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'?

[Syrente]

I always considered 'Eternal Borrower' or 'Stonking great Thief' as accurate ways of naming 'pirates.'

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'?

[VoyagerRadio]

Not a very good analogy. The wife would now have the herpes you gave her, which would make her less fun in that particular aspect of the relationship.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[PrimalChrome]

You are both depriving the producer of revenue AND making use of their product without paying for ownership. It's much like 'stealing' wifi access from your neighbor. The only physical aspect of the theft involves electrons/impulses/etc...

"the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny."

Copyright (whether you approve or not) denotes ownership...making it intellectual property. The wrongful taking of makes it theft.

Funny how the slashdot crowd considers it theft if Microsoft includes GPL'ed code, but if it involves a person stealing music/movies/software, it is a right in the pursuit of happiness.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[Qzukk]

Kinda like when I screwed your wife while you were at work. You could still use her, so it wasn't stealing

Fixed that for you.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[spun]

No, the slashdot crowd considers it copyright violation is Microsoft includes GPL'ed code, and we consider it copyright violation if someone copies music, movies or software. See how that works? It's a different word, denoting a different action, with different consequences, but it is still wrong.

Using someone else's wifi is stealing, as you are depriving them of a limited resource: their bandwidth. You can make unlimited copies of a digital work without depriving the owner of anything.

You can argue the point all you like, but the law sees it differently than you do. Jaywalking also isn't littering, in case you were confused about that, too.

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'?

[spun]

Not according to US law (yet). You can argue all you want about the way things should be, but the way things ARE, copyright violation is not stealing.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[Waffle Iron]

It's stealing: you're depriving the intellectual property owner of one of their property rights, i.e. exclusivity. The same way I may choose who gets to stay in my realty (i.e. I control the exclusivity of the property)

You seem doubly confused. If someone violates the "exlusivity" of your property, that's called trespassing, not theft.

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'?

[nharmon]

If you violate the law, you are a criminal.

Not true. Some laws specify civil torts while others specify crimes. You become a criminal by violating the laws that specify crimes. This isn't philosophical bullshit.

Copyright infringement (my favorite replacement term) can either be a civil tort or criminal depending on the purpose and circumstances. In most cases, especially involving P2P sharing, the infringement is a civil tort.

However, theft is always criminal. Sure, it might have to exceed a certain threshold to be a felony, but stealing even a fraction of a penny is a crime.

Theft is always a crime. Copyright infringement is only a crime in certain instances. Again, this is not philosophical bullshit.

Arguing that theft and copyright infringement are the same thing demonstrates a lack of understanding the difference between civil and criminal law not to mention the purpose and nature of copyright law.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[hey!]

This is a quite (unintentionally) interesting post. The words "stealing" and "piracy" are criticized here because they are inaccurate metaphors for the thing being described, chosen to sway the debate by their emotional impact. Here we have an AC troll who is trying to veer the conversation back into emotionalism by yet another inaccurate metaphor.

You can see that the words "stealing" and "piracy" obscure the issue, without necessarily thinking that copyright infringement is acceptable.

Some cases of piracy are reasonably close to theft: unauthorized commercial duplication for example. In this case, the copyright holders aren't deprived of the material, they are deprived of the revenue, which the infringer enjoys. Other cases are not very much like theft, but are still not very admirable. They are more like freeloading.

Still other forms of copyright infringement represent the user trying to exercise a right he believes he has but which the copyright holder does not believe he has. In some cases that may be a legal right (such as archival copying), in other cases it may be a moral right, like replacing a CD lost in a fire. Such infringements have to be viewed on a case by case basis. Some are be reasonable and others are not, some are legal and others are not, but none are precisely "stealing" nor are any "piracy", which technically means robbery on the ocean without a valid legally recognized license from a sovereign nation.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[menace3society]

I prefer 'piracy'. The group ethics of freebooters during the golden age of sail is identical with the ethics of digital encryption-circumventors and copyright-ignorers.

