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Spore the Most Pirated Game of 2008
TorrentFreak has posted some statistics on the most pirated games of the past year. Leading the list by a large margin is Spore, made infamous even before its release for the draconian DRM attached to the game. It was downloaded through BitTorrent roughly 1.7 million times, with The Sims 2 and Assassin's Creed following at just over a million each. (It's worth noting that Spore came out in September, so that figure is essentially for a mere three months.) GameSetWatch has posted a related piece discussing the countermeasures involved in dealing with piracy. It's the second article in a series about piracy; we discussed the first a couple days ago.
Maybe that is because of the DRM, even if you buy the game, you still have to pirate it to be able to play a clean version (clean meaning without DRM restrictions of course).
The solution is obvious. Add more DRM!!!
The creature creator used SecuROM (invasive copy protection) and 'phoned home'. I imagine a demo would do the same.
I, and a lot of other people, would avoid it as a matter of principle.
This should be from the I-told-you-so department. Does this really shock any of the /. crowd?
It sucks that something so popular with publishers and unpopular with consumers keeps making headline news (granted, /. headlines are a bit different), because we get to hear the same arguments again and again and again.
And I'd say these numbers are highly suspect to boot. Where does torrentfreak get the rough total number of downloads?
There was not a single case of a shipping of that game being stolen on the high seas.
Oh, you mean people shared the files? Well, here's a handy guide for you.
Arrrr!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Can't we stop it with using the term pirate? Yes, it might be a humurous label amongst us geeks, but by going along with it, instead of actively resisting it, we help to fuel in the minds of those who only hear one side of the story, that people who violate copyright law are bad evil pirates. Let's try using more accurate terms like copyright infringers, or something that doesn't have so much obvious bias in it.
It is rather funny though that a game known perhaps more for it's crazy DRM (heck I don't know what the actual game is about...) than anything else, is the game that has had the most unauthorised downloads.
Would a demo do the same? Why would you put copy protection on a demo anyway?
All that DRM actually means that EA _wants_ us to pirate games?
I know I'm interpreting it like that.
They invest lots of energy in piracy, so they get piracy. Stop investing energy in piracy, and it'll drop by quite a lot. This includes things like DRM, registration keys, availability (some people just aren't prepared to get a game from an online vendor) and ofcourse... price (the more expansive a game is, the more difficult it'll be to get the consumer to buy it).
Now, let's ponder for a moment. Was this game P2Ped so often despite the insane DRM mechanisms? Or was it maybe because of it?
How many read about what EA wants to do with their PCs to be allowed to play this piece of ... erhm ... software? Deep manipulation of your driver makeup, authorisation requirement to be allowed to use what you pay for, the sword of damocles hanging over you in the guise of limiting the times you may activate it, not to mention the question whether or not you'll be allowed to play it when EA decides that you shouldn't any longer because you're supposed to buy the successor...
How many of those copies are actually people who bought the game and for some reason had to activate it once too often, and instead of calling the very helpful, friendly and lightning fast user support people of EA who speak flawless English they decided for the faster venue of downloading the game to play it? Or, how many actually HAD to download it to play it at all because for some funky reason that DRM barfed on them and all EA said was "sorry, problem at your end"?
I'm actually willing to grant the DRM advocates that this time those copies are actually lost sales. But not despite, rather because of DRM. People wanted to play that game and they would have had no worries about the 50ish bucks it costs, but they just didn't want you to mess up their PCs.
Before someone asks, no, I didn't copy it. The money allotted for the purchase of Spore was redirected to Sins of a Solar Empire when I heard about Spore's DRM mechanism. Sins was a purchase of protest, only to turn out to be a pretty well made game. I then saw Spore at a friend's and realized it ain't even worth the bandwidth necessary to P2P it. So, I guess, I'm not in this statistic this time.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
To stop people comparing the demo and the game files to see where the protection was added.
At least, that's what I've seen claimed.
when pirating really leads to less sales. You download the game to see if it's worth buying. This game in particular had a LOT of hype (and a lot of potential), but didn't deliver the kind of experience everyone was hoping for. You play it once and after that it's just not fun anymore. Therefore no sale after you've downloaded it.
I hope they fix Spore. Make it more complex, at least as complex as they promised. Now it's just a dumbed down 2D gone 3D gone strategy simulator with plush dolls.
Particularly in the case of Spore. That game was sold as just damn amazing. Well often when that's claimed it turns out not to be the case. Fable would be a good example. Had it been what it was originally claimed to be, it would likely be the defining RPG of this generation. Instead it was a fairly average action RPG.
