As long as you support such ideals then i shall support you. Understanding you costomers are people and not a number on a peace of papper is the fist step in the right direction in game makeing and marketing and you guys seem to understand that better then many other companies if not all of them. Thanks

It's a good point though. What if all piracy stopped overnight.

EA could market it's derivative over hyped rubbish, and everyone who tried the game and was disappointed would be a sale for them. That isn't going to help PC gaming.

While the smaller publishers would also benefit from more sales, they'd probably be hit hard by the customer dissatisfaction spreading from the big publishers.

Demo's are OK so long as they're representative of the whole, but I've seen a few that had far more work put into them than the rest of the game.

I'm also really getting sick of buying games that get good reviews, then never playing them beyond perhaps a run through of the single player. I bought Crysis, CoD4 and BF2142, and only played the last 2 online for a few days, mainly because they weren't as good as BF2 in my mind (as an aside if you want a good engaging strategy FPS game try playing BF2 coop at high difficulty levels, while severely outnumbered, on the same team as a bunch of people with military training. Makes RTS strategy look like child's play).

It's not doing the gaming industry any good to have people buy games they never play, or to have people not have access to finding the right game for them. If a little piracy lets people find games they enjoy, so they can go out and buy them, and then put more into that game's community than a game they wouldn't have enjoyed so much, it benefits the whole of PC gaming.

For the record I've bought both SoaSE and World of Goo through the recommendation of Rock Paper Shotgun, with no demo or experience of play, as I can trust indie games not to be misrepresented by reviewers (Gamespot/Eidos/Gerstman debacle), and word of mouth is more believable than advertising.

BF2 is a great strategic game, but has had little help from EA/DICE in supporting the community outside their own ranked servers, and it's plagued by griefers/exploiters/noobs in conquest. I play AIX mod coop, have made some modifications on top of that (Flight School), and am setting up a colo'd server to run it, seeing as my clan's server had to shut down. I found a game I liked a lot (bought 2 copies) and put something back in to the community.

Where's the edit button gone? Got posted too late, and BBcode doesn't work.

[edit] What's the deal??!!! I got an edit button on this one liner, but not a longer post that's more likely to need an edit. Either give an edit button on everything, or at least implement a preview.

What I'm trying to say is you get to test drive a car, people spend ages viewing houses to find the right one for them, but with games we have to go on reviews, screenshots and limited demos.

Hopefully digital distribution/online play regulated with serial numbers can help with this problem.

If you give away the full unlimited game, but with a time limit of so many hours played, and limit this demo to only playing online with other demo players (keeps things at a similar level for new players, and saves pissing off paying customers with an endless stream of noobs), then everyone gets a test drive, the people who like the game pay to keep playing, and those who don't haven't lost anything but a bit of time.

You could even download the game incrementally, so you get the game core and a few levels to start you off on the demo, and add the rest of the maps later. Would save having to download everything before you can check things out/let you cancel the rest if it doesn't appeal. Everything's already installed if you want the game, you only need to pay (and the option of doing that a few $ a month would also open up the market to people who really can't afford to blow $50 at once, one reason for piracy being some people just can't afford that much, and wouldn't buy the game if piracy wasn't an option).

There is also the model used by GameTap (and done better by Metaboli in he UK):

A monthly subscription to a catalog of games where you can download and play any number of games from a growing catalog at any time. There are still some kinks to iron out in the system the main ones being:

- there's usually a month or twos delay before a game comes online (but the occasional game hits the service before the shops)
- patches are similarly delayed
- you need to be online and connected to their system to play

But it's working well for me and the delays are caused by the publishers choice not the technical capabilities of the system.

I've only bought about 3 games outside this system (and two of those were Stardock) in about a year and a half since joining.

Why do people insist on comparing a ~$50 game purchase to a several tens-of-thousands or hundreds-of-thousands of dollars car or house purchase?

Do you get to 'test drive' a board game? A movie?

