err , misvoted ... I voted yes , but for pc only when i should have voted that I often buy games. It's impossible to play online with a cracked game anyway
im not necessarily talking about subscriptions im saying make people pay for an account not the disk. Without an account the disk is worthless... like i said i actually dont think i would like this system but i do think it would be more effective than the current system at preventing piracy.
Forget that. One of the things I really love about Steam is that I can re-download the game on to my new machine at any time without worrying about copy protection and serial keys and such. As it is, I thought Bioshock was terrible so I'm not exactly bothered, but I'm not going to buy ANY game that needs to be activated, much less do it through Steam.
I don't condone piracy, and I certainly don't pirate myself (although when I was much younger I did download the odd game) - but that's just a foolish protection system to put in place. If a game picks up it's a pirate copy it should SAY SO. If you have just crashes then users will do what users do - bad mouth the product. If the anti-piracy tech fails for whatever reason and pisses off a legit customer, then that's signing your own death warrant. Piracy is bad, but I think the way MS handle it is very good. They tell you its a pirate copy, they don't give you nice freebies, but ultimately it does kind of work. This ensures the pirates don't go on rampages on the net, but also will slowly guilt people into getting a legit copy. At least in my opinion Of course the protection has been cracked, but those kinds of sales will be lost no matter what. You just need to stop casual 'here borrow my disc' piracy. I liked Titan Quest Had the fancy metal case version, and had no crashes myself.
I pirated C&C3 that's the most recent game I pirated and that was a good year ago, didn't beat the game but at the time didn't have the disposable income to waste $50 on entertainment. I will say that I pirate commercial class software. I actually legitametly own a copy of photoshop 6.0 but I pirated up to c2. As an individual I can't afford $200-1000 for commercial software when I just want to fiddle around in say 3d studio max or Reason or Cubase. My rule there is that if it's something I used for a commercial application or as a serious hobby I buy a legit copy, and as mentioned they generally work better. there's no real excuse but I guess that's how the apple falls, never played TQ
Greetings! Crytek on Crysis piracy and future releases: PC Play: How do you estimate the current state of the PC gaming industry? Some say that it's only a matter of time when it's going to finally die-off, the others say that "the big one" is only getting its comeback pace. Considering Crysis is a PC-exclusive title, what do you think of its market reception and its future? Skeptics would say that it's pretty risky going PC-exclusive with such a high-profile title. Cevat Yerli: It is certainly. We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy. To the degree PC Gamers that pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we wont have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future. We are going to support PC, but not exclusive anymore.
Could this just be that Crysis didn't sell to theirestimates, could this be that people didn't buy because its EA publishing (i know i thought twice) could it be that its so damn heavy on hardware (rumours still hurt sales) i could continue but there are dozens of reasons why people may not have bought this game. Come back in a few years when the current consoles are looking like pooh compared to the PC and we'll see much larger sales in the PC market. Consoles are at their peak in their cycle but will soon start to plummet x360 is already on a budget slope. I'm not going to start another argument with you impar since your opinion and mine are polar opposites.
I used to pirate stuff all the time until I had money not too. Honestly that was my only reason in the first place, and it wasn't usually pirating but usually getting a copy from a friend who had purchased it. However once I had the money I took to buying copies of games and I rather am glad I did. I would also point out another factor in this is due to the gaming industry and how hard it is to get established if all of your hard work is getting stolen. The more I think about it, the more I believe people who think downloading it is ok just lack integrity for doing the right thing. - You are taking something, that you didn't purchase (stealing) - It doesn't matter if you weren't going to buy it anyway. That argument is like saying, well everyone in Gamestop left the store and turned the camera's off, and I picked up a copy of the Sims 2. Now we all know I'd never buy this game, but since it's there I thought what the hell and grabbed it. - If you can't afford it? Don't buy it. Only have a $20 budget? Buy a $20 game, no games you want? Don't buy anything, save up that money for a $30 or $40 game. For the Game companies: - Demo's. -- doesn't need to relate to the story, but just give a game play demo and make sure it's not choppy. Doesn't need to be long, but just make it entertaining and make it show what the game can offer. - Not enough $$ for a demo (small game companies) get a video of gameplay, some good screen caps, good descriptions. If you can't afford a demo then the burden is on your to get people to want to buy your game. (not that they should be stealing it, just buying it as oppose to not buying it.) - Make sure the game is ready when it's released. (Not sure any game has done this for a while, but yeah.) - Kick hardware companies in the balls to get their act together.
Mike - it's all fine saying that, but Cyrsis had a fine, replayable demo. And it was still pirated heavily. However, one has to wonder how many of those pirates were in China/Asia/Russia and so wouldnt have bought the game anyway. Are these all European/US users?
Exactly. In those countries its almost impossible to buy the real thing, even if you wanted to. Although, having said that, games like Crysis and COD4 wouldn't exactly sell well there anyway - they're not interested for the most part, in that type of game.
Well that's not piracy, that's just making a backup of something you own. I rip all of my games to ISOs and then throw them on my fileserver (and have a text file of my serials) so I can stash the disks away and to hell with physical media. As an added bonus, things install faster since reading from the hard drive is a lot faster than reading from a CD/DVD.
You are given free tokens to redownload very frequently so usually you will never need them, I just read them that if you do it too often you could run out of tokens, but from what I read on their forums you can get them by just sending an email to confirm that you would like to have some extras ...
The worst console for this was the Dreamcast for me. Basically, a close friend at work got a whole bunch of enticing pirated Japanese games and a boot disc to play them with. It got me into loads of awesome Japanese games and such and I still bought proper PAL games, but there were so many US and UK game copies my mate just didn't want and would off-load them onto me. Honestly, who'd say no? At my last day at work with him he gave me all 40 odd of his pirated games after he sold his DC. I still have them. I have like three copies of Crazy Taxi (including a legit one yo). I never really felt too bad about having the Jap version of Jet Set Radio when I would go and buy the PAL one anyways... But hey. The DS is pretty bad too. I purchased an M3 slot 1 card as soon as they were released to get my SCUMM on... But then the full games were just too tantalising. Since the DS has no proper demos and the games can be totally overpriced for what they are, I just cracked. I feel pretty **** about it but then I just try and remember that I play on my DS very rarely and they sell 2 billion of them every week in Japan.
I've definitely felt that for the DS, I can't say that I don't feel the need at times when stuff is just so easy to get, but I am rather proud that at least recently (the last year+) that I've been "sober" =p so to speak. As far as piracy in foreign countries like or continents (looks at Asia) it's almost impossible to control. I can see why they do it, but I don't suppose it makes it any better.