Videogames and Pirating
polycounter lvl 18
/rant
So, this has been a big thing lately at work, and it's been driving me mad.
Some of you may know that gears 2 has been stolen via the disc production plant, and also torrented. Now, I would have thought that a torrented 360 game posed little threat due to the fact that you would need to mod a console and such, but supposedly, after looking into it, they have made it very easy to do soft mods to your hardware to allow people to play pirated games.
anyway, onto the point. I was browsing various Gears 2 forums/comments, etc. where I keep seeing people post comments about how terrific the game is and that theyve allready beaten it etc, but they stole the copy and don't plan on supporting the retail product.
so, I finally got mad enough to where I sent a guy a pm asking how he got it:
"i already have bought it lol just not from a retail company. plus another reason why i did it this way is because its sooo much cheaper and also i get it sooo much sooner i dont have to wait until its released" .....was his words.
i mean, these people praise the game, and then say that shit. I guess this stuff has been going on for quite a while, but it still pisses me off.
I guess I wish that these things were easier to control. like games were printed on a special disc that couldnt be purchased by consumers and the console would only read that disc or something. Just seems like more effort could be put into preventing it, but not with a DRM system like most PC games employ. I responded to that asshat that if everyone used his logic, that the companies that make good games, would eventually go under.
I dunno. just a rant. The internet has become quite a horrible place, and the demographic that most of our games target as an industry are total fuckwads.
so yeah, /end rant.
anyone ever been a part of a company affected by piracy? like, have businesses ever closed due to pirated games?
I read an interesting factoid the other day, that 5.5 mil copies of gears 1 was sold, but 11 million unique players played the game. a large part of that probably due to resale asses like gamestop. but thats over half of the profits gone, never seen by the dev. pretty crazy.
So, this has been a big thing lately at work, and it's been driving me mad.
Some of you may know that gears 2 has been stolen via the disc production plant, and also torrented. Now, I would have thought that a torrented 360 game posed little threat due to the fact that you would need to mod a console and such, but supposedly, after looking into it, they have made it very easy to do soft mods to your hardware to allow people to play pirated games.
anyway, onto the point. I was browsing various Gears 2 forums/comments, etc. where I keep seeing people post comments about how terrific the game is and that theyve allready beaten it etc, but they stole the copy and don't plan on supporting the retail product.
so, I finally got mad enough to where I sent a guy a pm asking how he got it:
"i already have bought it lol just not from a retail company. plus another reason why i did it this way is because its sooo much cheaper and also i get it sooo much sooner i dont have to wait until its released" .....was his words.
i mean, these people praise the game, and then say that shit. I guess this stuff has been going on for quite a while, but it still pisses me off.
I guess I wish that these things were easier to control. like games were printed on a special disc that couldnt be purchased by consumers and the console would only read that disc or something. Just seems like more effort could be put into preventing it, but not with a DRM system like most PC games employ. I responded to that asshat that if everyone used his logic, that the companies that make good games, would eventually go under.
I dunno. just a rant. The internet has become quite a horrible place, and the demographic that most of our games target as an industry are total fuckwads.
so yeah, /end rant.
anyone ever been a part of a company affected by piracy? like, have businesses ever closed due to pirated games?
I read an interesting factoid the other day, that 5.5 mil copies of gears 1 was sold, but 11 million unique players played the game. a large part of that probably due to resale asses like gamestop. but thats over half of the profits gone, never seen by the dev. pretty crazy.
Replies
it sucks
YO.
edit to elaborate more:
this kind of stuff happens, and it's annoying as hell, yeah. and if their primary reason is they didn't want to wait for it - you think they would at least buy it AFTER the game came out as a sort of IOU to the devs or whatnot, at least show their support, especially if they liked it.
but to DL it early with the reasoning 'I didn't want to wait' and then not show support is just asshattery. bleh.
On the other hand, it's stealing either way, and I can understand the frustrations. I just don't like when companies spend so much time and money trying to divert pirated versions, when typically it only ends up hurting the end of line consumer.
Spark
these are probably all broke 14 year olds anyways, so they wouldn't be able to afford the game anyways.
Oh, good point. I guess that makes it ok then.
People thinks that if a game is freely distributed online, if someone pays for it, then, they are idiots. At the end... a huge majority ends downloading pirated games because they don't want to enter the idiots group (in Spain the money they save is wasted in alcohol). This is something i have been said several times, sad but true.
"Why to pay if the game is free on the internet?"