Aye, I "test drive" movies all the time by renting them. (and board games by loaning them from the local library) Unfortunately that's impossible to do with pc games, and most "demos" are stripped of all the interesting and unique features, or have only 20 minutes or so of game play, hardly enough to tell if it's any good or not.

Hence the reason why some people torrent them, to see if the games worth playing or not. If the games worth it, then ya, spending money to support it is only practical so more of them will get produced. If the games so bleed'n awful you can't imagine why anyone would use the game for more than a drink coaster, then it's a simple delete and no money wasted.

As far as a $50 game compared to a $30,000 car the principle is mostly the same. (Value for your money) If you already own the car (and the payments that come with it) and the house (and the mortgage that comes with that) then that extra $50 of luxury money in your purse you've decided to spend on a game is likely the only $50 in your purse for fun stuff for that week. (or month or longer, depending on your income and family size/ cost of living) So spending it on a game you'll continue to enjoy for the next 2 months (or longer in the case of Sins) is still important.

There's also the issue that spending money only on games you think are good will promote those ones. I go out and buy a game that turns out to be awful like Space Force Captains my money has still gone to support an awful game and promote further development of equally awful games something I don't really want; but it too late now to do much about it. Now if I torrent it first and play it, and find it makes a better form of torture than recreation, I can cheerfully delete it and funnel my money towards something far better. (Like Sins)

Really what companies should start doing is instead of offering up 1/2 functional demos of their games they should offer up the entire game for free (complete with the ability to patch it) like polarity13jp suggested.

@Silveressa - An excellent response. On a side note, I think game developers should do exactly the same as Adobe does and that is give you the full software to try for a limited time. They could maybe set it for 24 hours. Then even I would be forced to change my view on "tasting" titles.

Indeed, although 24 hours is a little slim given most of us can only play 2-3 hours on any a given day, and maybe 6 on a weekend if we're lucky. Perhaps 15 days would be more a reasonable time.

I think a lot of us are ignoring the possiblity that most people who pirate games do so with the intention of not having to buy the game in the future. Sure, test drives make a lot of sense ... except when you end up in a Mexican chop shop.

My rhetorical point earlier (don't get any ideas) was that if you think PC games are risky to buy, then don't buy them. Wait for someone you know to tell you if a game is good enough to buy. If you buy shitty games, EA makes more of them.

I know. I know. They are tricky. They put hott women with big camel toes on their websites. They tell you Micheal Jordan loves their product. They tell you everyone loves EA... They tell you victory is at hand for the un.. EA.

Don't be deceived! Stop being tricked and buying shitty games. They get in my face, and I get constipated.

You'll not stop the deliberate piracy - technological solutions just slow them down to a lesser or greater degree.

What concerns me more is the increase in what I think of as casual or ignorant piracy. People who don't realise that what they are doing is in any way wrong. It's stretching out from online music & video piracy and I see it in friends and family around me. It's just seen as "sharing stuff".

I do my bit (with varying levels of success) by trying to educate those around me.

Better education on the subject would help and I think the games industry needs to fight it by stealth - if you can make it just as easy to get a game legitimately as it is to download a pirated version then there will be no point in getting pirate versions. Downloadable demos and/or full versions which turn themselves into demos when shared. Maybe even shareware style nag screens - "thank you for playing, do you realise you haven't bought this yet..." with the game letting you fully activate it simply by visiting the web site and purchasing a license.

Or how about "recommend a friend" schemes - the friend gets a discount and you get points towards further purchases. That one could be open to abuse if your not careful.

@Silveressa - I agree with you given my work schedule. However I was considering the younger element of gaming with loads of free time and whom often beat a game within a week.

In general the "sharing" argument simple will not be resolved to the satisfaction of IPR advocates when people have always shared games with friends. The whole licensing argument simple holds no merit. After all gaming is a social activity is it not?

What companies have to do is focus on service and support for their products like SD/IC are doing in my opinion. Pushing the legal position with the big stick in hand only alienates customers. Show a little love, get a little love - reciprocity it is how the world works at a fundamental level.

