Slashdot Mirror
Crysis 2 Most Pirated Game of 2011
MojoKid writes "When an advance copy of Crysis 2 leaked to the Internet a full month before the game's scheduled release, Crytek and Electronic Arts (EA) were understandably miffed and, as it turns out, justified in their fears of mass piracy. Crysis 2 was illegally download on the PC platform 3,920,000 times, 'beating out' Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 with 3,650,000 illegal downloads. Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past."
I wish there was some way to correlate between the illegal down loaders and the DRM whiners. Is it 5% or 95%?
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
Publishers have fled to the consoles in record numbers. Now all that PC gamers get is crappy console ports.
Ok, it's been downloaded 3 million times. But how many copies of the game did they sell? Half a statistic is meaningless.
DRM never effects the pirates, just the paying users,,,,
Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past.
Thus only punishing customers who paid, not the people downloading the game illegally and applying a crack.
Makes perfect sense
/thread
How, exactly, will "more draconian DRM" prevent the leaking of games before their official release date?
If you're in a position to leak a pre-release build out, you're probably also in a position to strip out or disable any DRM
Was there even any DRM in the leaked game, seems like that's the last thing you'd add in
Nobody wants to actually PLAY the stupid thing, they just want to see how their new video card performs.
...if the game had DRM and negative reviews anyways? I remember a similar thing happening to Spore a while ago...
Have had a bit of a crysis... Yes, I went there.
Makes me wonder what orifice they pulled those numbers from.
I am not a big gamer so I don't know the answers to these questions, but "Most pirated game" seems to indicate that the game was good. Did this game sell any copies?
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I sense a disturbance in the force, I hear thousands of nerds crying out that DRM only affects paying customers.
Is it a smokescreen for pricing changes?
Example:
You have a PS3, you're used to paying $60 for a new game or whatever the average actually is.
You have a PC, you're used to paying $60 for a new game, except when you plug in your ipod/iphone and play a new $0.99 game. Hmm why am I paying sixty times more for some games than others?
On /. we know why the iphone game costs a bit less due to technical knowledge of how they're made and what goes into them. That is of course completely irrelevant to the general public, who merely know that "a couple hours of fun with a new game" sometimes costs $60 and sometimes costs $1.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
how many of those downloads were due to the price being $0 or less than the retail price? Someof the downloads would not have resulted in sales anyways!
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 is a multiplayer game - as far as I know the cracked game will NOT let you play in multiplayer mode... so the majority of the people that downloaded the game probably purchased legal keys or stuck to playing the single player mode or playing with friends in LAN.
Basically, the download acts as DEMO, incentive to buy the access to the multiplayer mode, and it definitely does not mean that a download equals a lost sale.
As for Crysis 2, I'm not sure how many of those downloads were just to "benchmark" their video cards...
Even so, even if a large part of the downloads were pirates, it doesn't mean lost money... it just means they don't make as much money as they wanted. I know in my own case I'm currently taking advantage of every Steam sale to buy games I pirated and enjoyed in the past - I couldn't afford spending 40 euro on a game but now I have no problems paying 5-10 euro for each of the STALKER games, for example.
I currently have over 200 games bought, in the Steam account.
Crysis 2 sold about 500'000
Call of duty: Modern warfare 3 sold about 950'000
EA's decision to foist it's totalitarian-steam-wannabe on it's PC customers pretty much guarantees it will see even greater levels of piracy in the future.
Paying for a game I can get for free is one thing, paying to get metaphorically raped by a games publisher is another.
Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past.
I'd mod this entire article flamebait if I could.
In my view there are 99% chances that developers might be involved in the early release!
I know Crysis has no demo, and BF3 only had the beta; I believe none of the top five games pirated has a demo.
It would be interesting to compare games with a good demo, and those which have none; I'd bet there would be quite a difference.
Also, interestingly, Crysis 2 is only present in the top 5 for PC, and does not appear in the Xbox top 5, which would led some credence to the benchmark argument.
