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Free Games As a Solution To Game Piracy
christ, jesus H writes "PC gaming may not be dying, but it is in a state of flux. We're seeing developers and publishers blaming piracy for all the ills of PC gaming, but attempts to rein in pirates with the help of DRM only annoys and mobilizes the legitimate customers of your games. The solution? According to David Perry of Shiny Games, PC games are going to be free." (And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below.)
I prefer the term "stealing games" myself. It fits well, does away with the positive connotations that the term "piracy" has gained in some circles, and -perhaps most important- it really makes the pirates mad.
Electronic copyright violation.
Yarr, I be a clever pirate.
I never spellcheck and I freely admit it. Save your karma for more worthwhile "lol erorrs" replies
Free as in that shitty urine soaked couch sitting on the curb with a "Free" sign on it.
>> (And if anyone has a favorite replacment term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below.)
"Rape of the creative class"?
Instead of mediocre games that require incredibly expensive stuff few people have.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
How the hell am I gonna demand my money back if it sucks? Doesn't matter. Anything after X-com: Ufo Defense sucks the farts outta used car seats anyway.
Just like television and radio, games will find a way to make money, and offering them "free" (with advertising in-game/around the game to pay for the production and distribution) will be the forum for many (if not most games). That's how "shared games" will be counterbalanced.
Harold
Do one and you'll get the other!
Bootlegging: to produce, reproduce, or distribute illicitly or without authorization
This helps to distinguish private copying from for-profit counterfeiting by organized crime.
They'll be encumbered with ad- and mal- ware.
Warez was a personal favorite of mine.
"PC games are going to be free"
The only way this would ever work is if people stop considering graphics over gameplay.
I'm quite ready for that.
Currently, the iPhone AppStore is only showing one free game. Frisbee Golf is $2.99 and they go on up from there.
id Software is already heading in this direction with Quake Live, which will earn revenue from in-game advertising.
Light the blue touch-paper and retire immediately.
a spell checker.
Sure, free games may solve game "piracy", but it doesn't address what is killing PC gaming. Which are A) Windows, B) Insane hardware requirements and C) Consoles. When all PC games become cross platform (Linux, Windows and Mac), require the average hardware and will run decently on low-end hardware (for example, now it would need to run on 512 MB of RAM and a cheap Intel graphics card), and be better than the games on consoles. Once they solve all those problems PC gaming may be mainstream, but right now they confine themselves to a small niche.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
TV watches you
Products buy you
You don't understand: I am not locked up in here with you, you are locked up in here with ME!
Fail. Do not pass go. Do collect negative karma.
If you haven't been down-modded lately, you aren't trying.
Sacred cows make the best hamburger.
Would make for much easier to read articles.
I would still be willing to BUY games (I don't pirate them, I just haven't found much to interest me, console OR desktop alike).
Again, I would still be willing to BUY games if they would stop rehashing half witted half finished games. So few companies really release good games, and everyone expects insane growth. Always "growth". Perhaps some retards somewhere forgot that you can only grow so much before your body either collapses under its own weight or you evolve into something else. Otherwise, no luck.
Blizzard always releases late. People understand them. Why? Because Blizzard, ID, Ravensoft and no others I can think of, have managed to release a bug free or complete product. Most of their fixes, in my memory, have been playbalancing, rare bugs on rare configs, etc. But their games WORK. Other people's games... often hit and run.
Why is it that so FEW companies actually put out workable, GOOD products? Perhaps if more of them did, and if shoddy products were to be refunded in FULL, then perhaps better products would "revitalize" the market.
Games don't need to be free. Shitty ones and incomplete ones should be. The "no return if opened" policy is bullshit. It just allows a company to sell a shitty game and get away with it. It allows a store to carry a non tested product and get away with it. But hell, if pharmaceutical companies and electronics and even car companies can get away with shoddy products, why not the software industry? If the customers keep waiting for governments to step in and save them, they ought to realize that it is MUCH easier to buy off bureaucrats and politicians than ten thousand pissed off freemen customers, some of whom might be willing and able to use their rights (from the vocal to the physical) when other means fail to extract remedy for shoddy product and vaporware sold as an actual, complete product. Fraud of this sort should be held accountable by the victims, the customers. Until the customers demand quality, and stand by that remark... and demand refunds on shitty products, until that occurs... well, nothing's gonna change.
" What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
ARRRRRR
First!!!!!11!1!!ONEONEELEVEN
That would be even better if it was first
Ok, I can see that this MIGHT work for MMORPG companies, as they can make money off of subscriptions, or the ones that have tiered accounts (payed accounts have better weapons, etc than free accounts). What about games without much online component, like Bioshock? It was a good game and I didn't mind paying for it. What would such companies do to get money? Sell action figures and t-shirts? Charge for support, the way RedHat makes money supporting a free operating system? I could even see charging nominal amounts for "chapters" of a game (say $3.00 / chapter, and if you don't like the game you just stop buying chapters) - wasn't this how Quake was originally released? ...but FREE? i dunno...
And so should music, and so should movies, and so should all information.
"oh boo hoo but no one will make a living from creating these things if they are free"
and cops would never make a living if not for criminals. and firefighters would never make a living if not for people's houses burning down. but do you hear firefighters say "i sure am glad people's houses burn down, because that means I have a job!!"
these days, "making money off information" is based on artificial scarcity and draconian intellectual property laws, which are Bad Things, like criminals and fires.
"And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below."
Umm, a copyright violation? Copyright infringement? Why not just call it what it is instead of bringing in some new word that's going to have a specific connotation?
If the future of free games means installing DRM crap on our computers, such as SecuROM, then they can keep their "free games". It's only going to become an entry point for companies to install their malware on our computers.
"Copyright Restoration" - I have certain rights when I purchase a game, which the games companies try to artificially restrict using DRM and other technologies - circumventing those restrictions restore those rights.
Just make them good. I have no problem with paying for my games (I do so for every game I have a copy of), but I'm not going to go out and buy a crap game if I can help it.
Of course the industry needs to stop crying wolf as well. While sales from brick and morter stores are going down like a brick, a lot of that is being picked up by services like Steam, because Valve seems to have realised that attempting to screw your customers just doesn't work.
I personally think it's the consoles that are the REAL reason. A decade ago, PCs were at the top of the hill for superior graphics and networking for team playing. Now they aren't because HDTVs, internet connectivity and multicore proccesor consoles. There's no niche anymore. At least worth spending on. Same thing happened to arcades.
A good replacement term for piracy is the involuntary 100% discount... which differs very little from the voluntary 100% discount suggested by making 'all computer games free'. That is 100% stupid. If you are charging for services related to the game, i.e. "color t-shirts" in the game or the online service or whatever, then guess what part people will pirate instead of the game?
stuff |
All Nexon games include the rootkit know as "Game Guard". you may not want to install these machines unless your willing to have a rootkit installed on your machine.
I've said it before...open source games will improve this.
Sure, they might not have the latest engines, but many good, free, cross platform games have come from the open sourcing of the Quake3 engine (UrbanTerror)
It's a great game, and Windows, Mac, and Linux (32 and 64 bit Linux) users can all play it, for free. In my opinion its a commerical quality game, or damn close to it.
Manufacturers should opensource their old unloved game engines so they can live on as free games for all!
Even if they offered free (or cheap) API access to thier proprietary engines.
Of course this will bring up the money making point. How will vendors develop new game engines if they don't make any money.
That I can't answer
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Free Games As a Solution To Game Piracy
It is really tough to pirate a free game... I've tried it a few times, I just don't feel as badass when I do it.
People have been pirating games for almost 30 years, but companies have been profitable. Pirating games is a giant pain in the butt, so if you can purchase a game online and legally download it, you're probably going to do it. You can purchase almost any game via digital downloads these days.
Compare to consoles, I own an xbox 360 but do not own a single game. I don't pirate, but I have gamefly. I get 3-4 games per month, which I play beat and return in mere days. The amount of money being made there per game is miniscule, if I had more free time I would probably do the trade-in thing which I understand is all the rage.
I'm not convinced "free" (as in crack) games are a solution to a real problem. Windows is just not turnkey enough for the simple games that consoles do best. For the complicated games, lately people don't buy very many. Who has time for WoW AND Lotro AND MMOG++? PC games tend to be involved, for this reason we won't acquire every game that hits the shelves and will be selective. If a game sucks, we won't buy it, no time, forget money.
Console games...well gamefly will send me anything on my queue, and I'll keep the queue full even if the games on it suck and I just send it back barely touched. If you're EA, this is just fine, that means they're getting more share of my entertainment budget ($14.99/mo or whatever it is). From the standpoint of running a business based on increasing profits, they like it, no risk.
Its time they took their share of the blame.
Online games have it the best.
It's hard to pirate something that authenticates your key. I'm not just talking WoW or anythign like that, but more so BF2 or other games that rely the end users to play online to get the full experience.
I know this doesn't help the whole gaming market, but still....
Also they complain so much about how people getting the game for free (Piracy) is hurting them...yet they just go to offer it free for everyone? How does that make sense?
The greatest revenge in life is massive success.
Valve has a nice vision:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=160866
Have to say I agree with them.
I recently bought a new, up-to-date PC with dual cores and all the bells and whistles. After playing nothing but WoW, Civ and other less-powerhungry games on my trusty old 1,2 GHz Celeron and Win'98, I could finally check out all the games I missed.
