Pirates ruining it for the rest of us.

[Olivia Faraday]

I don't understand how you can't follow that logic. DRM and movement to developing on consoles is a reaction to piracy not the other way around.

I'll try and explain this but I'm out if this one doesn't land.

Let's pretend the test is totally fair and the student is actually just a dishonest, lazy little sonofabitch who wanted to take the easy way out. The teacher punishing the entire class for the one student's mistake does NOT make that student the enemy of his class, because the class in no way deserves to be punished for the actions of that one student. The teacher punishing the class makes them a bad authority figure. It makes them petty, selfish, and cruel. The other students in that class did nothing at all wrong. The teacher is trying to use fear as a weapon, to scare the rest of the class to never cheat. Using fear as a weapon is basically the lowest tactic in existence. These students shouldn't be turning on their fellow. They should be turning on the teacher, clambouring that this was wrong. What the cheater did was against the rules, but what the teacher did was WRONG.

And it's also just going to encourage more cheating. Half of that class will become cowed and side with the teacher and ostracize the cheater, but the other half will get angry at what was done to them and just keep cheating. They'll invent new and exciting ways to cheat even if they could ace the test on their own just to fight what was done. As the teacher finds new ways to punish his class, his class gets harder and harder to pass, and more and more people find they have to cheat to make it by. This could have all been avoided if the damn teacher had just handled shit like an adult.

What the teacher should have done was tried to find who cheated, try to find why they cheated. Punish the student if necessary and henceforth try to make changes to their class if there was a simple reason why they cheated. Maybe offer extra help, or stop talking on their cell phone while they're supposed to be teaching and then shooting out bursts of information anyway and putting it on the test.

The student ruined nothing for anyone. The teacher is the one who ruined everything, because he's a petty, angry jerkoff, and anyone who sides with the teacher is playing right into his hands. The student didn't intend to hurt anybody. The teacher did. So we're going to side against the student? Really?

The simple fact is this: piracy has been around forever. Forever. I'm pretty sure scribes were secretly copying extraneous copies of books and selling them at market back before the damn printing press was invented. There are a million reasons to pirate things, some of them bad, some of them good. It's never killed any industry. Ever. And these people getting outrageously angry about it are people who aren't suffering from losing a bit of cash. They're corporate sharks who are already rich enough to buy Pluto and pay off NASA to reinstate it as a planet. When they punish the class for one student's mistake, the proper response is not to feel sorry for them and try to do whatever you can not to piss them off. The proper response is to slash their tires and fill their car with whipped cream.

 

[German Borbon]

well the answer for everybody is easy, YOU CAN´T STOP PIRACY theres always a site that will have pirated games and you just can´t finsh them all bcause there are millions of them. the only thing that could end it (and is a big COULD) is the SOPA and that will end this site, every social network or entretainment site, so the solution is worst than the ill

 

[Irridium]

-Snip-

-Snip-

I will repeat...

If people didn't pirate the games, then developers wouldn't feel the need to try to protect their product. PARADOX.

Also, the developer and even the publisher has little say in whether or not a game gets DRM. Shareholders demand that their investment is protected. Which leads to DRM.

Blame the pirates, not the developers.

Don't blame the developers for something that's out of their hands.

I'm not blaming the developers, i'm blaming the greedy fuckers, namely the publishers. Who doesn't see a customer, but who sees us as an enemy who must be dealt with. Gabe Newell recently wrote about this and in short said "if you provide your customers with good service and reasonable prices, then piracy will become a non-issue".

This is fucking brilliant, so why doesn't every publisher go this route instead and make a huge load of more money. well, because they have the same intelligence as a fucking brick. simple as that.

Now, go die in a fire Bobby Kotick!

Again, while the publishers do develop the DRM, they have to make it secure enough that the shareholders say 'Okay'. If it's inadequate, then they have to go back and make it stricter.

Such is one of the flaws of an open market.

I know this. That doesn't mean I should just accept it when they treat me like a criminal after I already proved I'm not a pirate by buying their game.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

Yes nothing like a fake red haring to hurt a money overflowing industry.....

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

the student is actually just a dishonest, lazy little sonofabitch who wanted to take the easy way out.

I'm not at all backing up the actions of the teacher but the argument still stands that if it wasn't for pirates we all wouldn't be punished. Would we.

You can't use the piracy has been around forever excuse because developers are extremely more canny that they were in the 80's more sales are lost to downloads than to floppy disks and eventually they will say right we are losing too much money lets just abandon the PC.

Sorry to burst your righteous bubble but it's pirates we have to blame for this whole situation no one else.