BTW, the original TorrentFreak article is here.
http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2011-111230/
Now let's see a follow up on just how many people that pirated the game went and bought it at launch. . . . .and it seems to me that maybe if these large developers would lighten up a little bit, get the sticks out of whatever orifice they're stuck in, and be confident enough in their product that they're willing to ride on it's success based on it's quality. . [and removing DRM completely could be a really good PR gesture of faith towards customers treated more like slaves than customers] they'd see a huge boost in sales and customer support. Does this mean more "pirated" downloading? ABSOLUTELY. Back in the day they called it "free advertising", and what consumer, nay, WHAT HUGE MULTINATIONAL CORPORATION doesn't like "Free"? [except when it's used as an excuse for cutting 5,000 low paid employees to give the shareholders a .5% stock boost and the CEO his multi-million dollar raise. . ]
It just bothers me a little bit. . back in the day we had these things developers would put out called "demos", portions of up-and-coming games people could try out, get their appetite whetted .
Luckily, nobody who pirated Crysis 2 had a system powerful enough to run it, so actually the game wasn't ever successfully pirated.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The real question is how many of those downloads results in later sales. We give away samples to hook future buyers. SOP.
I was going to buy Crysis 2 yesterday on Amazon, it was on sale for $10. Then I remember that EA has terrible DRM with a 5 install limit. I'm not sure if that is still the case but I was too lazy to figure out what the current EA DRM situation is.
So DRM cost EA $10 yesterday. I could pirate it but I do want to support Crytek, just not EA.
Release it free as open source and protect it with GPL. No one will pirate it. I guarantee that. Instead, they can charge for services, like official server access, paid tech support, and maybe t-shirts and coffee mugs.
The most stolen cars are the most popular. Do you think stealing cars has anything to do with sales? And for some strange reason I don't see a lot of car thieves asking to do away with car keys, perhaps they have an ounce of common sense?
slashdot troll = you make a compelling argument I do not like the implications of.
OK so from the summary we have:
1) Unsubstantiated figures.
2) Figures that have no way of being correllated to actual loss of sales even if they were verifiable.
3) A conclusion drawn from illogical, perhaps even a (partially) inverted concept of causation: 'DRM is the answer to piracy'.
4) An unjustified focus on a single platform, the PC. Looking on TPB alone I can see half a dozen torrents of Crysis 2 for XBOX360 and another 4 for PS3. I don't know what has to be done to play pirated games on those platforms but I'm sure these guys aren't downloading 5-6GB torrents for the hell of it. Yes, there are about 100 torrents for PC vs. those console ones, but many of them are created solely for the inclusion of additional content (various cracks, mods, trainers, etc).
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
If I try and fail 10 times to get a pirated copy from various sources, do those 10 tries pad the statistics? Hmmmm....
Silence is a state of mime.
This only means that the subscription/account model surpasses the single payment model. How many times did World of Warcraft get downloaded illegally? Zero? Oh yeah.
And SWTOR? Uh... zero, also.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
How do they know the number of downloads? Are these all being copied via torrent with someone watching the tracker? Or is this an estimate from the difference of what they think they should be selling ,therefore assumed piracy?
And as an aside, I never heard of this game until this story.
Of course CD Projekt Red reported having 20-25% more piracy (4.5m) for their major title of the year (Witcher 2) than either Call of Duty or Crysis 2
* http://www.gamespot.com/news/the-witcher-2-pirated-45-million-times-cd-projekt-6346876
If those numbers are correct, I have to wonder where the Witcher 2 devs got their figures.
The game was removed from steam due to an EA contract dispute very early after release.
With no mainstream platform to readily purchase Crysis 2, EA lost out.
They're using their grammar skills there.
That it is missing from Steam
The game was sold over 3 million times. Until proofen otherwise I assume that 75% of all illegal downloaders used that as a demo and bought the game afterwards...the other 25% found it not worthy to buy...I wonder if we can map that against IQ statistics...
Was salivated over for its eye candy, not necessarily for its gameplay. It's a benchmarking tool. Then again, people who downloaded it for benchmarking certainly had no qualms over blowing thousands for a top of the line gaming rig....
hookers and grits.
Also you get easy backups.
Easy to move games to other systems.
Easy to play your games on other peoples PC's even if it just for temp use.
No need disk in drive.
It's not crystal clear from TFA whether the numbers are just from the final release, or also incorporate the leak that happened over a month before of the whole single and multiplayer.
I've no idea how you account for the effect of that on sales on your final product, as I saw youtube videos of it and got me to buy a game I otherwise wouldn't have, which I personally find interesting as I was more sold by the real footage that I was by any marketing.
