Which is the bigger problem? Piracy or DRM?

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veloper

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SenseOfTumour said:
Soraryuu said:
I think the fact that the 1 cent indie bundle got pirated tells us part of the problem is just making it easier to pay for things, I can't believe people pirated that because they wanted to save one cent, but because they didn't want to register, and then go thru card details, authentication etc. I didn't get around to getting it, but I know if I'd pirated a charity thing, I'd at least pop a £5 note into a charity collection box next time I was out.
Good point. You have to fill in alot of forms with info about yourself just to play SC2 for example.
 

Om Nom Nom

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Sonic Doctor said:
Good luck with that.

I'd like to note, though, that doing what you describe is highly illegal (and unconstitutional if you're American - I can't say what else it would be elsewhere).
 

aaron552

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I don't have an issue with all DRM; just DRM that actually makes it significantly harder for me to play a game I have paid for.

DRM I have no problem with:
Disc-check.
CD-Key for online play or content.

What's not OK:
Requiring an internet connection for a single-player game. Examples of games I have played that do this: Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed 2, Bioshock.
Multiple keys for one game. Examples: Neverwinter Nights Platinum (3 keys required for installation; insanity), Mass Effect (Bring Down the Sky DLC has a separate key and activation limit to the actual game)
Installing drivers/software without permission that can't be uninstalled by conventional means, eg. Any game with Securom, Starforce or Tages

Unfortunately, publishers are including the latter to increasing degrees and less of the former. Mass Effect is one of my favorite games ever and its DRM's install limits is always something I worry about whenever I reinstall it.

Whether or not piracy is as "bad" or not, DRM affects me, a legitimate customer, in a far more tangible way than piracy. To me, DRM is far worse.
 

electric method

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You don't have to go very far to see why DRM exsists. You can see it in almost any retail store. For e.g. The electronic anti-theft tags on retail items and the scanners at enterances to stores to alert the store staff of theft. Most people do not complain about those measures. What they do complain about is the higher prices for merchandise. Which begs the questions of; "why are the prices higher?" and "why are all of these security measures in place.

The answer to the above question is this: If a retailer has to take steps to prevent theft, we the consumer see higher prices on their merchandise. If a retailer continually loses money/product to theft, we see higher prices and increased security. It's simple economics. Further, they do have to recoup the cost of installing all of the anti-theft devices. Is it annoying to consumers? Yes. Is it annoying to the retailer. Yes.

The same applies for game developers and publishers. They spend inconceivable amounts of money to produce and market a game, only to have it pirated. Make no mistake, just because no physical object was stolen doesn't mean a theft occured. The pirate willingly and knowingly took product from a company with no intention of paying for said product. That pretty much is the classic definition of theft.

TL/DR: Piracy is theft. A company has not only the right to be paid for their product but the obligation to ensure it isn't stolen.
 

Soraryuu

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Sonic Doctor said:
Soraryuu said:
Piracy of games can be stopped, it is just that some people against piracy aren't willing to stoop so low to do what is needed to be done.

As I said before in this thread, but now with great detail here, we first find a way to discover all hackers/distributors of the illegal copies, the people that hacked the game to put it on the Net in the first place.

We work with anti-virus companies to create a virus that can't be killed or quarantined by any anti-virus. Then when we pinpoint the hacker, send the virus to his computer. It wipes the hacker's computer, not just erasing the files, but also destroying the computer hardware. How many times is a hacker going to be willing to buy a whole new computer and keep on doing what he or she is doing?

We then have to preform strategic regulation of torrent sites, they will be closely monitored. The only files that can be shared back and forth are those that are collections of things that have always been free to the public. If it is something that will cause a company to lose money, if it is a pirated game, it will be terminated, as well as the computer that uploaded it. It will be a smart system, which means it will kill the file as it is being uploaded, so that nobody gets to download it in the first place.

