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Mac Version Of Halo Exemplifies Piracy Problem?
An anonymous reader writes "MacSoft takes popular games and ports them to the Macintosh for all the Mac users to enjoy, but according to a TwinCities.com article, apparently there are far more users pirating Mac Halo than actually buying it A MacSoft spokesman 'didn't release sales figures [for Halo] but said illegal downloads number at least in the hundreds of thousands.'" The article uses this specific game to discuss how PC and Mac publishers are "...making gamers enter special codes, authenticate themselves online and jump through more hoops." It ends by describing the pain of the developer in seeing their title pirated: "It was a dagger in the hearts of guys who worked 12 to 14 hours a day [on Halo]... We're on an emotional high, and it all comes crashing down."
Bungie was the Great Hero of Mac gaming with titles like Myth and Marathon. Fabulous games that didn't require a supercomputer to get interesting graphics and great game play. Scenario editors that spawned communities.
Steve Jobs was using Halo to demonstrate 400 MHz G4 Power Macs. Halo was being voted the Game of the Year before release. We were going to have it for Christmas 1998.
What did we get? Shafted. Bungie Sold Out to the Great Satan. Sure, when the sellout occurred there were still promises that Bungie would release for the Mac at the same time as the XBox. Never Happened. When Halo finally became available what did we get? Bug ridden trash with insane hardware demands and a non-functional scenario editor. Myth sold off, and the result - a well documented failure.
If Mac Halo is being pirated in great numbers as a result, I don't have a lot of sympathy for Bungie/Microsoft. They broke faith with their users.
So, it is alright for a company to abandon their users and sell out to MS.
It is alright for their premiere platform to be the last one they port it to, years later.
It is alright for them to make the buyers unable to play with their PC friends who got the game years earlier.
It is alright for the game to run like complete ass showing it was quick port.
Is that all right?
Sleep is for the weak.
I, on the other hand, have all kinds of ill feelings towards developers and publishers who are stupid enough to think that piracy will be stopped by adding copy protection.
I've not copied a game since I gor my first full time job a few years ago. However, I've had to visit crack sites time and time again because of the stupid copy protection mechanisms malfunctionin on my perfectly legit copies of the games. I am so tired of ackward copy protection mechanisms that I've almost stopped buying computer games. Now, my console game purchases outnumber my PC game purchases by over 20 to 1. IMO, any company that puts copy protection in front of the user convenience deserves exactly what they are getting: lowers sales, and thus, more pirate copies, probably becasue in many cases the original, uncracked game is inferior to a pirated one you could pick up from kazaa.
Protecting your livelihood by lowering the qaulity of your product and making it less attractive is a recipee for disaster. Just like the RIAA is just shooting themselves in the foot by protecting their business model by copy protecting CDs in an ineffective way that hurts many of their customers, the PC software industry is just asking for decreased sales by releasing the unisable crap they've been releasing lately. Most software developers I know agree that the copy protection mechanism that the publisher adds to their games are just making their games less attractive, and forcing them to make patches that 'fix' broken copy protection mechanisms that make some costumer return their games because they are unplayable on their computer due to an 'incompatible' CDROM drive.
If developers and publishers want to stop piracy, they could start by either releasing their games at a lower price tag, or by going after the groups that are releasing their cracked games to the internet, as opposed to giving money to the makers of copy protection mechanisms.
Thanks to you we can be assured that game developers will continue to develop for only a single platform.
Thats the problem, most game developers only develop for one platform. Halo so far has 3 development houses behind it. Bungie for the XBox, Gearbox for Windows, and MacSoft for Mac.
Blizzard and id on the otherhand use *gasp* industry standard programming methods and thus have a much easier time getting the game out for both platforms. id even does 3 PC platforms, and console platforms. Epic is also now doing this, ensuring their engine is as cross platform as possible to help more games run on everything. These companies to me are much more deserving of my money. I appreciate the porting houses, but would rather see them break up, and get their programmers hired on at the big publishers to ensure more games come in one box, not two for a computer.
Yes, I'd rather support the guys going after industray standards. If they don't, well, sorry, I'm not paying $100 to play most games.
And if these people had not pirated the game, how many of them would have bought copies? Only I small percentage, I'll bet. So how much money was lost due to piracy is an open question. In fact, how many copies of Halo will be sold due to this piracy (which is advertising, if unintentional)? Perhaps this will eventually be money in the pocket of developers rather than a dagger in the heart. There is no way to tell without hard numbers, and those are probably unknowable.
Where is the demo? I go to Macsoft's Halo page and see a nice collection of screenshots, but is there a downloadable demo? Perhaps that link to "Preview" is it. Nope, that just goes to a review article on Apple's site. Well, maybe they're just really trying to sell it. Maybe it's really under the Game Demos & Updates page. Sorry, not there either.
The real reason why people are downloading the pirate version is because that's all that's available for them to download if they want to try it out on their system. And let's face it -- this isn't the early 1990's anymore where you have to trust some biased Mac magazine who gives a favorable review because Macsoft spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a multi-page ad campaign. Everyone checks the review sites to see how it fares instead of just rushing out to buy it. And guess what... they're finding out it's junk.
Macsoft, some of your products are great (Neverwinter!!) but you're not going to sell a whole lot of games with your "Trust Us" approach. Put out a demo and let people give it a spin. If it's good, there's a good chance they'll buy it. If they don't buy it after trying it out, then it's your own damned fault for putting out such a lousy product. But don't blame the p2p networks for spoiling sales of the stinker called Halo.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
My expectations are tainted by my experiences on more open hardware platforms such as the x86 provides. These games under windows perform significantly better on hardware costing half as much- that was my gist. It is a question of the econmomics of that performance.
Obviosuly, if your needs or desires bring you to a specific platform, you play the cards you are dealt.
Bugs and delays aside, let's give Bungie a little credit. Afterall, when Microsoft bought them and announced Halo for XBox, I was sure that PC or Mac Halo would never see the light of day. And I'm sure that the suits were all against anything but an XBox only title. Doing it on Mac and PC simply doesn't make economic sense given the numbers they have sold on the XBox. With that in mind, the only reason Bungie would release Mac and PC versions would be to keep their word to their customers. That's an honorable thing in these days of the bottom line rules everything.
Unfortunately this piracy problem is a double edged knife in the back. Bungie developers are rightly pissed off, and now the suits will make sure that Halo 2 never sees anything but the XBox. Any experienced developer will tell you that supporting more than one platform is a lot of work which publishers are less and less willing to pay for. So we won't be seeing any more multiplatform Halo.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
They say "gamers need a way to download games legally." Well guess what, people don't download games cause they like downloading, they download cause the games cost $50+! And then you have expansion packs, etc, that are another $40-50, sequels, etc etc etc. And then even at that, only 10% of the games you buy will be worthwhile. I know Halo is an excellent game, but I can safely say that Mac users hold something against Microsoft because they basically stole Bungie, and Halo, and since Halo was debuted over 3 years ago - on a mac - that grudge will never go away.
,and I always say to myself "if that game was $20 cheaper, I would be buying it right now."
All they have to do is start charging LESS for their games and they will make up profits in the numbers of games sold. Look at Avril Lavigne - she sold over a million albums in the US cause they were only $8.99 or something like that, not $20 like most artists. I see games in the store every day
But don't even get me started on Sims games - they have made SO much money out of those expansions (Which are basically collections of the stuff you can get for free on the net, legally) it's not even funny.