Such is the case with Spore as well. Now I don't know, maybe the game gets awesome in later stages but to me, it seemed very shallow the little I tooled around with it on a friend's copy. The first two stages were really boring. I also had a look at his game on the Civilization stage. Well guess what? I've already seen that done better in a game called... Civilization. I likes me a good Civ simulator, in fact I own Civ 4 and it's two expansions. So if you aren't doing it better than that, and it isn't, well then I am not that interested.
Had I bought it, I would have felt rather ripped off. However I know you have to be careful on those extremely hyped games. You can't go by reviews either. Reviewers have already talked them selves in to how good the game will be, reviews are far too positively biased for Big Hits(tm).
I also think in Spore's case a non-trivial amount of it may have been due to DRM protest. Now you can argue if that's the way to go about it or not, but there were lots of people pissed about it. I've decided EA can basically get fucked. I'm not buying their games with this activation bullshit unless they are absolutely superb. I bought Mass Effect, that game is just that good, but I'm giving most others a miss.
For example I'm not going to get Red Alert 3. I'm a fan of the C&C series and have bought most of them. I quite liked C&C3 and Kane's Revenge. However though I like them, they aren't good enough for me to put up with the activation shit. So I'll get something else instead, Demigod probably.
Now while I'm not going to go nab a copy off Bittorrent, that may be what some people do, people who are put off by the DRM.
I'm reasonable when it comes to DRM. I'll accept that publishers are paranoid and need the "feel good" of having some DRM on the games, even though it seems it really doesn't help (see Sins of a Solar Empire for proof). However when it gets to be bullshit like "You can only install the game 3 times and then never again," well fuck you. Good games, I want to play and replay. I still fire up Baldur's Gate 2 from time to time. You'd better believe I've done more than 3 reinstalls since then. Hell I've gone through more than 3 complete system upgrades since that came out.
EA really seems to have crossed the stupid threshold. In particular the activation limits imply that it isn't so much about preventing illegal copying as it is about preventing a used game market and forcing you to buy new versions. I think the rampant copying will help show that no, this shit DOESN'T stop it.
I wonder how many of those 1.7 million downloaded copies remained installed for longer than a few days.
Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 at #10?
Man, talk about right outta left field.
It seems far more common sense that for the average guy downloading something that DRM has zero effect on whether he pirates. This is because the smart people who crack the game have removed the DRM anyway- and it doesn't matter how good the DRM is, they'll still remove it and release it completely free. So personally I'd look at the fact that Spore was a really interesting game concept that actually turned out to be a bit crap. It completely explains why people would download to try and then not go out and by it. The only real pattern we've seen with pirating media is, if the media is popular, it gets bought AND downloaded, if it's not popular its not bought OR downloaded.
When I download a game, I expect the most I need to do is to run a keygen crack- now considering the variance in DRM protection, it doesn't seem like DRM is having that much effect.
This is ironic. Spore is the only game besides WOW that I *didn't* pirate and actually *payed* for in the last two years or so. Playing Spore without the online component sounds like missing the point to me.
However, my DVD drive ended dying right when I got the game, so I downloaded the image via BitTorrent to install.
Property is theft.
I really don't want to feel like the next grammar nazi that finds this post.
A good education is a bit like a STD - it makes you unsuitable for a lot of jobs and gives you a desire to spread it.
You're exactly right, i hate the fact that demos are suddenly out of fashion, it used to be the best way to get a good preview of the game. These days i pirate every game that doesn't have a demo and check them out, and buy them if i want to keep playing after the first 20 minutes or so, did that with Storm of Zehir last week, CoD World at War the week before that - IMO it's the only way to do these things.
Various reasons. One, as has been mentioned, to avoid crackers to look at demo and final and compare (which is, IMO, bollocks since when you use some sensible algorithms to crypt it you can't see jack, just use a boilerplate version of the DRM software that doesn't phone home and you're set. If your DRM vendor doesn't provide that, switch the DRM vendor if you really insist in having one).
Another reason, and more important if you ask me, as a gauge how many copies you might be able to sell. When a million people use your demo, it's likely that more people will buy it than when you see only about 100k using it. Downloads don't really count since they, too, could be redistributed or downloaded from pages that host your demo without your knowledge.
And of course to give people the train of thought: "Well, I got that crap on my PC already anyway, so buying and installing that game won't make it worse".