So far: Half-Life 2, Orange Box (consisting of EP1&EP2 too, and Portal). Love it. Also love Steam. It works.
Another case: Galactic Civilizations 2. Stardock's Stardock Central (and the parallel, Impulse), rock.
NO Copy protection. No DVD in drive bullshit. No running through the hoops. Before, when I bought a game it was always running via gamecopyworld.com to get the crack. Another game that I got was Crysis. Fine, gamecopyworld has cracks - except there isn't one for the 64-bit 1.21 version. So I was stuck with the DVD in drive..
Then, as an old Baldur's Gate&Torment&Kotor fan, I heard that Bioware had done a new RPG - Mass Effect. To avoid hassle, I googled for what copy protection it's using - and read about the whole phone-home-schema. I can run Steam in offline mode. Stardock Central doesn't phone home. But these guys seriously thought that spyware in your PC is ok?!
I was already firing up my torrent client, but then I read http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/09/2318229 about EA loosening the DRM and actually bought the game instead.
Gotta love Valve. And Blizzard.
Most of the games are following the "Free" MMORPG model.
The game is "free", you just pay a subscription to play online.
Other MMORPG's are "free" with no online subscription, but certain permium items cost money. [Albatross 18 or 'Pangya Island'] is a common example. 100% free, but most of the worthwhile items cost real money.
I also see a similar micropayment system happening with applications.
The base application will be 'free'
-spellcheck a document, $0.25/page
-print a document, $0.10/page
-voice recognition, $5.00/hr
-scanning , $0.10/page
-clip art, $1.00/image
-data analysis, $1.00/chart
I picture the OS doing the same thing:
-file management, $0.001/file
-memory management, $0.001/Mb
-CD burning : 5.00/CD + RIAA royalty
-DVD Burning: 15.00/DVD + MPAA + RIAA Royalty
-CPU management 0.000001/CPU/TICK*APPLICATION
-Viewing Digital Pictures: 0.001/Picture
-Network Management : 0.005/Mb
-View a DVD : 0.50 + MPAA royalty
-Send Email 0.05/Email/Recipient + Network Management Fee
-Receive Email : 0.01/Message + Network Management Fee
-Games: [Fees set by game owner , does not include Network Management Fee, and CPU / Memory management Fee]
I predict Microsoft or another OS maker will embrace this, by saying it benefits the consumer, as they only pay for the features they use, as they use them.
Heck, why not go back to renting CPU time, it's what Microsoft essentially wants, millions of dumb terminals, at the mercy of a centrally controlled Microsoft server.
Think it won't work? It already does. You pay the same 'as-you-go' fees for your cellphone, just at ridiculous [high] rates.
Because, you know, free games are working out so well on Linux. We have thousands of games to play here! Oh, wait...
IMHO, the problem in PC gaming today is that obtaining hardware that is comparable to modern consoles, and capable of playing brand-new high-end games takes a HUGE dent in the wallet. Getting the graphical equivalent of a Wii on a PC would cost hundreds more than a PS3 (Which is considered a real money-eater). Why would anyone pay over a thousand dollars to play games equivalent to games they would play on a console for much less? Also, now that consoles offer online play, there is no advantage to gaming on a computer, except for complex rpgs where a keyboard is more comfortable than a controller (Which may explain the success of Warcraft and Co.). If PC game companies want to sell more, they must invent new ways to take advantage of the pc's unique qualities, or somehow drastically reduce the price of high-end hardware.
Every fantastic new PC game that comes out is a new rendition of the same .. over and over and over again ... quake/unreal are still quake and unreal if you make the graphics better and better and add more maps ... almost every new game that comes out is just a new version of the same damn thing ... there is nothing new or revolutionary and that's why I virtually quit PC gaming and bought a wii
Can someone name a bunch of these games that are failing and not making money because of piracy? There's a difference between the majority of people playing a game pirated it and your game blows donkey balls and the only people that -tried- it (and subsequently immediately deleted it) pirated it. I haven't bought/played a new computer game since Doom 3 personally. Haven't been a big fan of computer games in years. However, I think most people just aren't playing them, not that they're all being pirated. Maybe I am wrong.
The game itself should be free and easily downloaded and with on-line play capability. They will have other avenues of income once the game is on-line. Think Korea.
The cost of the CD is really irrelevant compared to the monthly fee, which isn't "piratable" in the sense that a CD is.
This gives me a chance to see what the game is like and see if is worth buying. Sony does this all the time with the PS3 via downloads. Just wish their games weren't so friggin expensive. $59???
Id software mastered this. I'm not embarrassed to say I download games that interest me, then buy them if they are good.
As I am in the software industry, I know building software from the ground up can be a considerable challenge, especially since the underlying hardware changes so goddamn fast, however, it is possible for good dev houses to build and deliver stable products.
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
You make a reasonable argument on why its wrong to violate copyright. That does not mean its "stealing."
Possession of something that should lawfully belong to someone is not theft on its face. The means by which one takes unlawful possession indicate different crimes.
There are a number of other variations on the above. Simple possession of another person's rightful property does not necessarily constitute theft.
Copying is not theft, but it is not ethical either.
"Freeloading" seems a reasonable name for it.
I like the idea of, where appropriate, having real life ads in games....it A, makes it easier to relate to, and B, could pay for the game anyway...if done right, for the right game-types.
The games where free won't work though, are the single player games only. Bioshock for example; excellent game, very well choreographed, excellent "acting" and attention to detail, and absolutely no reason to ever be connected to the internet to play it. Free just won't work for games like Bioshock.
And one more thing; they need to make it easier to PAY for the game than to pirate it. All the steam games for example are incredibly easy to pay for; there's no disc; games are kept invisibly patched, and even your save games are (or will be, rather) kept online. Goto a new machine, log into steam, and voila; you can download it all again free and resume where you left off.
Most games however are just easier to pirate than they are to legitimately own. Shame.
throw new NoSignatureException();
Not to criticize the original poster, but the summary/opening paragraph of this article is misleading. Reading the actual article referred to reveals that the term "free" is quite loosely applied. The writer argues that the games *will* be paid for by its players -- just not *all* players. A representative of one of the game devs states, "...there'll be a charge for things you might want to use in the game...Your character might have a plain white T-shirt. If you wanted a nicer one you could have it for a dollar. Or perhaps you could buy a magic sword for a knight for a dollar." So it appears that "piracy", or "market correction", or "downright theft" -- however you wish to deem it -- will be counterbalanced *with real money* rather than completely free games.
Harold
How about "Alternate Sourcing" instead of piracy, But come on, nothing is ever free
I have given up on PC games. It doesn't matter how new your computer is, any game sitting in a box on the shelf today isn't going to be compatible with it. The game may cost you $20 but you'll have to invest another $200 into your PC before you can run it. Hardware manufacturers should just buy out the software companies and give the games away for free. They make all their money back on the video cards and sound cards and ram you'll need to actually play them.
"Free Beer as a solution to Drunk Driving"
It's not stolen, it's not pirated... it's an "Unlicensed Copy". Nothing more, nothing less.
When I give you something that belongs to me with no expectation of return, that's gifting. If I expect it back, that's sharing.
Very little rape, pillage, or seagoing vessels are involved, so piracy is clearly incorrect.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
My solution to stores losing product to theft is to simply give all their products away for free!
Just imagine- Best Buy would never have another CD, movie, TV, etc stolen from them again.
It's a whole New Economy! Let's race to the bottom!
Imagine a first person shooter with all the weapons having actual gun manufacturer names. Or maybe an RPG where the power up potion is a Coke or a Pepsi. A mount could be a Subaru or a Ferrari.
The possibilities are endless.
Insert Generic Sig Here:
1) Release the demo before the game's release, preferably by two weeks. Let the game generate the buzz. Game makers used to do this. 2) Quit releasing tech demos. Yeah, Crysis is pretty, if you have a rig to run it at other than slideshow speeds (especially when it first came out). Some people pirate to be "cool." Some people pirate because they don't have the money but want it "right now". Some people pirate because they're sick of paying US$50 to beta test a game they don't like anyway. The guy at Ironclad said it best, if you build a good game that will run on many computers, you'll make money.
People say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Why? Is there any shortage of bad ones?
In my opinion online multiplayer games represent the best chance for PC gaming to survive. Content delivery systems like Valve's STEAM allow developers to control access to games, which works effectively primarily for multiplayer games since you already have to be online anyway. Also, games like WoW have a future since you have to pay a subscription, and what you are paying for is not the graphics, or the ability to explore the online world, but the privilege of playing WITH other people on the company's game servers.
I think you're trying to have it both ways. If a software company can't morally require you not to make copies of their product, then the community can't morally require you not to make modifications of their code.
All you have to do is swap a couple of words: "Those (software copies|code changes) belong to our (company|community) according to the legal agreement!"
Same idea. The violating party says "I haven't deprived you of anything physical, it's not stealing, nyah nyah nyah."
If you look at recent charts, you will see that Assassin's Creed is still selling very well (German Media Control Charts Rank #4) despite being released as a pirated version months before it hit the shelfs. Alone In The Dark, on the other hand, is not even in the Top20, but it's out since two weeks without any _working_ pirated version available.
