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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
Instead of mediocre games that require incredibly expensive stuff few people have.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
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.
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.
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
"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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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)
... 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.
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.
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.
"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
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.
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.
He's put a nail in his coffin if he thinks he can rely on this. It's an insecure solution that will only turn people off more.
Micropay for items ingame is slightly harder to patch than disabling serial protection, if properly implemented. But not by very much, and we're really good at it, thanks, pretty much the computer does all the hard work now.
People don't want to whip out their credit card in midgame and use it to buy a +3 sword of shiny metal bits. At least I don't.
Try donations instead. You might be surprised, if your content is any good. If it's not, you may as well piss of your users with DRM (as if that worked), because they're not going to like the game once they start playing anyway.
Keep selling games. Stop whining about people sharing with each other. Or, if you like whining so much, maybe do some polls and find out what the REAL reason people don't want to give you money for your work is.
You like watching David Perry? Oh. You watched him make Earthworm Jim, then, I guess? That was pretty impressive, that character really entered society. Let's see what he did after that... OH! It was all derivative crud. Maybe you should stop following game developers around and thinking their shit smells good, and get a clue.
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.
"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.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
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.
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
Except writing a bad game review gets you fired so they're not at all accurate and doesn't give you any idea how it will play on your computer, xbox or TV screen.
The history of game reviews is littered with bribery and it's still the case. Reviews are complete bullshit.
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.