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id CEO Claims PC Hardware Manufacturers Love Piracy
arcticstoat sends a link to an interview with the CEO of id Software, Todd Hollenshead, in which he suggests that hardware manufacturers count on piracy to help drive profits, rather than doing something to prevent it. Quoting:
"...I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content — even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs — is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games. ...And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit."
years ago Piracy give windows and office a big boost to where they are now.
Q: It's the barrier-for-entry thing isn't it? It's really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?
Todd Hollenshead: There's lots of things that they could do but [...]
The next question should have been:
Such as what? What exactly are you proposing hardware manufacturers do about software piracy and peer-to-peer networking? You've said there's lots they can do but provided no examples. Give some.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Since when is it the hardware manufacturer's duty to prevent piracy? Who exactly? Is AMD supposed to stop pirated code from running? Is NVidia supposed to stop the graphics from rendering on a pirated game? My hard drive? My RAM?
old school id, 3d realms and apogee folk must be cringing at this kind of comment for it was the shareware "revolution" that created the major games industries we see today. if TH starts anti-piracy trolling, someone might have to remind him of his roots: episodic gaming is just the connect equivalent.
There's a huge difference between tangible property and intellectual property.
Don't mingle the two.
It is complete and utter nonsense that hardware makers should be somehow held accountable for the dissatisfaction of software makers.
Software was free to begin with. The idea that software is a product is the notion that doesn't quite work. Hardware makers follow industry standard specs for the most part and add benefits here and there and ultimately strive to lower costs. It's a classical capitalistic market. Supply and demand rules fit neatly here.
Software, on the other hand, does not. The supply is LIMITLESS and the demand is limited. Software-as-a-product people are attempting to create a market where none naturally exists. But this is generally the case of all products that have a limitless capacity for production.
One fact is known by all players -- lower costs bring more buyers. Software people know this too. Unfortunately, they believe their "product" is worth more than is actually is. The "demand" side of the equation demonstrates that demand levels at the prices they set does not always yield the sale numbers that suppliers would like to see.
In some extreme cases, software people seem to believe that the use of software should determine its value. Ultimately, software people are intending to leverage their software to get a piece of your labor pie. Just look at the cost of CAD or other design and engineering software. The prices are utterly ridiculous! Their expectation is that people who use this software will probably make a lot of money and as such, they want a lot of the users' money. Could you imagine what would happen to the price of other tools simply because they might be used to create some very expensive product or end result? My god, those would be some expensive hammers and nails! It is unrealistic for software makers to demand such exorbitant prices.
Meanwhile, real product makers will go on doing what they do -- give the consumer what they want for the lowest price they can so that consumers will buy more of it.
"Please give us a hardware-based lockdown solution for software authorization."
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Why does every discussion of IP have to include someone pretending to not see the difference between a product with unlimited supply (data), and a product with a supply of one (the GP's house)? You know it's not the same thing, so why the silly act?
Instead, how about you explain how giving data artificial value through copyright is A Good Thing, and stop with this silly argument already?
Create games that run perfectly on 3 year old computers and people won't spend money on new hardware, and instead (maybe) spend it on software.
Care to elaborate how this would stop piracy? Obviously after that date nobody can pirate those products anymore but the vast majority of piracy (at least the piracy that really bothers software developers and movie makers) occurs in the first 6 months of release.
Are you suggesting that people knowing that the copyright will expire sooner will cause them to wait 5 years until things are available legally for free? I honestly don't think that's true, so unless you've got something to back that up I think we can discount that as a valid argument - especially given that 90% of games are available for a fiver in the bargain bin within 18 months of release.
I'm no fan of DRM, Trusted Computing, or any other anti-piracy measure currently employed by major software publishers, but I don't see how copyright law has any tangible relationship to this subject.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
That doesn't even begin to make sense, I'm afraid.
One: Linux is basically unknown. Yes, we as Slashdotters know about it, and it runs on eight bajillion items, but the end user still remains basically ignorant.
Two: Linux doesn't require upgrades (in fact, it could really be argued that upgrading to the latest and greatest is a really bad thing for a Linux user, what with driver issues and all).
Three: Most of that pirated software won't run on Linux (or requires a bunch of screwing around to get working, hello WINE), so using Linux isn't a plus for people who want to avail themselves of that pirated content.