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
You've never been a teenager, have you? It's bragging rights. Remember kids, the more you download, the longer your penis is.
In my days it was the kind of clothes you wear, later it was having the biggest trading card deck, today it's the amount of ripped software you store. It's not like anyone really needs 20 TB of software (or movies), it's our good ol' hunter and gatherer impulse.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Nice how you will always see statistics used in articles but they never go into detail how they generated the statistics. The article is entirely based on their own generated statistics yet there is no information how they generated them. Might as well be pulling the news from your... you get the idea..
People who know anything about that DRM wouldn't let SecureROM on their system, it has no business doing what it does to a system just to play a game.
It's 100% certain they'd have had my money the day the game hit the streets if they didn't have DRM in it. As it is, no. Not ever. Not unless I can run it in a VM where it can't pillage my system, and AFAIK it doesn't run in a VM.
And anyone who wants the game can easily get it in a clean pirated version.
Counting just BitTorrent is undercounting too; usenet is a safer place to get stuff (not as trackable).
Well, when you saw Spore, I think you'll agree that any kind of demo would have hurt the sales, not helped them. What would you have demo'ed? The "eat and grow" treadmill in the beginning that I have seen done better in various flash games? Doubt that would have convinced anyone to actually buy the game.
But if it tells me something it is to stay away from games that don't dare to offer a free sample of their gameplay. When they're not confident that the 20ish minutes I can usually play such a demo before I hit the "buy the full version to play on" wall will make me want more, the game is usually good for less than those 20 minutes.
And, bluntly, 50 bucks for 20 minutes ... dunno, how much are hookers these days?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Thanks for killing the games industry, you filthy thief.
Yes, I second that !
We need more suckers... huh, no... "customers" to fall for the brainwash... hu, sorry... for the marketing overhyping our product, and who will blindingly throw their money at whatever product we manage to persuade them will be the best-game-ever-even-better-than-blowjob-and-beacon-sammich !
Our economy is dying because of all the filthy thieves who selfishly want to see what a game is worth before buying !
--
though, seriously, I actually found the game kind of cool.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Because you can't know if it's something you want to play before you try it.
Mada mada dane.
Standard excuses for not paying for this or any other game (pick any that apply):
1) I will pirate it first and then pay only if I like it (a la when I go into a restaurant and only pay when I liked the food, or go to the theater to see a film and pay only if it didn't suck). If the game is not PERFECT, I don't pay.
2) My pirating is good for the software developer (more people playing, even without paying is good, it gives them lots of free publicity). Piracy increases sales! I am doing them a HUGE favor.
3) I am a cheap ass.
4) There is no such thing as copyright (or shouldn't be). Other people should create art, music, games, films, and entertainment for me as a favor and fund it out of their own pocket.
5) Piracy is a fact in the gaming world. Get used to it. It's the developer's own fault because they should have taken it into account in their business case (besides, they should have been working on this full time as an open source program for free anyway).
6) $50 for this game is too much. Come to think of it, $25 is too. And if it is only $10, then pirating it shouldn't be that much of a burden to the developer.
7) I do not want to try the demo because the only meaningful way to try out a game is to try out the ENTIRE game.
8) Who cares if there is 99.9% piracy, all the developers need is to make just enough money to fund developing another game. They don't need to get rich (after all, I'm not).
9) "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
10) Because I have never had to create, develop and market a game and I don't have a clue as to what it takes to run a business.
11) Because DRM is such a great excuse.
Be it how it may, what stays is that the DRM certainly caused some people to abstain from buying it. Me, for one. I wanted to actually go out and buy it. I tend to buy the games that I play. Having had a bad streak of heavily DRMified software, which I oppose on principle, I started looking whether Spore will contain DRM akin to StarForce or similar crippling mechanisms, only to learn that it's going to be a LOT worse.
So I went and signed that petition that was being passed around. I didn't really expect it to affect anything, but hey, you never know. And I was waiting whether EA decides to drop it. I wouldn't have minded keeping a DVD in the drive or entering some serial number, but that's about the level of copy protection I draw the line at. Mandatory registration and tying my copy of a game to the machine I install it on is past that line.
They decided to keep this version of DRM, so I decided to keep my money. Yes, I wanted that game. I wanted quite a few games in the past that I had to pass on due to DRM. Later I often got to buy them from the bargain bin when the vendor decided to remove the crippling protection with a patch, and this is when I get to play it. Ok. So I may not play it when it comes out, but eventually I might.