Although the game were cheaper, they still will download pirated games. They are not "idiots", if they know they can get the game free... they won't pay a shit. To say that games are expensive is an excuse, a stupid one.
A possible solution would be to kill all those websites distributing illegal content as "links" or "torrents" and punishing their owners. The less points of distribution the better. We know how to solve this problem, but we don't do anything due to legal holes. The laws should be changed to protect the software.
For PC games, Steam was a good method of legal distribution... but now, steam games are pirated too. I'ts incredible. Piracy has reached astounding levels...
Another thing that irritates me a lot is when someone says: "And what if i download a pirated game, they still will earn too many millions, they are rich and they have ferraris", "i won't pay for a crap game, this will show them to do better games"
Videogames = like to work for the devil
BTW, my friends only buy games to play online, with a needed key for multiplayer (diablo2 as example). All the rest games the own, are ALL pirated games downloaded with their adsl.
A Gun don't kill, a man with a gun yes. A man with internet can do too much damage. U.U The problem is not internet.
Haha, spot on.
I agree it's stealing and wrong and everything, and I don't do it myself, and I understand that there are douchebags out there. But.
Gearbox is still making more money than me, so they can stop whineing.
Haha, nah, I kid. Burn the fucking pirates I say.
I dont really agree with this line of attack, it kinda comes off like Lars Ulrich of Metallica from the napster days.... stopping all peer to peer is a little delusional... I agree that pirating games is a shit business but there must be a way to fight it more directly.
a way to combat pirates in much the same way they attack and pirate games? Like some kind of propriety tech or something, i dont know the answer but pointing your finger in 360 degrees scares me because its the path many have taken and it just doesnt go anywhere. I want to obviously see the industry thrive so I hope companies take a smarter road than straight litigation. The technology for easily pirating almost every game already exists so you have to fight it with the same fire, invention. No one will win by "banning" P2P or through litigation or lawsuits ect, thats really not going to do anything permanent.
Lars Ulrich probably wanted to sue the creator of the MP3 or something, and even if he could account for exactly how much metallica lost through pirating, and even if he could find the person who invented the MP3 and the person who invented P2P and find records of all the transfers of his songs ect, its not going to end, the technology has changed the industry. Its one of those permanent changes that no amount of litigation can stop. You have to fight it by invention, not in a courtroom.
I want to the video game industry thrive even more, so I dont like piracy, but pointy pointy pitchfork mob style isnt going far, there has to be the silent sniper kill from the rooftop of the game companies.
IMO.
Bring back the almighty Dongle!
seriously though, what about a controller port dongle? or USB dongle? I mean if companies thought they were going to loose millions a dongle creation shouldnt cost that much could it?
maybe the system console itself could create a dongle port! and companies could dongle dongle ding dong dongle!
I guess if you can dance with chip mods, you can tango with dongles. but still its something....
oh, i really got it this time,
Limited edition, collector dongles!...
Also, on that note, consider how many people in the industry have learned their skills using pirated software and training material, and then went on to work for companies making these games that are now being pirated. So I still say we should be careful when jumping down game pirates throats.
Second, on a personal level, I don't mind/care that people pirate the games I work on, because I know most of these people wouldn't have bought the game anyway, or if they had they would have bought it second hand which would have awarded me no revenue at all. At least when they pirate my game they get exposed to it, and if they like it they might be more inclined to buy it when they become more financially solid.
Third, I don't see it as stealing. Technically, sure it may be theft, but if I'd see my game floating around on a torrent site I don't think, "OMG, they are stealing my work!" It may, or it may not, be potentially lost revenue. What worries me here is when we cry out for harder measures against piracy we end up with fucked up shit like the recent PRO IP Act. If this keeps going, I will eventually get a life sentence for pirating a game, but if I repeatedly raped a 9 year old girl over the course of a weekend, I would be out for good behaviour after 4 years.
So yeah, these are my opinions on piracy as it stands. Probably a bit controversial within our industry, but I still think that if your game fails sales wise, it it's not because of the pirates. It's a nice excuse, and all, but I would look more at your publishers marketing efforts since that is where the game's fate will be sealed.
That, and of course how many reviewers they can buy off :P
@ Microneezia: I vaguely remember Splash Damage talking about dongles for Quake Wars, would be interesting to find out about that, wonder if MoP knows?.
There's a connection between DRM slowly vanishing from the digital music business, an increase in accessibility and user-friendliness, while at the same time music piracy is slowing down at the moment.