Open source software isn't the same as getting commercial software for free. As much as some of the gnulots around here would like you to believe, most of the time commercial software is still better--for an end user, although not always (or even often) from a technical perspective. (Just look at Windows versus any of the major Linux DEs. It's pretty obvious that Microsoft has UI experts and programmers who are paid to work with them, as opposed to "scratch your own itch" open source programmers. Nobody can, or should try to, force open source programmers to work on them, but there is a corresponding failure of usability inherent in such.)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Creativity will NOT be rewarded in the future.
On the contrary. Creativity is precisely what will be rewarded in the future. It is distributors who will not be rewarded because the market for distribution of ideas was obsoleted by the internet. But creativity will always be in demand.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Manufacturers tell people all the time what to want. It's called advertising.
Define property.
This is where the problem starts. Once we can agree on this point, then we can move forward. The problem is that the sides of this debate define property differently. Many people define property as tangible stuff that they own. Other people define property as stuff that the courts will enforce your right to control.
The right to control is the most basic property right, so it makes sense that some folks will use that definition. But most people deal with the right in the context of their house, their clothes, or their car, but not in the context of ideas or expressions.
Until we agree on a meaning, the sides will be talking past each other.
--AC
I would argue that another reason hardware makers shy away from Linux is that a typical Linux system can remain functional and operating on a single computer far longer than a Windows system. I have a system from 2002 running the latest CentOS right now, no problems at all. I've had my laptop for three years, and see no reason to upgrade my hardware, even though I am running the latest Fedora and KDE. Compare with Vista, where I would have required an upgrade just to use some of the features.
Why would a hardware maker of any sort want to back a platform that decreases the incentive to upgrade and buy more hardware?
Palm trees and 8
Back when PCs came preloaded, there wasn't Lotus Symphony, Paint.NET, GIMP, Thunderbird etc. There was Lotus 1-2-3, Photoship, WinFax and Eudora - all pay-to-use, and later on crippled versions for "free". If you couldn't pay, the only alternative was piracy.
Open Source gives the freedom NOT to use pirated material.
With regards to "The ones that are still selling well after this period..." -- well, why the hell should they be prevented from continuing to profit?
Why should they be allowed to? Copyright exists for one purpose - to encourage people to create. Once they have made enough profit that it was worth creating it in the first place, then copyright has already served its purpose. If shortening the copyright term encourages people to write more then that's even better, although most of the people still making a significant profit after five years already made enough that they never need to write again.
You claim to be speaking on behalf of writers, but most of us don't want you to. You'd be surprised how few authors support copyright terms longer than 5-10 years. They don't benefit us, they don't benefit society, and they make people less willing to respect copyright in general.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
...pirating id's stuff.
That's how Id got big, remember? Doom was pirated a lot, and that made it a big hit.
Not only that but IP industry is the horse and buggy industry of the 21st century, why exactly do these people deserve our protection? Should we have protected the horse and buggy industry from going obsolete?
Oh, please. This analogy gets brought up into every single fucking IP discussion on this site, and it is always way the hell off base. There is no brave new industry that is making something better than what the software makers are making now... people are just taking what they make for free. When someone is making a new type of thing which obsoletes software, get back to me, and then you can use the buggy whip analogy. Until then, stuff it, because it doesn't apply one bit.
In any other area if we were capable of replicating matter and energy for food so entire industries would collapse over night, they would be seen as horrible people from trying to stop such technology from being used by people.
Yes, and that is because the work in those areas is the reproduction of the product. The work in IP is actually creating the thing you wish to sell, reproduction is and always has been effortless. When someone comes up with a way to instantly and effortlessly create a new piece of software which you want, then your analogy will apply.
Good God, why is is that no one on /. who opposes IP even understands the issue at hand?
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
Is this a joke ? You're not seriously wondering why the radically different skill that writing good software requires results in applications working according to, let's say, different philosophies ?
The only thing right about apple's interface is the consistency. Can you point me to a way to use anything OTHER THAN ITUNES to get an mp3 playing on my iphone ? Apple is "nice" as long as you toe the line. The only thing apple does a little bit right is consistency across it's interface. Mac OS is impractical, paternalistic in the extreme, and pushy as hell ... and yes it's a bit nicer to look at than linux or windows.
This consistency is pushed onto software developers from apple headquarters with, to say the very least, an iron fist.