(Yes, I know it got very bad ratings (IGN 3.5/10) but it was still highly anticipated. There are many examples that bad ratings are unrelated to selling as well)
I think Perry's nailed something here: micro-pay games are here to stay, and traditional studios are going to be less of a factor in the future of gaming. The pattern's been there for a while, in fact - small studio builds blockbuster game, big studio buys small studio, founders leave to start new small studio. Those of us who track the industry don't watch companies, we watch people. We don't watch Shiny and Origin and Atari, we watch David Perry and Raph Koster and Nolan Bushnell.
Will games ever be free? They already are. Thousands of games are released every year for free. You never have to buy another game again. What costs is the same thing that always costs: the drive to have the latest and greatest things first. When Crackdown came out, it was $60, and it flew off the shelves because of the Halo 3 Beta invite it contained. If you waited a few weeks, hordes of used copies flooded the shelves. The price on the used shelf plummeted. A couple months down the road, you could pick it up for $15. If what you wanted was a good game, that was fantastic. But if what you wanted was the game everyone else was playing, it was worse than useless.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
(And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below.)
Well, while we're at it with the silly ones:
Monopoly Competition
Copyright is just a state-granted distribution monopoly. "Piracy" is the competition where there can be no legal one.
Yes, it's ridiculous. Or is it? When's the last time you bought a game from the developer? Mine was DEFCON, and that was at least 18 months ago. The games industry isn't that different from the music industry - a small group of large distributors holds the keys. It's not quite the same, as the roles are different, there are less developers than bands and they are often fairly large companies themselves. Also, since they are companies, the distributors often own them, instead of only practically owning them through crazy contracts.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
If you're going to be dishonest and call it 'stealing', why not go all the way?
It's copyright rape. PirateBay is raping movies. Don't rape music. See? Even more spuriously emotive.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I believe the pirate marketing model has been touted as being responsible for the popularity of DOS and early Windows.
It makes no sense to change a word because of the connotations. The connotation is caused by how the word is used. I suggest we stick with piracy, but make the connotation more accurate by using it whenever it applies.
I think I'll go read a book I pirated from the library.
You're right; for far too long people have been using 'stealing' in a narrow-minded and incorrect manner, referring only to physical theft such as shoplifting. We must rectify this. Therefore, I propose the following terms all be rightfully called stealing:
Copyright Infringement - The perpetrator gains something they would normally have to pay for, and are therefore a thief. (By this same token, using Linux also makes one a thief)
Murder - It's just a fancy word for stealing the victims life.
Rape - This is just another word to make "stealing access to someone's genitals" sound less villainous than it truly is.
Assault - Where did their lack of pain and injury go? That's right, it was stolen.
Drug Use - Given the amount of money the US government has spent attempting to abolish drug use, it's prevalence makes them look incompetent and people lose respect for them. Therefore, every time someone uses drugs they are stealing the governments competence and respect.
Jaywalking - The drivers can't use that part of the road when someone walks across it. Their access to the road is being stolen!
Avoiding Advertisements - Companies spend significant amounts of money advertising products, so when you skip those advertisements it's the same as stealing that money from them. Who cares if you don't use javascript/flash. It's your duty as a citizen to install and activate those features to properly view advertisements. Unless, of course, you're nothing more than a dirty thief.
Not Giving me Money - Do you have any idea how much money I could have right now if all of you sent me all your money? I'm not sure of the exact amount, but I'm fairly confident that by not doing this that you as a group have stolen billions from me.
Once society has it's terms right, we can finally begin prosecuting theft, the one true crime, the proper way: infinity billion years in jail (and/or an infinity quadrillion dollar fine) for each incident.
Note: Theft's status as "the one true crime" certainly has absolutely nothing to due with being one of the only crimes to harm large corporations. Consumers need to stop making accusations like that before said accusations become a type of theft.
How about "copying"? I'm sure this has been mentioned before, but it seems odd giving one of the least violent "crimes" imaginable the name of perhaps the most violent crimes short of genocide.
Pirate == User 2.0
Instead of mediocre games that require incredibly expensive stuff few people have.
Isn't gaming pretty much the only motivating factor there is nowadays to expand the boundaries of computer graphics? If you believe progress is a good thing, eye-candy on the desktop or better support in the graphics card itself for managing photos aren't factors that encourage people to upgrade their graphics, and by extension, encourage card manufacturers to improve their mass-production offerings.
Better visual appeal in games does provide that encouragement, and the non-game developers can use that same horsepower in the applications that are meaningful to the rest of us. As a result, I can pay $50 for last-year's graphics card that gives me a much more powerful CAD system, photo management program, desktop eye-candy, Expose' , cubical virtual desktops, live icons, etc. And I'm very grateful to the gamers who will overspend on new graphics hardware to play the current and upcoming crop of games to subsidize that cost for the rest of us.
And why the coda "int the context of electronic games"?
a) they aren't any different from books
b) they aren't electronic, they are software games.
Wow, the new idea is Free Games that make money through adverts, micropayments, donations or paid-for upgrades?
Man, I should totally recommend that idea to the people behind KoL (started in 2003, and funded entirely by donations), Kongregate (entered beta last year and gets revenue from adverts), etc..
Blizzard is entirely unlike most game companies. Blizzard values its customers and wants them to have as good a time as possible. They don't just abandon products, they release no-CD patches. They allow their customers to enter their CD key on the website and download the entire game (useful if you bought the PC version and now want to play on a Mac), even if said game was released eleven years ago. Heck, they still have tech support subsites for Lost Vikings and Rock N' Roll Racing - titles they released back when the company was still called Silicon & Synapse.
Blizzard puts the customer first and only delivers polished products, release dated be damned. And that's why everyone loves them. Now compare that to, oh, just about everyone. It's a shame Looking Glass died, but the retail version of System Shock 2 was unbeatable for most people because a crucial window wasn't breakable. Piranha Bytes' The Gothic 3 gold master was so unready for production that they had to release the first patch on launch day. BioShock is a prime example of DRM gone bad^H^H^Hworse as many players are locked out of the game for too many reinstalls before they even played the game once - reinstalls which they accumulated trying to get the game to work.
To put it like Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee might: The video game industry is a sea of vomit and that's the qualitative standard against which new games are measured. The better ones are usually very nice and pretty examples of vomit but they're still vomit. The few gems people like Blizzard release can't change the fact that we're waist-deep in gastric acid.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Somebody has discovered that if you give something away free to everyone then people won't steal it. Simply brilliant. Can we get a Nobel prize for this guy?
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
An alternative revenue model does not obviate theft as a crime.
Saying the solution to piracy is making games free is like saying the solution to murder is making it legal.
I know, there is that alternative revenue model, so its not really free, but its like giving drugs to junkies and charging for the needle.
/\/\icro/\/\uncher
... is because they're based on the 'technology first, everything else second' formula that's been the defacto standard for PC game development since the late nineties, which was the point where the costs were starting to rise and publishers losing interest in being innovative, instead opting for easy tried-and-true-but-with-more-powerful-technology cash-ins. This worked as long as people were interested in upgrading their hardware not only for games but also to improve their overall computer usage experience, but since the advent of Windows XP (plus service packs) and the P4/Athlon XP generation of CPUs many users have found themselves able to carry out their computer-related activities well enough not to need further upgrades.
The PC gaming market is effectively destroying itself by sticking to this paradigm, because the amount of people who own top-end hardware isn't going to increase - someone who plays games and is looking to buy a PC today isn't going to opt for one with a fancy GPU from Nvidia or ATI that's able to run top-end PC games because even if a particular game isn't available for anything but the PC you can for most part find console games with comparable technology and playability. The PC doesn't have the technological advantage it used to have over consoles or at least it doesn't play as much of a role anymore because even if Crysis looks nicer than, say, Gears of War, for most people the latter is going to be good enough. Graphics in games have advanced to the point where they have become a commodity, and when people will no longer latch on to your game because it's technologically superior because your competitors offer something that might be somewhat inferior but still good enough you have get to them by other means. So far the gaming industry's reacted kind of similar to the music industry (where the music is a commodity as it's all seemingly factory produced) in the face of this - more focus on branding and controlling news- and retail outlets (hence the increase lately in reports of "professional reviewers" being restricted in terms of what they're allowed to print in reviews).
What most of PC game developers or former PC game developers refuse to admit to is that there's a huge market beyond the one that finds your technology the most appealing aspect of your game. The Sims and subsequent sequels proved it existed. People who shuffle The Sims, WoW etc. into their own categories as phenomenon that cannot be repeated simply don't understand that these games were and continue to be successful because they appeal to people by having good gameplay, which is far more universal than having cutting edge technology. And contrary to what these people think, their success can be repeated - but in order to do so you need innovative and creative gameplay and creating such takes talent; something the video game industry as a whole is surprisingly devoid of.
I've always liked this method of combating piracy. Make a game that anyone can download, but provide a service to use the game, or provide some extra features/goodies for people who want to pay extra. I'm not a big fan of giving significant gameplay advantages to people who pay, however I would lean more towards graphical improvements for characters, etc - that's just my own bias as a player. The whole new Battlefield game with advertising seems like a winner, as well. Advertisers are happy, game-developers are happy, and customers just need to blow up that sign showing a product.
I guess one possible problem I could envision with this is that developing the game client usually takes more time than developing the server (at least for me, with a nice server architecture already in place). If people grab the client, modify it and host their own private game, this could make devs want to spend less time making a nice client. Maybe? I don't know.
If anyone has a right to Piracy, I do, That game Suct on so many levels, literally.