Murder has been around since the dawn of time too, doesn't mean we just let people get on with it.

 

[Athinira]

I guess my discussion value is that 'Do you think gamers should take a bigger responsibility in looking after the integrity of their platform and shunning those that do pirate.'

No, for the simple reason that pirates aren't the problem, despite the games industry continuing to believe so.

Note that I'm not saying that piracy aren't reducing sales and hurting the industry. It definitely is, it just happens to be that it's not even remotely close to the level the industry would like everyone to believe.

Here is what is truly hurting the industry:
1) Lack of a sense of reality
2) Bad business practices (often as a result of the point above)
3) Bad budget and price management (again as a result of point 1)

Since you brought up Ubisoft, i would like to point out that many other video game companies does a lot better on the PC market than Ubisoft does. Ubisoft not considering the PC market worth it is their entire own fault, for the simple reason that they fail to grasp the concept of customer loyalty, creating 'value' and are instead trying their best to impose shitty DRM's on games. In fact, Ubisoft themselves are just a prime example of how not to increase your sales, and it's not because of piracy, it's because of their business practices.

You see, the ultimate problem is that the industry is coming from the point of view that every customer is rich, but would just rather spend the money on other things and pirate digital stuff instead, which is incorrect. In fact, neutral research shows that pirates typically purchase more digital entertainment than non-pirates. Most pirates also purchase a lot of content, but the fact of the matter is that disposable income is limited.

If we, from say one day to another, could entirely remove piracy on games, would this increase game sales? Definitely. But at the same time this would also hurt music and movie sales, because the increased game sales have to draw money from somewhere. The consumer (pirate or non-pirate) isn't an infinite well of money, and fact of the matter is that even without piracy, the consumer is very unlikely to draw money from other real-life activities to purchase more digital content even if they couldn't pirate. So in short, you might prevent piracy, but you would not increase sales, so no problems (including Ubisofts stupidity) would be solved.

You want to know what the real problem is? It's a simple supply and demand problem. The entertainment industry are spitting out increasing amounts of movies, music and games who all has increasing budgets (just watch the trailers to most recent games, those alone are almost as expensive to make as a video game itself was 15 years ago), but we as consumers aren't getting more money, and since prices aren't dropping we can't afford to purchase it all, and as a result the industry obviously has a hard time selling enough (with the exception of some of the really big players with successful franchises like Skyrim, Battlefield and CoD), which makes it hard to break even.

The solution? Make less entertainment so the supply drops to the level of the demand, or make more entertainment on a lower budget (aka. use less money, but try to make the most of it, like some games like Sins of a Solar Empire and Indie-games do). For the consumer, this is a sucky solution since it gives us less choice in games and less big-ass AAAAAAAA titles. But at the end of the day, it's the only solution, because piracy still isn't the issue. The industry created the money hole themselves by increasing expenses, but since the supply of money remains constant, the increasing expenses is of course catching up to most companies who can't compete with the hottest titles.

.

Edit: I also wanted to point out, that when i said earlier that consumers are unlikely to draw money from real life activities to more digital entertainment, this only applies are a constant price level. Things like SALES (Steam Sales etc.) can actually make consumers draw more money from their real life to their entertainment budget in order to get as much out of the money as possible. Valve has proven that to us surely enough.

 

[manic_depressive13]

People like to have things for free. If I could get people to stop doing something just because I personally thought it was morally reprehensible no one would be eating meat. Suck it up.

 

[Sir Thomas Sean Connery]

Two things.

1) Yelling at pirates is pointless. They really don't care what anyone says to them.

2) I don't know about you, but I feel a sense of fellowship with ALL other gamers, thieves or not. I simply refuse to turn in a fellow gamer on the charge of piracy.

 

[Therumancer]

"You can't beat 'Free'.

Also, pirates obviously think the game is worth something, otherwise they wouldn't have pirated the game in the first place. By taking the time to download the game and using the space on their computer, they've shown a greater than zero interest and would obviously be willing to pay something."


What if they simply can't afford to buy the games? Being a gamer is expensive,regardless of platform. Why should the poor be excluded? Libraries exist, and music can be listened to and recorded from the radio. Why should games be the only media free from being copied and freely distributed?

Hmmm not sure if the quoting is messed up here or not since this seems a bit contridictory.

One thing to understand about pirates is that a lot of them do it for the fun of it as much as anything, cracking the copy protection and getting a game to run being the fun as opposed to playing the game itself. A lot of things I've read from crackers talking covertly show that a lot of them aren't even all that into playing video games.