Edit: Also, the virus can't spread to other computers, it goes to the offender's computer, kills the computer and dies in the process.
Hm... I guess it could work, but I don't really like the idea. I'm not opposed to it(or maybe I am), but I'll have to think it through.
 

aaron552

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Sonic Doctor said:
We work with anti-virus companies to create a virus that can't be killed or quarantined by any anti-virus. Then when we pinpoint the hacker, send the virus to his computer. It wipes the hacker's computer, not just erasing the files, but also destroying the computer hardware. How many times is a hacker going to be willing to buy a whole new computer and keep on doing what he or she is doing?
If the "hacker" is running any recent OS, the former will be less destructive than you believe, and the latter is impossible without hardware that is specifically designed to be able to be remotely destroyed, or with very hardware-specific code that requires you to know exactly what hardware he has. And again, with any recent OS, that is made significantly harder. Not to mention that most crackers probably use virtual machines to crack software, primarily because that makes it easier to crack, but also mitigates both forms of attack.

In addition, if you started doing this, the "hackers" would wise up pretty fast and start taking precautions against these "viruses". An antivirus isn't the only way to avoid getting malware, you know.

We then have to preform strategic regulation of torrent sites, they will be closely monitored. The only files that can be shared back and forth are those that are collections of things that have always been free to the public. If it is something that will cause a company to lose money, if it is a pirated game, it will be terminated, as well as the computer that uploaded it. It will be a smart system, which means it will kill the file as it is being uploaded, so that nobody gets to download it in the first place.
Good luck achieving that. You'd need to basically reduce the Internet to a monitored service where only the US government owns servers and no one else is allowed to have open listening ports. This would also, incidentally, entirely kill online gaming.

Edit: Also, the virus can't spread to other computers, it goes to the offender's computer, kills the computer and dies in the process.
At which point it ceases to be a virus. It's more generic malware.
 

electric method

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I can see about 100 reasons why the above mentioned idea would never work. Most of it deals with burden of proof. It would be difficult to prove a person actually did what they were accused of. And, the liability issues the company(s) would set themselves up for would be massive. I mean we're talking lawsuits that could potentially destroy a company.
 

Boxytheboxed

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WhiteTigerShiro said:
If they can't pay the price, doesn't matter what content is in the game, tough. They will just have to go without. Gaming is a privilege, not a right.

The game that the publisher made, is their property, they sell it to people for them to use. If a person can't afford to pay full price, there are other legal ways to get it like rental(concerning console piracy), with PC, the person will just have to do without. That is life.
I can't help but get a sort of... "self-entitled" vibe from those two paragraphs, almost as-if they're the exact kind of thing that Prince John would decree to justify his unfair taxes. But really think about it; doesn't it strike you as odd that publishers don't even lower their prices after a set time? They would rather have people pirate a game and make no sale than to lower the price and make a sale at a reduced price. Mind you that they've already broken the profit margin on the game by this point, so it isn't as-if they stand to lose money by underselling, that copy along the manual and jewel case only costs about 25 cents, after-all. Mull that over a little; rather than lowering the price after some set time period, they would seemingly rather someone who can't afford $60 just pirate the game instead. Despite being a business, they claim that $0 is better than $30 or $20.
Just because someone can't pay for something, doesn't mean they can just steal it. BMW could probably make more profits if they just lowered the price of their cars, but they dont want to. It's the companies choice where o set the price, and you not liking their price isn't a reason for you to steal it. Sure it's odd, but its their choice.

WhiteTigerShiro said:
If we find a way to stop piracy, than there will be no need for DRM. It doesn't matter what is brought to the table, piracy is what created the DRM problem.
No, publishers are what created the DRM problem. Publishers were fighting pirates for YEARS without having to drag customers into the fray. Piracy may have made DRM necessary, but publishers took DRM too far.
Yeah, they did, but again that is no reason to pirate. You shouldn't blame them for creating something bad when it was piracy's fault it was there. The piracy problem ws too big for traditional methods, and publishers saw DRM as their only option. If people had always bought games legaly, there wouldn't be a need for DRM. People continuing to pirate games in the face of harsher DRM just encourages publishers to use more DRM protection.
 

vehystrix

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How does pirating older games fit in to all of this? I mean no retail store has it in stock anymore, except for 2nd hand, so the publisher doesn't loose any money. Hell, the publishers of some of these games don't even exist anymore. Is it ok to pirate these games then?