Does this have something to do with the stupid EA Origins tie-in that caused Valve to pull the stupid game from Steam? http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/06/16/crysis-2-steam-removal-not-an-ea-decision/
This is what the ignorant executives at software games companies don't understand. They can't really sympathize with those that pirate. They can't get in their heads. As "PC games" are reduced it will only motivate those sorts of people to move to rooted consoles. By rooted console I mean hacked to the point it's connected up to a PC for all it's input and output. Games will still be distributed over the internet and pirated. Nothing short of eliminating all existing computer network technology will prevent that.
The pity here is that the PC is the Superior game platform. So when PC version of a game is put up on the net there is little motivation or want for the console version of the game. But as the PC games disappear consoles become the new focus for pirates. Pirates are techies. The harder something is to do the more pride and status you get from doing it.
The weakest link to DRM is the internet. It only takes only one person to hack into a locked platform and then they share that information with everyone.
The Solution: The only strategy that will actually work is putting crackers on the payroll. As it is now they can't approach a company like Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft because of the "digital" IP laws these companies have pushed. It looks too much like extortion. But in truth that is the solution, to turn the resources and talent of the internet to your favor. Getting the crackers to fix the hardware and software themselves.
How you come up with an appropriate reward amount has to be open for negotiation. The companies and the crackers must be free to call each others negotiation bluffs without repercussions for the crackers. If the cracker won't accept a specific amount of money then he must be able to release details of his crack. The company can then handle the repercussions and then fix the crack themselves. The cracks are not kept secret, they are actually fixed. There is motivation to fix them. And the free market then decides what is fair compensation.
There then becomes an industry of "professionals" (even more motivated and talented) to not only develop security measures but to defeat them. They actually get a cut of the action. The current crackers doing it as a hobby then have no chance because if they had the ability they would be working for a professional cracking company or have their own.
In essence the problem doesn't actually exist. The entertainment companies are greedy and just don't want to pay that percentage. So they bully people through law suits and create laws that inhibit free speech and the free market economics. They would rather give the percentages to lawyers and politicians.
Obviously there's a price discrimination problem here. I you look at those millions of pirate downloads and don't think: "If only we could somehow sell the game to some of those people at a lower price, we'd make a ton more money". It's like a grocery store not stocking off-brands and getting mad when people shop elsewhere. If you cut the price in half and three times as many people buy the game, it's a big win.
With some in-game product placement you could even make money off the pirates "Dear Pepsico, if you buy ads in EA EXTRAVAGANZA 2012, your placement will be viewed by all 10 million purchasers, as well as millions more pirate downloads."
It seems like you'd have to be pretty dumb not to view millions of pirate downloads as a money making opportunity, it's not only free for the pirates, it's free for you, no bandwidth to serve the game to them, no support costs at all, and they're running your software on their machine.
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
..the more sales slip between your fingers.
Please, by all means use more Draconian DRM on your games. I DO NOT HAVE TO BUY THEM, I PROMISE!
I don't pirate, either. Pirating a game would mean I actually liked it, but I won't even acknowledge the existence of games/companies which employ asinine DRM measures.
It is fast coming to the point where indie game quality is as good as, if not better than, AAA title quality. I'm happy to give my AAA title business to smaller indie devs who understand the concept of not punishing their customers because they live in a perpetual state of fear for their bottom line.
-SS "Teach the ignorant, care for the dumb, and punish the stupid."
Where else were people going to get that game a month before release? Best Buy? Steam?
You can't cram a culture of consumption down people's throat, then act surprised when the consumption skyrockets past their artificial scarcity.
If you don't want your game to be heavily pirated there are two sets of rules you have to follow so your company isn't responsible. 1. Secure your company and game so you don't leak the entire game to the Internet 2. Encrypt the game or put a release date check to prevent it getting released before the release date. Any company who doesn't do this can't complain about piracy. A huge reason why sales are so good for preorders on Steam are because gamers want their game before anyone else. Steamworks means that gamers who pay get to play it first, and pirates can often be waiting for a long time or have lots of problems.
Each individual car costs quite a lot to make. A stolen car isn't merely a loss of a potential sale, it is a loss of real property.
Each individual copy of a game costs zero to make. The production company isn't involved *at all* when someone copies their own game and gives it to someone else. So there isn't a loss of real property.
This is why it is relevant that the most pirated games are the most popular...it means that the production company is *still* making an assload of money on the most pirated game, which means they *still* have a direct economic incentive to invest money in making and marketing the game. They can earn an excellent profit in the gaming industry without having to take control of people's computers away from them.
