How would you go about fighting/reducing File shearing/piracy

[darth.pixie]

StarCraft 2 is a great example - you buy, you get online. If you pirate, you don't.

Sorry to spoil it, but you can still crack the multiplayer. It's way harder and sometimes even impossible (Starcraft 2 is indeed a good example: there are no dedicated servers, the central server (blizzard one) finds an opponent so with a crack it won't and you can't play) but there are single player games with which multiplayer makes no sense.

Also, the free DLC can be distributed, though if any company would do that, pirating would be a real jerk move.

 

[squid5580]

1. Make a kick ass game with no drms, codes or any real protection. plug and play

2. put out demo of said kick ass game before launch day

3. include some physical object that cannot be pirated with every new copy (figurine, art book, some sort of swag). No DLC or anything like that

4. Profit

 

[Zipa]

Better protection for it. There was a game (forgot which, it's on the tip of my tongue) that was only cracked about 2~3 years after being launched.

Better prices and better quality for those who only want to see if the game is good, before buying. Having good and long demos.

Edit: Spliter cell: chaos theory with starforce protection, Bioshock with securom pa 7, riddick: dark athena (tages + solid shield) were all very hard to crack. I think a better protection than that could be done. And then pirates wouldn't have a choice.

Dear god no. Starforge is renowned for epically screwing up PCs.

 

[darth.pixie]

Dear god no. Starforge is renowned for epically screwing up PCs.

Hence the PC working better with a crack. It's the installing driver that just hijacks everything. I cracked my own bought game for this reason. In fact, I think the only reason I still buy games is because there are companies that I want to support and because I like having them physically, on a shelf.

 

[Zipa]

Dear god no. Starforge is renowned for epically screwing up PCs.

Hence the PC working better with a crack. It's the installing driver that just hijacks everything. I cracked my own bought game for this reason. In fact, I think the only reason I still buy games is because there are companies that I want to support and because I like having them physically, on a shelf.

Its also why a lot of people gravitate towards steam or piracy. If buying a genuine copy of a game is too much hassle and screws your computer people are going to pirate and crack games because no way are they going to put up with the kind of shit that starforce does. And rightly so.

 

[Thaluikhain]

One way would be making ginormously huge games that take forever to download.

Alternatively, more indie games...many pirates don't mind sticking to the man or whatever, but would feel sympathy for smaller people.

Or, forget the problem together and make money another way. If, say, instead of Duke Nukem Forever, they made Avoid the Noid Forever, in which the Noid has kidnapped "stolen" hawt pizza delivery women playthings, then its in Dominos best interest if as many people play it as possible, regardless of whether they paid for it.

[small]Avoid the Noid being an advertisement in the form of a computer game from the 80's[/small]

 

[TheXRatedDodo]

1. Make a kick ass game with no drms, codes or any real protection. plug and play

2. put out demo of said kick ass game before launch day

3. include some physical object that cannot be pirated with every new copy (figurine, art book, some sort of swag). No DLC or anything like that

4. Profit

Quoting this for absolute, ultimate truth.
The main problem in my eyes is too many shitty games, not enough demos.
I can list on one hand the number of franchises I'm still interested and invested in at this console generation. N64, PS1 and PS2 days? Too many to ever possibly list.

Demon's Souls (and any spiritual sequels,) Assassin's Creed and Half-Life/Portal (if Half-Life 2 could be called "current gen" which it isn't really, so you could almost count that as one less.)
There's stuff that showed real promise to me such as Guitar Hero and Mass Effect, but Guitar Hero got ran into the ground out of sheer, unrelenting fucking greed and Mass Effect got turned into chest high walls 2: the GODDAMN SEQUEL in aid of making the 13 year olds want to buy it. Stop insulting my intelligence, you fucks. I was enjoying the conversation system with our without your fucking chest high walls.

Even Assassin's Creed (which had a nice break in between the first two installments which said to me: WE ARE WORKING HARD AT MAKING THE SEQUEL GENUINELY BETTER, and it was,) has resorted to the A SEQUEL A YEAR tactic. Brotherhood was rushed, sloppy and buggy, if not still hugely entertaining in that ever so compelling flying squirrel in a past life kind of way. So yeah, I bought it, which does nothing in my favour (not voting with my wallet, etc) but once you get invested in a series' characters, setting, mechanics, at what point does skipping a big chunk of the story just for your own petty sense of revolution become a good idea?

But still, imagine all the games I *WOULD* play if they weren't all uniformly BROWN and about chest high walls. The amount of games that have done chest high walls well are few and far between and Gears of War was not one of them. (Incidentally Rainbow Six: Vegas is the one chest high wall game that manages to get me unequivocally moist.)

And as far as the try before you buy thing goes, I think Torrents are becoming a necessary evil as far as gaming goes. We get fuck all demos, even of the supposedly triple a games. So, if you want to see if you're going to get your money's worth (when you usually aren't in this day and age) you have to torrent the game and play for a few hours.
I may have only done this twice, but mainstream gaming's made me too goddamn jaded to continue the process. Why would I do it now? To see if Spore didn't suck a fat one? Of course it did, it's Will fucking Wright. (Don't take this too seriously, I am wearing my self-aware cynical irony hat this afternoon.)
But thanks to Torrents, I got saved from the unrelenting mediocrity of Brothers in Arms: Road to Gay Pornography and mournful trumpet wails and Quake 4.

I just think Devs all know they've got something to hide now. No creativity, no new ideas, no new mechanics, no nothing. Just pure regurgitation.
I am primarily an FPS and platform gamer. Assassin's Creed scratches the platform itch and Bioshock (the first one, not that disgusting cashgrab Bioshock 2 which I refuse to touch even with a mile long bit of stick,) proved that there was still incredible new atmospheres and stories to explore within any genre, not just the FPS one.
I had an idea for a first person surrealist'em-up set in an abandoned city whose morals and ethics came about from a fundamental belief and worship of numerology, sacred geometry and ordered chaos. The idea was that the game was mostly about exploration and environmental storytelling with sections where it fundamentally tries to fuck with your senses and perception in various ways that I hadn't quite figured out yet.
It's not HARD to come up with a new idea.

Until better games start being made more often (and until 3d collect-a-thon platforming triumphantly returns I'm looking at you Banjo Kazooie) the system that's in full swing now will perpetuate and quite possibly (meaning: definitely) get worse.