The thing is, we all have different level of tolerance for various things, not just DRM. For example, there are places in this world where people quite normally live with things which some of us would consider unbearable in every sense of the word.

To bring the issue closer to the western world, take civil rights for example. There was that big stink raised over the Patriot Act precisely because a lot of people *didn't* think that the infringement on their rights and liberties was "not that bad".

Same thing here. When I buy a product, it is mine. I did not lease it, I did not steal it. I paid for the game and the storage medium, and they are mine to use as I see fit. I can play it, I can destroy it, I can even reverse-engineer it as long as I do not abuse what I learn.
Maybe the publisher *thinks* they can dictate to me what I can or cannot do with my things, or even the manner in which I should use them, but then the publisher is mistaken. They no longer own the product, nor do they own me.

What they own is copyright on the product line. While this means that I am obliged not to distribute, resell, yadda yadda, it does not mean they can dictate what I do with the product in the privacy of my own home.
And yet they do that, but using invasive DRM, installing unwanted and often unstable software on my computer, which in some cases even forces me to adapt my wherewithals because it demands that I also own an internet connection even though the same is not needed for the software to function.
Maybe I forgot to pay the bill. Maybe my net line is down. And now I can't play a game I paid for because someone thinks its ok to check up on me like I'm some sort of criminal.
While the guy who downloaded Mass Effect off some torrent site is happily blasting away without a care in the world.

The lesson here? You tell me. I don't feel exactly appreciated as a paying customer. Maybe I should be grateful they *allowed* me to buy their game...

I get ID'ed at bars all the time. Does that mean I can't drink the beer I paid for? Only if I'm underage or don't have an ID.

I want to go to a store and buy a game, or go online to buy one, for the simple satisfaction of owning a game and advancing the industry. Thus, I try to avoid those who waste too much time on DRM (I'm boycotting EA, even Battlefield Heroes), or those who pump out the same ol' thing again and again (Again, EA). Pirates are merely those who don't enjoy a good contribution. I don't like the carnivore-herbivore relation, though. It's the way I'm made. (I eat a lot of steak)

Do you get ID'd when you open your six pack at home that you were already ID'd to puchase in the first place?

Are you retarded or something?

nope, and kids drink all the time at home and at parties. they get busted sometimes, but no one really cares. so it'll keep happening. are you retarded or something?

Good ideas, but please try not to glorify piracy by saying its cool to be a "carnivore". If you only buy games without DRM because that's what you want, then you are doing exactly the right thing. That is as long as you aren't stealing the other ones.

I never said that. I just find the carnivore part bad! It's inaccurate. What about the herbivores and plants? I eat a carnivorous diet, so is it bad to eat cattle, or are they there for the higher purpose? It isn't taking advantage of others, it's being pragmatic.

Well, if they didn't exist, they wouldn't be needed. They aren't really necessary. Herbivores would find some other way to control their populations. Carnivores started as parasites of autotrophic species, and then the two co-evolved. The reason carnivores exist is that they can. They may serve a purpose now. But, originally, they were pirates.

On the other hand, I don't see our favorite pirates as ever contributing to the software ecology. They are more like the influenza of games. There's no mutualism or even commensalism there, and there will almost certainly never be.

I'm not an evolutionist, don't forget, and us ex-parasites played an important part as waste disposal, or limitation.

Pirates will never destroy a company while there is still a legitimate demand for the service it provides.

Tapeworms never kill their hosts.

Pirates are annoying for two reasons:

1) They are thieves, criminals, and cheats. The moral outrage alone is unsettling, regardless of the actual damage. Maybe you could give your desert to a bully everyday without feeling hungry, but do you really want to?

2) They decrease the quality of the games we see. The fact is that some pirates would buy PC games. The fact is that pirates really, really want them. Otherwise, they would not steal them. If gamemakers project less profit from a game, there is less incentive to invest in them. Less games will be made, and the games will not be as content enriched as they could be.

Err... you know, I spend a LOT of time developing a high quality mod/addon for the Sins of a Solar Empire. And I mean, high-quality, on par with what you get with the vanilla version (or at least I so aim). And you know what, I sort of doubt there is a couple of million dollars waiting for me out there as a reward for my effort.

I do it for free. Because I love the game, I love to spend my creative energy that way and to top it all, other people get to have fun with what I make in the end.
That you have to spend top dollar on quality is simply not true. What companies spend money on is actually fluff.

You can make a shallow and boring game which looks great, and you can also make a deep and fun game which was made practically without a budget. The fluff, the superb voice acting, crisp visuals, great sound effects, that costs money. Its a bit sad, but you can make a lot more money as a graphic artist than as a writer, because *everyone* wants their games to look good, while the storytelling takes a back seat.