Not quite what I meant by test driving, but I see what you're saying. What I meant was do you get to test drive a movie when it's first released to theaters? Or any number of other products.

I view renting the movie after it's released on DVD as the same as picking up the game in the bargain bin. By that time, you've had enough reviews and feedback from friends to know if it's worth picking up (or renting a movie) or not.



While I have no doubts some people actually do this, I'm willing to bet there's at least an order of magnitude more that 'intend' to buy it later if it's good... and don't. Many people feel no incentive to buy something they've just played for free.



Yes, but one person's awful is another's brilliant gem. So, in that case, you'd have played a game that others may want to see more of and you paid nothing to do so, and contributed nothing to the company they want to see continuing to make games.



And this falls under caveat emptor. Research before you purchase the game. I know everyone wants to be the first one to get that new game as soon as it hits the shelves, but I find it generally far wiser to wait a few days or a couple weeks before purchasing. That way I can get feedback from people and other sources I trust to see if it's something I may like.



I see nothing wrong with supporting a game company that makes products you like. I'm all for it in fact. But if you DL a company's game and play it and then decide you don't like it and it's not for you, what, exactly, have you done? You've played their game without paying for it. To me, that's like walking into the theater to see a movie, telling them you'll pay afterwards if you like it, then deciding you don't like it, and walking out.



Perhaps something like that would work for certain game types, but for the great number of players that prefer single player, how is there incentive to pay to keep playing (unless you're cut off before finishing the game)? I can imagine most would just shrug and move on to the next thing instead of paying to play through again if they've already completed it.

I have a question that no one seems to be asking, rentals. Game devs seem to love the consoles, but how many sales for consoles are real sales to your market? How many people actualy own those games? If everyone bought games, why is there such a booming business in renting games for consoles?

If game devs just want the sales (which it seems they do, damn the customer or not, someone bought it right?) why don't they allow rentals of PC software? Arrgh you say piracy, why now is it a bigger problem? Just because you can rent it they will copy it quicker? If that is the case why do they even sell movies and not just rent them? You have the movie in hand, why not copy it and not buy it?

Netflix seems to be making a big profit on rentals and I do not see that killing the sales of DVDs. Heck, Netflix sells the DVDs also (of course the producers get no additional money, but thats another story) If any developer wants a piece of the console pie maybe they should see rentals as the next vista, not lets screw the PC. Heck rent to everyone, PC console etc. For the console owners out there, how many games have you bought vs. how many have you rented?

Now if I am off base on the rental arguement why don't we see EA and the big guys making much smoke and noise about rentals? Renting would solve all the we need a demo issues and if you realy like the game you buy it (generating another sale since the store that rented it bought a copy and now so do you.)

True this means changes for the PC games that make them more console like - IE no keys to verify, codes to type, malware to install to play the game, etc. but it increases sales and that is the point that all these devs want right? They want more sales so lets try renting the stuff first.

PS - Now it may shock some, but if we went rental and the devs say lets make money with addons and such, hmm...thats a new revenue stream! Take a look at XBox live people it is happening already. True this means being nickled and dimed to death, but it seems to be working and people do it already, so come on game devs lets catch up on the new wave and try it out.

So I am a pirate, but not just because i dont like to pay for stuff, I learn off of what I can, i cant always afford what i need to learn. as for those who say "well your taking some one else stuff so how would you like it if some one stole ur car" I say to them if they learn how to build a car from stealing mine, GO FOR IT!!!!! but it better be better than my car or it is a waste. I pirate because one day I will be a big game producer and developer(my dram any way) and thanx to being able to get games and software easly I am able to learn a lot(If I could afford It I would buy everything, buth that would run me prolly a grand every month and i cant even afford $10) for those that say if you didnt but it dont use it, BITE ME! i diserve to play games as much as the next guy, because i am poor doesnt mean I shouldnt have the chance to live my dreams and blow stuff up(to tell you the truth i spend 25% of the time playing and the other 75% takening it apart and learnin g how its made) I have millions of ideas for games and my friend keeps telling me to go to scholl because I have the imagination, being poor sucks, currently i am trying to get a qa job with any gaming company to get my foot in the door and at least get my ideas heard, piracy is to blame for games like this being big, if it was not pirated the sales wouldnt be as high(common sense good game in pirates hands he will tell every one he knows about the game) and not every one is a pirate(plus a i know a lot of modders and map makers that are pirates who buy the games if they like just to mod them, doesnt any of this make sense?