I prefer to think of it as "absconding" with someone else's data, as in "Have you played the new video game from (major developer)?", "Yes, I absconded with it from a bit torrent tracker and have enjoyed playing it." Or maybe "Have you seen the new Hellboy?" "Yeah, I absconded with a DVD-rip and skipped the theaters. Had I gone I would have wanted my ten bucks back."
But when it isn't, neither are you.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
In a perfect world everything's free and people are so honest and civil-minded that they donate their money to content provider's as appropriate. blah blah blah. Personally, the system we have seems just fine. Pirating is heavily skewed towards the younger and less affluent anyway.
No, it isn't, because you know perfectly well that copyright infringement isn't theft.
And no, my saying that doesn't imply that I'm a pirate myself or that I think copyright infringement is OK or that INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE MAN or any of those other bullshit strawman arguments you're thinking of.
And yes, that IS what you were thinking.
No DRM. But if you want update/additional content => you need to be registered. AFAIK the CEO of the company making sins of a solar empire even said the same (DRM is stupid and costly)
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
If the game is good enough, people buy it. Look at WoW, more than 10 million subscribers. And its worth paying the oney for if you like that kind of thing. I can also garantee that Starcraft 2 will sell well over a million copies. Blizzard make good games. Unlike EA, they don't just mass publish tonnes of stuff, which more often than not gets pirated so people can play it for the 3 hours of fun its worth. I wont pay Eur50 for 3 hours thanks, so I just lost interest in a lot of games. Thankfully Blizzard and Valve still keep producing top pc games, and we can only hope that the decline in gaming on pc's results in better quality games maybe even ones that will reach a broader market ( linux + mac ). On that note, most linux and mac users would buy a decent game, and I know a lot of linux UT and Quake players, who buy their games. I know I havent run WoW, Diablo 2, Warcraft 3 or Starcraft on Windows in a long time.
If you want a term to replace piracy.
As far as the "no return policy", it is non-sense, especially when it comes to console games. The reason I say this is because if you wanted to make an illegal copy of it, you could just go out and rent it, or use your buddies.
Since with a console you have the ability to rent a game, why should you not have the option to return it if it sucks. Because it would be much easier to pirate it via other means.
Ok, you could make the argument that some one will beat it and then return it. That is a good a argument and very true, so have a 15 day, if this game sucks get your money back policy. This might encourage gaming companies to make good games and have the companies that are wasting time and money making crappy games close.
Why would anyone pay over a thousand dollars to play games equivalent to games they would play on a console for much less?
Because, for some people (myself included), having a high-end computer is useful for more than just gaming.
I do alot of amateur video work as a hobby in my spare time, and rendering video at a decent speed requires an impressive amount of computing power (not to mention storage). I'm also into photography, and use the computer as my primary media center and DVD player. For me, gaming was almost an afterthought, but it made sense to spend about $150 more on a fancier graphics card than to buy a dedicated console.
I've been playing a game called Kingdom of Loathing for several years now which works on this model. Play is completely free, advertising is nonexistent, but an optional donation system allows you to acquire some "nicer" stuff. There's an active in-game trading system, so if you earn enough game money you can get those items without donating, either. In this case the tradeoff is it's a VERY low-tech browser-based game (with humorous stick-figure art and exceptionally good writing) made by a small team, so the business setup is vastly different from a traditional game. Still, it works fantastically for them, and it seems to work reasonably well for some other copycat games as well.
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
...and it says, simply, that companies will charge for in-game crap -- like a better t-shirt on your character, or a magic sword -- instead of charging for the game itself.
Bravo, so now instead of illegally downloading a game you didn't pay for, you'll illegally download a magic sword that you didn't pay for. Congrats. Now, instead of stealing $60 worth of game, you'll be stealing $0.50 worth of sword.
Now it's nothing more than petty theft. Which means that slowly, but surely, the penalty for stealing that magic sword or pretty t-shirt will be raised to the same point as stealing that game. Which, based on how most legal systems work, means that when a 10-year old shoplifts a $2 candy bar, they'll be looking at ten years in jail, or some other rediculous penalty designed to discourage video game piracy and now surrounding all petty theft.
That's just great.
The problem with the term piracy, is that it has many meanings, depending on what is being done
There is downloading, uploading (distribution), cracking DRM/locks, altering the software etc...
Each of those violations can technically have their own name.
The name piracy is in many ways wrong, as some one has pointed out, none of the acts above is raiding and looting ships.
Illegal sharing(is a bit of a paradox, because most sharing is encouraged in society, it is called helping someone).
Omit sharing with distribution and it cuts out the two sided nature of sharing.
If you try to say that it is a contract/license agreement violation, where the sharer has broken the contract/agreement with the rights holder. It just becomes too neutral.
Media crime/violation, is a little less neutral.
Media Content Abuse (violation or crime), is my favorite, as it can be shortened to MCA (MCV, MCC), which is easy to remember. It has all facets of the crimes in the name and isn't as prejudiced, as the term piracy.
I would prefer a single word to describe it, like piracy, just not as hard hitting, after all there are many sides to the story.
One little thing, I am not an anonymous coward, just not bothered to go through the actions of signing up at every single site.
but there are so many free games, I simply cannot see the point in PAYING for games. There are free-to-play internet games. There are open source games. There is abandonware. Games, games, games. I could sit down and play a different game each day for MONTHS, all free, and not come back to the same game. So many free games to choose from..... What, exactly, do the game software people offer us? Well - for the latest game to run on my computer, I will have to replace my video card, if I want the full video effects. And, if I'm going to do that, I might as well upgrade the CPU. Ooops, the newest CPU will require a MOBO, and I might as well add some extra memory. Might as well just buy a new computer, huh? Oh, wait, I've fallen into the trap!! The games become more and more demanding of high-end hardware, and like a lemming, I just HAVE to have the latest game, which forces me to buy a new computer almost every year. IMHO, it's just a stupid fad that has hung on to long already. If/when the games makers come up with something new and different, I may take a look at it. Til then, I'll play free games. Actually, though, most of my gaming is online, and I have upgraded my accounts to paid accounts. The graphics may be nothing to brag about, but I play against real people, where intelligence is required, as opposed to fast reflexes, luck, or whatever else one may need to beat a "computer" game. I will also note, that one of man's greatest inventions is pretty much wasted, if all that it is used for is gaming........ Download BOINC, and put your machine to work, searching for cures for diseases, huh? http://boinc.berkeley.edu/
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Content Liberator... :D
Most Pirates I have heard about download it becasue they aren't sure about it, and paying 60 bucks for something you can't return is a little much.
On the Internet they have these things called "game reviews." What happens is, people play the game, then write about what it is like, and post it on their website. I have found that reading these "game reviews" is a less illegal way of learning about a game before buying it.
...because Dave Perry is a God-Damned Idiot
Schnapple
Valve has a nice vision:
Gotta love Valve. And Blizzard.
The only issue I have with this is that game companies go under, sometimes. Or are bought by other companies. Or stop supporting their product 10 or 15 years down the road. To be completely honest, it frightened me just the other day when I thought about my Steam games disappearing when Valve quits supporting them. I won't be giving Valve any more of my money, because of that. At least, not until some clever pirate shows me a way to install and play Halflife (1 or 2) without phoning home to a Steam server that may or may not be there in 10 years.
WoW is slightly different, although Blizzard's (and other game companies') tactics chap my hide for a different reason. I don't mind paying $15 a month to play online, with paid moderators whose job it is to make sure the game runs smoothly for all participants, and constant patching to keep the exploits to a minimum. Blizzard puts out a fine product, and I applaud that. The issue I have with it is... why do I have to pay $50 for a game, and *then* pay a subscription fee for the right to play it? Pick one, please. Either charge me for the privilege of playing, or charge me for a pretty box and shiny disk. Don't do both. Feels too much like paying for my cake and not getting to eat it anyway. And don't think I'm not a WoW addict... I've got a 70 undead 'lock, and I have mid-range toons on several servers. On two servers, I'm not allowed to make any more toons without deleting some. I managed to kick the habit after only 2 years of die-hard playing, and damned if they're not coming out with another expansion to make me crack out and buy the game *again* (the expansion pack, at least) later this year, so I can grind my way up to 80.
Of course, with the money flowing constantly just so I can jump on a WoW server every once in a while, Blizzard's not going anywhere, so I'm not worried about them... yet. Guild Wars, on the other hand, got out of hand long ago, and if anyone wants to purchase my Collector's Edition account (with the pre-order weapons and the special pets), just make a reasonable offer.
If I couldn't whip out my old copies of Master of Orion, Diablo, Quake 3 Arena, Unreal Tournament, or Warcraft: Orcs and Humans every couple of years to relive my "glory days", I would be rather upset. Why, just a few months ago I beat MoO for the first time (with the Humans, anyway). What ever happened to single-player games with replay value?
The same goes for my old copies of Zelda and Zelda 2 (in the gold cartridges, mind you), Final Fantasy (the first one, not those anime-fests that people think are Final Fantasy nowadays), or Dragon Warrior (again, the very first one, not the mutations that occured later). Admittedly, No one is going to take away my rights to play those games on my 20-year old NES, but what happens when the hardware dies? That newfangled famicom duplex, or whatever it's called... yeah, sure, but why can't I plug my NES Advantage controllers into it? And don't get me started on the insanity of Nintendo throwing that group of counterfeiters in NEw Jersey into the slammer for causing them "millions of dollars in lost revenues"... they didn't even produce the original NES anymore, how were they losing money by these guys producing something they no longer sold?