Thats totally what they should do, then they could not only stop pirates but also use this pirate firewall to actually market the product instead of always being on the defense! People would show them off and put them into display cases instead of having these unattractive jiffy marker fliping wallet of burned CD's to flip through, you go to your case of collector dongles.
Then you take the same dongle to your computer for extra content, like those bonus content DVD's, like it would have an icon pack and some wallpapers ect and some other exclusive stuff that only purchasers get. access to a certain owners part of the games website ect.
I just think that going this positive direction is so much more profitable than the litigation angle.
It's like a vicious circle ^^, ppl who learned with pirated programs get pirated their product. Too bad, but in contrast, a game is not so expensive like a license of a mayor 3d program.
Not all studios survive... look at Iron Lore. Too many workers care about this, and you should do if you live making games. It's something to be worried about, because the studio where you work can fall down someday (big, medium or small).
A great % of the ppl who download a pirated game, would have bought the game, that's a truth as huge as a castle. All who download a game know perfectly what they download. And as i said, here where i live, too much people don't buy games because are free to download in the internet. Without internet, they surely will have bought the game they downloaded illegally.
This is complicated problem to solve
just tell the program that theres a dongle in the usb port and you've got a lot of expensive hardware produced without any reason, dongles can be cracked as anything else
I have played pirated games myself on numerous occasions, many times actually believing that I had a legit copy till I got a look at a REAL legit copy. Why? Because I lived in africa where the material simply wasn't available and internet was far too slow to download the stuff. As a result, all these asian companies that have a foothold in africa braught in their pirated copys. In a land free of internet (at the time that is) piracy still thrived. Now I make a point of buying anything I like because I have the ability to do so but when I see windows Vista POS version for $$$$ and then fork out only to find it halved my PCs performance and gave me BSODs all the time well, I'm not going to waste my cash on that shit again untill SPx comes out and fixes all the bugs.
Loads of people use pirated shit because they have no way to purchase it. Especialy here in eastern europe and Africa. On the same note tho, the industry looses nothing here because the shit was never available here in the first place. Not everyone has the ability to buy games and other software online. I am the only person I know here who has a credit card that is accepted internationaly and I only have it cuz I have travelled a lot. Make the shit more available in areas where there is no coverage and you will make more off it. Although now, these people have been downloading pirated software so long I doubt they will pay if its introduced now.
Ah, the whole thing is a viscious circle and a pointless excercise in futility.
You also need to think realistically about this. A great percentage of people can not buy the games they pirate, because they pirate more games than they could afford, even on a good pay. Though neither of us have any proof either, so let's just call it a draw and agree to disagree :P
Now, I don't advocate piracy by any means (except when I'm pissed off by some onerous DRM solution, like not finding one of those fucking worthless piece of crap dongles (seriously, LET THERE NEVER BE DONGLES EVER AGAIN!..), but I'm in the tricky situation where I'm in the business of making games, and I'm not convinced piracy is as big a problem as publishers and developers make it out to be. I would love to know the actual impact of piracy, but all I have are claims by publishers and developers when a game doesn't sell well, which frankly just comes off as conveniently shifting the blame, and enthusiast blogs pick up on it like vultures scenting corpses.
Actually without internet there would be more middlemen who sell pirated games and make a profit from it, that would be worse.
@neox;
I was talking about the ones with proprietary no-hack technology.
@East, its no wonder you are so lax with game pirating, it sounds like you have some heavier past-times on the go...
lol.
say 90% of internet savy people pirate games because they can
say only 30% of people are internet savy
say only internet savy people buy games
thats a very small target audience....
Consoles help cuz you don't need to know how to download a patch to play xbox or PS so add a little more there.
What does all this mean? More or less 70% of people don't play games at all. Rather than wasting time trying to stop piracy, get more of that 70% to buy your stuff.
Now I'm just talking out my ass cuz I'm bored so ignore this if you like.
haha yeah sure!
lulz
Rock Band has the right idea, you can't pirate a drum kit, and playing on a standard controller is much less fun. The Guitar Hero controller is like a giant optional novelty dongle.
Online games also have an advantage - if there's an online multiplayer aspect, make sure you authenticate users online so that only one CD key can be in use at any one time. This doesn't help single-player stuff or offline (LAN) multiplayer, but it can be a big reason for people who might otherwise have been content with a pirated version to buy the full game.
The dollar has changed now dramatically, but back when the AU dollar was at almost 90 USD, games here in most stores remained around $90-120 RRP. Compared with games in the states that are on average around $45-60.
