News Call of Duty 4 piracy is rampant

i downloaded CoD4. then i played through the singleplayer campaign in about a day. if i ever planned to do some multiplayer or spend a lot of time playing, i would have bought it, but there is no way i am paying $50 for a days entertainment. if they sold a singleplayer-only version for ~$20 i would have bought it.

 

The only good pirate is a dead one.

 

I just Paid £25 for COD4 limited edition from GAME of all places....
Like someone else has already said, single player only games i would pirate, but multi players are worth buying if the multi player is good!

Edit: PS i don't play games unless they come with a multi player aspect any more, seems a waste of money for a few hours gaming, while i can really sink my teeth into some multi player and enjoy it with some friends for hours on end

 

Ill admit i have a copy of the game, not from shops, However, its only for me to see what its like (i havent gotten around to it as of yet)

I believe that if its worth playing online, its worth paying, and CoD4 wouldnt be any exception, i think its quite sad that people are playing this game that much, and not ever paying for it

usually though, you cant play online, as its quite easy to check that the Keys arent duplicates/copys or whatever (a-la, Q4 and doom 3 for example)
I guess the dev's did somthing wrong this time

 

Also id like to add a user account would be the best way to solve this problem, works great through steam, only one person can be connected to that account at the time...so why not implement this, or even sell your game cheaper through steam,
when i looked to buy the game it was SEVENTY dollars, thats £35! I got the limited edition for £10 cheaper, and it came in a box and everything ( with a poster and a downloadable copy of the game guide! ). Make it cheaper to buy online and people will come, they dont have to leave their house to pay for it, it wont run out of stock etc etc!

 

I certainly wouldn't even dream of gaming on a PC if I could play with a keyboard and mouse on a console.

 

Forgive me for being a bit skeptical, but a first post that reads like a PR blast on why piracy is bad, plus some anecdotal evidence about the consequences, just seems a little too "shill" like to me. So I hope you don't mind if I take your comment with a shaker full of salt, regardless of what my own person views on piracy may or may not be.

Re: Lewchenko

While I appreciate your sentiment, your analogy is flawed in a few ways. 1. The only way to "play alongside" with pirates, is to play on cracked servers. But regular players aren't playing on those servers anyhow. It'd be more like "Your mates get to ride for free, with their "pirated" keys, on a second, run down "shittier" track, that are full of other riders who often disobey the rules, bump you, cheat etc, and has no supervision". 2. How does it feel that my mates got to ride for free, when I didn't? Uhm, exactly the same as if they paid? I mean, nothing has changed for my experience. In fact, if the alternative was that they didn't get to race at all, and it was only me and my 7 buddies racing, I could probably argue that it would be more fun for me (with more racers on the track) with them than without them, regardless of whether they paid or not.

Now, if you changed things a bit and made it so that the race track needs 9 paid carts on the track in order to make enough money to stay financially viable, and with only 7 people paying (and two racing for free) they are going to have to close down and go out of business (so that no one can race anymore), then that makes a lot more sense and becomes a compelling argument. HOWEVER that has not been proven to be the case, so far.

If we kept the things the same, then I would never give a friend a few of my french fries, because it would "ruin" my experience of eating my meal knowing that he is eating some of my fries without having paid for anything at all. And video games aren't even french fries, because there is actually no physical loss. It'd be more like me being able to duplicate my french fries for free, and still not share.

Obviously the analogies have gone a bit too far now, but I think my point is clear

Aggies

 

Tell that to Ritual. They didn't do too well with Sin: Episodes on that policy and, so far, the only people who've been able to do it at all are Telltale Games (sam and max) and Valve. Valve only managed it because HL2 will always sell. TellTale only managed it because Sam and Max has low production values and a stable audience.

 

once you've got a single player steam game activated
right click -> properties -> updates -> do not automatically update this game
you only NEED to update for the MP games

birdy was right

 

Activision didn't help themselves... My friend and I played with the same copy on 2 pc's for about 3 days non stop and we never had any problem. I bought the game since then and I don't regret it at all. Great game overall... now if I could run it smoothly

 

The only game i find myself going back to is WoW, been playing for ages now and everybody goes on about how much i must have spent on it at £8.99 a month. BUT, in terms of cost per hours played it's the best value game i've paid for. I've bought loads of games new at full price that i must have had less than 10 hours gameplay from, them being that bad.
I've given up with PC gaming recently, i'm not paying £30-40 for a game that i get a few hours worth of gameplay from and that each new game that comes out forces me to upgrade my PC to run it correctly. Especially as new GFX cards alone cost as much as entire consoles!