But hey, if they want to focus on console only, let them! It will create an economic void in the domain of PC gaming, which will let some new, more economically literate company enter the market and make money in their place.
They released a sequel to that crappy game?
This is totally silly without sales figures sat beside the piracy figures.
I bought Skyrim, I also pirated Skyrim so I can avoid the DRM. I don't like that junk on my PC. Skyrim just sits on my desk in it's shrink wrap. So which am I counted as? Pirate or paying user? Both? I can't really be considered both, cuz I purchased it. Does that make my download of a non-DRM version no longer an illegal download?
I know a lot of friends who do this same thing, pirate a game, then buy it as well, having liked it.
As has been said already, DRM doesn't bother pirates. They just break it, heck, they probably enjoy the increasing difficult to break DRM, its more challenging!
I personally wrote a letter to Bethesda, praising them for making such a fantastic game, informing them I bought it and pirated it and would be continuing to use my pirated version to avoid DRM getting onto my PC.
But without sales figures next to those piracy figures (and where are they getting those figures from anyway?), its pretty useless information. It tells me and probably tells game publishers nothing. Especially since there's no way to know how many of the pirated downloads resulted in a sale that otherwise wouldn't have occurred.
You would think after, what, 20+ years of copy-protection utterly failing they'd cut it out. It just doesn't work, never will. And the only people benefiting from copy-protection is the people licensing their protection schemes to the publishers.
Sounds like an unhappy employee wanted to give the company a massive kick in the nuts by leaking the thing...
The right one is how many sales were lost. And how much advertisement value was gained for future games.
For sales lost, the equality "1 download = 1 lost sale" is only for the terminally stupid and has been demonstrated to be wrong time and again.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
1. Big-name PC games used to be $50 (and some still are). Now most are $60, but there's no justification for the increase.
2. PC games used to be better than their console ports. Now, the consoles are the main platforms and the PC is the after-thought port.
3. DRM schemes have become progressively more annoying and intrusive (first you had to have a CD, then you had to activate online, then you could only activate a limited number of times, now you have to be online all the time).
4. DRM only impacts the legitimate, paying customer. There's no DRM that can't be cut out with some disassembly and a hex editor (or spoofed in some other way), so pirates don't have to deal with it.
5. Steam is the platform of choice for distributing PC games electronically nowadays, yet many primarily console-oriented producers refuse to embrace it.
I wonder why games get pirated?
If game companies got their head out of their asses, the PC market could be largest of them all. After all, there are far more PC's then all the consoles combined. On what are you reading this message? Your console? Didn't think so. Console owners have PC's but many a PC owner has no console.
But the PC is not a console. We don't need supersized fonts or dumbed down controls. Games like Deus EX and many other original PC games that moved to consoles and gave the PC crappy ports show that the PC has a need for a more complex but also simpler control interface. We got 101 keys on average so there is no need for optimazations in weapon selection. Take Skyrim. The game wanted to present itself as you wielding two powers at once and shifting between powers quickly. That is not how it works in reality is it? I switched quicker in Doom but then Doom was a PC game and simply used 10 keys to select one of 10 powers (weapons) and voila, it worked. In Skyrim... actually, I have up on that and played SWTOR. Nice looking world Bethseda but I knew the interface was going to be crap so I didn't buy it and instead spend over 300 dollars on SWTOR so far. Money Bethseda could have had if they sold the CE in Holland (they don't) and had made a proper PC interface like they did a long long time ago in a galazy far far away...
Games like The Sims proof and even Farmville proof that their is a huge PC market out there but you can't approach it the same way as the console market. PC gamers want more then just a shiny disk and 10 hours of gameplay with "achievements". They want something they can control, where fighting the interface and controls is not half the game. DRM isn't even that big a issue if done right. How about you simply release tiny amounts of new content continously and adjust the executable for it? Release groups are typically lazy and will crack the original release and then stop. Sure, that means you can't sell horse armour (Bethseda again) for a fortune but you give people a real reason to BUY the game to get updates that make you seem like a nice company that gives out free goodies.
It sill amazes me to see console games retail for 20 euro's more then the PC version, countless torrents for the xbox version, lousy ports but somehow piracy is to blame for Crysis bad performance... it only did half the sales of the xbox after all. No license fee and an environment where you can blame poor performance on the customers hardware rather then your own coding skills.
