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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."
I have not downloaded Halo (mostly because there's not a snowballs chance in hell it'll run on my iBook 700), but my friend did. He has a TiBook 1Ghz, and it runs EXTREMELY slow. He had to put it on the lowest resolution possible to even make it playable. But even then the game slows to a halt when there's any kind of action going on... Needless to say he quickly deleted it.
Now come on, this computer is less than a year old and yet it wont play a game that was made a few years ago. I wonder if it'll even run on the latest G4 desktops (I'm sure it flies on the G5). This is pretty unacceptable in my opinion.
I'm willing to bet that a lot of people were in the same boat as my friend: pirated it to try it and found out it ran as slow as molasses - then quickly deleted it.
I dunno who it is
but it prolly is fhqwhgads.
I have to admit I will never buy Halo on the Mac. Why? Well, I own it on the PC already. My Wintendo will always be my main computer box, since it does games better then my Powerbook. But, I personally enjoy a game of Warcraft 3 every once in a while on the road, so I pop in the same copy of the game I only had to buy once to play it on either my Powerbook or Wintendo desktop.
Use this same argument for Linux too. Many gamers see no reason to buy a Linux only version of a game over a Windows version. But a ton enjoy the fact that the Windows Quake disk also allows Linux play.
Macsoft also has the problem of not ensuring they keep up with patches. By what I understand, no Mac user could play online with a PC user for a while after release. Thats a bad thing for sure.
I get a pirated copy of every game first (with the exception of Bioware titles). There is no way in hell I'm buying a $50 game that won't run and cannot be returned. I'll waste the $0.25 on a blank and then see if it's worth buying.
Maybe if MacSoft worked closer with the development studios to get the titles out within a month or so of the PC release they'd sell more. When you have to wait 1-2 years for a game that is in the PC bargin bin for $9.99, most people will just pirate it since the perceived value isn't there.
For example, Neverwinter Nights. It was supposedly getting released for Linux, PC and Mac in the same packaging at the same time. Reality: 1+ years later, no expansion packs and it doesn't have the Aurora Toolkit and it's $50. The PC version is $30 with the first expansion (gold version) and toolkit included.
If you want to play games get a PC. Until Mac releases are timely I won't buy any.
Heck- it's cheaper to buy a PC clone at $400+ than to try to get Halo to run well on a Mac.
I have a 17" iMac G4/800 with 1GB of ram- this system will not upgrade "officially" much beyond this configuration. This system is 14 months old. It will not run any of the FPS PC ports from the past 2 years with an acceptible frame rate (including Wolfenstien, Jedi Knight II, and No One Lives For Ever.). I am not complaining about the inevitable obsolecence- it's the price curv between x86 hardware and Apple's.
There is clearly a lot of polish and pazaz that goes into Mac systems. There is some bleeding edge risks too. There is, even with budget macs, no way to compare their performacne to PC counterparts at half the price. x86 beats the Mac hands down in budget power.
While MacPlay and similar companies make bank on game-desperate mac owners trying to keep up with the PC market, it's disgusting to me. I bought NOLF for $49 when the PC version was $20 and the sequel, NOLF2, was $39 (and most retailers bundled the original in for free with NOLF2).
I am done investing in Mac games. I'd rather put the budget towards Linux x86 as a gaming platform where many development houses are doing parallel development on Win32 and Linux instead of porting. It may lack polish, but at least I'd get more from my hardware investment.
I don't condone the raping of intellectual property- but just the same, in NY state it's practically impossible to return software. At $50 a title, the gamble is too high on the Mac platform. I'd rather go without or choose a platform alternative.
I am fortunate in that I have an Xbox, Linux and Win32 hosts here to kick around with. I find that I do most of my gaming these days (as little as I can game these days) on the Xbox. I can rent titles before I buy them to see that I am getting what I expect. I just drop in the disk, fire up XBOX live, and embarass myself publicly. On Win32 or Linux I spent more time updating drivers and other code and tweaking the system than actually gaming. The console (xbox, ps2, whaterver) just smokes the Mac for most action games, and it's hard to say that the Mac has more variety than today's consoles for most game genres.
How have these guys measured this? downlading stuff off bit torrent you rarely get more than 20 seeds. How many files have you grabbed from kazaa that have more than 10 other clients they are downloading from? Seeing as there are loads of p2p networks, how have Macsoft come to the conculustion that "hundreds of thousands" of illegal downloads have occurred.
lots of comments here mention how the Mac version is buggy, slow and people resent buying the game after bungie sold out to Microsoft. Perhaps (in true RIAA style), Macsoft are blaming poor sales on p2p networks as opposed to poor product.
The Romans didn't find algebra very challenging, because X was always 10
I have a 17" iMac G4/800 with 1GB of ram- this system will not upgrade "officially" much beyond this configuration. This system is 14 months old. It will not run any of the FPS PC ports from the past 2 years with an acceptible frame rate (including Wolfenstien, Jedi Knight II, and No One Lives For Ever.). I am not complaining about the inevitable obsolecence- it's the price curv between x86 hardware and Apple's.
I call bull. While I upgraded last fall to a Dual 2 GHz G5 with a Radeon 9800, before that I gamed constantly on my 450 MHz G4 Cube with a Rage 128. One of the games I played the most was Jedi Knight II, and my Cube handled it easily. I also played Ghost Recon extensively, and rarely would I run into having too low frame rates. Sure you won't be able to play them with graphics settings at the highest, but a year+ old iMac is not meant to be an awesome gaming machine.
From the perspective of someone who creates and sells small games for a living, I'd pooh-pooh most arguments legitimizing the act of piracy.
1. If the game "isn't worth buying," don't pirate it, spend 30 hours playing through the whole thing, and claim that you "wouldn't have bought it, anyway."
2. If you want to try the game out before buying, don't pirate it; play the demo.
3. If there's no demo, and you don't trust the developer enough to buy the game, sight-unseen, don't buy it. The developer doesn't deserve your money, but neither do you deserve to own a copy of their game.
4. Copy protection schemes that prevent you from playing the game you paid for are inexcusable. If the copy protection detracts from the game, tell the developer why you're not going to buy from them again. Don't pirate the game; piracy will only make future copy protection schemes worse for legitimate users.
Recently, a young man from the UK e-mailed us, requesting a free copy of one of our games, citing that he could not possibly buy it. Later, he e-mailed us asking for tech support on the full version. Is this audacious, or simply stupid?
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
You are, in fact, wrong.
I purchase a number of games. And not just games -- I have purchased *more expensive equivalents* and simply postponed purchasing a non-game product to avoid purchasing Microsoft products. I use Linux for things that it would be easier to use a pirated copy of Windows for. I use a MacAlly Q-BALL (and waited years to buy one) because the functional alternative was a Microsoft product.
You may be right that the majority of pirates do not feel this way. However, I do. I consider it an ethical mandate to avoid giving my money to Microsoft, and if I want something and there is no alternative to and the software cannot be pirated, I simply go without. This does not apply to any other company, but my wallet my own small way of expressing my unhappiness with Microsoft.
I even build systems in a day and age when OEM computers are price-competitive with home-built machines to avoid giving money to Microsoft.
May we never see th