I can live with that. I wonder if the game makers can, though.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Is it just me or is The Sims 2 HUGE? It's always in the weekly top 10 PC sales charts, and apparently it's also being pirated like mad, still. People REALLY must have no lives...
At this point, I have to think that companies see that they cannot stop piracy with DRM. The continued use of DRM under the guise of stopping piracy, must therefore be a ruse. They continue to claim use of DRM as an anti-piracy tool, because it's better than saying "we're doing it to usurp your right of first sale". The question is, will more revenue be gained by cutting off second hand sales than will be lost by people fed up with DRM not buying it in the first place?
...support independent game studios. Whether you pirate or buy a giant conglomerate's product doesn't matter, they win either way.
Do the right thing and vote with your wallet, send the money to the independents who actually CARE about their customers and the quality of the games.
A company that makes Spore wants to earn a living. And to do that they put on DRM.
And it just can't work.
The premise of DRM is to make more difficult for people to casually copy the game.
That means managing to put restriction for every last game player out there. Everyone has to be subjected to that shit in the hopes that the copying will be limited.
But then, all it takes is 1 single unique copy. 1 single unique time when the DRM has been circumvented, for that copy to be made available to millions via the internet.
Who in his right mind could guarantee that, out of the several millions of sold copies (2 million after 3 weeks according to EA as reported on Wikipedia*), the DRM will stand un-defeated, not even 1 single time.
That requires failure rates lower than 1 in several dozen of millions. That are failure rates that even space exploration - with all its engineering brilliance - can't guarantee. And your expecting shitty manufacturer of crappy DRM systems, which can't even stay stable on a machine without crashing it, to be able to guarantee that ?
Even without entering in the stupidity of the DRM's cryptographic details, or the complete out-of-reality of the pay-per-copy failed business model, just the sheer numbers involved tell you that DRM just doesn't stand a snowball in hell's chance to be even remotely reach something that could be interpreted as success.
DRM just can't be the answer to the piracy problem :
to succeed it must stop absolutely everyone from copying.
to fail 1 single leak is all it takes.
That's impossible.
--
*: EA reports 2 million copies sold after 3 weeks.
TorrentFreaks reports ~2 million download after 3 months of BitTorrent.
That's an incredibly high... SELLING RATE. Articles on /. have mentioned that 90% piracy is rather the norm in the gaming industries.Whereas, it seems that Spore has sold more copies than it got pirated.
That's some damn fucking sign of tremendous success. And given this success, given all the money Spore has managed to earn, why does anybody need to give a fuck if some punks have downloaded copies of the intertube ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think (software) piracy is actually starting to gain positive connotations. Just think of all the "pirate parties" that are being started all around the world.
I think a pirate (the non-seafaring variant) is increasingly being seen as a technology-affine free-thinking individual who is concerned about privacy, sensible IP laws and non-intrusive government. Depp's portrayal of Captain Sparrow probably helped too. :)
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
A few people have mentioned DRM as shareholder appeasement. It would seem the company would enact more sensible policies if their shareholders were themselves gamers. Either that or people from this group who understand that DRM can always be circumvented.
It would be interesting if a major benefit of holding shares in a company was a discount on the company's products. It's a very old fashioned view of the stock market, but I think you should buy shares because you believe in what a company is doing and want to help them succeed. Of course, their success = your success as far as your ownership goes, so it's not an altruistic act to purchase shares. Currently, many companies are run by people who have no interest in the products being good or even finished are a bad thing as well. Maximizing shareholder value doesn't always give you long term success or a good product - just look at Circuit City. They were held up as an exemplar in Good to Great of increasing shareholder value. Even during that time where they were doing a great job, their customer service (which I guess is one of their main products) was widely panned.
I'm no economist so maybe this idea is hugely naive. I welcome being shown as naive.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
Steam isn't better than any other DRM, and worse than most. It's just very convenient, being able to download a game to any computer.
Effectively, however, your Steam "purchases" are rentals. Internet connection down? Games are inaccessible. Account gets banned? Games are lost. Valve goes out of business? Games are lost. Valve gets bought up? Pray the new owners don't change the terms of use to something draconian.
I wouldn't spend a dime on Steam. I like to own my stuff.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
Having wasted my money on the game I'm surprised anyone would want to pirate the game. I waited a couple of months until I read about EA relenting somewhat on some of the restrictions.
I was aware of some of the criticisms but thought the game might be entertaining nonetheless. What a complete and utter letdown. Gameplay is excessively simplistic and bland.