The user doesn't have zero interest, but there is a definate differance between being willing to try something for free, and dropping $60 on it. It's sort of like how if you put a jar of free pens on a counter with your corperate logo on them everyone will take one, but if you put those same pens up there for even a quarter apiece a lot less people will take them.

As far as availibility goes, I'll probably regret saying this someday given my situation, but I think it's important to understand that games are an entertainment product and not something people are entitled to.

It's also important to note that libraries and such operate largely on donations, being given a lot of those books by the publishers in exchange for tax write offs and such. Other books are purchused, but library copies oftentimes cost a LOT more than buying a book at a store would because of the terms of use they are getting for it (ie to lend it out). You'll also notice that library copies of a lot of books tend to be a lot nicer than the ones you buy, even when I was a kid I noticed that the library had their "Choose Your Own Adventure" books in hardcover as opposed to the softcover versions you saw at book stores.

Radio stations are largely advertising power houses, meant to circulate the song to encourage people to buy it. They also make money by selling advertisements which... depending on the situation, might also wind up with royalties going towards music labels as well as the station.

Right now video game producers have yet to decide to donate their works to libraries, and attempt to support free games with advertising have been a very mixed bag. After all it's one thing to hear a song, an ad or five, and then another song, and quite another to have your game stop to spam you with an ad. The guys paying for those ads want them to be seen/absorbed. Someone driving along is unlikely to switch their radio station just to avoid a few ads and thus hears them, but with a video game someone who has to stop to absorb the ads is going to decide "this sucks" as it disrupts the flow of the game and the whole type of entertainment and decide not to go with it. Tasteful ads worked into the backround are easily avoided, and don't usually wind up seeing their messages absorbed the same way and as such few companies are going to want to pay for those.

I might not like it, or agree with it but I understand it.

I do think the gaming industry has gotten too greedy and needs a kick in the teeth, of course how to deliver that is debatable. One of the reasons why I was kind of cheering for Lulzsec and their PS-3 antics is because while inconveinent to gamers, they did manage to give a very deserving company some well deserved lumps. Ideally I'd prefer other viable methods to make themselves known.

Oh and by the way, poor people are not totally excluded for gaming, just from new gaming. If you look around you'll find plenty of abandonware sites that provide old games with expired liscences for free, not to mention sites like Good Old Games that sell old games at a very low price. Sure, you might not be able to play the most current games with all the bells and whistles, but you CAN play a lot of decent games for less than a jewelbox title costs at Wal*Mart or entirely for free.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

snip

So what you are basically saying is that you are clearly entitled to every game that comes out and it's the industries fault for making you pay for it.

Yeah that sounds right...

What I would agree with is that games companies take a hard look at their pricing policies. It's only been recently that every game costs pretty much the same.

We really shouldn't be getting charged the same amount of money for shovel ware and Skyrim for example.

I agree with that much.

 

[Maleval]

This whole thread stinks of #firstworldproblems. I live in Ukraine. If you want a new game you either buy it online, pirate it or buy it from a dude at the "book market" (It's this place we have in Kyiv, a huge area of you standard market stands filled with books and a third of it, if not more, is legit looking stands with CD's/DVD's. That cost the equivalent of 5 dollars in our local currency. For, say, MW3 or some shit. Totally legit [/sarcasm]).

Buying a game online (say Steam or any other online distributor, ignoring amazing -75% Steam sales, they are obviously out of the norm) costs you a third of your monthly salary. Or if you are a student with a budget place in a university your whole monthly stipend. And that's ignoring the fact that not a lot of people have a bank account to use in online transactions.

That leaves pirating if you have some basic common sense or paying 5 bucks for the same pirated game if you are stupid enough to not be able to torrent.

And then there's other post soviet states with low income per capita. And all this "Well, we should just shut down pirate bay before those filthy pirate ruin everything, hurr durr" will just not give people the chance to experience gaming at all. Remember kids, if someone pirates doesn't mean they won't buy it later.

 

[Vardermir]

Wasn't there recently an article on this very site talking about how Gabe Newell said piracy is a total non-issue for Valve? Surely, if a company like Valve can be outrageously successful in a market where they have to compete against the price of free, other developers can as well. As far as I know, Valve only uses Steam as their DRM, and Steam is so convenient it doesn't even feel like DRM. Big game publishers just need to stop making Call of Battleassassin 83, and make some genuinly interesting and exciting games. And also never count past two. Just like Valve.

 

[mike1921]

Even if pirates wouldn't have bought the games to begin with, that doesn't matter.

