You don't go to the high court for civil matters, all you needed to do was send them an angry letter back telling them to kindly **** off as they don't actually have any real proof that you personally downloaded the game. I had a similar letter through, we ignored it, and had no more hassle (although they're now taking people to court who do that). No, but I'm seriously considering not buying RA3, even if it does have Tim Curry in it.
Im gona buy crysis when i get a new rig i so love that game but when the crytek president says they wont release exclusive crysis stuff for pc i immediately removed my pirated crysis!!! anyway i cant ply it 5fps is too dam low even though im on a reasonable level into the game......
no it wasn't i worked in the law industry for four years and therefore have plenty of solicitor friends, a couple of people looked at this for me and they all agreed to just pay it and be done with the matter remember this was a PRE-RELEASE game, and thats the premise they stuffed me on. atari are doing this quite a lot now so if you do download games just be careful
What gets me here is the general belief that pirating of PC games if much more rife than piracy of console games. However the amount of xbox 360 games available to pirate seems to greatly outweigh pc titles and usually have greater numbers of seeders/leaches and the xbox 360 games are always up on the torrent sites before the PC games even when they have the same release dates. So looking at this how can the developers justify not developing for PC using the piracy argument??
If they code it for PC, they have to come up with the anti-piracy code and dev also. If they make console games, they dont have to invest time into the anti-piracy code since it is built into the hardware. What they are really saying is they can get more money since thats what they really care about. I dont mean to say that that should not be thier goal. But it is starting to annoy me that developers view the numbers as "what we believe we deserve" vs "OMG, look how good we did!". Valve never bitched about what they got for HL 1.
Not games, but music and movies/TV shows (Top Gear for example, I have no other way to watch it except the cut down 2 year old episodes on BBC America). I have a link on my phone's homepage that goes to an MP3 search, I download my songs on the go. But I really should be paying for them, and perhaps I'll buy legal copies...someday.
In fact, I just stumbled across another valid reason to try downloading a game - compatibility. You could either go to the shops and spend £40 on a game which the spec sheets say you can run on your computer, but it turns out you can't and you end up giving it the three finger salute (CTRL+ALT_DEL). This means that having opened the plastic, you can't get a full refund on it, and the second hand market is full of DRM controversy, so you can't get a good price on it when you sell it off. Or you spend £200 on a new graphics card. Or you just download the torrent to see if it works on your PC. If so, you go and buy it. If not, then delete the bugger and be done with it. AFAIK, demo's won't be as strenuous on your system as the full game...
First of all this guy missed a very big point! Games are to ****ing exspensive, yeah he could sell 100K more copies for increased profit or... HE COULD SELL 1,000,000 MORE COPIES IF HE WOULD SLASH THE PRICE IN HALF!!! this is corporate whiny greed all over again. Why does Mcdonalds sell more with every passing year? Because they cut prices, it pretty simple buisness strategy. It's like if Bit-tech tried to subscribe me to their news, I wouldn't f'n read it or I'd find some otherway of getting it, god knows how many adds they've added. On that note, if you ever do those adds where you hover over words and little adverts pop up, I will never read this site again. With that in mind, I love this site! Anyways there's also DRM and tech support: Punkbuster and gamercomereade have ruined more than one game for me and EA wont even post a ****ing phone number on their website! I have to scroll through a useless faq before they'll let me send an email, of course I have to be a member to do this also. Then you get to Valve.. steam is great and all but they absolutely will not help people who've been hacked, they absolutely wont. It's happended to several friends of mine, and all of them have had to re-buy their boxed games, which they offered as proof of purchase, but no "**** them" valve says.
You won't believe what happend to us today - we're building PC's here and one of our customer returned to us PC with dead DVD drive - it couldn't read anything. This was however the second time and it's less than one month since we received it with dead DVD drive. Customer also included Assassin's Creed game disc(original, czech version) so I immediately checked what copy protection it's using - safedisc 4. Safedisc 4 is OK. I thought to myself "hell, there must be something else killing it. It's weird two brand new DVD drives dies within one month(samsung SH S223F)". After a brief check I noticed more game shortcuts on desktop, so I checked them one by one...'till I opened directory of game called "Dead to Rights" - "Frontend.dll". Starforce! Call me a pirate, starforce guys, but one more time our customer return us PC with dead drive, I'll warn him that it's starforce "copy protection" killing his dvd drive and avoid playing games which are using starforce copy protection. So we swapped dvd-drive again for free. However, this is not first time I encountered situation like this - friend gave to my brother a game called Boiling Point some time ago because he couldn't play it(weak PC). It's starforce protected game - I remember as my brother had to reboot his PC to finish installation of starforce copy protection software. After reboot it took hours and soon his dvd drive was absolutely unable to read anything - blank discs. At that time I blamed my brother for killing dvd drive. I think I shall apologize to my brother and point my finger at someone else... Poor dvd drives. May your lasers shine a heavenly light and your motors spin forever in heaven, we miss you...
