piracy on pc

d_brennen said:
How many of these pirates will buy the full game though? If they like it and want to access the network games (a BIG draw) they will.
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This, since the main part of the game is multiplayer im sure very few them would have got the full game anyway :rolleyes:. games companys will just use these kind of statistics to justify how they almost rob people themselves with their overpriced DLC's (LOL CoD) etc.
 
lunarwolf said:
it's not like they force them to play WoW.

also the pirates are missing a big chunk of the game -> multiplayer. then again i bought the game and I am missing the Zerg and Protoss campaigns
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The Zerg and Protoss compaigns are not missing. Blizzard had a choice, keep the SP the same length but divide that time between 3 races, or focus on 1 race and give the other 2 races their own unique expansion. Which is the way I prefer them doing campaigns, at least this way they are nice and long and provide a good story, instead of trying to fit everything in to a limited time frame.

As for the piracy vs theft argument, well with theft the theif gains, and someone loses something, with copyright infringment someone gains but the owner of the content doesn't lose anything. They are called different things because they are different things, and if anyone things theft and piracy is the exact same thing then you don't know what they mean.

The 2.3m downloads on torrents figure is bull IMO, as has already been said that will include incomplete downloads, and maybe even people just connecting to the tracker but downloading nothing (such as people looking to get the list of IPs). But it is just torrents, a lot of people (such as myself) use Usenet. My own opinion on piracy is that it may be legally wrong, but it does put a message across. For example, Console owners pay £50 for a game so developers keep selling it at that, PC users have a way to rebel against that and hopefully force the developers to sell the game at a reasonable price. And price isn't the only issue for me, I think that publishers havn't evolved with technology, I want to be able to consume content any way I want from any where, I don't want to be limited to buying in certain ways. Steam has come a long way and the vast majority of my games are payed for on steam just because of the convenience factor and the ability to get the content the way I want (digitaly downloaded).
 
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Who'd want to play Star Craft II anyway?
It doesn't even have proper resource management.
Gameplay 2/10
Graphics 8/10

There hasn't been anything decent since Age of Empires 3: Asian Dynasties in 2007 Q4. Resource management with 4-6 resources with upgrades is a must for me.
 
Yes £35 is too much for a PC game. When I got into PC gaming you could buy new releases for £12.99 mail order. I used to buy games without thinking twice (after playing the demo of course, and all games back then had demos).

Today companies want £25-£30 of my money, don't often have a demo and sure as hell won't let me re-sell them if I don't like them. Oh and they don't often last more than 6 hours in single-player either.

But hey, blame piracy.
 
PanMaster said:
Who'd want to play Star Craft II anyway?
It doesn't even have proper resource management.
Gameplay 2/10
Graphics 8/10

There hasn't been anything decent since Age of Empires 3: Asian Dynasties in 2007 Q4. Resource management with 4-6 resources with upgrades is a must for me.
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The resource management is fine. The game is already insanely difficult and hard to balance, adding unecessary resources to the game would just make it even harder to balance competitively.
 
Most of the people here taking the moral high ground have properly pirated something durring their lifes, whever it be a movie, mp3, game or some software.

Piracy hurts single player games more then say multiplayer games, theres no real reason to buy the likes of mass effect, dragon age, football manager when they have no multiplayer to speak of. But all these games have got sequels so sales on pc must be decent or they wouldnt bother.

I do think true pc gamers will buy and support games if they feel they are worth it. The same way collectors of movies rather have the movie sat on theif shelf then download it, less so with music these days.

I used to pirate a fair bit but i do it far less these days most games i wait for untill they on a steam sale when they are usally patched up and at their best, unless its a game i really want and cant wait for i will buy it and be happy to pay 30-40 pounds for.
 
The portable market is far worse than the PC for piracy, especially the DS because of the easy availability of piracy devices and the small size of games.

I work in games, and I've worked on games that have been massively pirated. Now I would normally agree that 1 pirated copy != 1 lost sale, but if game leaks before release then you've got a huge problem. Some gamers are impatient, so they'll jump at any chance to get a new game as quickly as possible, even if that means pirating it.