Same goes with films and DVD's, but DVD's have region protection, so we Australians can't import with a fair price. They wonder why it all gets pirated?
Also you could attribute pirating games in Australia to another factor which is that games do not have an R+18 content rating here, so there are many games that are outright banned and "illegal" to import. Fallout 3 for example and even mainstream games like GTA IV were censored.
jep give the player things he can't copy, something that looks cool, something that might have a use and they'll more likely go and buy the game, seriously, why buying a crappy plastic dvd box whithout a proper handbook or any extras when you can get the game for free and get all you need to know about in any online forums?
But there are the people who pirate a game just to play it before release, even though they already have a store copy pre-ordered. As to how many that is, who knows?
There isn't going to be any way to stop piracy any time soon, maybe DLC is the way to go but that is a while from now. People don't pirate Live Arcade games as far as I know, but obviously file sizes limit online distribution at the moment.
Hehe, imagine every game with a proprietary controller :P
Maybe raising awareness as to how much work goes into games will help with piracy. It brings to mind something my uncle did in Zimbabwe when the whole "land reformation" BS started. My uncle owns a farm that grew hops, when the "war vets" came and tried to chase him off he simply told them that he was the only local supplier of hops to the breweries and that if they took his farm they would never have another beer. They left and stopped any other "war vets" from comming. This is a true story by the way, sounds funny till you realise they were all armed with AKs and had already killed 6 farmers in the area.
Teach kids that if they pirate games, the day will come when there will be nothing left to pirate....
Just an idea.
fun thread and so far free of flaming, just goes to show how serious the issue is.
Mainly due to past experiences of purely profit driven price markups on games, Australian gamers in particular will know about that all too well. As well as the odd highly intrusive and inconvenient anti-piracy measures forced on legitimate purchasers.
You can't ask the customer to be honest and do the right thing, then fuck them over at the register.
(I buy my games legit.)
It's difficult to judge the quality of games today. "How much is this game worth to me"? To my disadvantage, I have not played many games due to this question. I can't afford them all, I have bills to pay. And I don't pirate them. The most I've played, are because a friend had it. So the experience was no cost to me, and no profit to the developer, and I keep my social life. If I really enjoyed it, I'd buy it for myself. More often, I don't find many popular games fun at all. It's like the same sports car with a new brown coat of paint...and slower (Gears of War reference).
I assume nearly every company in the game industry expects their game to sell millions and millions, and often their existence as a company depends on it, as they spend far too much on production. But, we don't need games. The average person doesn't need new games. Doesn't need to form a line at the door each day a new game is released. And we especially get tired of playing the same milked genre over and over (unless obsessed), possibly settling on just one title that always gets it right. (Call of Duty)
But, a GAMER needs games. It defines him. It's a priority. I believe Gamers are the biggest consumer whores in our society. They'll buy anything marketed well, regardless of its quality. Terrible games will be marketed heavily, bought, played, disliked, never played again...but still give the company profit to continue developing shit titles.
But, the tech savy can avoid the whole "buying" aspect of it. When you don't have to pay, the question of quality gets thrown out. And you can experience more games, with fewer consequences. It's the "don't care how, I want it know, have it my way" attitude. Maybe a result of irresponsible parenting. How many parents know what a torrent is?
So what's the worst situation for a developer...piracy of the game, or simply not playing it? You can't beat piracy. You can try to reward those who support the company, and punish those who pirate. But it's likely not going away, unless the game is released for free. We're a self defeating society. Willing to ruin everything for ourselves.
Meaning? It's probably better if you're less vague with your accusations (that's what it looks like) just to avoid misunderstandings. If you're saying I don't care about game piracy because I'm a big pirate, then no, you're wrong. I used to be a big pirate when I was younger. If you want to hold that against me, I'm not going to try and stop you, but it does give me some insight into how pirates think and the motives behind their actions and the apparent lack of morale and integrity.
Instead of just immediately going into hyper-judgmental paranoia condemnation overdrive mode, which I assure you does absolutely nothing to combat piracy, and instead encourages these people to act out in an even more anti-establishment fashion.
Also, generally speaking, the music industry and the movie industry haven't suffered significantly due to piracy. They have suffered significantly because, among other reasons, the games industry taking over as a big source of entertainment, as well as the Internet as a whole which makes people spend more time on Facebook than they would otherwise spend going to the movies, watching TV, etc.
Sadly, this doesn't quite work either, as the data on the UMD, using homebrew, can be dumped to a memory stick and then played off there. Of course, then you get the assholes who instead of using it to backup their games, instead go and pirate the isos...