So when we take all this into account, your claim that pirates decrease the quality of games we see simply does not stand. You can make a great game in your garage. Sure, it won't look like Crysis, but it doesn't have to. Quality means more than just expensive special effects. It means depth, it means creativity, and you know what?
People who have the urge to express themselves creatively do not care too much about making millions of dolars. Big publishing companies do. But they do not make games.

I'd say it is actually the big publishers who have the longer track record of destroying the quality of games, than pirates.

While that may be true, $10,000,000 dollars can buy you a much better anything than what can be made in a garage, story or graphics or whatever.

With that much, you could do what MASS EFFECT did and hire a whole team of writers to build a game containing more than 300 novels of script. And the visuals looked great, too.

Garage games are fun. Mortal Kombat is still fun, and so is command and conquer. But you get what you pay for. No one is going to work as an organized team for free. Not many, anyway.

Well, I think I ought to say my piece...

1. The EULA of most programs states that it is OK to modify the game that you own at your own risk; ergo no-cd/DVDs are perfectly legitimate in my book, as long as you bought/own a legit copy.

2. I think that it's pretty friggin' ridiculous that a PC gamer is supposed to spend even more money to get more licenses if they want to play games over a LAN connection when you're dealing with manufacturers such as EA. Many manufacturers aren't too strict along these lines, and I thank them. However, if I was playing it on console, it would have split-screen or other such multiplayer capability a lot of the time, ergo I believe keygens are acceptable as well.

3. Some companies' DRM is a bit ridiculous as well. I have, on many cases, wanted to make a backup of my games, because I have younger siblings who have broken 2 of my games thus far. However, I am just forced to pray that my discs aren't thrown onto the floor and stepped on/run over, etc. because often the CD copy protection is too stringent and I cannot create a reliable image on my PC due to my recent hard drive failures. I would like to be able to copy the discs for legitimate reasons, so I think programs like Alcohol or Daemontools are just fine.

4. On game borrowing: if it was a console game, the developers wouldn't care if you and your friends set up a sort of gaming commune and shared the games around; yet another reason why keygens should be legal or they shouldn't force you to install the software onto only 1 or 2 machines.

That said, I do think that sites dedicated to downloading full versions of games that you do not own is pushing it. If you want a game, support the developers that put effort into making it, k? If you enjoyed the game, let them know!

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of you make fun of me for this, but I'm just stating how things should be. People should police themselves, but they won't in the foreseeable future...

Best fps of it's time, Counter-strike. Most innovated fps of it's time, Natural Selection. Half-life mods that far surpassed the original game, made for free.

Best fantasy turn based tactical game on the market right now is Battle for Wesnoth, a free game.

I'm all for capitalism, but I'll take BfW over Heroes 5 any day, and the mods were the only reason I purchased Half-life. Money can get you a good game, but it's hardly the deciding factor. Pong tends to be a better game than most.

As for Mass Effect, if only they'd hired a few less writers. The one that wrote the EULA really fucked up. No mention of SecuROM 7, no mention of the 3 activation limit, and a termination clause that will qualify as fraud the first time someone takes them to court.

For free, no. Although I could argue that many professional teams start out either as modding teams or volunteer teams, both of which work for free initially. Some years back, when I was just starting out with the graphics, I had the opportunity to witness a formation of one such team. Guys making a fantasy RTS game, programmers, sound and graphic artists, writers, all pitching in with their skills and free time to work on their dream.
Many don't make it, but some do - and later on we read about big publishers buying them out and stiffling all that creative energy in the name of the allmighty dollar with "smart" business strategies such as rushing the product out before it is finished because Christmas is coming.

Games are interactive art. As such, they intrinsically should escape pricing, deadlines, rushing, target audiences and all those things which "guide" their creativity when creativity clearly should be kept wild and free.
Unfortunately, the bigwigs at the publishing companies do not see it that way. They only see numbers and bottom lines.

As for Mass Effect... don't always believe what the game PR tells you. They tend to be like the ancient greek historians - always multiplying the figures by a factor of 10, or in the case of Mass Effect, 100. I took time playing through and unless those novels have 2 pages each, I sort of missed on the whole 90 000 pages of written or spoken text (average novel is about 300 pages).
You've seen it many times if you are a gamer.

Hundreds of units! (actually, only about fifty in all)
Many new foes! (five in total)
...and so on.

If you want to see a game which does have several novels (still not 300) worth of dialogue, and general text in it, check out Albion. I never finished it, because it was so long. Had a blast playing it though.