I'm now going for a PS3, looking at it as a long term investment. My PS2, which is on it's last legs is now over 5 years old and still running things. I've not had to upgrade it to play a new game and i can get many cheap, budget, 2nd hand games for it still.

My current thinking, PC = MMORPGS, Console = everything else.

 

Greetings!

No one was forced to play the game, no one was forced to buy the game at $50.
You wanted to play the game and pirated it, that makes you a freeloader with an excuse.

 

For all the people that called me a filthy thief and scum, i wont respond to them or else i would get banned or censored.

Why did it say the above?..... i have lots of originals in my room, there must be 20+ in my chest and 30+ in "exposition", all of them i saved money to get, i also pirate a game from now and then, most of them turn me into a customer, i only buy a game when it reaches a critical price and a critical quality and i usually get them when they get into some kind of pack, the critical price is about 30€, i refuse to pay more than 30€ (60€ for a game is to much my wallet) for a good game so i wait, and wait, and wait, until.... there.... the game i want for <30€, and then snatch! i buy it, like i did with COD2, which single player i finished 2 times before i bought the original, and then finished it again (and it is there calling me to play it again), when cod4 gets to the critical price i will get it, Activision deserves my money for what they have done in the past.....
When people call me a thief and scum they are putting me into the same bag as people that go into a store and steal money (or games), steal purses from people that are walking on the street, steal things from old people homes, evade taxes, beat wives, sell drugs.... etc..... these people are he real thieves and scum.
If i never pirated a game in my life i would have never gotten so much games, so then i would still be a worse criminal? Raven, epic, EA and all of the others would never had my € and would be "starving".
As for demos...... did that for a time, and the games them selves were immediately sold second hand after i got them, after passing the corner of shame (the pinnacle tv card is still there jinxing that corner of the room), demos simply don't reflect the quality of the game imho.
On a final note, if had a pc that was good enough for current gen gaming my collection would be bigger, why did i say this? simple, this means that one of the reasons all those excellent 2007 games did not sell very well is that they demand to much from current gen systems and people are not willing to get them, neither i am willing to pirate them.

edit: there is one kind of pirate i can call scum and thief, the ones that sell copied games, movies and music on the street and by other means, these guys profit from other people work.

 

I buy games second hand and when they get reduced <£5 the older games are so much better than the new ones in the majority it's not ever funny. There are still some good games like orange box but most are poor. Anyway the games companies don't make any money off me even though I'm not pirating. I hate the asumption that jsut because you have made something you should automaticly make money off it. COD4 looked rubbish to me so I had no motivation to buy it.

 

I generally will torrent a game before I buy it. I find demos woefully inadequate most of the time and have made quite a few bad purchases based on them, leaving a nasty taste in your mouth when you're £35 out of pocket and the shop won't refund you. I must have downloaded near to twenty games, the only ones I didn't buy in the end were Bioshock and UT3. I played both of them for about three hours then uninstalled them. I didn't even seed them past 100% which tells you something about how disappointed I was by them as normally I'm particular about my torrenting etiquette.

COD4 impressed me so much I bought it the same day.

 

piracy IS a problem of PC gaming, due to how easy it is compared to consoles. but i think the reason piracy is so heavy is that why, when you have installed a game, you have to put in the disk to play it?!? it's not a console, it's a PC game, and that's why i think if they get rid of those stupid counter-measures (which are easily disabled by using cracks, i do this all the time with all games i bought and i am not ashamed) they might get better sells. eg CoH got pretty good sells.

 

i'm not trying to justify it. i know that downloading games is wrong. i'm just saying that game companies might have more luck getting people to buy the game if they priced it a bit more reasonably.

technical measures to defeat piracy will never work. the publishers need to convince the customers that they want to pay money for their product. they need to build some brand loyalty through respecting their customers and offering prices that their target market can afford. the music industry is slowly learning, i predict that movies will follow in the next two years, and game and software publishers after that.

 

I think some people may decide on pirated games as a means of trying out a game before purchasing it, and if that is the case then I suppose it isn't all too bad. I remember getting Crysis online because it was out 3 days before it was officially out but I had already placed an order at Play.com regardless Some games (like COD4) don't appeal to me so I don't play them nor buy the copy off the shelf.

 

You can try and justify Piracy all you want....ITS WRONG FULL STOP. You wouldn't break in to a car showroom and steal a car just to see if you wanted to buy it. Would you?
As long as there are people downloading content they are not entitled to, the industry suffers. The practice is so commonplace people actually think there are times when it's justified.

 

Can we about stop the endless reruns of the "war on piracy" episode? It's getting quite old by now... Some do it, some don't, but the choice wetter or not someone pirates software is a personal one...