What I found particularly ridiculous was the fanfare behind the game being some sort of evolution "simulator". There even was some lame cross-promotion on Discovery channel. Again, I wasn't really surprised going in, I just found the marketing to be a bit ridiculous.
If anything, given how the game essentially depicts creationism and intelligent design you'd think the creationists would adore this game.
Back onto the topic, I find this a bit concerning. The people downloading the game are convinced they're screwing the man and thus justified in what they do, but instead they're just making things worse for all PC users.
What message are they sending? The game apparently is desirable. But whereas gamers thing they're protesting the publishers are seeing this as a sign that gamers are freeloaders. They're going to assume that these people would have pirated the game with or without the DRM.
So what conclusions are they going to reach? DRM isn't strong enough, so lets make it more invasive. And that's assuming the market is deemed to exist. Because the more likely consequence of this is that they'd abandon PC development and focus on consoles as much as possible.
And to be completely honest, I feel that people pirating games are unprincipled. If a publisher has done something you're not happy with, let's say introducing draconian DRM, the solution is simple. Don't touch the damn game. That sends a much clearer message than pirating.
Some people seem so desperate to get the latest and greatest of anything that they're willing to let themselves be screwed on a regular basis, or in this cases continue insuring that we have to suffer with DRM.
In the case of Spore, I found that trying to figure out how to download it and then use the crack to play it was more fun, from a gameplay standpoint, than actually playing the game. So I'm glad I found that out before paying $50 and could just delete it.
This kind of pisses me off seeing as i actually paid for the game, the only reason being DRM that made me think about it, how ever in the end i probably wouldn't have pirated / payed for it as its pretty average and is most likely going to have 200 expansions packs like the Sims.
How are these stats measured? Piratebay doesn't have any "Number of times downloaded" stat, so I'm insterested in how they arrived at those numbers. Some sites have a "downloaded" stat, but that number seems to only be connected to the number of downloads of the ".torrent" metafile itself.
I recently bought the native OS X version of Call of Duty 4. (I had the PS3 version for a little while, but I can't get used to playing a 1st. person shooter with the console controller....)
I only got to play online a few times before I was greeting with a "CD key already in use" message and kicked offline. Apparently, quite a few people are suffering from the same issue. Tech. support suggests that improperly exiting the game can cause the main server to hold onto your login info for a while, and to "wait a little while and try again". They also suggest that an "overloaded master server" could temporarily cause it.
Well, that may be true in *some* situations, but the more obvious problem is that pirates have created key-generator programs that make valid keys that wind up matching ones paid for by customers like me. Will they issue me a new key though? No way! Forget it! I've barely been able to play in the last few weeks..... If I finally get online with my key, I guess I need to leave my Mac connected all the time? Ridiculous!
My best friend had the exact same issue with Quake 4 a while ago - which prompted him to stop buying any more 1st. person shooters requiring keys for online play. Activision refused to help him with his problem -- so he was essentially better off just pirating.
The article didn't say anything about how they measured this. It did mention that EA was sceptica to their statistics (EA downplaying piracy? Nooooo). However, I can't seem to figure out how they measured this. There are a vast number of trackers out there, and a lot of them aren't public. I suspect that the statistics for such trackers is quite similar, but there's no real way to know, is there?
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You should be able to at least get a blow job for $50. To have sex you're looking at probably about 3x as much, but I guess it varies from place to place. I suppose a blow job would last a bit less than 20 mins however, but the overall entertainment would be about 20 mins. I'd probably go with the blow job over spore. But then there is the stigma attached with getting a hooker, esp when I can just get my gf to suck me for free. Actually, I'd probably just keep the $50 and spend it on a couple dinners.
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Yes, way to overdramatize, slashdot. "Draconian" DRM. You mean the fact that it won't even RUN if it finds evidence of a ROM loader on the system? Oh, wait, my legal copy of Spore ran just fine with daemon tools up and running. In fact, Spore doesn't even care if you have the CD in the drive or not. That's better than most other games these days. The only DRm they seem to have is limiting you to 3 installations, which is not even a hard limit because you could always call support an get more. No, the supposed draconian DRM is just an excuse people use to justify downloading the software illegally.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
DRM isn't there to stop someone experienced in illegally obtaining software. It is there to stop the average person from doing so. Most people don't know how to download software, run key generators, replace binaries and that sort of thing. They want to click on something and have it run. It is just like a lock on a house doesn't do anything to stop a professional thief, but it will stop the guy going door to door just trying doorknobs until he's found one that is unlocked. The people screaming "DRM is useless", are like the professional thieves saying "locks are useless" all the time justifying that they only break into houses because people put locks on them.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Why don't publishers/developers try to make it socially unacceptable to steal games? Instead of using a terrible DRM solution and suing the pirates, drop the DRM and subpoena the pirate's ISP for their name and address, which you then post on a public Wall of Shame website. It sure wouldn't look good when said pirates' employers do web searches on them and find out that they are petty thieves. Getting rid of the DRM on the game is crucial for this to work, however. You can't expect the social rejection of copyright infringement if devs/pubs give people a valid reason to steal the game in the first place.