Also, what about games that have clearly made break-even for the publisher already? After a year or 2, a publisher doesn't expect the game to sell anymore I'd think. And yet the price of these games stays at it's original value for much longer then it's worth. Would you say CoD4 now is still worth ?60? I'd say it's more around ?15-20 nowdays. I'd rather pay ?15 for it then pirate it, but alas, it's ?60 or pirate, hence I pirated it.

Note that I'm not very fond of digital distribution, but I do realise that games are cheaper there, and still available after a long time. I don't however like the fact that once the distribution service goes dow, you loose ownership of the game.
 

Nalgas D. Lemur

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TomLikesGuitar said:
That's like saying, "What's the bigger problem, terrorism, or random airport searches?"
I can honestly say that, at least in the US and in my opinion, random airport searches (along with other similar security theater crap) are a much bigger problem. In the past ten years, a few thousand people have been directly affected by terrorism. "Becoming dead" is a pretty big side effect, and the effects caused by that ripple outward from that somewhat to other people, but overall it's not really a huge number of people.

Searching people at the airport (and frisking fondling groping them, and banning completely absurd mundane objects that couldn't be a credible threat in any practical way, and taking "nude" x-ray images of them, and harassing or even detaining people arbitrarily, and...) affects everyone who flies, though, which is a substantial portion of the population. I'd be surprised if fewer than half the people in the country have flown and had to deal with all that crap in the past ten years, and people who travel frequently have had to waste hours of their lives, if not days (cumulatively), having their privacy and other rights violated for negligible security benefit, if any...because almost none of it actually has any effect on "terrorists", only on innocent people trying to get from one place to another.

(Anyone who wants a more detailed explanation of how all those things have not only failed but often can't even possibly work in theory can look at what Bruce Schneier [http://www.schneier.com/] has written about it, because he says it better than I could.)

Similarly, while piracy is generally a bad thing and causes legitimate and sometimes serious problems, many of the approaches used in an attempt to stop it are worse, in my opinion, because they're rarely effective at actually stopping anything (and frequently are cracked before the games are even released), and usually the only people they get in the way of or prevent from playing the games are the ones who bought legitimate copies.

There are some games out there that I've heard are awesome that I'll probably never find out about firsthand, because I'm not willing to put up with stuff like SecuROM or GFWL anymore, not to mention some of the other crap they've been pulling lately. Doesn't seem to do much to stop other people from being able to trivially download a cracked copy, though...

I'm all in favor of buying games, and over the past few decades I've accumulated a collection of a few hundred of them. Make something good, and I'm happy to pay for it. Include anti-customer software with it (which is what a lot of DRM ends up being, instead of anti-piracy, although I'll tolerate something like Steam, because it's minimally invasive and offers several genuine benefits to me), and you've just lost yourself a sale, though. There are so many other good games out there I could spend my money on instead, along with all the ones I already own and could replay, that I refuse to let them treat me like that.
 

furiouspol

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Piracy is theft. Make no doubt about it. Video games are a form of intellectual property and purchasing these games from anyone other than publisher or authorized vendor is illegal.

Whats interesting about video games and software in general is that the companies have decided that these games are still their property after consumers have purchased them. Copy-protect is fine, but constant disc checks and forced online play are terrible. Why did companies like Activision-Blizzard remove the ability to spawn from Starcraft 2? Because people were getting free access to the game, even if it was only with a small group of friends for a limited time. DRM is not designed to stop piracy, maybe slow its progress, but it is really designed to prevent customers who legally purchase these products from sharing their copy with others and forcing more people to buy the game.

I am not pro-piracy, as gamers we must support studios who release good products by purchasing them and giving the studio money for the quality work that they put in. But DRM is not the answer and neither is stripping games of great functions that brought our community together in our favorite pastime.

"According to a 2007 study performed by the Business Software Alliance and IDC, the
AdChoices global rate of piracy is almost 60% (1). In developed countries, the rate runs as low as around 20%. In other countries, a staggering 90% or more of software is pirated."