To understand, you have to realize that sailing in the 17th century was a miserable occupation, especially with the Royal Navy. The hours were wicked, the breaks short, and the work back-breaking. Officers (who were paid about 10 times what you were) were rewarded for treating you harshly. Rations were insignificant and insufficient (the practice of giving lime juice to sailors didn't start until the 19th century, so scurvy likely). You could even be forcibly press-ganged into serving on a ship, if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

As a pirate, however, there were many more men on a ship, meaning less work and more free time for all. Food and fresh water were easier to come by, since you didn't have to make long trans-oceanic voyages, so nutrition was better and servings more filling.

The captain still earned more booty that the rest of the crew, but only by a factor of three or four, as shares of treasure were distributed proportionately. And speaking of captains, they were elected by acclaim, rather than imposed by remote authorities from the Admiralty.

The characterization of pirates as bloodthirsty is mostly a historical relic inserted by the authorities to frighten children and to discourage sailors from becoming buccaneers. A few were psychopathic, it's true, but the punishment they meted out as victors was no worse than what they would have faced themselves at home. All the talk of bargains with the Devil or Death was a metaphor for the pirates exchange: they earned freedom and sovereignty, but had to pay for it with a price on their heads.

In many cases the pirates proved better men than their opponents. Jean LaFitte fought alongside the Americans in the War of 1812, Capts. Morgan and Kidd plundered vessels in the name of the Crown, and Great Peter fought at sea to protect Friesland from its belligerent neighbors.

The parallels to modern-day software/content piracy should be obvious. They believe in freedom, rather than monopolistic autocracy; they risk severe punishment; they advocate sharing the fruits of their labor; they are generally nicer people than most of their adversaries (game designers tend to be the best of the lot, but when it comes to music, movies, books, etc. the contrast is much more clear).

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.

Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'?

[Emperor Zombie]

The distinction between theft and copyright infringement is not meaningless at all. Yes, they are both crimes, and yes, they both deprive people of revenue; however, they are not the same crime and should not be treated as such.
Let's revisit your example, but in this case somebody starts murdering anyone who bought the game. After a couple news reports, people might stop purchasing the game for fear of being murdered. Obviously the murderer is depriving the developers of sales revenue, so by your logic we should charge him with theft, right? Not murder?

ooh, ooh, I've got one!

[BlackCobra43]

Electronic copyright violation.

Yarr, I be a clever pirate.

make good games that run on reasonable hardware

[WillAdams]

Instead of mediocre games that require incredibly expensive stuff few people have.

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.

Re:make good games that run on reasonable hardware

[UserChrisCanter4]

Quick question (and not meant to be rude): are you old enough to have been in peak game-playing years during the NES and Genesis/SNES era? You must not be if you are attempting to distinguish those systems from the current ones based on "crap games."

Lousy movie tie-ins? Those have always existed. Hell, the legendary ET game for Atari (so bad that it is often partially blamed for the collapse of an industry) is a movie tie-in. In the NES and SNES/Genesis era, LJN, Flying Edge, Acclaim (or, as many jokingly called it, ACK! LAME!) and plenty of other publisher/developers were responsible for literally hundreds of shovelware titles between the three systems. We are shielded from those titles by the virtue of 10 to 20 years of passed time that have gradually allowed the gaming community to repress those awful, awful memories. If you're curious, go look at the wiki pages for LJN or Flying Edge; 9/10s of the games on there were garbage and a good number are all movie tie-ins. Better yet, go check out the wiki page with the list of NES games. If you grew up during that era, you'll pick out a few great games, a bunch of stuff you barely remember as being mediocre or never worth your time, and some true stinkers.

We also have the virtue of being able to group the "hardware-pushing" games all into a particular era, rather than recognizing that months and years passed between what we now just blanket-label as NES-era games. For every developer that figured out how to bootleg up some parallax-like scrolling on the NES, there were a TON of devs pimping out simple side-scrolling platformers or shooters that look basically indistinguishable from Mario 2 (for example, ANY NES movie tie-in game that was a side scroller or shooter).