But hey, continue to go to consoles only... enjoy coding for hardware half a decade out of date and the console companies desperate to stretch the lifespan of their hardware while the PC keeps moving ahead. I am still spending money on gaming, feel free to take it or leave it. But I don't do consoles. And if that means no more FPS for me... I try not to loose to much sleep over it.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Oh, we don't have those figures - after all, no-one would want to acknowledge that it might be down to rush-releasing an unfinished PC game....and then look even more stupid if someone could produce figures for how many pirate copies were replaced with genuine ones once that issue was addressed. And that's before we get to Steam selling it, then not selling it, then Origin appearing, then Steam selling it again. But ey, confusing the buyer always means more sales, right?
None of this is uncommon knowledge - maybe I just didn't expect knee-jerk, taboid-level logic from Slashdot headers.
I bought the game and never completed it because I just lost interest, I can see why no one would want to pay for it.
Let EA go console-only from now on. That would be great! The economic demand for PC games will still be there, so some other companies (who understand how to market to PC owners without having to take control of their computers away from them in order to make money) will then be able to fill that void.
It would be a win all around.
Sorry EA, It wasn't the most pirated PER PERSON.
I have a problem with my network card driver, so the zip files often fail the md5 checks. I just queued this game 3,000,000 times so I was sure one would work!
As it turned out: it was a shitty first person shooter that I deleted ten minutes in. I'm sure glad I got to try the "unofficial demo" before wasting money on this!
Crysis 2 was not as well received on PC than PS3/360, word of mouth got out that it was linear consolised simplified. Consolised : the keyword of death for a FPS. So people did not buy it for PC, and those who downloaded it, may have played with it, but frankly I know of a few person which downloaded it and used it as a sort of "futuremark" benchmark. I know I avoided the game after trying it out from a renting shop.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
£40 for a new game is utterly ridiculous. And consider most of the people who play pc games are slightly more technically able than those who buy PS3's and Xbox's. So, you want the guy who can download it, can apply a patch and can play the game for free to pay £40 when the pc version has little resale value and practically no trade in value in Gamestation, for example.
Piracy will continue while pc gamers feel ripped off. If the game was £15 and released on Steam, I would pay that. As it is, I just don't play the latest games and wait for them to hit eBay.
Just wanted to reiterate what's been established in many of the above posts, in my case in particular,
i've purchased several hundred games from steam just last year alone, what does the new year bring?
Well, i suppose in any given week i only play PC games maybe 4 hours, but when i see these sales
on steam i see value: Games 80% off, Franchise bundles 75% off etc,
and i say to myself, "I can't NOT get that, i'll be playing that eventually, and i'll kick myself when i see the price".
Attention all forms of media: Show me VALUE and point of sale will be
a minor detail rather than an "obstacle to bypass or go around" as you so
often claim. Not everyone is rich, but, if all $60 dollar games had $60 dollars of worth,
Everyone would be broke, but we'd all be happy at the end of the day.
Just my opinion.
It wasn't a big deal when DRM meant leaving a CD in the tray. That was about the last time when buying a game meant less hassle than copying it. From then on, it was straight downhill.
From shitty, half-baked CD-drivers that crapped out on various machines and thought the game was a copy despite being legit, to authentication servers that first could not be connected and then crashed the game if your ISP had even a minor hiccup in its connection, to the latest "lemme look what's on your machine to play my game". And I didn't even get into the crap I should have had to put up with Windows Live.
Any of those problems do ONLY apply to people who are honest (or stupid) enough to actually buy the game. Nobody who ever copied the game had any of these problems. And that's poisoning your own pool.
From a market point, you compete with the copies for your customers. They offer the same product you do, illegally, ok, but it's still the same product offered. You cannot compete on price, for obvious reasons. You don't want to compete on content, since printing manuals seems to be too expensive. But throwing out the last advantage you had over copies, i.e. convenience and compatibility, was just plain out stupid. You managed to make your products worth LESS than the copies. It's not even on par with the copy, it's worth LESS than it.
How? Because the value of an item is not only its price, it's the usefulness to its user. A game that runs without hassle is more valuable than one where I have trouble getting it to run properly. For the longest time, this was in your favor. Running a bought game was heaps easier than running a copy. You slipped it in and it worked. With a copy, you had to apply a crack, hope that it works, and often you had to install it manually with some tricky "copy this there and that there, and then run this, then copy that and run..." you get the idea. It was LESS convenient than buying the game.