I keep an old Pentium II machine around the house with Win95 installed on it (gods, no, it's not on the network) so that my wife can play Lemmings once in a blue moon... and just try and find a 5.25" floppy disk drive in today's market. Matter of fact, half the places I used to go for random "common" items don't even carry them anymore. Blank cassettes, blank VHS tapes, parallel cables, for crying out loud! How long before we can't buy blank CD/DVD media anymore?
But back to my point: you can't subscribe to a game company without the twinge of fear that someday, you won't be able to play their "activated online" game anymore.
This is also a str
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
I dont think that games for PC will be free. I think that yes, we are going through a shift, but that isnt the shift we are going through. Multiplayer games - PCS Single player games - Consoles Most computer games are online already. This is what the majority of the market has done in order to stop piracy. Sure, you can also pirate a MMO by hosting your own server, but that takes resources, and extensive knowledge of the game/programming in general, not to mention a lot of work.
Just ask Blizzard Entertainment. "World of Warcraft currently holds 62% of the MMOG market at 10 million subscribers". (Reference: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_of_Warcraft). Yes, with over 6 million paying $14.99 per month, you can give the software away for free. That business model is working well for Blizzard.
It works both ways -- and if it doesn't, it's going to for me anyhow. (I'm not in a good mood today.) If the game companies are allowed to indulge in name-calling people who rip them off, what name do we get to call the game companies that rip people off? The laws aside (they only enforce the good for the game companies), why should they be allowed to get away with making crappy games that you can't return, loading their games with DRM, that if it doesn't screw up your computer (remember Starforce?), is designed to to make you buy a second copy of the game, thus paying them twice for the same product? But nooooo, it's all about the poor, poor game companies who get ripped off left and right. It's perfectly okay for them to rip us off, now isn't it? Frankly, I'm so sick of that kind of treatment from them, it's enough to drive me to pirate games more. If they didn't pull this crap continually and try to pass laws that prevent you from doing anything about it, I would care. Screw that. Like it or not, we're not going along with it. You rip people off, they rip you off. That's how it is and how it's going to be, no matter what you do. Sure, even if they did dump all this DRM and crap and start treating their customers decently there would still be people pirating the game, but that number would drop significantly -- and yes, I would bet my life on that because I do know how it is out there in gamer-land and pirate-land. Besides, their exorbitant prices on new games more than make up for any of the losses they keep imagining that they're suffering. Again, why should I care?
I dream of a better world... one in which chickens can cross roads without their motives being questioned.
Games don't have to be free.
And they will never get away with charging microtransactions to PC gamers.
David Perry of Shiny Games is a moron.
Make a decent product. Give us plenty of chances to view it. Give us ample opportunity and convenience to purchase it. If we like it, we will.
Eliminate DRM. It obviously doesn't work. Sometimes it prevents your game from working properly.
Use Steam!!!!! We do. Stop wasting your whole budget on marketing. We don't care about the TV commercials. We don't come to E3 to get posters.
They're using their grammar skills there.
As one of the 10 people on Slashdot who speak out against piracy and this silly notion that you have a right to something just because you have access... [rate me as a troll, like you always do] ...I am annoyed by industries who cling to piracy as the major cause of their woes. There's a larger elephant in the room. Like quality or pricing.
It was due to pirace (yaaar mate!) that I knew, played and bought "Commandos: Behind Enemy Lines", and later bought "Commandos 2: Men of Courage" and "Commandos: Destination Berlin".
Therefore, pyro studios did get not 1 but 3 purchases due to me pirating (yaaar!) the first game installment.
Of course, part of the reason why I bought the game, is because the game series is *really awesome* and completely different to any other game (similar but different to C&C wannabees) and also because the game were about USD$10 (or MXP$200) when I bought them.
IMHO that IS the sweet spot for a game. $10, £5.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
"Using someone else's wifi is stealing, "
only if you don't have authorization. If the system lets you in by design, then you have authorization.
The incoming house analogy will inevitably show how little the person knows about how computers communicate.
Stealing wifi is like dropping a house on a witch. It will make strange looking midgets dance around with glee, and get her sister to send flying monkeys after you.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
As long as you are replacing "piracy" with "stealing games"... you may as well do the same with "homebrew". Because very few people who mod their XBox360 are doing it so they can program their own version of PacMan.
Sure, free games may solve game "piracy", but it doesn't address what is killing PC gaming. Which are A) Windows, B) Insane hardware requirements and C) Consoles.
One "insane hardware requirement" that a lot of people don't think of is the requirement for one PC for each player. A four-player PC game could run in four tiled windows, each 960x540 pixels on a 1080p (premium HDTV) monitor or 640x360 pixels on a 720p (basic HDTV) monitor, so that my friends and I can play on the big screen like wii do with That Other Platform. Heck, some game designs don't even need the screen to be split, such as Bomberman, Smash TV, Street Fighter, and the like, because they show the entire arena at once. Yet apart from a few isolated cases such as Serious Sam and Lego Star Wars, the majority of PC game publishers insist on not allowing one computer's input devices to control more than one player character at the same time.
A decade ago, PCs were at the top of the hill for superior graphics and networking for team playing. Now they aren't because HDTVs, internet connectivity and multicore proccesor consoles. There's no niche anymore.
The niche of PCs includes anything with user-generated game elements. Comparatively few console games attempt much of that, apart from token efforts such as Xbox 360 games' custom soundtracks or the stage editor in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Certainly, a home user can't easily make a game with new rules from the ground up on a console.
You're stranded if Valve ever goes under.
Which is why they should do like Blizzard did; enter your CDKey or whatever, and download your game. Or Steam allows you to play steam-downloaded games without "valve's blessing" for games that were released after a certain point (2-4 years sounds fair; most games at that point are like 20$)...
from now on let's call it "ninjacy".
Never let a lack of data get in the way of a good rant.
No, it's not. There are no absolute rules. Prior to all of the rules we made up for society (including rules related to physical items and rules related to information), all that existed was survival.
Also love Steam. It works.
Steam is good for online multiplayer games. It's not so nice for single-player games or shared-screen multiplayer games, especially if you have to keep active a subscription to Internet access at your home just to be able to activate new Steam games purchased at retail.
Are you saying that "stealing" is a legal term with an agreed upon legal definition? If it is not, then your statement is debatable.
And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy,"
infringement.
It's what the constitution calls it. Why change it just cuz it's electronic?
It's not stealing, looting, plundering, raping, etc, like the **AAholes would have it. Just infringement of the owner's exclusive right to copy.
Pavlov wouldn't be so famous if he'd used a can opener instead of a bell.
Games don't need to be free, but if I'm going to pay $50-60 on a game, I need to know I will be getting my money's worth. Music and DVDs are the same way. If companies would cut the prices for these things to make them an impulse buy, everyone would be happy. I'm talking $5-7 Albums, $10 DVD, $15 Blu-ray (they were supposed to be THE SAME PRICE as DVDs when they were released anyways... way to lie Sony) and $10-20 on games. Buying a year-old product should be cheaper than the brand new one too. I've seen The Blues Brothers priced $20 on DVD. That's completely rediculous. People would buy more if they feel like they're getting it at a bargain price, and companies would reap the benefits of all those extra sales of those who wouldn't buy the product to begin with.
In honor of Richard Feynman, who can not have too many honors, I suggest waklixery.
To make games free, game developers will have to figure out how to make money off free (as in both beer and speech) software, and it won't work like it does for servers and stuff. For software like, say, Apache or Linux or Samba or OpenVPN or whatever, you can give the software away for free and then charge for support. This works because some savvy businessman who wants to jump on the Open Source bandwagon but doesn't have the skill or time to learn this stuff (he needs to run his business, pay his employees and his bills, and make money, after all), so he hires some geeked out 1337 h4x0rz to deal with these issues, get his system working the way his business needs it, and contribute bug fixes and whatnot back to the community. But it won't work for games because nobody is going to pay for support to get the thing up and running or implement business rules or that sort of thing. So there will have to be something else that people have to pay for, and if it can't be content and it can't be service, then what can it be? Maybe hardware. Maybe the game companies will have to become fabless semiconductor companies that build anything from bitchen new graphics processors to entire video game consoles. These companies would then write FOSS drivers and games to demonstrate the hardware, to cause people to buy the hardware (to play the games at full speed and quality), etc. I don't know how sustainable such a business model would be, but I can tell you that gamers go out and spend beaucoup dollars/euros/pounds/yen/shekels on all kinds of fancy hardware to run the games they pirate, er, borrow... so maybe such a thing could work.
McCain/Palin '08. Now THAT's hope and change!
There is always the paradoxical, yet brilliant radiohead solution - Release it for free, but accept monetary values of any sort. Incredible amounts of distribution, and surprisingly astronomical amounts of revenue. Everyone is happy.
Best game ever. Free.
Hey it got me to buy Quake Wars years later...
If you take a copy but don't pay for it, you have deprived the original owner their profits. It is STOLEN. Once it is paid for, it ceases to be considered STOLEN property. Don't give be this bullshit story that you're "test-driving" it to see if it's worth buying, and eventually will pay for it. Until it is paid for, it is STOLEN. What is so hard for you fuckers to see about that? I'm tired of seeing your bullshit argument modded up.