in a few years most online games will be played with an extremely simple client where even the graphics are generated remotely along with all the game logic. the client will be able to run on cheap hardware (no more crazy gaming rigs) and DRM will become unnecessary...
in this age of communication i'm just not getting through
So why all the research into new and better DRM schemes? If DRM is only meant to keep out the common man, the simplest DRM should be enough.
"It seems that the current generation thinks that charging for software is a bad thing."
That could only be true if the RATE of piracy is higher than in the past. And what you'd need to do is to study what is being pirated and how it compares to 5 or 10 years ago. You could do lots of interesting research in this area provided you have the data.
What we're lacking is facts, and the people providing them have a vested interest in doing research only as long as the outcome they're paying for.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
I haven't bothered pirating anything as I'm just too lazy to care, however, I could see it being worth the effort to drive a point home.
If you care about any games, and know DRM afflicts the games you care about, and hear about the Spore debacle, you may wish to prove the DRM only hurt the industry in this case. You may not care about Spore (quite possible given the critical reception), but the opportunity is ripe to show that legitimate customers suffered for naught (given the ostensible reason would be to fight piracy and this proves it doesn't help).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
It's not like anyone really needs 20 TB of software (or movies), it's our good ol' hunter and gatherer impulse.
Speak for yourself. My 22TB of midget porn rarely keeps me entertained for more than two hours at a time anymore. I just need new material!
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
For one, you insinuate the parent poster must be willing to infringe on copyright just because they express disdain for SecuROM. There is no indication he chose to play a pirated game, just expressed the simple fact the DRM technology hurts legitimate users and dose nothing to faze illegitimate usage.
Though I don't agree with the method, the message is not much more clear for a game to have no piracy and no purchases. If a game releases, infested with invasive DRM mechanisms, and sees negligible sales, the company can't be sure whether the game flopped because the baggage that came with it was too burdensome, or if it flopped because the game just wasn't desirable. If it is accompanied by rampant copyright infringement, they can at least know their DRM didn't help their cause, and depending on the circumstances realize the product itself may have otherwise been successful. The Spore case is different as I believe the infringement incidents are artificially high due to a protest justification rather than genuine interest.
The company signed up for the most user inconvenience they could in the name of protected their intellectual property, and as a consequence, experienced the counter-intuitive result of a higher-than-normal percentage of piracy to legitimate sales.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
You've never used Steam, I take it?
Most Steam games will work without an Internet connection present. Multiplayer games are the exception to this rule. I suppose you could play them without an Internet connection, but it'd be pretty pointless.
That most Steam games wotk without an Internet connection also addresses your "Valve goes out of business?" bit.
I don't know how Steam's account banning works. I also don't know what would happen if Valve gets bought out, although you can block updates to games and Steam itself.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I was very interested in the game and was planning on buying it until I heard about the Nazi DRM. I haven't pirated it since I'm not that desperate to play it, but once I heard about how the DRM operated and how restrictive it is, I didn't even consider buying it. I don't want to buy it and then pirate it after a few reinstalls.
I have a Steam account, I got HL2 bundled with a graphics card a while back. You're talking about offline mode. You have to authenticate online at least once before being able to enter offline mode. Also, each game must be activated online, you can't install games to an offline Steam client.
As with any online activation based DRM, even store-bought steam games get reduced to coasters once the authentication servers are gone.
Have a look at the Steam subscriber agreement. It pretty much says that games are tied to accounts, and that Valve can terminate any account at any time for no particular reason, without any recompense.
No, really, I wouldn't spend my money there.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
...because Wrath of the Lich King has only been out for three weeks.
So you're worried about not being able to use online authentication to validate games you downloaded online. Brilliant.
The fact that they can axe your account is lame, but if they were in the habit of doing so participation in their service would quickly decline.
