News Call of Duty 4 piracy is rampant

[Tim S]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/01...y_is_rampant/1

The blog of an Activision employee has revealed that Call of Duty 4 piracy is running rampant despite the efforts of developers, possibly damaging PC games as a whole.

[steveo_mcg]

Not wanting to defend pirating games but surely if there are high number of people playing on line then it benefits the people who have played since there will always be people online to play against. I'm sure we've all had a good muliti-player game die on us because there was a limited community to play with.

[Jamie]

Originally Posted by steveo_mcg

Not wanting to defend pirating games but surely if there are high number of people playing on line then it benefits the people who have played since there will always be people online to play against. I'm sure we've all had a good muliti-player game die on us because there was a limited community to play with.

At the end of the day you are right, but when a business looks at developing a game, especially multi-playform, they will be looking closely at the return on investment. If gamers don't buy the game they can't cover the development and production cost. If it gets so bad that the PC market is so small they'll eventually just drop that platform all together or they'll look at other ways of making the cost back -- in game ads perhaps.

PC gamers that don't pay for gamers are just shooting themselves in the foot.

[naokaji]

if they want to stop piracy of games then they need to switch their stupid copy portections and cd key system to accounts like mmorpgs have them.

noone has ever managed to play wow or eq2 with a version they didnt pay for. they could even go for the cc payment to make sure that you are who you claim during registering the account. instead of a monthly fee they could drop the retail price to some very low amount and then charge rest upon account creation.

only one person can login with the same account at once (so you dont "lend" it to a friend and then both play with only one purchase) + whitelist of valid cdkeys (to stop keygens and if someone generates a valid key the person who bought it simply scans the receipt, sends it to the developers, they ban the one that created the key with a keygen) + identity verrification (noones going to comit a crime if he has to leave his full name and address at the crimescene).
that would surely take care of the problem.

anyway, cod4 is a really good game, definitly worth paying what they ask for.

[plagio]

yeah, but than you need to be connected to the internet even to play single player games.

[Shadow_101]

The last game I cracked was age of empires 2, I don’t know how many years ago. I found that hassle enough, I would have thought by now copy protection would have improved vastly particularly in multiplayer.

[will.]

I've downloaded 3 games in my life.

The Sims
Need For Speed Carbon
Soldier Of Fortune

I treated those downloads more like demo's. I hated the Sims, so un-installed it. Loved messing around with NFS Carbon so bought it. Thought that Soldier Of Fortune was a pile of wank, but bought it anyway because i thought it was hilarious.

My flatmate downloaded Crysis and CoD4 the other day, so while he was out I un-installed them. They both have very decent demo's available (and I already have them both!) so the "I wanted to try them out" argument didn't stand up.

But am I a hypocrite for saying don't download games, when I'll happily download a film. I do buy DVD's and go to the cinema if it's a good (or what I hope to be good) film.

[teamtd11]

I will quite oftern use a no cd crack on a game i allready own, Its annoying having to find boxes to then put the disk in, and then play for a hour befour moving to another game.

Supreme Commander and steam are good friends of mine, in the way that i dont need the disk's to play, so now if a game is comming out, i always hope that there will be a steam version aswell.

[frontline]

A bit of a strange article really, as they don't seem to have noticed that more than one person can play multiplayer (from the same ip address for sure) without having to use the game CD. Don't know whether this was intentional or just an oversight on their part. I havent tried it myself but know of at least a couple of instances where 2 people in one household are playing multiplayer off one copy of the game.

[naokaji]

Originally Posted by plagio

yeah, but than you need to be connected to the internet even to play single player games.

yep, but i prefer to be required to have a constant internet connection over game developers threatening to stop making pc games....

[lewchenko]

I know people who have pirated games. They are thieves. Simple as that.

They do it because its ..

a) easy [torrent of a cracked version]
b) free and
c) risk of getting caught = nil

They are scum bags who dont understand that it will eventually kill the industry. Sometimes they make up excuses (like it wasnt worth £35 so why should they pay it... or that they are gonna buy it anyway so its a trial).. All really lame lies.

Yet when a company tries to make it hard to pirate a game (Bioshock for example), the whole PC community goes up in arms about its protection and reinstall limits.

I personally think that ALL games must be registered before being able to be played. Your serial number should be unique to you and secured against a central identification process, like bank details. You should be able to install as many times as you want, providing you ID yourself to the registration server each time.

I dont care, or buy the argument that people shouldnt have to activate games to play single player. Almost everyone who plays games has the internet, so its not an issue.

Ignore the people who moan. The people who made call of duty 4 did a terrible job of protecting their game, and STILL let known pirates run rampant on game servers...

