http://blog.webroot.com/2010/07/29/starcraft-2-launch-day-piracy-infects-eager-gamers/ Apparently so. No sources are directly claimed in the article mind, but it's not uncommon these days in game releases imo.
While I can't say it surprises me, I do find it odd that SC2 has been chosen to highlight this. As far as I know, most zero day torrents contain some nasties. It's really to be expected. The people who wouldn't get caught out by this anyway remain unaffected, and the people who blindly torrent games because they have fast internet and no patience will learn a valuable lesson. I see no downsides! As for myself, I wasn't planning on torrenting or buying SC2. I generally buy my games anyway. If I want to download a game, I use Steam, but since my internet connection is shoddy, I buy hard copy.
That's my point - why bring it up now? Could games publishers purposely leak cracked exes of their games to send info home about the PCs they infect?
That's very underhand if it's the case. I find it hard to believe a major company like Blizz would do something that flagrantly illegal and risky. Then again, the motives of all malware writers and virus spreaders have always been a mystery to me, always. I just can't imagine why someone would be bothered about doing that. Chances of it actually returning usable info that results in a cash profit is less than slim, you'd make ten times more money per hour just stealing stereos out of cars. And spam emails! Don't even get me started. The internet's gone batshit crazy is what it is. /incoherent ravings
Dog bites man. Next in News: Bobby Kotick likes money. These things are highlighted per torrent in the comments on popular tracker sites BTW. Also, and this is important, most hacked exe's will scan as malware in antivirus programs. False positives are part and parcel of running no-cdcracks and the like.
Nope still no sympathy. Read / watch the reviews, I'd wager a good majority of people who say they're downloading to test it never go and buy it later. The reason we're getting all this cack handed DRM, punishing legitimate customers, is because of people pirating the games. If they then go on and buy it later (minority) it still adds to the numbers of people pirating it.
What about those who just wait for a clean repack? I'm not surprised this news is coming out now. SC2 has an RRP £10 to £15 higher than most other PC games (MW2 excluded). Perhaps Activision/Blizzard want to scare people into paying the higher price who would have otherwise said "I'm not paying this much, I'll Torrent it instead"?
I have pirated almost every single title I own and I have purchased almost every single title I've pirated. Try before you buy is a legitimate and time-honoured customer expectation and the games industry has hacked its own feet off by abandoning the practice of making game demos as a matter of course.
Amen to that. If you take the risk and pirate games then fair enough, but you have to accept that you may get a virus.
It's not a time honoured customer expectation at all. You don't have the god given right to do what you want at all. You don't hold any licenses for the game and can't buy it.
I think getting a virus from any source indicates a certain level of durp. I still reel when I discover that there are people using the net without any firewall packages installed. It's like buying a house and never installing any locks edit - Virtually every other product you could buy is available to test before you buy: phones, TVs, cars, even films if you consider cinemas and rentals to be 'testing'. There is nothing unreasonable about wanting to see a product before you pay money for it.
^^^ console games can be tested in depth, even in MP, since you can rent titles at blockbuster. That's not really true. DRM and other forms of digital protection are being put in place because of perceptions of lost revenue. The reasoning behind it, namely that x% of pirates would buy the item is a mix of wishful thinking and poor fiction. It's boardroom fantasy. Anyone who's gone out and spent top dollar to play MW2 and its DLC on PC knows exactly what the boardroom thinks of paying customers. They don't give a damn about them.
But if they didn't see the number of people illegally downloading their game (whether they were going to buy it or not) they wouldn't perceive the lost revenue.
So true. No-CDing my old boxed games picks up a lot of false positives, and recently Avira has been announcing that my Steam copy of Crysis Warhead has a trojan in the appid_17330.exe (the launcher, I think)
The reasoning for the entire situation is backwards. All they're doing is making the situation for paying customers more expensive and in some cases breaking the game. Look at Ubi's latest dial home DRM, and MW2's platform braking MP implementation. MW2 is the one game that should be a haven from pirates and cheats. But everyone that plays it knows it's the exact opposite. Hell I had to no-cd crack singularity because the steam version of the game has an unfixable texture streaming bug. Guess what, the pirated no-cd exe comes with the texture streaming patched. Yet another Activision SNAFU. So far the only people to suffer from DRM are paying customers. Meanwhile, pirates get the game before paying customers, certain bugs are fixed out of the box, and pirates don't have to put up with the game kicking you out because your internet hiccuped. It's like those anti piracy trailers you get on DVDs and in the cinema, you think pirates have to put up with that noise - no all the rubbish is stripped out. The hacker / cracker groups thrive off circumventing these systems. It's just a massive game to them. And the pirates win every time. What's more they're going to keep winning, sure a publisher might spend a million dollars on a new system, but some kid in his parent's basement's still going to shatter it in a couple of months... for nothing. And then every iteration of that system is going to be easier and easier to break, until they go and spend millions making a new system. All so they can rake in a fortune for the latest iteration of the game/movie we all played/watched last year and the year before. Now with more realistic hair!