Don't underestimate the power brought by a system where masses can complain without giving your real name and without the fear of being punched in the face for being an idiot : )
Unless it's the try before you buy crowd. That, and people just like to complain. The point is, that if a bunch of people are ranting about what a POS this game is, are you going to go out and buy it? If a game is buggy and the developer says "That's only because people are pirating it", are you going to believe them? As much as I hate this fact, perception matters. I really sounds like this developer did it to themselves. They delivered a product that was hard to make work, and which was intentionally broken for significant part of the user base. Lets take a look at the user expierience for a minute. You hear about this great new game coming out, maybe see a little advertsing about it. Of course, in this day and age no one trusts the claims that manufacturers make, but at least we know a game is coming that might be interesting. So then one of two things happens. Either you wait to see what other people say about it, or you download it and try it yourself before spending money on it. If you do the first you see a lot of people saying this game is crap, it crashes at the first quest and the developer replies "That's because you pirated it" or "That's because your computer isn't up to date". In the other case, you download the game and it crashes all the time and you decide it's a total POS and feel good about not spending money on it. Neither of these outcomes are likley to encourage potential customer to buy your product. The fact that they did as well as they did only shows that there are a lot of people willing to take a big risk on a game without researching it. Does anyone else hear just a slight bit of entitlement in that statement? I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it sure sounds like he thinks the world owes him a living because he made a good game. What I don't hear in the quoted post is any acknoledgement that they bear any responsibility for the failure of the game. It's all someone elses fault. It's pirates fault, it the reviewers fault, it's the stupid customer's fault. Don't blame us, we made a great game and it's everyone elses fault for not buying it. And besides that, they didn't lose money on it, so why are they going out of business?
i pirated defcon, but i had it pre-ordered the whole time but the pirated one was out before my pre-order went active (steam) i wonder if that counts as pirated or a sale wherever these numbers come from (still havent seen any sources for them ) was checking the release dates for defcon on wikipedia and it just reminded me how much they take the piss i find it mind-boggling and franky insulting that games are still released on different dates for different areas i cant remember which game it was but i remember last year marvelling at how there was a game on sale US Retail for like a week before it was available on steam i suppose you could argue shipping time or something (but it probably all comes from taiwan anyway ) for retail but delaying online distribution for a week? what the hell ET:Quake Wars is the only game i can think of that was released in the EU before the US
While I agree with you about his copy protection schemes, I think he's actually implying that it would be different if the pirates had spent money on it. It's less about him being entitled to a living for making a good game, but more to do with him being entitled to not to be stolen from - or to expect that much at least. Well, supposedly it was a number of different factors. Titan quest was just one - and just because they made profit doesn't mean that they made enough profit for their business to remain financially viable.
We get spore a day earlier woo!11 It is rather annoying, the main problem is for a US release you only need english, and spanish if you're feeling generous. For a european release there are so many languages to localise the game into so it takes a while to get the game ready for the european market. I do like how a lot of developers are going for general releases now and get their acts together with localisation, but with some games it's still awful.
I pirate console games out of spite. I can't play because i don't have a modded console but I wan't the console piracy rate to look really high too. Then maybe the developers would come back.
Most games I pirate I only play at LANs where at least one friend has bought, but the rest of us don't like it enough to dish out $50 for it, but we all want to have something to play with each other. I also pirate every game I've ever bought, as I lose/scratch disks all the time, also if I lost the cd-key I would still want to be able to at least play single-player for a given game. Now that I have a steady part-time job(high-school student) I can see my piracy rate going down and my purchasing rate going up, although I still think I will "try before I buy" as the saying goes. Don't want to spend 6.5 hours of work on something that ends up being crap, if I can only buy a couple games a month I'm gonna make sure they are good ones.
I think that's one of his points: The game wasn't buggy. If people had just bought a legal copy of the game, they wouldn't have been dumped to the desktop, the copy protection would have been transparent, and there would have been no reason for the unwarranted bad word of mouth. The argument that second-hand sales are as bad as piracy doesn't really hold water. In the case of piracy, everybody gets their copy of the game from a common source, usually on-line. It only takes one person to buy the game, crack it, and post it to the interwebs (or, one person to sneak a free copy out of the production house, factory, etc.). In the case of second-hand sales, in order for the millions of people to buy a used game, millions of other people had to buy that game first, which puts money in the developers' pockets. They really are different animals. -monkey
TBF though they've tried to be clever with the copy protection and its totally back fired to give a bad impression of the product if they didn't bother with the cp they would have probably come out of the whole fiasco with more sales. Word of mouth is a very powerful marketing technique especially with the web and they have blown it by creating there own bad press.
Is it actually possible to create anti piracy code or something which will make a game unplayable if ripped?
Copyright laws are government backed enforceable laws, **** ones but law just the same. EULA's are pretty much unenforceable contract, in Scottish law and i assume in English law a contract must be written to level of the person intended to read and agree to it A 20 page legalese document is over the head of most gamers also to agree to a contract you can not be a minor there for any children playing your game would be unbound by your EULA, theres a whole list of problems with EULAs they still put them on so they can scare people but not a court in either land would enforce them.
No, that sounds pretty on-the-ball to me. For example, I bought 2 Colin McRae games, then started pirating them, simply because they're all the same, but with better graphics. I just thought of something. If you're really anti-piracy, a really good tactic would be to upload pirated copies with a couple of critical files missing and a corrupted crack, so they can never play it and get frustrated enough to buy it. That happened to me with McRae 2005. The pirate copy never worked, so I just bought it, and was pleasantly surprised. I pirate according to quality, normally, and the climate surrounding them. Doom 3, for example, didn't trouble my conscience, because (a) already had it on xbox and felt robbed in that sense, (b) they'd made an unbelievable amount of money on initial hype-sales, which the game didn't really merit, and (c) I was never going to bother buying it anyway. I've given up trying to find moral lines in all this. I buy when I can, steal the rest. I don't try to excuse this behaviour, it's just the way I do things.
Another "used to" kid. Then I got a job with a software company and I realize that if I'd like to play good games in the future, I'd better pay up.
You just listed 3 reasons that you used to justify piracy. I'm not sure I understand. In point A you said that you already had it for the XBox; however, in point C you said that you weren't going to buy it anyway. Did you buy it for the XBox, or was that version pirated, as well? In Point B, are you suggesting that a developer's profits determine the legitimacy of piracy? If so, can you quantify the amount of profits required before piracy is legitimate? Point C doesn't really make sense to me. You say that you had no plans to buy it, but you spent time and effort to obtain a pirated copy. If you were going to play it anyway, why not spend the money for a legitimate copy? -monkey