I assure you, not much has changed. There are still some worthwhile gems sprinkled in among garbage. If anything, the lowered cost of physical CD/DVD production has allowed more quality, niche games (tactical combat games, for example) to be ported from the Japanese market than the cartridge medium allowed.

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.

TAANSTAFL

[Mesa MIke]

They'll be encumbered with ad- and mal- ware.

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.

Re:Problems...

[VoyagerRadio]

On point A)Windows: Exactly. Halo 2 running only on Vista? What the...? That's plain wrong, considering most of us are still running XP.

Re:Problems...

[JCSoRocks]

Holy crap can we stop with the "PC gaming is dead / dying" mantra? It's simply not true.
- US PC Gaming Revenues 2007 - $2.76 billion +12%
- US PC Gaming Revenues 2008 - $3.1 billion +14% (forecast)
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2007 - $8.3 billion +14%
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2008 - $9.6 billion +16% (forecast)

Those numbers are from the May MaximumPC. PC gaming is *not* dead, it's growing. Stop spreading the FUD.

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:

[truthsearch]

Other people's games... often hit and run.

Hit and run games are fun, too. Now hit and miss games I could understand not liking. ;)

Re:I prefer this idea:

[Anonymous Coward]

The "no return if opened" policy is bullshit.

This is actually a very good point. I didn't pirate things anywhere near as much as I do not before that policy. Back when Egghead or wherever would accept returns, I bought a game and, if it was horribly buggy or just plain sucked, I returned it. When they changed that policy, that is when I started looking on pirate BBSes, etc.

The natural extension of that is the Internet and technologies like BitTorrent.

The same kind of thing applies for the ridiculous anti-piracy measures that publishers take (e.g., SecureROM). If you make it a pain in the fucking ass for me to use your product, don''t be surprised if I shoot you the finger and, in so doing, get the product from somewhere else.

The solution is to increase product quality, while reducing the negative impact on consumers such as "The correct CD is not in the drive."

Re:I prefer this idea:

[sm62704]

I think you unintentionally found the replacement for the term "pirate".

it is MUCH easier to buy off bureaucrats and politicians than ten thousand pissed off freemen customers

The Fremen fought CHOAM and the Sppacing Guild. Perfect name for copyright infringers!

Re:I prefer this idea:

[billcopc]

+50, Nailed it!

The no-refund policy leads to horrible products with fantastic marketing budgets. What's a scorned gamer to do, sue the company ? On what grounds ? You can't prove "lack of fun" in court.

I'm of the opinion that piracy / software theft / whatever you wanna call it, helps the good game houses and hurts the bad ones. The whole try-before-you-buy excuse is a very valid one IMHO. There's a crapload of software out there, that I would have never heard of, were it not for some illiterate little shit in Norway posting it on Usenet. Not just games but apps too... prime example: O&O Defrag. I saw it on some FTP eons ago, gave it a whirl, and have been a paying user for over eight years now. Why the *&@^ am I paying for a defrag tool ? Because I like the damned thing, that's why. Had it not been pirated, I would still be cursing at MS Defrag / Diskeeper on a daily basis.

Same thing applies to games. You mentioned Blizzard, well a long long time ago, when I was just a teenager with lots of BBS accounts, I stumbled upon the original Warcraft. I had no clue what this game was, nor did any of my friends, but it was an addictive little thing. Chop wood, mine gold, kill stuff - FUN! Warcraft 2 came out, I trotted down to EB and picked up the War2 battlechest. Then Starcraft, War3, and WoW.

Had it not been for that pirated copy of the original Warcraft, I would never have bought the 2nd and 3rd installments.

The same is true for a bunch of Lucasarts games... Day of the Tentacle, anyone ? If it weren't for those massively distributed copies of Monkey Island, I would not have been hooked, and they would have sold $250 less games to this one guy alone.

Meanwhile, when companies release shitty games, the kind that's not even worth pirating, you can be damned sure I'll never buy their stuff, and I won't bother downloading it either.