I'd love to see you try to use that argument in a court of law.
For those who don't know, these free games are all the rage in places like korea. Instead of buying a boxed game and then paying a monthly subscription ala World of Warcraft, you download the game for free and play it for free BUT all the advanced items are not looted or crafted but bought.
The earliest games just made some useful but not-essential items buyable. Buyable but still lootable or at least tradeable. Think Second Life where 1 person buying linden dollars can buy stuff from players who never spend any real cash.
But that isn't profitable enough, so slowly the "buy" items have become more and more essential to play the game beyond the basics.
One example is a game, might be Perfect World, where you get one free sample of a pet. A little pig that picks up loot for you that drops in the world. Handy no? But hardly essential? No, the game drops so much loot that anyone trying to pick stuff up AFTER the free pet has run out will find the game near impossible to play. So where do you get more piggies? From the shop.
And then of course the smart players are going to do a small sum, exactly HOW much do you have to pay each month to play the game succesfully? Oh dear, an amount very similar to the monthly subscription of WoW. Execpt for ONE small problem, that is the MINIMUM sum. You can easily spend more and we all know how addictive these games can become. Blizzard can only charge you the monthly fee, although Blizzard and SOE are learning how to fleece their customer for more, but the Korean games go far further.
Remember all the outcry when console games for the x-box and 360 started charging, one racing game where most tracks and cars had to be bought after you bought theboxed game?
The Koreans go far further.
I don't see this as the future.
Do you REALLY want games entirely designed around selling you items? An RTS where every upgrade for your units has to be paid for, an adventure where puzzle items have to be bought, an RPG where every skill is paid for?
As expensive as single player games have become at least that is a fixed one time charge (oh okay ignoring games like Oblivion) where you know the game can be finished for that amount of money. I really don't want a future in which a company makes its money from me playing the game over and over.
lets not forget also that this means the end of modding. Do you really think that if EA manages to introduce the sale of single pieces of furniture in The Sims that they would allow the countless free mods that exist?
How are you going to sell a FPS with bought items if any modder can add far better weapons?
No, just produce games that are decent value, remove the damn DRM so paying customers ain't punished and accept that perhaps the market isn't in producing the Xth FPS but in producing unique fun games that the people want to pay and play. Remember that the biggest game ever is The Sims. A series that launched WITHOUT drm and allowed open modding and made the company more money then they could ever have dreamed. The PC market is alive and well but you got to stop aiming for the 12yr old boys. I know quite a few The Sims fans and they don't give a shit about buying a new expansion, all they care about is new options to produce free content for EA. That is how you make money. Sell to people willing to pay for your product, not fight a loosing war.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
...so that it would be stuck directly under the GP's trollish mind-feces and people wouldn't have to scroll 1/4 the way down the giant wall of text for a proper rebuttal.
To anyone who agrees with the GP: Sometimes I pirate games, sometimes I pay for games, sometimes I pay for games I pirated, and sometimes I wish I'd just pirated games I paid for. If you don't like it, bite me. I have an extensive collection of legitimately purchased games which is probably bigger than yours, so I've probably made the game industry more money than you have.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Bob:Hmm, kids are pirating our games, even with the massive amounts of hardware destroying DRM we put on them.
Jack:They can't pirate them if we just make them free.
Bob:Hey, you're right. Ha ha, suckers!
I joke, I joke.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
This sounds like a really bad idea, to me. And their references are HORRIBLE. Who has honestly ever heard of Nexon? But no mention of the massive failure Project Entropy, not Midthievia, not Second Life(hehe, understandable that one..)
Let's look at the first game to try this: nominally called midievia, is better known by the name 'Midthievia', because the code is ROM (which is licensed to say you can't charge for it), then they turned around and charged users for items in world.
Hm, for some reason this reminds me of GPL3's extra protections. Maybe fascism has its place o.O in licensing, that is...
He's not saying games will be 'free' so much as games will be forced online pay model for anything interesting. Sucks to be on a bad net connection and sucks even more if you don't want your computer phoning EA, Activision-blizzard, Valve, Ubisoft, Nintento, Sony etc. with a list of what games you played today.
Under his model there's no reason you can't continue to sell the same sorts of products now, just without the retail outlet (like steam/gamersgate etc).
Nothing here is particularly insightful. If every game released from today on had the same business model as WoW that would mostly end piracy (and so long as your servers keep offering up better content than the fake ones you're in business). But MMO games or microtransactions isn't what everyone wants (think horse armour from oblivion). People also don't want to rely entirely on a subscription service for what could otherwise be a boxed product. If I had bought from the (fictional) interplay online store baldurs gate, NWN and Fallout, I'd be SOL when it came to trying to play those games today since interplay is, for all practical purposes out of business.
The main attempts at solutions to piracy all revolve around online authentication, either immediately upon install or repeated online phone home systems. Disc duplication is largely solved by this system of online variants of the CD-key. However in the age of online piracy the solution seems to be moving towards Steam/Gamersgate (etc) type 'accounts' where you pray the company you bought from stays in business, isn't selling your information, and is keeping your data secure, for you to use your product whenever you want. No more than Samsung should be able to say 'well we don't want your TV to work anymore' or 'we're out of business your TV won't work anymore' should EA be able to do the same thing to ones game collection.
The other solution to piracy is consoles, which are basically expensive DRM boxes with some PC-type components. I'd personally be much happier if they'd charge me half as much for the DRM box (say a custom formatted disk drive for which you cannot buy burners) but have it run on my PC. Won't happen of course because they make more money on consoles and consoles have certain other advantages (like mostly standardized capabilities for developers).
For the moment it looks like the PC market is pushing the revenue sources online (even if the product is the same as in a box), either from advertising, which we don't want, or forcing online dependency for the product, which we also, don't want. Without substantial cooperation between game companies, microsoft, and hardware manufacturers to implement an affordable hardware based solution to disc verification which also adds something for consumers (say the capacity of blu-ray, or more likely video card related) we're going to see the PC market continue to struggle to adapt to new revenue modes which their customers don't want.
Oh and if you're going to make a game like crysis, you need to remember that not everyone who pirated your game could run your game, which was why they pirated it: as a benchmark, not for the game.
Walking into a bookstore, slipping a best seller under your jacket and walking out--that is stealing. Walking into a bookstore and copying a best seller word for word into your personal notebook--isn't that considered fair use? It isn't until you have given your notebook with the copied words to another person that you have created copyright infringement.
I pay for hardware. I don't pay for software. I pay for the box, the printed discs, the manual, the artwork, etc. I don't pay for the game. If I don't need or want the physical property I'll just download it. I have no moral dilemma with this in any way shape of form. If I find myself in a position that my hardware fails and I don't feel the urge or need to even download the software again, then it isn't worth my money.
A term to replace piracy: Wisdom
And why blame Windows: It provides a very good platform for game developers.
I do agree with the console argument, though. Which is why I see no real reason to buy a PC for gaming anymore. I mean, why would you?
You answered your own question. The advantage of PCs is that PC games are more likely to allow use of user-generated game elements. In fact, PCs support the ultimate user-generated game element: the indie game.
However something that is going to run on a cheap intel graphics chipset, is going to look like it was released in 1998, and then you would hear complaints about good video games again.
Sure, you're not going to get PS3 or Xbox 360 graphics out of an Intel GrandMA from the past two years. But are you certain that the Intel GMAs are less powerful than the Wii console's "Hollywood" video chip?
I've always found it funny... Piracy, stealing, and theft are all, semantics aside, the taking of physical property from one person by another.
Simple truth is, there is nothing taken from anyone when software is "pirated". The person who bought their game still has their game, complete and unchanged. The stores still have the same number of copies of the game that they had shipped to them. The game developers still have all of the original media, source code, and master copies of the game they always had. Nobody had anything taken from them and there are very few things, if anything at all, in this world that works the exact same way when "stolen".
Further more, the developers intellectual property and copyrights are still intact. A pirate couldn't take their copy of the game, and re-release it claiming they made the game. As such, even the pirated game still fully credits the initial developers for having made the game in the first place.
In my opinion, "piracy" is only piracy in the notion that the people doing it are flipping off the DRM heavy handed and the copy protection crazy. They become "pirates" only in the romantic sense and really are only that, for they took nothing (not even money). Software pirates wouldn't even exist if there was no copy protection on the games in the first place, and while people may copy the game between friends, the game companies would more than likely see an increase in sales over all.
It's not stealing and it's certainly not piracy. You're doing something that doesn't harm anyone in any way. If you think about harm, it requires an overt act. If Joe punches Bob, that harms him. If Joe steals Bob's CD, that harms Bob because he no longer has the use of that CD. If you think about it, the game companies (plus MPAA and RIAA) are not complaining about people using their products. As a matter of fact, they want as many people as possible to use their products. What they are complaining about is the lack of payment. "Not purchasing" a game does the same harm to them that they do to me by not giving me $50. "Not purchasing" a game does the same harm to them whether I use the game or not.
The copyright monopoly created by our governments is an artificial right of refusal granted to copyright holders. Unlike inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, I haven't seen arguments that even come close to persuading me that the right to hoard and control knowledge is a moral one. It is a legal regulation meant to encourage the creation of new works by allowing the creators a method of profiting from them.