Bottom line: money can buy you "technical" stuff. Great engine, great tools (licences for professional development tools tend to provoke a groan in anyone who is on a limited budget), big teams of professionals.
But money can't buy you ideas. Nor talent. Creativity is also outside of its paying power. And these things stand at the core of a great game.

I don't care about the fluff. I care about the art that are games. And *that* pirates will never destroy, just like copycats can never destroy an artist's need to express themselves. People will always make games because people like to play games. End of story.

Well it will always be a "law" that if the light shines, there will be a shadow. Nothin' to do about it. However to be exact, there are several problems with current piracy and the main problem is that it is a vicious cycle going round at the moment in my opinion. I admit, that I didn't study business or anything the like, so my opinion in this matter is of amateur interest only. The vicious cycle being that most game developers (Stardock excluded), spend a mountain of money on their copyright protection. However to get that money in again, they rise the price for the game (Though I am sure most of the increased prices go back to inflation), which leads to that "Random Guy" can't afford the game anymore from his sidejob next to school in the coal factory outside town.
However due to all the hype that has been going on because of the game "Random Guy" decides to download the game like all those other "Random Guys". Now "Random Developer" notices that and spends even more money on the next copyright protection and the cycle repeats itself.
However if a good game like SoaSE comes out and it is actually cheap, has large amounts of content and many options / modification abilities "Random Guy" who is basicly an honest hearted citizen will look in his wallet and think after reading a review somewhere: "Hmm that's nice, I'll buy it and be happy."
In my opinion the biggest problem is that pirates and most developers have their fronts up and won't budge due to their morals and because they have somewhat become archrivals due to god knows how many trials at the court.
As for me, I am one of those who rather waits until a game's price drops or watches for titles like Sins which provide long time entertainment at a good price. Though you often have to wait longer, it still pays of in your wallet at the end and you can enjoy the game without any moral doubts that you "cheated the poor programmer XYZ"

You could say the same for some businesses and governments as well. Some people even say the same about entire countries. Personally, I'm indifferent to piracy. Is it good? No. But I've got enough experience with software and media to understand where it comes from. The whole concept of copyright is based on morality. Creativity by people for people. Large businesses are not moral. It is just not a concept that is familiar to them. Small businesses allows the morality of the owner(s) and workforce to shine through in it policies. Big businesses don't allow this by nature and many important decisionmakers in big business have questionable morality themselves.


Disapprove. When I grew up (15-20 years ago), piracy was a large problem as well. It was also the only solution for most people. No internet, modems were rare and dogslow and only a handful of stores in the cities. Getting a game wasn't easy, except on school. You could find any game there, and usually when someone got their hands on the latest, everyone knew it within a few days. And the quality in terms of gameplay in that time was better than most games now. Even the graphics and music were great, if you take the limitations of that time into account.


AFAIK, games do not have to be cheap per sé, but they have provide value-for-money. That is one of the things most mainstream software fails to do, but smaller outfits like Stardock seem to get right. Value-for-money, communication and support, not treating customers as criminals or idiots; those are usually signs of a healthy relationship between a business and its customers.

These teams form in the hopes of selling out. They wouldn't be prevalent if there weren't money in the game market. The market would have neither money nor prestiege.



That depends on the nature of the business or government. A law firm that teams up with the opposiong lawers to increase profits could be said to be immoral (and most of them are). A government that embezzles money from the people for the benefit of the people who run it could be said to be immoral(and most of them are). But taxes are not inherently immoral, no matter how much you don't like them, and neither are insurence companies or law firms.



Rationally, no one should ever buy a game. Ever. As long as there are free-loaders stealing them. Why buy something when you don't have to and when other people don't? It just doesn't make sense from a logical perspective. See, "Random-guy" already buys games. "Pirate-guy" is the only guy who would consider stealing it.

[edit: The reason society does not like pirates is that a bunch of emotionally driven random-guys don't want to be taken advantage of by pirate-guys. I thought this might not be entirely obvious.]

You evidently have no understanding of the concept of rationality.
It is perfectly rational for someone to pay money for an inferior product than one they could get for free from a pirate (by inferior product, I'm referring to DRM and other copy protection measures on the non-pirated version). Why is it rational? Because of the costs associated to them of obtaining+using a pirated version. For example the time+effort cost in locating the pirate version, downloading it, etc.; The negative utility they may well suffer from doing something they know to be illegal; the risk they (believe that they) are undertaking that the pirate version may contain other undesirable elemnts, e.g. give them a virus or something.