If games didn't cost $60-70 to "try", maybe they would sell more. There are very few shops that release demos anymore, and the ones that do, often pull a Hollywood on us, where the full product only adds filler with no substance. The business model needs to be redesigned from the ground up - new distribution, new (smaller) budgets, greater emphasis on gameplay... it's not so hard, just look at all the runaway hits of recent years like Portal or Sam & Max - inexpensive to make and tons of fun.

Sure, blockbusters can be good too, but so many of them flop because the money takes over, release dates get bumped up and salaries get chopped. What, you actually believe those no-experience foreign sweat shops with mile-long resumés are going to cut development costs while delivering a superior product ? Ever heard of EA and Activision ? Ever seen them release a top-quality product ?

The game industry is fucked, much like the music industry. Pointing fingers will not change that.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[PitaBred]

The no return with open package isn't just because of piracy... it's because people would use big-box stores as rental stores. Get a game, play through it, return it and get another one, all "free". What I'd be most impressed with is if they did a return policy like Gamestop does. 7 days, no questions asked, after that, you're SOL. 7 days is long enough that you can return it if it sucks, but short enough that you can't play through most games worth money, assuming you're a normal person. There may be a few people who abuse it, but I think that would be a solution that would appease the greatest number of people, and get more people buying games again.

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:

[Denial93]

When I worked in a games company, I was told matter-of-factly that 80% of games sold are played for less than 30 minutes, and 80% customer satisfaction was alright. By that logic, a lot more effort was put in the first level compared to the last. Playtesters made sure the game was finishable, but everyone involved knew it started to get tedious after the first few hours. I scripted a couple of cutscenes very late in the game that I was told less than a percent of players would ever see. I still did them as best I could, but I wouldn't be surprised if others were less motivated...

Re:I prefer this idea:

[BPPG]

Schrodinger's Cat Baseball. Although it still doesn't work quite right when it's out of the box.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[Danse]

Here's a hint, if you truly can't return the game, you can't reject the EULA, and as such aren't bound by the terms.

Which means that you'd be able to distribute as you like.

What are you smoking? The EULA doesn't take away the right to distribute, copyright law does. That is in effect whether you agree to the EULA or not, so no, you could not distribute the game if you refuse the EULA. You're stuck with a box of discs that are essentially worthless unless you can sell them to someone else. Of course if it was an online game or application, then that person would be stupid to buy the opened box b/c you could have already gotten the CD Key from it and they would not be able to use it online. Of course sites like Ebay will probably shoot down your auction of it too. Sucks to be a software consumer these days.

Re:I prefer this idea:

[Surt]

Having worked for blizzard, I can assure you we shipped at least diablo, diablo II, starcraft, broodwar, lord of destruction, warcraft III, frozen throne, and wow with lots of software bugs.

Not many fatal bugs, but plenty of bugs. I personally fixed about 300 non play balance bugs that went into various patches.

Bugs are unavoidable in large software projects. Avoiding serious bugs that will make your customers unhappy is mostly about devoting sufficient testing resources to finding that class of bugs before shipping, and planning for extended work hours right after release to quickly fix the most serious bugs that escaped your testing.

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:I prefer this idea:

[elrous0]

Apparently, MS doesn't allow caching or optional HDD installs (or actively resists it). The games have to play the same whether the console has a hard drive or not. Otherwise games like Oblivion and Mass Effect would almost certainly have cached (and you wouldn't get all those damn elevator rides in Mass Effect and graphics pop-in in both). And they also supposedly killed Rockstar's attempt to allow for an optional hard drive install of GTA IV on the 360, similar to the PS3 (early on Rockstar said they would have it, then suddenly they didn't and were mum on why).

Re:I prefer this idea:

[bluefoxlucid]

I agree that the "no return if opened" policy is hurting consumers

I used to tend to steam my PC software open when possible. Not really steam, just get the glue weakened and soft so it'd peel off. Open, install, play, beat in like 4 hours... close back up and return. A game needs to take a week :(

Console games shrink wrap so this is a non-option.

Call it what it is

[Mr.Ned]

"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?

Why do they need to be free?

[Jellybob]

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.

Piracy is not an excuse

[Austerity Empowers]

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.

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.