John Locke:
Unauthorized duplication consists of two things:
An any rate, I cannot see how people can perpetuate the myth of "billions of dollars lost". What is wrong with the media that they are so eager to report the drivel spouted by the entertainment industry without balancing the story? They count a 13 year old kid as having cost them the full purchase price of $20,000 when he downloaded 1,000 movies. The kid might only get $10 a week in allowance so the most he theoretically could have cost them was $520 in one year. In actuality he might have only purchased a DVD or two, or rented a dozen. I am sorry that I appear alone in ignoring people that make flawed arguments and try to mislead the public.
The biggest problem, though, when comparing PC gaming to console gaming is that most people see it as X vs. Y. Consoles vs. PC. It's more accurate, in my opinion, to see the PC as another platform; to compare it individually to the Wii or the XBox 360, etc. rather than to the consoles as a whole.
X vs. Y looks more reasonable when you compare the platforms like this:
So from the perspective of a small business that develops video games, the feature matrix looks like this:
"Those who pay for games will pay for it, and those who refuse to will continue to pirate."
;)
Really that's all that needs to be said in response to the main point of this article.
But micropay actually rocks. Not for games, though, lol... what a bad idea... obviously he's crying wolf. But it's good for the rest of us, because micropay methods are especially useful for unknown artists, and they need improvement. So maybe he can stumble past the blocks for us like a good human
... but we'll still patch his games so we don't have to pay for that sword except with in-game currency. GG. Binary's EZ, son, when will u LERN?
Personally, I think the answer is subscription gaming like GameTap. All you can eat from their catalog for one price. That way, you don't get burned on a bad purchase. It's convenient, cheap, and generally easier to do than pirating.
The biggest reason piracy is so rampant is because it's so easy and because it's free.
If they added value by putting feeliesback in boxes, it could help.
But hey, if you work for one of the amoral industries, don't let the spin stop you.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Instead of profits coming from the license, it comes from the advertising in the games themselves. The game must always be networked. Voila.
Games have always been copied and passed around for all to enjoy. Computers haven't changed that. I had an uncle with shelves of floppy games(this was 80's, early 90's) for the kids that he'd occasionally make copies of for them to take home. Less and less are showing up to play kickball these days, so it seems only natural that without any alternate fun, free, group activities that this would happen.
I think your right on most points. There will always be people who steal games and i agree with you that what doesnt kill you makes you stronger idea. If a game is good and i mean really good it will sell anyhow. Of course the gaming industry could make more money but maybe it is the pirate that does a little of free marketing to. Look at warcraft f.e. it is really hard for the common men to play online with others without owning the original game. Counterstrike is an other example how the gaming industry have developed a great solution for this problem. Robbert Cheap Fish Finders
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I'm quite partial to using the word "privateer" as a replacement for "pirate", especially in those many cases under the mercurial umbrella of "piracy" which aren't even illegal.
As many have pointed out, blowing $50-$60 a pop just to find out whether a title is good just isn't feasible. This is why many people download "unlicensed evaluation" copies of PC games. The ones that are good, get bought. Yes, really. It'd be interesting to find out how many folks do legitimize their favorite evaluation copies. I bet the anti-evaluation folks would be surprised.
if i could vote :)
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
A person who pirates has no intention of paying for the software/music/etc. That person does not have the money to buy these products, but still has an urge to use them. This is the non-consumer consumer. They acquire the product via no actual production costs to the producer (its just internet electrons flying around being copied).
Even while all these 'free copies' are going around, being used by people who would never have actually bought the product, the product is seeing a much more extensive and widespread distribution. This distribution serves to influence more and more potential buyers, though their friends and family they heard about it from may have an illegal copy.
Furthermore, when one of these 'would not buy this product, but will use it' people (pirates) are satisfied with the product enough and happen to have a consumer-urge, they too may buy the product! More revenues! ...
Here's an example.
Situation 1:
2000 people in LA buy a new Metallica album. Metallica is coming to their city for a concert. Those 2000 people get their friends to listen to metallica in their car, 1000 more people (the friends) get interested and go to the concert, pay $100 a ticket, and are quite possibly pretty into metallica and some are now buying metallica albums.... Sounds good.
Situation 2:
2000 people in LA buy a new Metallica album. 10,000 people get the album via piracy. These 12,000 total listeners hear about a metallica concert. They show the new album to their friends, and like the situation above, a matching 50% more are interested... Thats 6000 more people, not 1000 more like in situation 1, due to the larger free distribution of the media. Now maybe some of those 6000 more will pirate the album, but lets say like the other, they all pay $100/ticket for the show. Then some of them are hooked and they actually go out and buy CDs as well. The end result is MORE SALES.
A pirate has no intention of buying the product, so don't assume that they would buy it if there were no way to pirate it. They would most likely not buy it instead. But, as illustrated, a pirate WILL produce more buzz-meme-interest in the product to other people who may actually pay.
Personally I never liked pirates, therefore I propose ninjacy as a replacement term.
No, it isn't, because you know perfectly well that copyright infringement isn't theft.
And no, my saying that doesn't imply that I'm a pirate myself or that I think copyright infringement is OK or that INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE MAN or any of those other bullshit strawman arguments you're thinking of.
And yes, that IS what you were thinking.
Bullshit. I was thinking that software piracy is theft, in the same way that jumping the turnstile on the metro is theft, or leaching off your neighbor's cable is theft. You're welcome to disagree with me, but don't put strawman arguments in my mouth to do it.
And really, log in.
Do you mean stealing, as in shoplifting game boxes from a store?
Then I'd guess you're right.
But I think you're referring to unauthorized copies, i.e. copyright law infringement.
My take is that the use of the term piracy was a successful marketing feat of the pro-IP lobbies. In order to associate copyright law infringement with the negative views on the violence and cruelty depicted in popular culture and commonly associated with robbery committed at sea.
Such associations have the hidden intent to liken copyright law infringement with the infringement of natural law rights (the right to life and to property - although the right to property can be debated).
The effect is that copyright and patent law are increasingly deemed as natural law: The authors and inventors must be rewarded. We owe them so. They deserve protection.
In fact, some little research will show that copyright and patent law were created not so long ago as incentives (even called privileges in some countries). Before these laws were created, the natural law was to copy what was useful with the means available at the time.
I'd say that continuing to use the term piracy, instead of copyright or patent law infringement, is to inadvertently cave in to marketing tactics of industries that have established and maintained themselves mainly because of the human created systems of state granted privileges (and not necessarily the value of their work).
Not to say that I'm against the granting of temporary and limited privileges, when they are actual incentives to the production of something useful, that wouldn't be produced otherwise.
But I'm surely against the granting of disproportionate privileges without regards to their actual need as incentives and the disincentives they weigh, curbing innovation in many ways.
The main trouble the pro-IP industries now face is that the means to copy are nowadays much more generally accessible. The "natural law" or "natural ways" of copying what is useful or pleasing is increasingly more accessible. With such, the industries that maintain themselves mainly because of the privileges they were granted, instead of the value they create, are being challenged. It's the case of old business models.
It really is time to think of exchanging patent and copyright law for more effective and proportionate incentives: such as temporary tax exemptions instead of monopolies and artificial controls on the common and natural ability to copy, modify and distribute.
Cheers,
And I hope it stays that way. I'd LOVE to just sell advertising space in it, and give it away free forever.
No license software crap.
No worries.
expandfairuse.org
How about: creative procurement.
It reminds me of the days when people said, "I didn't destroy it, I creatively modified it."
Ask me about repetitive DNA
it's the potential that hasn't gotten a chance to be realized. companies are forcing the programmers to work faster, fit in more product placement, put in stuff that's supposed to sell more games... then they forget about working on the main idea itself, and that's where the game goes to shit. after they tell the company 'you gave us such a short time to work on this, there's NO WAY this will sell,' the overseers say nay, and ship it out the door: broken. this is where patches come in. and that's why we keep getting 'bad games.' they are great ideas that never get a chance to be really tested and developed. for a great example, see any game electronic arts has put out in the past, I dunno, 8-10 years [especially sequels].
Hell, the whole thing is confusing. Why does it mention online games? Those do not get pirated! How can you pirate WoW where you need to pay monthly to play it? Yeah u can use a private server, but those have less than .1% hardware capability of anything Blizzard tapes together from used parts. So enjoy adventuring ALONE. Also, why would anyone want to move to the Asian pricing model? Americans, by large part, prefer the way things are. Most of them do not want money to give someone an advantage, as witness by backlashes to gold selling services.
Online games have little problems with piracy. That leaves you with not online games, which you cannot give away for free, because even if you used an ad model, the game still has to connect to get new ad material.
I call it sharing.
If the pussy media company executives that complain about 'piracy' ever met a real pirate they would shit there pants and beg not to be killed. Piracy is the taking of material goods with force, usually deadly, and normally but not exclusively connected with boats. On land it's called theivery, armed robbery or banditry. What we do with software is sharing.
I also agree with the part about games becoming free, steam is a good example of them becoming cheaper and the resurgence of the free playable demo. Dwarf fortress is an example of a truly free game that is also right up there with the biggest budget releases (or above them) in terms of gameplay quality.
In fact the designer of the game, Tarn Adams usually mentions in interviews that modern games are overhyped and overpriced, that after you pay $100 for a game you may not even like it and that it is possible to make a living purely off donations from people who like the game enough to want to pay as much as they think it is worth.
Provided you can come up with a stroke of genius like dwarf fortress.