That's quite alarming. I'm moving towards the same weird middle ground that most people seem to be in. I'm not very proud of piracy and feel there's something wrong with it, but I also loathe DRM and will pirate to avoid it.
I had a thought the other day. games are typically pirated by using some form of crack. Now its not hard for the developer to check torrent sites and see what the crack is. Here is my solution, and I know it would require a lot of work from developers and video card developers, and would not work 100% of the time. but anyway, Have the game developers send the crack information to the video card makers. when new drivers come out, and people update with them(maybe forced updating), have the drivers check the games for evidence of the crack. if the crack is found. the card sets on fire and kills the user. Ok maybe not the last part, but it could refuse to display, or force the minimum resolution to show while the game is running. again, it would be a lot of work for the people involved, and if someone doesn't update the video card drivers(again, maybe forced updating?) it wont work either. but its a better solution than drm as it would not hurt the people who pay for games. flame away if you dont like it.
Hey, I just wanted your opinion on this. Is it pirating and/or wrong if i legally rent I movie and then after watching it rip the iso to my computer. Some of the movies I burned I never watched again but I put some on my ipod. As for pirating games, I don't, I even went out and bought another copy of dawn of war after I lost the serial key. The only game i have pirated before was serious sam, lets be honest, there is no way I'm going to pay for that game, I'v only played it a few times. I just wanted your thoughts the whole movie thing. EDIT: i know the movie thing is pirating but i just wanted your thoughts on that.
That will not only stop be buying the DRM-encrusted games, but also the video cards. It also wouldn't work. See: HDCP.
I'm 95% sure that it is illlegal. the other 5% is because i'm tired. confused, what about hdcp? why would you stop buying video cards? no card, no games. unless you like freecell. its not like it would ever effect someone who legally buys games. what I hate now is that games are coming out with limited installs. I know that when you break it down, it should never have an effect on the average user. but it still bothers me. a simple check when the game starts for a known crack wouldn't take a measurable amount of time. It would only hurt the people who pirate games. And the reason I picked video drivers is because eventually, you have to update them. try going a year without updating your video drivers. sure you could pirate a game, not update, play for a while, then update. and then you cant play the older games. unless you are actually willing to go through the trouble of uninstalling your drivers, rolling back to an older version, and then playing the game again. only to have to update again to play newer games. It makes a lot of hassle for people who download games, but none for people who dont. and yes there would be other troubles, and maybe there are better ways to do it. but really I think its a sound idea. The basic idea here is to find something that people do, on a regular basis, and use it to combat piracy.
Chrisb2e9 - "cracked game" means that copy protection code has been removed from game executable. And most probably, there would always be a way to fake it so that drivers/software cannot recognize if it's original or cracked exe. There's better way to fight piracy than plaguing games with DRM, product activations or killing DVD drives. In fact, some of these protection methods encourages piracy or decreases sales. If only some publishers offered better prices. Only fanboys are buying their favourite games for high prices. After 3 months most of the fanboys have their game bought and finished while the rest is waiting for price to drop to reasonable level. And there are people who pirate the game but "legalize" it once the price has dropped. For example - I'm still waiting for EA to drop prices of Crysis in my country. 66$ is far too much for me to buy it(checked several sources, this is the lowest price). 25$ would be OK for me. On the other hand I wouldn't mind spending 75$ on special edition of Oblivion or Fallout 3, since these games are very big with plenty of replayability and different gamming experiences. Some publishers understand this - like CD Projekt. Some do not(or don't want) Or maybe developers should release alpha version of their game so that pirates enjoy plenty of BSoDs, crashes, problems...at least they would help to test it