While this made users initially happy, for obvious reasons developers didn't like it. They hated apple, from the beginning, and the hate only grew stronger. So there weren't all that many developers, and therefore not too many apps for apple.
And then microsoft came along. And gave developers visual basic. Easy to use, fast to get results, but to say the least, not perfect. Obviously given that you "just want to develop something", you "want to give developing a try" you're (and this is still true) going to do it on windows. This was true long before windows became anywhere near dominant in the marketplace.
Therefore there's MANY more apps for windows. And before that all applications ran on DOS. Why ? Because that was cheap and easy. Getting an app to run on mac os/iphone is both expensive, difficult, and you have to pass apple's "commisar". DOS/Windows doesn't force stuff onto you. I'm going to get a lot of flak for this post, but just look at the exact same situation :
matlab vs mathematica. Mathematica is beautiful. Nicely built, nice to look at. And a veritable thumbscrew to develop in, just like mac os. Matlab gets results, and is beyond ugly in design. It's literally a deep dark pit in the ground and you can see a faint red light glowing at the bottom. Yet nearly everyone jumps in the matlab pit.
The exact same situation you have with iphone versus windows smartphones. Why do you only have skype on windows smartphones ? Why do you only have good calculators on windows smartphones ? Why do you only have on windows smartphones ... no developer keys, and no restrictions on what you can put on devices. It gets worse. The physical restrictions of windows mobile are MUCH, MUCH worse than those of the iphone. Apple has loosened up a tiny little bit. But that loosening is costing the iphone in consistency, and a lot. It's loosing it's beauty, but it works better.
In the end it's similar to communism/socialism versus capitalism : central planning/forced consistency looks good, and IF you like the guy that's currently at the wheel it may work for a little while. Everything may not work, but at least it looks like it actually fits. Capitalism is a thousand trumpets blowing completely out of sync. But when you have to live with it central planning/communism/socialism is a death knell, and capitalism gets things done (1000 ways will fail, 1 will work, that's the way of capitalism. The 1000 that fail are not a pretty picture, and the one that does gets "all the glory". Communism/socialism/central planning only tries one way, or maybe a few. If those few tries fail ... then it's over. No matter how many people know how to solve the problem, nobody else gets to try)
You see that with the olympics in China : the top layer looks beautiful. Lots of nice girls, beautiful city (for the moment). But ... it's being forced onto the people at gunpoint. And apple's "easy to use more attractive software" is also being forced at (the proverbial cryptographical-development-keys) gunpoint. It looks nice if the person holding the gun is trying to impress you. It does not look good AT ALL if you're on the other end of the gun.
And developers, the people you as a user depend on, are on the barrel end of apple's gun.
Who do you think is going to win after the "oooh" factor wears off ? Apple is currently a blip, a drop on a hot plate. It will shine ... for a short while. Then *poof*.
I'm sure more than a few /.ers remember the old PC role playing games, with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid had something like this - one of the access codes you needed to proceed with the game was printed on the back of the game case. Bugger if you were playing a burned copy!
These methods are ultimately better than a CD check or similar, as they actually engage the player and give them a reason to keep the game packaging around. Unfortunately these days, game packaging is disgustingly minimal - the days of the latest Square RPG coming with giant fold-out maps and equally large fold-outs of bestiary stats and item lists (anyone remember the original Final Fantasy NES packaging? That bigass poster Dragon Warrior came with?) are long gone... ultimately leaving the gamer with "less hassle" as the only reason to buy the game or software instead of downloading it.
I'm not into multiplayer online gaming or mods, custom models, etceteras (probably due to my roots as a console gamer) - I don't want forty multiplayer modes as the "value added" bit for a few hours of single player - I want a keychain fob or a tchotchkey for my tower or something I can hang on my wall. In the box, not available from the company's online store for even more money, thank you.
As long as bits have to be read, piracy will always be an issue. I say stop whinging about it and put in a little extra effort to reward the people that want to give you their money!
You may not have noticed, but a computer does not "work" without software. That's why it's perfectly reasonable for consumers to expect software to come loaded on their new computer. When you buy a cellular phone, do you expect it to come with empty memory so you have to install the communications software on it before you can make a call?
Nobody is forcing Dell or HP or Sony to load tons of junk on their computers when they leave the factory.