One movie a week (8.5 gigs), times 53 weeks a year makes that a four year supply of movies. Two a week.. two years. That's with standard def, not HD.
Uh.. plenty of Steam games can be bought in a brick-and-mortar-store, on a physical medium. Everything HL2 related, for instance.
You don't think it sucks that you have to have a) ask for permission online to play a (legally bought) single-player game, and b) Valve can render the (physical-medium-attached) game nonfunctional by canceling your online account? Inacceptable in both regards, I think.
As I wrote above, I like to own my stuff, and with Steam it just doesn't feel like it.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
Ah! I understand now. The whole millions of copies downloaded, that's just.. people who ended up giving up because they couldn't run the game?
I'm not sure what all the hub bub is about here.
Official servers and online hubs have been shut down in the past for other games leaving only a few old players tooling about on Hamachi. It's just something that naturally happens over time as player counts dwindle and everyone moves on.
Seeing as how Valve isn't an evil empire, I'm quite sure that in case things went to crap they'd unlock all the games and free them from having to be authenticated by Steam in order to play online. After that, it's just a simple matter of burning the game to a disc and keeping it in your binder.
You do backup all your downloaded content I hope.
Manages to stay alive and keep making hit games with no DRM.....Morrowind, Oblivion, and Fallout 3 are all bona fide hits, surely making the company a big pile of money, and yet none contain DRM. Hmmm.....I wonder how that works....Maybe it has something to do with the fact that these games are great, and can yield years of entertainment. Morrowind is one of my most played and replayed games of all times, with it's open ended nature (in terms of game play and modability), and both Oblivion and Fallout 3 follow this trend. If you make quality stuff, you don't need DRM, apparently.
I wasn't aware that there were 371 days in a year now.
*obligatory* 4 years of movies ought to be enough for anyone...
is the fact that the means of aggregating the facts are different. In the mid 1980's my dad worked at an insurance company (a pretty big one, too) that had purchased one copy of Wordperfect 5.1 for an entire office floor; the number of copies in the building could be counted on one hand. Who's going to report that?
All it takes now is some loose counting on the top 10-20 torrent sites and that's where the numbers come from. It's likely that piracy based on empirical numbers (i.e. literal number of pirated copies in use) has gone up based on the much higher number of people using them, but percentage wise (pirated copies over purchased copies) has probably gone down as a whole. While centralized sourcing has gone up (one purchase, 100 limewire downloads), disk swapping has likely gone down (100 purchases, each person giving the disk to two friends, who then each give copies to two friends equals 700 installs)
Joey
Man, I have no idea where that number came from.
I actually know a guy who went out and bought Spore because his pirate download was going too slow.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Valve doesn't need to, all their games have been already cracked, so I don't get why people are bitching about it. If worst comes to worst, you can still get the cracked version.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
The best way to slow down these pirates is to decrease the number of activations to zero. This way, if you download the game it is worthless. But if you buy the game, you still can't install it, but you got a nice colorful packaging to look at. Buying the game therefore gives you a better experience so everyone will buy it instead of pirate. Problem solved!
Of course, the 90% piracy rate [...] is a complete ass-pull
Well, in the last article it wasn't an ass pull.
IT was based on a ratio of scores submitted to their server (as an approximation of the number of people who play the game) against number of license sold.
It's not a perfect metric, but it's still a metric.
BTW the developpers were far from being hungry, and didn't botter putting some DRM in their application.
(That was the subject of TFA's interview : they didn't throw money on some DRM and their piracy rate were exactly in-line with what was reported everywhere else. Conclusion : DRM is useless and doesn't matter at all for piracy rates)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
And yet, TPM commeth.
Of course. 20 years in gaming consoles have very well proved that a platform designed only to run signed code is a perfect and undefeated form of protection.
The only single reason why mod-chipped video console aren't as popular today as they were 15 years ago, is because of the menace of being banned from On-Line service if the chip is detected.
But if you put strong limitation on what code a PC is allowed to run, the only net effect will be a net increase of pissed consumers.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
"Walls of Shame" are actually socially unacceptable in many civilized countries. In fact, it is not only punishable under civil laws (libel and defamation), it is often a criminal offense. And it doesn't matter wether the accusation is true or false! Should any one involved in such activities visit one of those countries, they may even risk jail time, if not just huge fines, even if the public pillories and their own location were abroad.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
You know there are other options. You can rent, ask a friend
Wonderful way to legally share content.
Happen to be completely impossible to achieve on several games due to draconian DRM methods.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
But that's not legal.
