering development costs. That's where publishers come in, and if you're not mindful about money, they'll be more than happy to wring developers dry. Though most devs will overlook this and appreciate piracy in its own way because it's something akin to free advertisement. Generally speaking it's the publishers that always put the foot down on piracy, because they're typically the only ones with anything to loose.
Piracy used to mean PROFITING from theft... the word has been twisted in the information age to mean infringement of copyright... piracy is just a buzzword, one that has far greater impact due to its past association than merely 'copyright infringement'.
Im not saying that the creator or owner of a work doesnt have sole rights to profit from its sale, but I think a line has been crossed where the law permits them to sue for deprivation of potential sales, as though that potential loss is something that can actually be measured, not merely them twisting numbers to mean that they are owed more money than they could possibly hope to have made through legitimate sales.
Ive 'pirated' games in the past, but I have never cost the games industry a single cent in doing so, because at these times I lacked the disposable income to acquire these games by any other means, whereas Ive happily paid full price for new games from retailers at times when Ive had more cash to spend on my personal entertainment.
Do i have a 'right' to enjoy a game Ive acquired without profiting the copyright owners in the process? If not then I suppose the second-hand game market is morally just as bad as piracy, except of course the publishers dont have a legal leg to stand on with regards to doing anything about that... and you know they would if they could, a fact which is evident in many recent titles that require once-off registration to access DRM or other free 'extra' content that comes packed with certain games, not to mention multiplayer.
Im rambling, but Ive made the points I wanted to; to sum-up, piracy in the context its used here and now isnt as bad as the publishers would like us all to think. They are motivated purely by greed, and the shady means by which they justify and enforce their agenda exposes them as the villains in this matter to anyone with a working brain.
- if there is no demo then you have a way of testing the game before buying it.
- the cracks killing a sick-ass-Ubisoft-alike DRMs are always there for you, a week after the game is released (so you can play like a normal person, not wasting your DVD drive and the game disk itself).
I don't support piracy, I don't condone it but it IS useful every time the publisher is trying to dick you.
One should focus on Solutions. Trying to convince someone that something is immoral or wrong has never worked out for anyone. People still steal (Goldman Sachs anyone?), people still kill their own, and people lie (Iraq War?). You will not be able to convince people not to Pirate games with WORDS. Why do we not focus on solutions?
Economic condition is a valid reason. You want to reduce piracy in low income countries, start charging lower prices. Nothing beats that. Charge something people can live with. Entertainment is not a luxury. A PC game is not a 400K sports car and neither is it a 10M dollar piece of art. People have a right to buy a game, at prices that reflect its true cost of development. What publishers charge today for a game is a multiplicative of its cost. Profit is good and all, but where do you draw the line? Goldman Sachs made a Profit. Meryl Lynch made a Profit. Whats wrong with that? Right? Seems to me, if these idiots understood business a little better, they would actually try to discriminate prices to gain a wider audience. The variable cost of a game is only a small fraction of its total cost. Hence, the more units you sell, the more absolute profit you will make.
Lack of Transparency is another. We live in the golden age of marketing hype/bullshit. Irrespective of whether someone is in a low or high income country, everyone *should care about where and how they spend their money. No one wants to buy a shitty game with 50 quids. No one wants to buy a game only to find it crashes every 5 minutes. As long as publishers like THQ and Activision (to name a few) exist, people will have good reasons to be cynical about games. Demos is an obvious answer. But there is an alternative. Publishers can allow gamers to access a playable portion of the game directly via their own website. (like the Cloud Gaming Model), where the gamers can actually play the game for 1 or 2 hours themselves. This will practically eliminate the downloading / pirating routine to a large extent. This bull crap about a Demo not being possible due to the *large levels will not work with the Cloud Gaming model. If you have a great product, you have nothing to hide.
If my 2cents sounds too preachy, don't worry, I will rightfully punish myself with a round of Test Drive Unlimited 2.