What, ofcourse it matters, it is the only thing that actually makes a difference in the real world. I don't buy a game and the developers don't get money, I pirate a game and the developers don't get money

And what do you say about me having skyrim on xbox (sister wants to play, computer can't run it) and pirating it for the PC so I could get UI mods? I did buy it and give them my money, does them getting money not matter?

 

[DarkRyter]

Then that just becomes unfair to the people who did pay. Why should they be forced to pay when some other guy can just go "oh I'm poor boohoohoo" and then be "morally justified" in downloading it for free?

Other people pirating isn't a good justification(nothing is, besides special situations, like living in a country that doesn't have the game) to pirate.

Yeah, it's unfair, but what more can you really do about it than complain and buy the game anyway because it's the right thing to do.*

*Okay, objectively, there is no right thing to do, but from the perspective of an individual who wants a game developer to do well, this is preferred course of action.

 

[Stainlesssteele4]

I'm sure the mods will get me for this one, but I've held my tongue in several other threads about piracy.

First of all, hundreds of thousands of people who pirate a game end up liking it, and subsequently purchase it. It happens a lot, weather you believe it or not. In fact, all of the big name torrent uploaders advise purchasing a game you like.

Despite the fact that demos exist, very few developers release them anymore, mainly from the fear of lost sales, because people will blindly purchase a game if there are no reviews or demos, but if they play a demo for a game they thought they wanted, and it turns out bad, they won't buy it. I pirate games all the time, yes, but I have purchased more than half of them, and the other half were crap, and I didn't play more than a half an hour of them. Lots of pirates are like this!

As for the Witcher 2, there is no way that the game was pirated 4.5 million times. These numbers are speculation, as there is NO way to tell how many times a game has been downloaded. They probably took their projected sales number, and subtracted the actual number and said "There, we should have sold 6.5 million, but we sold 2, so... they MUST have pirated it 4.5 million times".

If a game does bad, it's not the pirates' fault, it because the game was bad or marketed poorly. Piracy occurs, yes, but it's a small pocket of people, and not a large enough group to actually damage sales.

 

[Olivia Faraday]

snip

So what you are basically saying is that you are clearly entitled to every game that comes out and it's the industries fault for making you pay for it.

Yeah that sounds right...

Well, look at the bright side. At least he didn't try and equate piracy with murder.

 

[Athinira]

snip

So what you are basically saying is that you are clearly entitled to every game that comes out and it's the industries fault for making you pay for it.

Yeah that sounds right...

Where exactly did i say that? I feel like i need to get you a space rocket, that's how far the point went over your head.

What I'm saying is that piracy isn't the cause of the money problems in the industry.

The problem is caused by an exploding supply, but not an exploding demand.

It's economics 101. We live in a age where more games are made than ever, and the budget of those games are also more expensive than ever (read: the industry is spending more money than ever making games). But since we as consumers aren't getting more money between our hands, especially not with the economic crisis on hands, what do you honestly believe the result is going to be? That's right: Profits are dropping, and it is ENTIRELY unrelated to piracy.

 

[Projo]

Internet: "THEY'RE TRYING TO TAKE AWAY OUR RIIIIIIIIGHTS."

Let's pretend I order a PPV movie. I invite some friends over to watch it. Am I now a felon? If I purchase a PPV, am I only allowed to watch it by myself, in a soundproof room with the windows covered?

If I buy a movie that was recently released, and I want to enjoy it with friends, or watch it a second time, should every viewer/viewing be expected to pay?

So... how is streaming any different? If I decide "hey, I bought Airplane!, I should watch it with a bro!" but my bro is 1,000 miles away, how is us watching it together on a stream any different than if he was on my couch eating my fucking pizza and hitting on my girl? Either way, he's watching it without paying. If we watch it together, physically, the distributers still didn't get that sale.

Also, developers need to start making playable demos again.

 

[Marcus Kehoe]

I think pirating should a sign to companies to improve their products, but pirates need to stop pirating these games day one. Pirates should at least wait a month after the game releases, and if they can't wait then buy it.
Pirates are wrong in their own country, but a lot of times the only way that I can play foreign games is to pirate it.
And even then their never mainstream games and is given the opportunity I buy the game.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

snip

So what you are basically saying is that you are clearly entitled to every game that comes out and it's the industries fault for making you pay for it.

Yeah that sounds right...

Well, look at the bright side. At least he didn't try and equate piracy with murder.

That's not what I did at all I equated it with a crime that has been going on since the dawn of time. You are twisting my words.