The individual is acting irrationaly if and only if they believe using the pirate version of the game would provide them with more utility than the legal version, and yet they get the legal version instead of the pirate version.

That's a very uninspired view you have there. It tells me one thing - you have a lot to learn about creativity and how it drives mankind in its many endeavours.

To start, consider this - why art? Did Michelangelo scuplt David because of money, in the hopes of selling out? Has Dante written his "Divine Comedy" because he hoped to earn a lot of money? Or if you want to go beyond art: do you think scientists, true scientists, study the world around us because they hope to sell that knowledge? Or that the astronauts first asked "what's the pay" and then decided whether they want to fly into space? Perhaps Amundsen thought he will find gold in the Arctic ice?

It is the love for one's work which drives a man forward in what he does. If he hasn't got that love, he may do the job, but he will never excell in it. A man who loves what he does will try to do it no matter if he's getting paid for it or not. Those who just "do the job" will certainly not be doing it for free.

So in essence what you seem to be saying when all of your comments are thus analyzed, is that pirates will jeopardize that part of the gaming industry which tends to go through the motions of making games, with profit first and foremost in mind. Interesting.

@Slydrivel

go back to 4chan and troll there, your attitude about piracy is that of some non existent guru. People pirate anything and everything. Internet piracy is just a new forum of it. It's always existed and always will. If companies understand that fact and just roll their shit out without DRM then if they make a quality product people will buy it.

ps I pirate all the time and I could care less that all of you like to pretend you pay for everything you have. I'm sure you iTunes every song you've ever listened to.

Anti-piracy people get off that high horse.

And Pirates stop feeding the trolls like Slydrivel

If products are pirated, its developer, in practice, loses money (and also in all the cases I have seen, popularity as well).

How do you think good games or other related items are made? The list would include a good idea, skilled people making the game and money. If the budget is low, you will naturally get a worse game. And how do you think people get a higher budget? It is, again, that money gained from honest people who actually buy the game. Also, if a game is bad, its developer will lose popularity. And if that continues, the developer will also suffer a slow death (and for any smart-mouths there; I don't mean the "death" concretically).
In other words, piracy causes the low quality of a developer's products.

There isn't a single corporation which has suffered of piracy that is not still affecting it negatively. Even if the piracy has stopped, it has effects in some places on Earth. By that I mean there are some people who would never buy that developer's product, with usually no matter how good or bad the product is. I even know actual, real people who wouldn't voluntarily buy a product from Microsoft with the reason of that they could just take or buy them at a lower cost. I won't give their names away however, because I still respect their privacy.

-------------------------------

Sincerely yours, Elite

EDIT: I forgot to mention: If someone actually buys a product, then it is NOT about piracy. I refer to some earlier replies that said that sometimes pirates buy products too. Even if it is a pirate who buys a product, they are not pirating that particular product.

The biggest factor in a games development is talent. A budget makes the game pretty. It does not determine the fun. Can anyone think of a big budget game more fun than super mario or goldeneye or starcraft. For me, if a game's graphics are too pretty I know it will be much lauded as amazing, but most likely be amusing at best, and not brilliant or even fun.

Make games worthy of being bought(like sins{which is still too pretty}) and ill buy it.

It does take money, yes. But you don't need piles of it to make good stuff. The logic of having a low budget naturally leading to worse products is flawed. Take a movie like El Mariachi. Cost 7000$ to make, and was supposed to be a sami-local video release. Instead, it ended up getting a 200000 dollar post-production make-over and a real release, because for a 7000$ movie, it was really really good and it impressed some movie-execs. Not sure how much money was made on that movie (regardless of piracy) but I'll bet some serious cash was made. And it launched the career of Robert Rodriguez.

Take a product like Windows. MS had a huge amount of cash to spend (in fact, a few years back MS had so much on the bank, they decided to pay an extra dividend to stockholders because they couldn't do anything useful with it), but we got Vista. Which is peculiar. While Windows is probably one of the most pirated pieces of software, it is also one of the most selling pieces of software and it is one of the most profitable pieces of software. Yet, despite an almost unlimited budget, and a pricetag which was high in comparison to earlier versions, Windows Vista is mediocre at best.

In the MS case, you can even argue that people should have pirated Windows more, because Microsoft was abusing its monopoly and the courts took rather a long time to fix the situation (long enough for MS to get rid of some competition). And even now, it is still not over, looking at the stunt they pulled OOXML.


Have to agree. Besides, if a game is fun, people will buy it, and you'll get the money to make it prettier. The issue with most big budget productions is, the focus too much on being pretty and forget that looks are only the surface.