I'm still waiting for that $$ you owe me. Pay up already!!!
Piracy has meant theft of copyrighted materials for a VERY long time. Since 1790. I think 218 years or so is long enough for the definition to be valid.
From the 1828 edition of Webster's dictionary:
" PI'RACY, n. [L. piratica, from Gr. to attempt, to dare, to enterprise, whence L. periculum, experior; Eng. to fare.]
1. The act, practice or crime of robbing on the high seas; the taking of property from others by open violence and without authority, on the sea; a crime that answers to robbery on land.
Other acts than robbery on the high seas, are declared by statute to be piracy. See Act of Congress, April 30, 1790.
2. The robbing of another by taking his writings."
Coming soon - pyrogyra
GarageGames has a website for their free games. They also allow you to purchase ActionTokens which allow you to buy new skins for characters, new tanks, new marbles, and access to new levels. http://www.instantaction.com/
And watch software piracy all but disappear. Providing a game for free and using micro transactions for revenue is damn lucrative. Korean gamdevs have been doing it for around a decade. Another approach is a solid digital distribution system. If it's easier to pirate your game than obtain it legally, you're an idiot. Steam, although it had some teething problems and is by no means perfect, is an excellent example of a great online distribution system. The big releases are cheaper to buy than in the store here in Australia and the casual/indie games are only a few bucks. I think game piracy is predominantly self induced by insane prices.
less-than-legal software distribution
s/piracy/communication/
s/pirates/speakers/
"We're seeing developers and publishers blaming [communication] for all the ills of PC gaming"
I guess they miss those days when computers were isolated boxes, unable to communicate with the outside world. Speech is everyone's Right: That includes ALL information.
All data is speech. All speech is Free.
That used to be the preferred term for unlicensed copies in music. Bands used to love or hate the bootlegs, with the simple rule being giving a buddy a bootleg was OK, but selling a bootleg was a no-no. The studios, of course, hated bootlegs. Even in the Seventies and Eighties, they would frisk you and turn you away from concerts if they thought your Walkman was capable of recording.
"Pirates" is just a bad term for copyright scofflaws. It is not stealing per se, but ignoring the legal limits to who may make a copy.
It is a legal system to protect publishers, from the days when making copies was an expensive enough to make it viable only for commercial publishers. Copyrights also were intended to encourage publishers to pay the authors a share of the profits, not to simply grant them a monopoly.
So yeah, I prefer the term "bootleggers". Like the namesakes of yore, the crime isn't theft but in ducking under the law, not paying for a license or taxes to make what they make. And like the bootleg hooch of old, the quality of the bootleg media is not guaranteed. It's rotgut, not fine wine.
"liberation"
Not really a replacement for the english-speaking world. But in german, "schwarzkopieren" means "copying something without being authorized to do so", thus somebody who does that is a "Schwarzkopierer".
This is analogous to "schwarzfahren", which means using some public-transport vehicle without paying the fare.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
There might be a little less piracy in Australia if they weren't trying to charge $90-$110 for each game. Our dollar is nearly neck and neck with the American dollar (and hasn't been far off for many years), and yet the impression I get is that games are only $50 in the US. This leaves the Internet for buying games, but as I recently discovered, credit cards charge an entirely relative fee for purchases in different currencies (because it's not like it's a simple, automated millisecond calculation that many websites perform as a free service). And then there was that bullshit Activision pulled on Steam with COD4, artificially adjusting the price depending on your country. They claimed it was so that stores wouldn't get screwed over, but as I pointed out, it's not exactly like the exchange rate suddenly doubled the night after they shipped out their 99 cent DVDs. I like to buy games that I find good, but frankly it's almost like they're trying to prevent it.
"And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below."
* Unauthorized magnetic pattern duplication
* Duplication
("Today 5 men were charged with unlawful duplication")
* Data liberation
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
I am i pirate. I buy pirated games, copy them, download them, etc. Why? Reason 1: Because i cannot get the games in my language. I live in Russia (the land of the free) and my Russian is simply not good enough to buy games in this language. Very occasionally a publisher will release a multilingual version of the game over here but this is rare, and when i see such, and im interested in the game, i may buy it. Otherwise, i have no choice, i must buy the pirated version from some guys who sell on the street or get from other sources.... and they naturally sell these with English because they are converted from the English into Russian so contain both languages. Reason 2: I have children. Small ones. With sticky fingers. Who like to play with CD drawers and bite disks, and stand on disks, and throw disks into the toilet. Given this, i have to keep my disks in a safe place. When the disk is in the drive (because the game publisher demands i do this to play), and im happily playing, i may get distracted by the wife, or one of the kids needs something, and i leave the computer. You can guarantee within 1 second the other kid will have opened the CD drawer and started to play frisbee with the disk. Conclusion: I am a pirate because i have to be. On those rare occasions i can buy a game in english that i want, i still have to go and d/l a No-CD crack which criminalizes me again. Funnily enough, when i lived in the UK and didnt have kids, most of my games were originals. Sometimes i would buy the original after playing the pirated version, because i do believe in supporting those who create these games. PS: I know i can order over the internet games but not only would i incur quite large postage costs, but also to do this i would need a credit card, and i really dont like having these tools of Satan about my person.
Pirate:
- one who loves music
- one who loves movies
- one who loves games
- one who loves art
- an art lover
- an art appreciator
- a fan
- one who appreciates creative effort
- a potential sponsor
- a potential customer
"Piracy"
- appreciating art
- appreciating music
- appreciating movies
- appreciating games
- being an art lover
- being an art supporter
- being a potential art customer
- being a potential art sponsor
Also,
"Piracy"
- standing up for your rights
- courage
- hero
- entrepreneur
- leader
- revolutionary
Finally,
"Pirate"
- DISSATISFIED CUSTOMER
"Piracy"
- COMPETITION
I don't disagree with you, really. Mac ports of many of the popular 3D PC games DO have worse performance. Not surprising though, when you look at "ports" in general. Ports of console games for the PC generally have worse performance too, from what I've seen.
A game developed natively for a particular type of system is always going to run better than somebody trying to hack/edit that same code into running on totally different hardware. Windows games typically use "Direct-X/Direct 3D", while the Mac running OS X has no such equivalent. Therefore, they're usually stuck only trying to port over things that support OpenGL instead. That poses some serious limitations right away, but doesn't mean the Mac hardware itself is inferior.
As for Mac video editing/production apps not doing 3D though? What about Apple Motion?
Maybe the market for new games is dead (or more likely it's just flattened out), but PC gaming will always be alive and well. Some of us gamers are simply happy enough playing old games that actually work on the hardware we have without having to go through one upgrade or another every year or so.
Bored with a game? Download a free mod or a new map that changes some rules or aspect of gameplay, and get more value out of it. Not to mention some multiplayer games age ridiculously well, as long there's a good server up it doesn't really matter much how old the game is. (People still play BF1942, StarCraft, or Total Annihilation, don't they?)
Also why is it so bad to cycle through about a dozen great classics which may not be so pretty graphics-wise than to go and buy the latest polished turds? (What's the point of a new game if you can play through the storyline in under a week, and that the multiplayer mode doesn't offer anything really novel in comparison to games that are close to hitting the decade mark?)
Of course companies could try to make unique puzzle games or simple platformers that have novel features, but then 90% of the time they may as well make the games in Flash and go for ad revenue instead of trying to sell the actual game.
I gave you a chance to reread what I wrote. You obviously didn't. What, exactly, do we disagree on, hmmmm?
Here's a little quiz to test your reading comprehension.
1.) Do I claim copyright infringement is moral or in any way acceptable?
2.) Do I say I want a world without copyrights?
3.) Do you and I disagree over copyrights?
Even giving you a chance to go back and correct your misinterpretations, you refused, obviously believing there was no way you could have misread what I said. No, obviously "I need to learn" that when you completely miss the point of something, it doesn't mean you missed the point of something.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Intangible assets liberator
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
You're liar. I didn't put anything into your mouth, I took it out of there. That WAS your reasoning beyond all possible doubt. You absolutely WOULD have responded with each and every one of those bullshit arguments if I had just stopped with the first sentence. You're just whining because you've been made to realize how predictable you are. You'll claim that isn't the case, but we both know that you'll be lying again. There is literally no chance whatsoever that I'm less than 100% right.
Further proof that you know I'm right. You're trying to take the focus off of your own exposed stupidity and dishonesty by making an issue of whether or not I choose to post anonymously. You know perfectly well that it has nothing to do with the validity of my comments, yet you chose to act as though it does. Therefore, it is a lie. And the ONLY possible reason for you to tell this lie is because you know for a fact that everything I've said is absolutely true.
the word used by most of the rest of the content industry is "redistribution"
and as a solution, we offer a way for Content Creators and producers to release materials online for broad distribution and accept financial sponsorship directly. go to http://www.egaltorrents.com/
I really like Valve Software's model.
So do I. No, really I do. Here's what happened:
1. My flatmate bought Halflife 2, played it through, enjoyed it.
2. I wandered over, asked for his username & password
3. I used his username & password to install the game on my machine (didn't even need the disks.. just grabbed it from Steam)
4. I set my firewall to permanently block the game from the net
5. I played Halflife 2 over the course of a few months
6. I deleted it
I'm not sure exactly where people thought it would be an excellent idea to allow duplication of a single person game.. but all I can see is that I don't think I'm alone here in this scenario.