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Games X Copy Stirs Backup Controversy
Thanks to GameSpy for its article covering the unveiling of a utility called Games X Copy at this year's CES show in Las Vegas. This commercially-sold gaming backup option claims: "You no longer need to fear losing your expensive PC game collection to scratches, skipping, or freezing... Now you can simply back them up and put the expensive original in a safe place, and the backup will play on your PC just like the original." The maker of this soon-to-launch utility, 321 Studios, has faced lawsuits previously regarding its DVD X Copy software, and a prominently marketed, gaming-specific backup product is sure to cause sparks - the GameSpy article writer comments: "No matter how much 321 Studios claims that parents with the most honorable intentions are its target market, it's easy to see where it would be the perfect item for unscrupulous gamers to copy software to give to or trade with their friends. It goes against everything the industry has been fighting against."
Exactly. If I can find one, I always apply a no-CD crack to any game I install.
Back in the days of 3GB hard disks and smallish games, when you installed a couple of hundred megabytes and streamed the music, video and some of the sound from the CDs (see: Jedi Knight), it was reasonable to have to put the CD in the drive before playing.
Now that games don't let you play from the CD, partly for performance reasons and partly because the game is on several CDs anyway (like Unreal Tournament 2003 and its 3 CDs, of which about 2.5 CDs of data are copied to the hard disk and the last half a CD consists of optional mod tools and Linux binaries), I don't see any reason why I should be required to dig out the correct CD every time I play the game, just to reassure the game that I have a legal copy of it.
Once I went and bought a value pack of like 5 CD games, one of which being an Ultima game (couldn't tell you which one). Whoever published this value pack lacked the foresight to include the manuals for any game, so when I hit one of those anti-pirate questions, I was out of luck. If I had downloaded it, or even gotten it from a friend, I'm sure I would have gotten the manual exerpt with the answers.
People are always going to pirate games. It's just too easy to copy 1s and 0s. I think the solution is the opposite of what the game industry is doing: Sell me more than the disc. I want physical items that are worth more to me, such as a big thick manual, maps, posters, maybe even a player's guide, right in the same box with the shiny disc. I would imagine I'm not alone on this and that if gamers received something more tangible than a disc with their $50, perhaps they would be more inclined to purchase.
I'd also add this: if I'm going to buy a game for $50 and I'm not supposed to copy it, the least they could do is supply a decent jewel case. This is especially a problem with multi-disc releases, such as NWN and UT2k3, both of which had the discs in little paper envelopes. I don't even mind the cardboard-like cases, as long as they have the plastic holders for the discs rather than just having sleeves, because the sleeves themselves scratch the discs.
Considering that I have a box and a half full of game manuals and other stuff that came with games back in the 90s, I don't mind so much that I don't get a lot of extra stuff in the box. However, I do mind that I have to buy stacks of jewel cases when the games should come with them. Sell them to me in DVD cases for all I care, I just want the discs protected to some degree beyond a dust cover.
Beyond that, there isn't a disc that can't be copied out there somehow, otherwise it wouldn't have been distributable on any significant scale. Almost anything you can do on a CD that can be read in a CD-ROM drive can be mimicked by a CD-R drive with the right software. Just protect the discs you ship and go after the people that are really pirating your games. I'm sick of downloading CD-cracks to make games playable and I'm even more sick of copying disc 3 of 5 for my friend who found out this one disc in the game wouldn't play because you shipped it in cheap packaging. Nothing better than a game with so much obvious expense at least in the artwork (to take up 5 discs) being sold in such cheap packaging that there's a 10-20% failure rate of the discs.
-PainKilleR-[CE]