It really drives me nuts to see people pirate video games, especially indie games (which are cheaper than a movie)! Do you think pirates would accept a pirate version of the game, that is one designed a stripped down version of the game, where its pay as you want. Or would they simply pirate the full version anyway. Would than the ordinary customers simply get the stripped down version. Those pirates!

ARRRRR!!!!!

They would simply pirate the full version anyway, most likely.

Everybody I see running pirate Windows, pirate Adobe Creative Suite, pirate this, pirate that... they're all running the Ultimate, Enterprise or essentially the top-of-the-line versions.

Why take a stripped down version when you can download the whole lot for free? If you're not paying, what difference does it make?

I thought this thread was going to be about Pirates!.

This is why some developers who either can't invest in high-tech DRM or don't want to are eating up alternate revenue models. Advertising in free games, F2P MMOs with item shops and others. I expect to see this trend continuing on.

However, there is a big conflict that I see in the gaming community at large. On the one hand, players complain about the increasing costs of games (which is only partially due to piracy, of course), closing of studios, and decreasing commercial offerings every year, but on the other hand, they raise hell when a company actually wants online-verification for offline single-player games. If we all just accepted internet verification as a ways to at least mitigate PC game piracy, companies would be much better off against it. While it doesn't stop everything, there are advanced security techniques that involve internet-verification that would make things incredibly harder on so-called "release groups" that are the ones distributing pirated games.

(On a side-note, how some of these people have the gall to call themselves "release groups" when they are "releasing" something they don't own that has already been released is beyond me.)

Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
(On a side-note, how some of these people have the gall to call themselves "release groups" when they are "releasing" something they don't own that has already been released is beyond me.)

Sometimes they "realese" things before the official release. That's something I've always found quite odd. I mean, there gotta be some insider in the game company or the publisher who pass the unreleased game to the pirating groups.

Quote: Original post by owl

Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
(On a side-note, how some of these people have the gall to call themselves "release groups" when they are "releasing" something they don't own that has already been released is beyond me.)

Sometimes they "realese" things before the official release. That's something I've always found quite odd. I mean, there gotta be some insider in the game company or the publisher who pass the unreleased game to the pirating groups.

Games are often printed several months before they actually hit the shelves. Games have to make it to the stores before they release. Two weeks before the actual release date has thousands of people outside of the developers with their hands on the data.

Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
However, there is a big conflict that I see in the gaming community at large. On the one hand, players complain about the increasing costs of games (which is only partially due to piracy, of course), closing of studios, and decreasing commercial offerings every year, but on the other hand, they raise hell when a company actually wants online-verification for offline single-player games.

Games are not cheap. I don't play commercial games often anymore either. I play more Flash games on Newgrounds and some online games like MMORPG's and stuff.

But IF I buy a game (like I probably will with StarCraft II), then I mean to buy it to HAVE it. To have it independent from anything.

I recently played Starcraft (Brood War) again. That's 10 years after I initially played it. I own it legally, but what did I do? I created an ISO file of the StarCraft and the Brood War CDROM, mount them in Linux, and play it that way with Wine. One of the last patches of SC removed the CDRom check anyway so now it even just works without mounting them. I hate having a spinning CDRom in my PC. It even works through battle.net.

I also still play Unreal Tournament every now and then. For that I bought "Unreal Anthology" on eBay for 5 or 10 euro's or so, because I lost the original. 4 Unreal games in one :)

I'm not the kind of guy who finished the one commercial game after the other, I'm someone who sometimes likes a certain game and can then be hooked on it for years. And that's never going to be the sort of game where you play it through once and you've seen and done everything.

So DRM in games is bad for me. It gives me the feeling that I'm not going to be able to play the game anymore in 10 years. And it depends on a lot of crap too, so the scenario of mounting ISO's in Linux and playing it with Wine doesn't sound realistic with modern games anymore either (and neither does playing it with whatever version of Windows that exists in 10 years).

And that why I think it's the customer's right to complain about DRM.

Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
but on the other hand, they raise hell when a company actually wants online-verification for offline single-player games. If we all just accepted internet verification as a ways to at least mitigate PC game piracy, companies would be much better off against it. While it doesn't stop everything, there are advanced security techniques that involve internet-verification that would make things incredibly harder on so-called "release groups" that are the ones distributing pirated games.

But... offline single-player games with online verification are still easily cracked! It's not a solution to piracy at all. Even high-tech solutions like steam are easily defeated by these groups...

Quote: Original post by jackolantern1
(On a side-note, how some of these people have the gall to call themselves "release groups" when they are "releasing" something they don't own that has already been released is beyond me.)

These "release groups" can be very professional organisations, with worldwide distribution networks of private FTP servers, sources (people in retail, manufacturing, development) and lots of talent (crackers, hackers, compression tool authors, asset unpacking and repacking, virus/trojan writers). Most of these groups actually operate completely behind the curtain, and when their "work" shows up on a torrent site, it's usually someone else leaking their "release" to the public at large.
Even though we hate what they do, you've got to respect the complexity of their operations ;P

Quote: Original post by Talroth

Quote: Original post by owl
Sometimes they "realese" things before the official release. That's something I've always found quite odd. I mean, there gotta be some insider in the game company or the publisher who pass the unreleased game to the pirating groups.

Games are often printed several months before they actually hit the shelves. Games have to make it to the stores before they release. Two weeks before the actual release date has thousands of people outside of the developers with their hands on the data.

Bioshock avoided the pre-release piracy by simply not putting the main EXE file on the disc -- you had to download it from a server that only came online on release day. This also meant that there wasn't a crack available for 13 days until after release.

Quote: Original post by Lode
So DRM in games is bad for me. It gives me the feeling that I'm not going to be able to play the game anymore in 10 years. And it depends on a lot of crap too, so the scenario of mounting ISO's in Linux and playing it with Wine doesn't sound realistic with modern games anymore either (and neither does playing it with whatever version of Windows that exists in 10 years).

And that why I think it's the customer's right to complain about DRM.

I wait until the no CD crack comes out for a game before I buy it. I don't really care how people want to spin the license. It's on my computer and I'll privately do what I want with it. Modern Warfare 2 is the only recent game I've bought without waiting for the crack first.

About the Windows thing, I got a whole stack of MS-DOS games that don't really work anymore. I know there are things like DOSBox but that is besides the point. Technology moves on and old things don't work anymore. If it means that much then keep a Win98 computer around. In 10 years make sure you got a old dual core with XP on it to run the 'old games'.