...but from what I've seen, Sony tries their best and hardest to keep the PSP from being able to do this stuff, and the only thing they have to show for their effort is that it takes people a few months to bring down the new protection scheme...
Dunno why I am still thinking about this :S
but you can get dongles containing up to 8gb nowadays for less than 25$
[ame]http://www.amazon.com/DANE-ELEC-MEMORY-DA-ZMP2-8192-R-Zmate-High-Speed/dp/B0011X3D5E/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1224955519&sr=8-1[/ame]
just plop some wibu technology onto this one, and make it so that you can install the game onto the HD, but only work if the dongle is in the port, and voila, you have the perfect PC-game distribution system!
the game can be patched and shit, and no installation needed!
just plug and play.
wave goodbye to scratched installation CDs.
oh and of course a 2 year warranty for the dongle should be a given.
Microsoft has the ability to monitor how long it takes the 360 to read a DVD drive, and after collecting enough data on how long it takes for the game disks to read, it can be determined if the 360 is using legitimate games or pirated copies of games.
It makes it even worse, as that person could sell their Xbox360 to Gamestop, and someone else could buy it, and have a 360 that would not work on the XboxLive, which is one of the better things of the 360 and the thing that sets it appart from the PS3.
Not only that, but you also risk ruining your warranty when you open up your 360, and personally having gone through 4 Xbox360s that have broken down, I would not want to have a 360 without a warranty.
Require dongles for games, and I will pirate them...or avoid them entirely. End of discussion.
There is no way to combat it ..only way it seems possible is if you kept the whole game server side and streamed it to the player...and even then someone would set up thier own server and get thier hands on the client. When I worked at the rent-to-own place I had a customer that ran his own WOW server, charged people 2 bux a month to play it
If I want a games and can't afford it I wait until it comes down in price unless it has something like training videos that come with it, then I'll buy it full price. Unreal tournament collectors edition is a simple example. I bought roboblitz to play with the editor. Waiting for a game to go down in price hurts the developers as well, from reading an issue of Game Developer, they mentioned in the article that developers get most of their money from when the prices are high, since that how the publishers did the deal, and if it sold over a certain amount later like say starcraft has, then they start to get a cut from sales... I be might be off since I read that a few years ago... But I think games sales are hurt more by the practices of publishers and retailers. The lack of proper advertising hurt the game sales the most. I really can't believe that posting an ad on website is that expensive for the publisher to do, I can understand a tv commercial and how controlled that shit is by corporations.
hardware and software locks are easily emulated with cracks... To do this for a game would hurt the LEGIT CUSTOMER more than the freaking pirates. It would make the games even more expensive. If the console shit is such a problem make so the console has to update itself every few months so the cracked games won't work anymore.
think of it like this then: no time spent installing, and no friggin CD key.
plug and play.
i've had a wibu dongle lodged firmly in my laptop for 3 years without a hitch.
its worked pretty much flawlessly for me.
and in the space of a dVD, you can have up to 10 wibu dongles.
with a wire attached, you can even drive a nail into the wall and hang them there like a keychain.
You cant really protect shit. Blu-ray was supposed to be uncrackable but its open now.
I guess it's a little like sneaking onto someone else's wireless connection. "I wouldn't have paid for my own wireless connection if I had to, but now that someone else is doing it I don't mind, even though I'm not allowed to use it."
It just confuses me to think about it... And then I think about how to prevent it, and I get even more confused. Games with a high amount of online content are doing a pretty good job at keeping pirates at bay (har), but there's still things like Hamachi, emulating local area networks and letting cheapskates play games like Battlefield with other cheapskates. It's not a perfect fix, but I think that's one of the best ways to go about doing things now. Somehow forcing games to rely heavily on online content, where you could somehow detect if a game is legit every time it logs on, should lower the amount of piracy some. But exactly how something like that would work, I don't know, and everything's hackable so it's still not a surefire solution.
The most secure thing I can think of is consoles, like the 360 and PS3. People still hack them, people still pirate for them, but the whole online community experience and all the multiplayer components are such a large part of games that it's almost not worth missing out on them. What do consoles do differently? They're unique pieces of hardware that connect to unique servers.. I guess there's no way of copying that behavior to a PC game without making things really messy...
I'm clueless.
How effective is it at stopping piracy? It seems pretty useful since you can't do anything with a login?
Would never happen but hey, its 1am and I have just finished a bottle of home brew peach brandy hehe.