One game I worked on leaked a week before release via the distribution chain and was so heavily pirated it did affect sales - in fact I didn't get a sales bonus from the game I was expecting because sales were below expectations, despite the game getting excellent reviews.

Saying all this, as a PC gamer I despise DRM, especially limited activations or a requirement for a constant internet connection. That's mainly because I don't like having to rely on a third party server that may not be available in the future to install my games, or to have to rely on contacting a companies support department to beg permission to install a game.

The only DRM I don't mind is a one-off internet activation, like Steam does, which downloads the game executable on release, preventing zero day piracy.

Once your game is out there there's not a lot you can do to prevent it being pirated apart from offering excellent customer service and free content and patches to legit versions. Extreme DRM just punishes legit customers who can see the Pirates getting a better version of the game than they are.

This again is where Steam gets it right. You can pirate Steam games but you then don't get all the customer benefits on top - free downloads, automatic patching, cheat protection, in-game messaging and chat, etc.

Of course Steam still has a long way to go in the customer service department, especially the no-refunds policy when dealing with games that just don't work properly cough *codblops* cough.
 
£35 for games today is a bit steep now, most people buy a game that's £30 or below. I don't blame the price tag despite i would only buy a game that was £30 or below, i think it's generally because SC:2 is a popular game from what i have seen due to SC:1 being popular amongst gamers, i also doubt it's the complete game and i reckon thousands of people who went to download it got shafted with viruses and had errors which prevented them from downloading the game.
 
The headline number of torrents is what hurts more than the actual downloads as the people who control the budgets decide PC is full of piracy so they do not even bother making the game even when it takes them a fraction of the budget to make :( If they build a 360 version then most of the game is already made.

That alone tells you how little regard most publishers consider the PC even though digital sales & even retail are healthy on certain games the piracy problem appears to override all. Look at recent PC ports all lacking more than ever the features even 1 year ago you would have expected on a major PC release :eek:

NFSHP is the latest to deny PC gamers config options. You have to text edit a config file to even have AF & AA does not work at all only the MLAA on ATI cards which forces Blur to the edges but is not a proper AA mode. This is all on the same game engine as Burnout Paradise (which had plenty of config opotions). EA obviously would not give the budget to customise the PC version.

360 piracy is much bigger but as they also sell many more copies of the game it does not get as much media attention & MS have no reason to tighten up by making console gamers type in the serial number as everytime they do a ban wave console sales go up as the people affected go & buy a brand new console so MS win regardless :rolleyes:
 
RedStarRiot said:
lso metalface mark, is £35 really that much? I was paying 50+ for snes games in the 90's, that was expensive!
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This mentality sorta highlights why the PC game market is in the state it is, I was going to buy Black Ops on the PC yesterday after seeing a friend playing it on xbox. I went to a store and the RRP of the game is £40.

Seriously WTF lol, and some people think this is ok. I grew up as a PC gamer, im used to paying £10-15 for a game, not 50 for a snes game or 70 for an N64 game. I remember when Quake 3 first came out and it was £24.99 that was massive at the time.

Sadly the PC market has been flooded by people who grew up with console games who actually think £40 for a game is acceptable. Te reason console games cost so much is because the cartridges themselves used to cost £10-£20 before the was a game on them and when the console market moved to CD's they never passed on the £10-£20 cost reduction to the customer. PC games on the other hand came on tapes/disks/CD's all of which cost manufacturers pennies so the games were cheaper until the companies realised people would actually buy them even if they cost stupid amounts.

Piracy is on the rise because games companies have been getting increasingly greedy for years, simple as.
 
Blue160 said:
Piracy is theft pure and simple. The games companies produce a product which has value. If you pirate it for nothing you are stealing their work. If I think a particular game is too expensive I will wait for the price to come down to what I am willing to pay rather than ripping it off.
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But then your getting the benefit of playing the latest games without the premium that comes with early adoption. What if we took your example to an exstream and waited 5 years and bought each game you previously pirated for £0.50 from a bargain bin? Or stole an item of clothing from a shop and then decided to pay for it a few months later when it was 20% less. The world doesn't work like this.

I'm not trying to slate you as you start your thread 'Piracy is theft pure and simple' so I know your not kidding yourself. I'm just adding my 2p.
 
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