This was turned around when DRM meant that it became more of a hassle to play a bought game than playing one that was copied. This was achieved for some when the copy protection CD-drivers weren't fully compatible with some CD drives, but it was reached for the mass of your customers when you insisted on authentication servers that could not handle the load during release and that dropped the connection (which meant that the game instantly stopped working). From then on, it was plain MORE convenient to NOT buy but to copy!
The more draconian and the more invasive DRM becomes, the worse the favor tips towards copying. Because for copying, the "hassle" for the user stays invariably the same: Copy game, crack game, run game. What will you want next from us? A blood sample to tie to our account? How much less convenient do you want to make playing games I buy? And how much more inconvenient will it have to become for me to say "screw this" and join the copying crowd?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Are we just swallowing these stats, like politicians automatically buy made-up industry dollar losses? How can this even be measured? Think about it. One site may be able to show a number of download attempts, but probably can't confirm success, nor begin to measure stats from other sites.
Because, if you have one method of getting a game that is free and is available immediately, and another method that costs money and will take another month, it's pretty obvious to see which is the better deal, and this isn't about the money, this is about immediacy, like pretty much every other thing that is pirated. Honestly, I bet a number of those "pirates" have the game on preorder, and just wanted play it sooner then later.
Cut the price and piracy will decrease.
Would not touch this title. Can't accept DRM and will not pirate (who wants that - with related risks - in their lives). So I get my games on Steam (maybe a couple of dozen @ year) and keep hoping that the DRM junkies in the publisher set come to their senses.
A download is not a lost sale at all ! Clearly all the people pirating Windows would switch to FreeBSD and Ubuntu if there were no way to pirate Windows.
Fuck off with your fear mongering. It doesn't bode well for game vendors, because nobody NEEDS to buy their games.
Crysis 2 was highly pirated because it wasn't worth buying. Linear, scripted, aggravating and out of the box it didn't even look that good until they came out with a bandaid overlay to tack on some DirectX 11 features. That didn't make up for the lousy game though.
Same with Modern Warfare 3, which is absolutely the worst deal of any Call of Duty game to date. The campaign is a few hours long and the graphics are mediocre at best. It's a boring game, with a "more of the same shit" feel to it. The multiplayer is a drag too and the maps are boring. I didn't buy it, but I played it on my friend's Xbox. I finished the whole campaign while he was sitting on his computer playing World of Wankercraft then proceeded to multiplayer, to get aggravated by a bunch of pimple wizards.
What entitles them to payment of $60 for such rubbish? I'm sure that not everyone hates those two examples and would play them, but they wouldn't want to fork out that money.
"More draconian DRM" means even fewer sales. Some of these games are retarded. I bought Fable III through Steam without reading carefully enough. That it needs Steam is a given, but also it requires Games for Windows Live sign in to play it at all (which is a highly insulting and annoying waste of time) and if that isn't enough, it also has Securom even though it's not on optical media (They are using Securom for an additional method of restrictive product activation). Go fuck yourselves... it would have probably been easier to pirate that game.
Bought The Sims 3 for Android during the Xmas sale (for my daughter to play). Installed it on my phone. Works great but needs the wifi to be on otherwise it just sits there. Installed it on my CyanogenMod Touchpad. First it wouldn't install because it just sat there waiting to download additional content. Then, I found a post on the web describing how to download the content and put it on the device so that Sims 3 would not try to download it. Did that and the game got past the content download problem. Of course, that's when the DRM kicked it and it tells me that it's not authorized to run on my device. Really?
I think it's also notable that Crysis 2 is no longer available on steam, and MW3 is a steam game. The extra DRM on Crysis 2 seems like it did the job... by gaining the most pirate of the year award :)
What if u d/led it n bought a copy of it.
crysis 2 was the first game i bought twice: once on steam, once on dvd-rom.
don't forget: i was a pirate when i was kid with no money and cars to wash. but still a gamer.
Easer to download and install than used purchased disk.
I buy my games but its easier and I often get better performance just to download it, install and use than run the install disks and hope the CD drive is up to date with SecureROm, hope I don't get a message "I have DVD emulation software installed" or wait while yet another program must load and access the Internet before I can run the game.
Have fun playing on your antiquated hardware with a bunch of 17 year olds.
With humble bundles & indie royales + steam sales I really feel no need to pirate anything, but DRM on some titles I've bought recently have been really annoying. I bought it on Steam, why should I have to deal with all this DRM crap? Splinter Cell Conviction & Bioshock 2 were especially inconveniencing in that regard.