Now, speaking to the issue at hand, the idea that computer hardware manufacturers are "in favor of" piracy just because some of them don't want to include DRM in the hardware or firmware is just a bunch of crap. You have a bunch of crybabies saying that "it's their fault" instead of looking at themselves in the mirror.
For example, many people have found that it's just simpler to pay for computer games when they are sold and delivered in a sensible, reasonably-priced manner, such as Steam, instead of downloading them from TPB. So a group of vendors actually thought of a solution instead of trying to turn users into terrorists, and now they're making money and consumers are happy.
A casual home user who needs a word processor shouldn't be expected to lay out $500 for some overblown suite. And thanks to openoffice.org, google docs, etc, we are learning we don't have to. There are even quite a few professionals who find that Open Office works just fine, thank you. There was a time when anyone who wanted to use a computer had to budget in a thousand bucks just to do some basic tasks.
The question isn't whether corporations should make money. It's whether they need a steady stream of ever-increasing record-breaking profits. Pigs do get slaughtered, you know.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The Doom 3 engine, which is what everything since then has been based on, really fails to impress me. Several problems:
1) It doesn't look as good as it should for the hardware requirements. I remember when Doom 3 came out, my PC struggled with it despite being decent. Had to run it at 800x600. No big deal... Except that it really didn't back that up with beauty. For example if you got close to a surface, you started to see pixelization of textures, even with it set on ultra detail. The game just used pretty low rez textures, and had nothing like the detail textures that the Unreal Engine uses to deal with close up viewing.
2) It was too concerned about being "realistic" not enough about looking good. The lighting model is a great example. They wanted 100% dynamic lighting, meaning there was no magic global lights, all lights had a source. Great... Except their lights didn't reflect or refract. Light would hit a surface and bounce only once. If it went to the camera, ok you saw it. Anywhere else, it went away. This lead to the hard shadows and the extremely dark corners. You could have a corner with two bright lights right by it, but if neither shined directly back in there, the corner would be pitch black because there isn't any reflected light. While that may be more "correct" than models used by some games, I don't care, it doesn't look as good and that's what matters.
3) The games had little replay value. Doom 3 in particular was all about shock value. I've gotta say, it was a scary game to play the first time through. However, it lost all that after the first run. When you know the imp is standing behind the door to ambush you, it's not so scary anymore. With the scare factor gone, it was really a fairly mediocre shooter in my opinion.
4) Poor backward scaling. While the Doom 3 engine now runs on what is quite old hardware, when it came out it was very much a Crysis. It needed first flight hardware to run. It wasn't just that you had to have it to look good, you needed it to run at all. DX8 or better hardware was mandatory. All the peopel with DX7 hardware were SOL. Well, many other games scaled much better. They had to give up shiny features on older hardware, but they still ran.
Over all I think iD has really dropped the ball recently and I think it shows in engine sales. Unreal Engine has been vastly outselling the iD Tech engine. Their problems with sales don't come from piracy, but from lack of quality. Their games, as you said, are not great. I gave Quake 4 a pass, and same for Enemy Territory. Decided to get Unreal Tournament 3 instead. Their engine is also getting almost no licenses. People are buying the Unreal Engine instead. No surprise there either. UE 3 looks fantastic, and scales quite well. It may not be as technologically "correct" as Id's engine in terms of lighting and such, but who care? Ultimately it looks awesome and that is what you are paying for.
I get tired of companies that release poor quality products blaming poor sales on piracy. This is especially true for companies that release shit that requires the highest end, most badass computer. Crytek was whining about that with Crysis. "Oh we only sold a million copies, those evil pirates are killing us!" Hmmm, you think maybe instead the reason you only sold a million copies is because you need, as Yahtzee put it, a hypothetical future computer from space to play it well? I gave Crysis a miss because looking at benchmarks, it wouldn't have run well on my system. When I came out, I had an 8800 GTS, not the top of the line, but damn near it in terms of video cards. Reason I had it is I have a large LCD. I want games to run nice and fast on that large LCD. They do to. However the Crysis benchmarks showed it didn't. Maybe if I had 2 8800 GTXes it would have, but my lowly GTS (a $400 card I might add) wasn't enough. Ok, well I didn't need that, so I passed on it.
Well same shit with Doom 3. I did actually pick that one up but it really ran pathetic. I wasn't rocking top of the line graphics hardware, but