An idea to combat the piracy of PC games.
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I don?t thank fighting against the pirates at all is doing much good. The more you push the harder they push back. What might be a better method is to make actually purchasing the game more appealing. You know, actually reward the buyers instead of treating them like crap. The worst think companies have done is brought their customers right into the middle of it.
You know what happened recently? A DVD thanked me for buying it. Instead of that stupid, long, over dramatic crap of ?You wouldn?t steel a car!? it had been replaced by a quicker far more pleasant to witness ?Thanks for buying this and supporting the industry?. It was cheery, lightly, slightly humorous and not an absolute ***** to sit through for the 1000th time.
Positive re-enforcement.
If a DVD can make me feel appreciated for buying it I?m sure some companies could manage a similar thing with games.
You know what happened recently? A DVD thanked me for buying it. Instead of that stupid, long, over dramatic crap of ?You wouldn?t steel a car!? it had been replaced by a quicker far more pleasant to witness ?Thanks for buying this and supporting the industry?. It was cheery, lightly, slightly humorous and not an absolute ***** to sit through for the 1000th time.
Positive re-enforcement.
If a DVD can make me feel appreciated for buying it I?m sure some companies could manage a similar thing with games.
Part of the reason I love my copy of Mafia 2 is because it is in a metal case, I got some DLC, I have the orchestral score on a lovely LP style CD and an artwork book. I could have bought the ordinary game and got none of that but I paid the extra £20 or so for all of that. There has to be a good few pirates who are willing to buy a game for all that extra stuff. Combine the incentive idea with a few others that give people more reason to buy a game and then you'll see a drop in the number of pirated games. Although, I'm just preaching to the choir now.squid5580 said:
Instead of a bad torrent that fucks up their copy of the game, why not just give them a gimped version that doesn't reveal itself as such until you're done installing it? With a short message attached like "Ha ha, caught you. But seriously. No hard feelings. You have the game, but we're only gonna let you play it on the most difficult setting, and even if you beat it, you don't get to see the last cut-scene. Now here's a discount code. Here's a button to purchase the full game. Don't be a jerk."
I can see something like that getting a headline on the Escapist pretty easily.
Hell even WITHOUT gimping the game, I think the good-faith showing on the part of the publisher would win a lot of purchases that would otherwise have already committed themselves to finding a working torrent. You'd also have a lot of word going around to the effect of "Hey man, Bioware put out a torrent of Mass Effect (link) GO GO GO"
I can see something like that getting a headline on the Escapist pretty easily.
Hell even WITHOUT gimping the game, I think the good-faith showing on the part of the publisher would win a lot of purchases that would otherwise have already committed themselves to finding a working torrent. You'd also have a lot of word going around to the effect of "Hey man, Bioware put out a torrent of Mass Effect (link) GO GO GO"
That's a nice idea, actually. Take your cues from contemporary psychology instead of corporate paranoia.PurplePlatypus said:
Drip-feeding content also seems like a viable plan. With games bought on Steam and similar online platforms, you could even implement a system whereby essential content is added as the player progresses through the game. It would be more difficult to pirate those patches, especially if the integration process was highly convoluted. That would essentially reduce the game to a series of demos, upgraded online.
Say, three online updates over the course of a ten hour game, each giving access to a core mechanic needed to progress.
Of course, you'd still need to include all of the content with the hard copy of the game, seeing as some people don't have their gaming PCs rigged to the internet [I suppose..], but flooding the torrent sites with distractions would mean that quite a few physical copies of the game would need to be purchased in order have a predominantly legitimate source of cracked copies.
Right right. And it's also time that retail clothing stores said "How can we use shoplifters to our advantage? I know! When people wear clothes that they stole, other people will say 'By gum, them's nice clothes. Maybe I'll go pay full price for them!'"
Silly retail stores, putting up security cameras everywhere. Don't they know that shoplifting is the future?
Silly retail stores, putting up security cameras everywhere. Don't they know that shoplifting is the future?
Instead of trying to stop leaks,an impossible task,why not release fakes?Flood the torrent sites with fake releases.Sure,the most resilient pirates will get the game,but those unwilling to sift through pages of comments to find a link to a real upload will be stopped.All that for a half a day of putting trash code and silly pictures and "leaking it".
I edited your post because this is the only part I really know how to address.warprincenataku said:
Ubisoft learned the hard way that constant contact DRM is a terrible idea. It actually worked against them with Assassin's Creed 2, in more ways than one. Pirates had no problem faking the contact in under 24 hours without requiring an internet connection, real customers had no interest in maintaining the contact.
I'm pretty sure I remember them later announcing they'd never try that again because of how poorly it went.
What you are suggesting amounts to game publishers/developers DDoSing private websites from their offices. It's illegal and a plain bad idea to do from your workplace. If they're going to do it, a publisher would be paying a "security firm" to handle it at an undisclosed location and time.brandon237 said:
Well, start a company with a 100 guys that basicly only thumbs up and comments, also act like legit pirates, they can even say that the torrent is a fake and lead them to another torrent although the other is also a fake. It could make torrent sites become messy and loose new comers.TriggerHappyAngel said:
This.Emilin_Rose said:
We need to go back to the early days of interactive fiction when feelies where the norm. A cheap cloth map, like they did with one of the ultimas. Or the zorkmid in the Zork anthology.
Hell, even lowering the price a bit would curb both piracy and used game sales. In Japan, where I am, a new PS3 game runs damn near $90.
you could always PREVENT the leak in the first place (I,m not sure how these things get leaked but there should be a way too prevent them)