Inappropriately conflated "Illegal" w/ "Steal"

[Woundweavr]

You make a reasonable argument on why its wrong to violate copyright. That does not mean its "stealing."

When you pirate a work, you must by definition make a new copy. That copy can only be legally produced by the copyright holder. It would make no sense to simply destroy it, and so ownership of it reverts to the one legally able to produce it in the first place. Most of the time illegally-produced copies get destroyed anyway, but that need not be the case.

In any case, you now have a copy of the software that belongs to the copyright holder. By not returning the copy to them or buying it outright, you are in fact depriving them of something: a copy to sell or otherwise do with as they will.

And so, piracy equals theft.

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.

• If one physically takes possession of something belonging to another person through force or stealth, this is called theft.
  
• If one obtains property of another through a transaction that used an excess of deceit to the point that the transaction is considered invalid, this is called fraud.
  
• If one makes a copy of media that is copyrighted without the consent of the copyright holder to an extent that is considered unlawful (one has the right to make backup copies under the fair use doctrine and until the 90s one could make copies if one did not receive financial gain from the copies), this is called copyright violation
  
• If one purchases or otherwise obtains property in a transaction that would normally be legal, but the goods are stolen, this is called purchasing stolen goods (and is only a crime if done knowingly).
  
• If there is a civil dispute over property ownership and the possessor of the goods is found to not be the proper owner, this is not considered theft or even a criminal matter (generally).
  

There are a number of other variations on the above. Simple possession of another person's rightful property does not necessarily constitute theft.

Call a spade a spade

[eepok]

It's not stolen, it's not pirated... it's an "Unlicensed Copy". Nothing more, nothing less.

Re:Call a spade a spade

[Anonymous Coward]

I often go into the store and start eating the food off the shelves. When they tell me to stop, I just tell them that according to Samuel Gompers, there's no inherent difference to the food in the store and the food on my shelf, so how can they expect me to know the difference? Then I eat the security guards, under the misapprehension that they are also food. I think it works out best for everyone, in the end.

Re:Call a spade a spade

[rabiddeity]

I often go into the store and start eating the food off the shelves. When they tell me to stop, I just tell them that according to Samuel Gompers, there's no inherent difference to the food in the store and the food on my shelf, so how can they expect me to know the difference? Then I eat the security guards, under the misapprehension that they are also food. I think it works out best for everyone, in the end.

I think you've been playing too much Nethack.

You can't compare Blizzard to most of the rest

[Jesus_666]

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.

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?

Like dropping a house on a witch

[spun]

"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.

Re:Expensive hardware kills PC gaming

[Targon]

This is a very common misconception about the costs for playing games on a PC. I have seen your argument over and over again, so I hope you see my response/correction.

A computer that is used for work or general "home" stuff does not come with good graphics in most cases. These machines are 100 percent focused on non-games related tasks, so as a result, you should not put those functions into the "cost for the games portion of the computer". You can also look at this from another point of view, where if you ONLY buy a computer to play games and NOTHING else, then the cost of a gaming computer is much more expensive than a console, but if you plan to buy a computer for other things as well as playing games, you can now split the costs up.

HP Pavilion desktop computer with AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3GB RAM(DDR2), 360GB hard drive, integrated NVIDIA graphics and onboard sound will cost you $530 from Best Buy. Add a 19 inch screen, and you are looking at under $700 for the complete machine. Notice that there is nothing here that is focused on playing games.

So, what would turn the above computer into a decent gaming computer? The video card, which will run between $200 and $300 for a card that is probably more powerful than what you would see in an Xbox 360 or PS3. That is the only price you are really paying to play games here.

What many people do not think about is how many people use a flat panel TV to play their game console on. If you don't watch TV on that big flat panel screen, you should now add the price of the screen to your game console. That will be upwards of $800. Suddenly, the cost of a game console is quite a bit higher than the computer. In the same way I write off the non-gamer components from a computer, you can theoretically write down the cost of that flat panel TV if you watch TV on it.

So, what platform costs more to operate now? Do you connect your PS3 to a regular TV?

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.