News id: Piracy 'hidden benefit' for PC manufacturers

[CardJoe]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/08...anufacturers/1

Piracy, says id Software's Todd Hollenshead, is a secret boon to hardware manufacturers who can benefit from extra sales.

[yakyb]

he has a point also for every £30 not spent on a game thats a £30 better GPU

so they are gaining there also

[Bungle]

Well you can understand the train of thought for some. I'll buy a top end PC over a console because I can get the software free. Don't agree with it, but I can understand.

[Xtrafresh]

This is stupid. What does he suppose hardware manufacturers do against piracy? Also, aside from piracy, there is a lot of great content on the internet that actually is free. Free content and freedom to use the PC what you damn well want to use it for was, is, and will always be the single biggest pro for buying a PC.

[liratheal]

Wait.. He doesn't want us to pay for his games, just steal them so long as we buy better hardware?

Score.

[Flibblebot]

I'm not entirely sure I follow his train of logic. Buying a PC doesn't turn you into a rampant pirate overnight (my mum is living proof of that ), and I don't see how hardware manufacturers would benefit from piracy anyway?

I'm confused.

[Da Dego]

Originally Posted by Flibblebot

I'm not entirely sure I follow his train of logic. Buying a PC doesn't turn you into a rampant pirate overnight (my mum is living proof of that ), and I don't see how hardware manufacturers would benefit from piracy anyway?

I'm confused.

Here in the world of "We release a lot of crap and nobody bought it...therefore piracy is to blame", you must first leave your common sense, logic and reason at the door. You must START with the assumptions that:

1) Piracy is what's hurting YOUR sales,
2) The hardware market isn't falling down and dying because everyone only plays Bejeweled.

Now that you have your base assumptions, it's clear that people aren't buying your game because they're pirating it. Bad customers. Worse, they can then use that money to plonk down on new, fancy hardware the doesn't put the effort in to DRM your software for you. Bad hardware manufactures.

They're in league, the hardware and the consumer...they're all bent to screw YOU...it's a conspiracy. (Why on earth he says that and in the next breath says "it's not like I think it's some conspiracy," just that everyone thinks that way and acts on it!)

Seriously, I think he might benefit from some psychotherapy, because this sounds a lot like paranoid delusions.

[bowman]

I'm so sorry Mr. Game Developer Man, you were one out of a million game developers who made a crappy game that noone bought - hence you, in your awesome narcissistic grand delusions assume that everyone went ahead and pirated it instead. Guess what, there are hundreds of games released every year and even the most fervent mainstream enthusiasts probably buy less than 10. Good luck as the needle in the hay stack, just shut up about the pirate strawman argument.. The last id game on my radar was Doom 3. Not a good game. I didn't buy it. Now get off the stage and make good PC games. Last I heard you guys were busy making console games and throwing us some port scraps - not a good recipe, unless of course you're just waiting for an excuse to blame pirates again.

I'm sure everyone who buys an Xbox 360 does it so they can pay someone to mod it and get free games too. Roll.

[munim]

What he's saying is that if you could magically and accurately forecast future sales of hardware in a world where piracy was rampant, and then magically forecast future sales of hardware where piracy was impossible, the latter would have less hardware sales.

Sorta like the PSP, it sells like hotcakes but proportionately less software.

[perplekks45]

@ Dego: Maybe he should pirate more games and movies to have the money to pay for his hardware getting repaired.

On topic:

Yea, right, Mr. Hollenshead! Ehrm... wait... no, wrong it is! Anyways, thanks for making me laugh.

[Burnout21]

He just wants to point the finger at someone, next he'll be crying like a baby.

If game makers did something like Steam, where you get a free account and you have to purchase the game then there would be no problems.

A few years back i hated the idea of steam, i didn't like the idea of having to have internet access to play games, i still hate battle field 2 and the fact that weapons and maps sizes are only unlocked via online multiplayer but thats another story of why to hate EA.

[Teq]

Originally Posted by Burnout21

He just wants to point the finger at someone, next he'll be crying like a baby.

If game makers did something like Steam, where you get a free account and you have to purchase the game then there would be no problems.

A few years back i hated the idea of steam, i didn't like the idea of having to have internet access to play games, i still hate battle field 2 and the fact that weapons and maps sizes are only unlocked via online multiplayer but thats another story of why to hate EA.

Do something like Steam? Why not just bloody use Steam, one distribution stream to rule them all I would also like to see them reducing their fees so Valve can offer the 3rd party titles at a more reasonable rate, why the hell would I buy a digital distribution game for more than the physical version?

Some publishers/developers really need to sort out their priorities, stop blaming piracy for their woes and start doing something about it - be it improving the content, offering digital copies at a _reduced_ price or making the game virtually impossible to fully enjoy without the added benefit of legality (though personally I would have some content available for the pirates to give them a taste of the 'full' experience)...

[mmorgue]

I agree that Steam and the like are great concepts and I love the idea. The problem with digital distribution of software/media is that you don't actually have a physical copy of it. Nor do you own it, though I s'pose technically, based on the RIAA/MPAA mandates, none of us actually own the music/films we buy on physical media anywaze... @rseholes...

Well, ok, you do have a physical copy on your hdd, but not a dvd/cd of the material. So if you lose your hdd, which is a very common and not wholly-unrealistic scenario, you'd need to go an re-download the material at your own expense, be it either time or cost or both. And as films/games/music increase in quality (I mean physical not quality of content! <grin>) so do their physical sizes which means more downloading time/bandwidth.

And as our (UK & I suspect a great deal of the US) entire bband infrastructure is sh1t compared to the likes of Japan and Sweden who have 100mbit+ download speeds, re-acquiring your HD films and legit versions of high-end games via digitial distribution would be a nightmare.

[MrMonroe]

This really lacks context. Why did he bring this up? It's certainly true but why bother talking about it. Accusing hardware devs of secretly not caring about piracy doesn't really do much good for you as a software dev.

[alexandros1313]

Originally Posted by Xtrafresh

Free content and freedom to use the PC what you damn well want to use it for was, is, and will always be the single biggest pro for buying a PC.

Exactly, well said.

[AlexB]

I'm getting bored of re-reading Eurogamer's news, a few days later on Bit-Tech..

[cpemma]

Originally Posted by yakyb

he has a point also for every £30 not spent on a game thats a £30 better GPU

Disregarding the article (which I haven't read) and gaming, this has been one of the base three reasons for piracy* since computers were invented.

I spend on silicon, not software

(*

• The entire industry is one giant rip off/ X$ are evil, etc.
• I've no intention of buying it so it's not a lost sale

)

[feedayeen]

People don't use PCs because they can get the games for free, a high end gaming PC could easily cost more than a console and a decent libary of games. The only real way that you can say that piracy hurts the gaming industry is if the games require a decent rig, the rest of the industry is mostly crap and sequalware.

[Fusen]

if he was making this argument against ISP's I could understand, but don't see it really applying to hardware companies

[Firehed]

Originally Posted by liratheal

Wait.. He doesn't want us to pay for his games, just steal them so long as we buy better hardware?

Score.

You're really looking for justification, aren't you And no, that's not even close to what he said.

I think there's some validity to Hollenshead/id's point, but I think there's also a decent amount of baseless whining and looking for someone to blame mixed in.