[AcidJiles]

Games are one thing you should never pirate ever. I choose well and always get my moneys worth out of it so am happy to put up the cash. With tv shows, movies and music for the amount of time enjoyment I get out of them I am less inclinded to put up the money. I am prepared to pay for time I enjoy with M,M and TV the price at retail is too much per hour of enjoyment. (eg they are over priced for what they are)

[mikeuk2004]

90% people have pirated something but I agree that the Pc market is not very big anymore and probably because its too easy to copy a game. It will die and everyone will have a console

[Carbon_Arc]

2007 was a fantastic year for PC gamers, and with reports of dispaointing sales and mass priacy, it worrying that we may not see as year as good again.

I believe that game developers put a lot of passion and effort into their work and that they deserve to be rewarded for that by people paying money for the games. Most new releases can be had for 25 quid on-line, so there is no excuse for not paying for a copy.

Anti-piracy measures are rather poor at the moment and generally do cause issues for those of us who actually bought the game (Relic on-line with it's required log-in for multiplayer CoH, and horrible, horrible server reliability has seriously hurt what is a fantastic game for me). But it seems like a vicious circle, if piracy was less abundant then publishers would get less jumpy and maybe not be quite so hard us legitimate gamers.

Personally i like a good collectors edition tin case with my new releases!

[steveo_mcg]

I suppose the question of 2007 being a fantastic year yet having poor sales would be, if these games came out separately instead of a few weeks apart would they have all sold better?

[Journeyer]

As long as there is computer software (be it games or applications) there will also be piracy. There is absolutely no way to combat this. Look at Vista, with its horrible activation system and all the troubles with WGA and whatnot; how long did it take for this to be circumvented and cracked? Not long, and this will always be the case.

You might argue that this deals heavy blows to the software industries, but on the other hand it also helps promote development in software security. However, it can never be made foolprof and still be expected to work.

Yes, they might require online registration and activation, but the increased hassle would also alienate their users. And besides, again I might refer to Vista which supposedly was "un-pirateable." I know of pirated copies of Vista that are permanently activated leaving MS none the wiser.

[iwog]

The last PC game I pirated was Sims 2, which bored me to tears so that came off. The one before that was SupCom which I enjoyed so much I bought, this was after the demo perked my interest. I do how ever have the N64 goodset, and its surprisingly easy to avoid the copy protection on some consoles.

[cjoyce1980]

people download games like this because there not sure how well it will perform on there pc, so why spend £30 to find that you need a new MoBo, processor and graphics card

[badders]

Bioshock made me laugh. Everyone was up in arms about the copy protection and limited installs. Oone of my friends had a pirated copy the day after it came out, which had all the copy protection stripped out.

As companies create more and more restrictive copy protection systems, crackers will find more and more ingenious ways to get around those systems. Every idiot who intended to pirate it will do, and the only people who lose out are the ones who actually buy the game - us.

They may as well just take off all copy protection apart from having to have the CD in the drive with a valid CD key, and let the pirates get on with it. It's up to us to take the moral high ground and buy these games.

On a side note, I've replayed the Crysis demo loads of times, cos I don't want to spend £26 on a game that's been panned for everything except graphics! Bauer difficulty with unlimited cloak & Aliens rocks.

[[USRF]Obiwan]

I have other thoughts:

Would the people who play the copied game bought the game if this game was not crackable or copyable.
Can they say they lost profits from copied games if the users of these games would not have bought it anyway.
Are these lost profits then fictional or do they have actual proof that people who have played the cracked game would actualy have bought it if the game was not available throught underground scenes.

And now they say: "ooh a xxxxx total of people play online with cracked keys". WELL dont let them, ban them, or do something. This is stupid. Why make a key in the first place of everyone can use it anyway. Hell, Lets open the Levi store at night so people can run in and get stuff free. Hey! there where 200 people last night who walked out with a trouser wow!


My thought on this is, that good quality games will sell. Also think about the costs of a game. A lot of people i know wait 3 or 4 months, so they can get the game for reduces prices (me included), over here Crysis is 59,99 euro in the stores. (And COD4 is even 65 euro) In about 3 months it will be 30 euro or less (if i am lucky)

How can they say COD4 does not sell it is not even out a month. Do they now how much PC games there where released the last 2 months? And it with 65 euro it is one of the most expensive games at the moment.

And they can save oozes of money if they would totaly ditch any copy protection because, it is proven for 20 years that copyprotection doesnt do anything other then being a pleague and anoyance for game-buyers. Dont you just all love the nocd/dvd cracks?!