5% (or less). Illegal downloaders never have to deal with DRM.
Arguably one of the most 'hyped' and crappy games of the year too. I wonder if there is a correlation between high levels of marketing and friends saying the game is terrible.
But how many people kept it on their computers for over a week?
I'd bet a good chunk of those are from "Will my computer run Crysis 2?" or "Is this game worth buying or is it garbage?" throw in a few hoarders (You know, those ones who pirate everything, but never play a thing) on top of poor college students who are surviving on ramen noodles.
Also, since beta leaked before the actual final version, I'd bet many folks who bought it pirated it before hand, just to see if it would be worth their money.
I was talking about pirates, not myself. :P
Remember: Time is money, pirating costs time, buying costs money. And you got it exactly right 17 year olds are more likely to not be able to afford a high end computer, so will have more antiquated computers.
I still play a lot of Quake III, so I bump into more 30 and 40 year olds there actually. :)
Also quick disclaimer: I've never played, downloaded, pirated or know anyone who plays Crysis 2.
So I'm looking at "Have fun playing on your antiquated hardware with a bunch of 17 year olds." and thinking, what? You need a little more of a meaty comment to chew on there.
They still don't realize that more DRM = more piracy..
Sigh.
The players I mean, not Crytek / EA!
I paid legitimately for the game! Expecting to get a sequel to the partially open world game Crysis 1, which was really bloody good. A great compromise between on rails standard action FPS and open world game.
Sadly when I got Crysis 2, I got a game which had gone backwards with terrible, awful mouse input code, graphics which were about the same, mediocre pacing and gameplay, buggy abilities nano suit wheel and a story which made me wish they'd just gone 'lite' on the story like the first one. Biggest dissapointment in such a long long time. Frankly, fuck Crysis 2. As for the pirates, my condolences on your wasted bandwidth.
I reccommend people go pick up Crysis 1, sure the last 1/3 is weaker than the first 2/3 but it opens damn strong and in max detail it has some amazing art design and graphics still.
The more DRM the more chance for it being pirated. Haven't they learned yet?
And out of those illegal downloads how many people went out and brought it?
Just coz its leaked early DOES NOT mean people who download it wont buy it.
I know a LOT of people that download games and most of them DO buy it so just because there are 3.9 million illegal downloads DOES NOT count to 3.9 million loss in sales.
I for one HAVE downloaded games BEFORE they are released in the shops just to go buy it when it is in the shop so where do you put me? I download but I also buy. I download because I get to play it early but I buy when its available so that DOES NOT count as a lack of sale.
If you have 3.9 million illegal downloads but only 3.8 million sales then ok, there is 1 million illegal copies out there and the rest brought it so what does that say? People are after that game and want to play it early so its a very good game. BE HAPPY with the money it made you. And DONT FORGET the more DRM the more piracy.
When Spore came out it was the most pirate game and why? DRM. Nobody likes DRM so they would prefer to get the pirated version which CAN be played without an internet connection.
When I buy a game I want to play it where I want when I want and if I dont want to connect to the internet I should still be able to play that game as I paid for it. If I cant then I wont buy that game and I will look other places to get it and let me play it without an internet connection and unfortunately for the game devs thats a pirated version. If they released games without DRM there will be more happy gamers and less piracy.
The piracy war is up to the game devs. Less DRM = less piracy. Your move.
If you add up the downloads for the two versions at http://www.crydev.net/faq.php there have been 1.06 million legal downloads of the free software development kit that lets you mod the Crysis 2 game, create new levels, or even entire games from scratch, and then sell them. So while it may have been the most pirated, at the same time it may be the most free and legal downloads too. I don't have numbers for other game engine SDKs, so I can't say for sure if it's the most downloaded, but a million is sure a lot of them.
I was a fan of the battlefield series until BF3 came out. It took about 6 hours to install when I had bought a physical copy thanks to the needless crap you have to agree to and install. "Do you agree that we will monitor and collect information from you?", heh -- I'd like to see you try *downloads and installs crack*. I hate EA, always have, always will. I got BF3 for free as a promotion so I can't really complain but it wasn't worth wasting my time on it. EA mistreats their employees, they overcharge for their POS games, and they force you to install crap that you don't need.
After reading all the hype about "Will it run Crysis?", it's sort-of become more of a graphics engine measuring stick then a game to me. I'd pirate it because I'm not sure that it would even run decently on my hardware; once I've got it and I see that it works - why bother buying it? I've already got it...
