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.)

Comments

A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[Millennium]

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.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[spun]

It's not stealing as copying does not deprive the original owner of anything. Copyright is an artificial monopoly provided by the government as an incentive to create and release creative works.

Am I stealing from you if I choose not to buy from you, but from someone else? No? Yet I am depriving you of revenue, isn't that stealing? No? Then depriving you of revenue by copying your product isn't stealing either.

It is copyright violation, which is wrong, but not stealing. It is wrong because it violates the social contract you agree to by continuing to live in our society.

That is important: you wouldn't even have a moral claim against a person who renounced society and all its benefits who then violated copyright. They would not be a party to the social contract, and would have no moral reason not to copy.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[flaming error]

> favorite replacment term for "piracy,"

market correction

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[Nursie]

"Actually, no, because the copy wasn't obtained by lawful means. You are depriving its rightful owner of a product it could sell or otherwise dispose of as it saw fit."

Hate to break it to you, but no he isn't. You haven't in any way taken a physical item from them, or prevented them from making more. Your logic sucks.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[Odiumjunkie]

I prefer the term "raping children" 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.

See the problem?

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[bzipitidoo]

The physicality of the item, or the lack thereof, is not important.

Wrong. The "physicality" is fundamental to the issue.

Your bank account scam analogy is fatally flawed. You said "shaved". As in, people's bank accounts are being reduced. That is theft. A whole lot of people lost a little money out of their accounts. That does not happen with copying.

Even the immaterialness of your bank account example is flawed. Money is a convenient representation of all scarce resources, and as such must itself be scarce. Easily done by using some sort of material representation such as coinage. But if it's done electronically, then it must be kept scarce by other means. Otherwise the economy would have to go back to barter. Creating more money, which is what copying money would do, is another crime known as counterfeiting. Unlike money, information is not scarce. And information does not need to be kept scarce to be valuable, just the opposite in most cases.

when you pirate software, you have deprived the copyright holder of something which belongs to them: the copy you made.

No. Information is not a good, and cannot be owned. It isn't material. Now, information can be "fixed" in a medium, and that material item can indeed be owned. But the author has a copyright, not a property deed. Copyrights can be owned, media can be owned, but information cannot be owned. We often say of people who have paid for a medium containing a copy of something that they "own a copy of" or even just "own" some album, book, movie, or whatever, but what is meant is that they own the medium, not the information on it. There are many things they can legally do with the medium such as sell it, that they can't do with the information. Fixing a copy of some copyrighted info to a medium does not somehow assign the ownership of that medium to the copyright holder, that's not how the law works.

We can't have a good argument on these issues until we can agree on the terms. Your logic is founded on redefining the basic terms to mean things they do not mean. There's nothing more to say until you stop equating copying with theft. Copying is NOT theft. It's not even similar to theft. Copying isn't always a crime, theft is always a crime. Copyright infringement is always a violation of the law, but not all copying is copyright infringement. Murder, speeding, perjury, vandalism, fraud, and counterfeiting are always violations of the law. But none of those are theft. There are many, many crimes that are not theft. Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is not theft. One more time: Copyright infringement is not theft.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[merreborn]

If you download (steal/copy whatever the fuck makes you sleep at night) the game, then clearly you were in the target market and wanted it. But you just shrunk that potential target market by 1.

False assumption. Some, if not most, people who download illegal copies of software have no interest in purchasing the software in the first place. They were never potential buyers.

You might as well claim, "Hey, slashdot should start charging for pageviews! They're serving a million pages a day for free! If they started charging $1/page, they'd make a million dollars a day!"

As you raise the price of an item, (from $0 to the actual MSRP) the number of people willing to buy at that price decreases. Basic economics.

I understand that you want to get paid for you work. So do I. But copyright violation is not theft, and you can't assume that every copyright violation is a lost sale.

Bootlegging

[Geof]

Bootlegging: to produce, reproduce, or distribute illicitly or without authorization

This helps to distinguish private copying from for-profit counterfeiting by organized crime.

Problems...

[Darkness404]

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.

I prefer this idea:

[DaedalusHKX]

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.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[sxmjmae]

I have returned lots of opened software. I return it and claim I disagree with the Licensing agreement (which typical states that if you disagree with it you are to return it). If push comes to shove I ask them to read the Licensing prior to opening the box and of course you can NOT use my copy to do that. I have had 100% success rate in returning opened software packages.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[Machtyn]

You know, that's interesting. I downloaded the completely free Radiohead album that came out recently. I didn't like it, I deleted it.

Ditto on games. I will try them and buy it if I like it.

CD cracks are a completely different issue. I do NOT want to be bothered to search my huge collection of CDs, then find out the blasted thing is scratched. Not only that, I've only got so many 5.25" slots for CD drives. I have two slots, but I could, in a given week, play about 7 different games. Currently, I'm working through Oblivion, Civilization IV (with some friends), Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (with some friends), Diablo II (III's coming out "soon", I hope), TrackMania Nations, Need for Speed: Underground 2. I need to finish Neverwinter Nights (I got the expansion recently), I may reload Fallout at some point. And all of this does not even touch my Valve Software collection. Five of the seven games I just mentioned required the game CD when they were first released. Diablo II, I think, no longer needs it and Fallout is old and the company released a no CD patch themselves. GRAW2 was legally purchased from a website and downloaded. I burned the install files to a disk for archiving purposes, although that was not necessarily the intent of the download.

Interestingly, Civ IV failed to work for one of my friend's legally purchased copy because of the CD checks. I pointed him to a place to acquire the no CD crack. His game works perfectly now. I use a certain set of software to create an image of the disk that will circumvent the disk check and allow ISO reads. So Civ IV, Morrowind, Oblivion, NFS:U2, and NWN all have their image stored somewhere on my hard drive.

I really like Valve Software's model. They don't care how often I reformat my computer or even what computer I'm on. If they can validate my account, I have access to the game.

Re:make good games that run on reasonable hardware

[Darkness404]

Ummm... Quantity != Quality. Just look at games for the Wii, sure there are some good ones, Super Smash Bros Brawl, and Super Mario Galaxy to name just two, but if you go into any major store you find that about 75% of Wii games are crappy mini-game collections with virtually no purpose that involve shaking around the Wii remote to try to do something.

Even if you look back to the NES where we only had a few major developers there was a lot of quality games made, games that pushed the hardware to the limit. In the SNES/Genesis era things stayed the same. But once we got to the PS1/N64 era, we got flooded with a ton of really crappy games. Think about it, once Disney games were good, at least decent, and worth playing, then midway into the '90s something started to go terribly, terribly wrong. Every movie had some lame video game tie-in, games started to all be the same, originality seemed to be confined to first-party developers. We are still there, you only need to take a look at the Wii.

Not free. Digital downloads, easy updates.

[Zarhan]

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.

Re:You can't compare Blizzard to most of the rest

[MooseMuffin]

bnetd? The reverse engineered version of their free online service, minus the check for a legitimate copy of the game?

How exactly can they justify not shutting that down?

Re:Unauthorized Duplication

[cliffski]

"You're doing something that doesn't harm anyone in any way"

Let me guess, you don't rely on selling games for a living do you?

You are talking shit. long winded shit to justify stealing games, just don't embarrass yourself by this rationalizing to people who actually lose sales to piracy...

If I make a game, and you want to play it, and you refuse to pay me for my work, you are a thief. you can type pages of bullshit to try and weasel out of it, I'll always call a thief a thief, a leech a leech and a scumbag with a sense of entitlement a scumbag with a sense of entitlement.