It ought to be, of course. It just, very simply, isn't.
Kid-proof tablet..
It's legal where I am.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
It's illegal in most of the EU (not sure about the UK if that's where you are), in the US and in Australia.
Besides, "cracks are available" is not much of an argument. They can be infected with all sorts of malware and can't be used on a computer you need to be able to trust.
Don't whistle while you're pissing.
Actually, the chance of finding a proper key that is suitable for online play is non-trivial, here is how key generation usually goes:
1) programmer of company develops an algorithm to generate keys
2) company runs said algorithm 100,000 times to generate 100,000 valid keys, covering only a tiny fraction of the complete keyspace
3) company records those keys and adds them to their master server to allow online play
4) those keys are distributed with the games
What happens once the game is released is this
5) cracker figures out the algorithm
6) cracker tries to generate a "valid" key for online play, but fails because the keyspace is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the small number of keys actually distributed.
Chance of valid duplicate keys: close to nil. Chance of generating a valid key for online play: also close to nil.
Of course it happens, I just don't believe it happens that often.
EU has no laws on cracking or using cracked copy protections/DRM. There are laws against illicit copying, which is not the problem.
It isn't a argument, it's a fact. If VALVe goes under and takes Steam with it and stops all the games from functioning, I'm not worried.
I don't trust games, Windows, undocumented software on machines I need to trust. How does this change anything?
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
Even if Valve didn't unlock them, I seem to remember a provision in the DMCA that allows for breaking/bypassing DRM that is no longer supported.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
But I won't confuse it with useful game reviews. Perhaps I just have different tastes than him but, for example, he really didn't seem to care for Mass Effect. I would say it is the best RPG ever, any generation, any platform. I watch for entertainment, not reviews.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Then why does the data consistently show piracy rates directly corresponding to popularity rates?
I understand, except my suspicion/fear is that a cracker could examine a number of valid keys to figure out a good idea of which small portion of the complete keyspace was used in their generation - and tailor a keygen accordingly.
Anyone working at a retail store (Best Buy, Circuit City, etc.) would have a relatively easy time accessing a number of valid keys by simply opening a few boxes and peeking inside before re-sealing them.
But then there is the stigma attached with getting a hooker
I dunno about you, but I couldn't say what would be harder to explain for the average geek: Being caught with a hooker or being caught with Spore?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
With a good algorithm and a decent random number generator this should be virtually impossible.
It's somewhat like a md5sum, where modifying only a single bit in the seed changes the complete result. If these bit-changes are performed randomly, then it should be impossible to derive the "valid" keyspace.
My girlfriend has bought all 8 original Sims game, and all 9 Sims 2 games.
That equals between $750 and $1000 spent on one single videogame franchise.
And despite her being against software piracy, she is now unlikely ever going to buy another EA game again.
You hear that EA?? You've lost one of your most loyal customers because of your ridiculous policies and DRM.
The last game (Apartment Life) she installed was done via their online service.
I spent Two weeks fixing her computer and trying to get the game working. With zero help from EA, I ended up finding answers on cracking sites (even then, all the security measures made it tough to implement the user-made fixes). After a few days I downloaded the pirated expansion pack onto my computer and let her play on my computer until I got hers figured out.
The next Sims game she plays will likely be pirated. After seeing how easy it was to just download the pirated game and what the DRM encrusted game could do to her computer she very quickly changed her mind on the morality of downloading software.
Then, if you were a game developer, you'd be getting no money from me. I have no interest in online multi-player games. Call me antisocial, but I don't feel like dealing with idiots in my free time.
If the product had been DRM'ed, that'd probably have been enough to put me off. But since the Goo guys made the thing so damned easy to get hold of and install (you can buy it direct from wwww.WorldOfGoo.com as a download, day or night), when the impulse to get it struck me at 4am, I couldn't think of any reason to hold off. I'd already played the demo, the price was within my comfort threshold, if you bought the Windows version they gave you the Linux version for free (when it's finished). I didn't have to worry about media incompatibilities, or problems installing it on different machines, or network incompatibilities, or the fact that my new PC doesn't have an internal optical drive.
And the Goo guys seemed to be trying so hard to make things as easy as possible for their customers that it was difficult not to have a lot of goodwill towards them.
Result: product purchased, and also recommended to friends.
"I am a valued customer!" -- World of Goo
Eric Baird
Well it makes perfect sense since everything that is popular is junk, see Britney Spears, Windows and now days somtimes even Linux. :-)