10 Ways to Fight Piracy

[Shamus Young]

10 Ways to Fight Piracy

If DRM isn't the solution to fighting piracy, what is? Shamus Young provides 10 (relatively) simple ways to fight the problem.

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[sirdanrhodes]

You know, these would work... But hey ho, no publisher is going to take any notice of you!*

*Don't take it personal, the industry is full of morons.

 

[arkwright]

remember those silly little plastic lenses from the 8 bit days. the ones you had to hold up to the screen and try and read a code through. stopped the game being pirated also stopped the games being played a lot of the time as you lost the little plastic thing lol.

 

[thatstheguy]

remember those silly little plastic lenses from the 8 bit days. the ones you had to hold up to the screen and try and read a code through. stopped the game being pirated also stopped the games being played a lot of the time as you lost the little plastic thing lol.

True, but with the advent of the Internet people are likely to get around that.

 

[arkwright]

True, but with the advent of the Internet people are likely to get around that.

yeah i suppose but the shear maddnes of the black plastic bendy thingy was enough to put the priates off.

i still think the code on the back of the manuel is the best option but as you say there are peeps out on the interweb who get round these sort of things.

 

[paketep]

+100. Ten nails in the head.

Shamus Young for EA president!. Down with Riccitiello!

 

[nomercyrules10]

I don't pay for any video games. Deal with it.

 

[hopeneverdies]

DRM is annoying if you want to play Audiosurf with songs off iTunes. You have to go out of your way to copy it to a CD just to get rid of DRM. Man if devs actually tried to do something productive about piracy we wouldn't need this discussion

 

[Doug]

+100. Ten nails in the head.

Shamus Young for EA president!. Down with Riccitiello!

Agreed!

 

[Doug]

DRM is annoying if you want to play Audiosurf with songs off iTunes. You have to go out of your way to copy it to a CD just to get rid of DRM. Man if devs actually tried to do something productive about piracy we wouldn't need this discussion

Buy off Amazon instead - better quality, no DRM, and same or less price

 

[Kross]

Great article as always. Point 8 reminded me of an article from AnandTech about grabbing the mid range market to great success: ATI versus Nvidia [http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3469]

 

[Nuke_em_05]

I don't pay for any video games. Deal with it.

If only everyone were of that attitude, then there would be no money to make games to pirate. Sadly, enough of the world still has a concience to pay for games, keeping the game developers afloat so the parasites can continue to leech off them. Regardless of how (or if) the developers spend their resources trying to stop it, it still takes time and money away from making better games, which costs both those who pay, and those who do not.

Sadly, pirates are unavoidable. You can deter some, and make some stop out of frustration, but some will simply refuse to pay, even if that means that they get nothing at all. Others will still continue to strive for a way around it, and distribute it.

Good suggestions though for lowering costs to greater effect. Sadly, the powers that be have hardened their hearts. Reason has fallen on deaf ears.

I know I sound pessimistic, but work for any body of American government for any amount of time (or any large organization for that matter), and you'll understand.

 

[Jiki]

I dislike how people tend to think that if you play games like Sins of a Solar Empire, you're automatically smarter than the guy who prefers to play Crysis. How about inserting taste in the calculation? Yeah, Sins is a far deeper game than Crysis and Crysis is a bad example of the fps genre since it's an empty shell of a game, but just preferring Crysis to Sins doesn't make the user dumber or place him/her lower on the social ladder, it just makes the user more friendly towards the fps genre than the 4X strategy genre. So it's a bit disheartening to see people dissing pirates for not liking Sins and taking a higher stance just due to it, while I, for example, both disliked Cyris AND Sins and I doubt I'm the only one. I would also buy the first Painkiller (a far better example of a stupid yet good game, another one prolly disliked by the gamers equivalent to mensa) over any of them any day.

Not that Shamus surely thinks so, it's just that this isn't the first place I've read stuff like that and so my paranoid-sense starts tingling.

 

[hamster mk 4]

Your proposals make a lot of sense to us gamers, however we are not the ones you need to convince. While I am sure some game developers are avid readers of the Escapist, you should be publishing this sort of stuff to Gamasutra http://gamasutra.com/ if you want to get the eyes of the industry upon you.

 

[zoozilla]

I definitely agree with all of your suggestions, as I almost always do.

However, can we have an article that doesn't have to do with piracy once in a while?

Please?

 

[Ralackk]

While I agree with most of the points you bring up, the seventh isn't completely correct. I'm sure some copys of games have indeed been leaked by reviewers or the like, but due to the fact physical retail copys are still sold a company can't stop those from being leaked. When they have hundreads of thousands if not more copys of games being shipped around the world at least days before release date it would be very hard I imagine to track down how a game was leaked.

 

[Epifols]

So I was liking this article until this

"Note that Crysis was a tech-heavy game that was notoriously hard to run and offered no demo. It was saddled with install-limit DRM. "

Uhh, what? Crysis DID have a demo, and no install limit. If this guy can't get basic facts like this straight, all of a sudden I'm skeptic of the other things he has said.

 

[nomercyrules10]

I volunteer at soup kitchens and donate to charity on a regular basis. I'd rather give my time and money to people who need it; I really don't care to support the developers. And besides, video games aren't that entertaining most of the time. If the developers didn't release any games I wouldn't be at a loss much. The best part about most games these days is the hype surrounding them.

 

[ROBO_LEADER]

So I was liking this article until this

"Note that Crysis was a tech-heavy game that was notoriously hard to run and offered no demo. It was saddled with install-limit DRM. "

Uhh, what? Crysis DID have a demo, and no install limit. If this guy can't get basic facts like this straight, all of a sudden I'm skeptic of the other things he has said.

Yeah, I noticed that too. Looking back, while point 9 and point 7 are good points, they don't fit together well, because together they say "Here's how you deal with this part of the problem, but that is in no way my point at all".

I remember at a thing about breaking into the games industy, sombody behind me asked Chris Taylor about how they planned to fight piracy. I was pretty surprised when he said that right before Supreme Commander's launch they filled torrent sites full of junk downloads. I got a few laughs out of that.