Duh? Even people who morally believe in buying games, etc, will still download a leaked pre-release. Must be online at all times, with significant components only server side is the only form of DRM that works. Publishers will push it as economics and public opinion allows it. End of story.
Numbers like these don't bode well for PC gamers and will only serve to encourage even more draconian DRM measures than we've seen in the past.
I don't know why people think illegal copying of PC games is a big problem that threatens the future of gaming on the PC. In the 1980s and early 1990s, every single PC game I ever saw was pirated. I don't even know where one would have gone to buy a game. People gave each other illegally copied games as gifts. As far as I can see, that hasn't killed the PC game industry.
Personally, I think that publishers should not worry about how many copies are created illegally, but about how much revenue they make. If revenue is high enough to cover your costs and make you a profit, you're doing well. Software piracy affects revenue in complex ways; on the one hand, if people can play your game for free, they may be less likely to pay for it. On the other hand, more copies made leads to more people seeing the game, which may increase sales. I am sure that piracy increases revenue for some software. I would not be surprised if it decreased revenue for other software.
As for DRM, I think the story is somewhat less complex. I will not pirate your game. If I like it, I will pay for it. If the DRM is too intrusive, I won't like it. Many others think the same way. On the other hand, most if not all DRM schemes are eventually circumvented. So adding the DRM increases your cost, may hurt your sales, and won't stop piracy. And even if it did stop piracy, it is not clear that this would increase your revenue.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This will end the general computing.. it will soon be illegal to own a gaming PC so the only games available will be on a console. I don't support piracy, I have tried years ago but I guess I didn't know all the little tricks to bypass DRM. I fear this is why we won't get to see a benchmark game like crysis was in 2007. the only good thing I have seen so far is my PC had dual GTX 280 in SLI with Nvidia 3D vision. every single game I have runs very smooth. I certainly don't want to give up gaming on a PC for a lower end console ever. I have a PS3 for the exclusives. I have a PC for everything else. Microshaft is a horrible company for customers just squeezing out every last possible cent from customers. now it is perfectly OK to release a $15 DLC on the first day of a games release. DRM for me is a no issue. so long as I am connected to the internet, my games will work. but, to see only half the content in a game I paid $60 for come as DLC (Dirt 3). but still on the disk anyway. (you race against the Ford escort MKII but you can't drive it till you buy it). That pisses me off more than anything. I personally will never own any DLC unless it goes directly to the developer and that "developer" is NOT EA or Ubisoft.
the company still gets extremely wealthy, as opposed to obscenely wealthy.
I only consider money lost when falls out my pocket, and I dont pick it up. According to the IRS a loss is something once you had and now you don't. The quaifiing loss has to be due to no fault of your own. Failing to recognize opportunity doe not mean you lost anything. When the circus comes to town did it lose money because it could not charge all for use of all the roads to and in town? Sounds like someone is not satisfied with ticket sales at the door and their portion of the receipts from the side shows.
If it is over the shoulder, third person perspective in a 3D game, almost universally the console control scheme is better (e.g. Assassin's Creed). For RTS (e.g. Starcraft, C&C), the console version is unplayable. For FPS, I don't understand why so many people prefer console. It's slightly more serviceable than RTS, but still worlds different.
The console sales figures I was considering as a rough indicator of overall popularity. E.g. Crysis low PC sales are not due to increased piracy, but because it just wasn't popular anywhere.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
When the number of X-Boxes is 1/4 that of the number of PC's in the world, you can expect about 1/4 the piracy.
And... lo and behold... that's what we get.
Neither one is more or less secure or immune. They're just different.
I don't regret buying the game. Yeah sure, it was a little "dumbed down" compared to the first and second entries however it was still a great game. Wonder if it would've been pirated more, or less if it wasn't so "consolised"?
Crysis 2's DRM had a 5 install limit. Even after that it was still like $60.
I for one refused to bend over and be EA's bitch.
Most people pirate games to see how they run on their pc before dropping the cash or to try it out before they buy. No one likes crappy games and then being stuck with them. I'm sure the developers made plenty of cash off the majority of the people who pirated.
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The fact that it was a leaked early release is the reason for the mass downloading numbers, not weak DRM or growing numbers of pirates. I mean come the fuck on- even people who typically or ALWAYS purchase their games would have been interested in this release, who wouldn't want a chance to play a game before it even hits shelves?