Quoted from http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/2392168/a_history_of_software_piracy_and_video.html?cat=15

Edit: As the poster above pointed out, file-sharing is still technically legal, if only because there's really no way to go after everyone who does it.
 

veloper

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vehystrix said:
How does pirating older games fit in to all of this? I mean no retail store has it in stock anymore, except for 2nd hand, so the publisher doesn't loose any money. Hell, the publishers of some of these games don't even exist anymore. Is it ok to pirate these games then?
Sure go ahead.

Note that I'm not very fond of digital distribution, but I do realise that games are cheaper there, and still available after a long time. I don't however like the fact that once the distribution service goes dow, you loose ownership of the game.
Steam is very unlikely to go belly up anytime soon given how they are taking over the market, but games that require DRM activation through some maker's website are 100% certain to stop working given time. Game companies don't last.
 

furiouspol

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Sonic Doctor said:
Soraryuu said:
Piracy of games can be stopped, it is just that some people against piracy aren't willing to stoop so low to do what is needed to be done.

As I said before in this thread, but now with great detail here, we first find a way to discover all hackers/distributors of the illegal copies, the people that hacked the game to put it on the Net in the first place.

We work with anti-virus companies to create a virus that can't be killed or quarantined by any anti-virus. Then when we pinpoint the hacker, send the virus to his computer. It wipes the hacker's computer, not just erasing the files, but also destroying the computer hardware. How many times is a hacker going to be willing to buy a whole new computer and keep on doing what he or she is doing?

We then have to preform strategic regulation of torrent sites, they will be closely monitored. The only files that can be shared back and forth are those that are collections of things that have always been free to the public. If it is something that will cause a company to lose money, if it is a pirated game, it will be terminated, as well as the computer that uploaded it. It will be a smart system, which means it will kill the file as it is being uploaded, so that nobody gets to download it in the first place.

Edit: Also, the virus can't spread to other computers, it goes to the offender's computer, kills the computer and dies in the process.
Wow... just WOW

What you're talking about is an Orwellian state I cant even imagine. I guess the ends justify the means?
 

The Night Shade

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DRM is worst because it punishes the people that pay for the games

Also

Piracy isn't too bad,sometimes is the only option that you have to play a game
 

Sonic Doctor

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Jan 9, 2010
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furiouspol said:
Wow... just WOW

What you're talking about is an Orwellian state I cant even imagine. I guess the ends justify the means?
Actually it wouldn't be. It would be Orwellian if what being stopped was part of a person's rights. People have no right to hack and copy games to give other people for free.
 

Sonic Doctor

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The Night Shade said:
DRM is worst because it punishes the people that pay for the games

Also

Piracy isn't too bad,sometimes is the only option that you have to play a game
Piracy is never an option.
 

Stillve

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You know, to me it all comes down to this: How many people pirate games?
In comparison, how many folks have to deal with intrusive DRM, that while they've bought their game legitimately, screens their computers like malware would?

The question was which is worse, and DRM obviously takes the cake.

Soraryuu said:
A few notes to future pro-DRM fighters...
(...)
SenseOfTumour said:
(...) If sales went down, ok, maybe the piracy is a genuine problem. I think most of us are in agreement that a paid for original purchase should never be worse than a pirated copy.
WhiteTigerShiro said:
You make it sound as-if you have a personal stake in this battle; let me tell you something, you don't. Nor do I. The simple fact that we're even having this discussion means that the publishers took things too far.
And the medals for well thought out posts go to...
 

babinro

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I would say piracy is far worse. I cannot name a single person I know who owns a computer and the internet and doesn't steal either music, games, tv shows, or movies.

Piracy is out of control and completely unjustified...much more needs to be done about it.

DRM may well inconvenience some honest people...but this is an extremely small group compared to those who steal. The effort put forth to show that piracy is wrong is what matters. Even though these efforts are often negated mere weeks after being implemented. Companies should not simply give up and declare that they are fine with constant theft.