Wrong. Playing games is not a 'right'. If you can't afford it, you shouldn't be playing it. This is exactly the kind of attitude that causes all the bloody problems in the first place. If you can't afford video games, then get a different hobby that you can afford. Or try to get a job to pay for your leisure activity of choice.



Your sense is far from common. I highly doubt piracy is the reason for any game being big.

I usually stay out of any form of arguement over opinion but...



Wait, wait, what is wrong with that exactly? by choice that is Exactly what I would do with movies, People who make bad movies or games (of which there are an awful lot) don't deserve my money, just having made something is not enough, it has to be good.



This is a silly point as well. Of course opinions will vary, but just because some people do like a game doesnt mean everybody who Doesn't like it should have to pay for the company to keep going.

Personally, my greatest annoyance with peoples objections to piracy is the bizarre assumption that any instance of piracy is equal to a lost sale, Which it just isn't. Just because I downloaded something doesnt mean that I would have bought it had I not been able to do so.

So you think you should get the benefit of that movie/game/entertainment first and then decide if it's worth paying for? I don't give a crap about potential lost sales. The fact of the matter is you played the game. Whether you liked it or not is immaterial, since you didn't pay for the right to play it in the first place. If you want to 'test' the game, then go to a friend's place and try it. Or try a demo. Or do some research and see if it looks like it's worth buying. I'm amazed at the rationalizations presented for pirating software.

How do you rationalise this suggestion exactly? whether I do as you suggest or download the game off a torrent I get the same experience, and either way I am playing the game without paying for it, surely then how I got to play the game is inconsequential?



This is just a pointless suggestion, especially as you have already made the point that what one person likes another will dislike, there is no way of knowing whether or not you will like a game without playing it yourself.



And I equally am amazed at your abhorrence of it, but I think the point in this thread that I realised we would never see eye to eye is when you said that piracy is morally the same as stealing.

First of all, I am sorry for any children you may or may have in the future. Every one should always have some kind of fun in there lives, you should not be able to block anothers enjoyment(not including mass murders and rapists and the sort).

If you want to block some ones freedom, then you are even worse than anything that bothers me. Freedom means you have a chance to do what you want when you want. Now I am not endorsing piracy on a whole, if you have the money pay for it, if it is not for educational purposes, buy it.

I did not say that video games are what made me happy, Its the process of learning and do something that few people do.

damn double post

Overthrow
When you need 4.............I will bring 40!!!!!!!

P.S. How would you like it if some one told you, YOU CANT DO WANT YOU LOVE ANY MORE!!!! how would you react?

My children are very happy. But thanks for the concern.

Sarcasm aside, you have every right to enjoy yourself, but it doesn't give you the right to pirate software. If you're engaged in an activity that's wrong or illegal, then yes, you should be blocked from that enjoyment.



Oh, please. I'm all for freedom, but that doesn't include trhe 'freedom' to pirate software, steal, hurt other people, etc.



Sorry, that still doesn't excuse piracy.

@Terraziel: yeah, we'll probably not come to an agreement. But hey, that's the way of things. No hard feelings here. Rock on.

Ok, so I thought freedom ment that you are allowed to do what you want, when you want. Hurting some one or doing something wrong, is all about morales. For those you that say that is anarchy, well its not. You still have a goverment helping you and protecting you.

"What you do when no one is looking is what sets you as a person"

Sorry I am an idealist and thats not for this subject. Thank you for the feed back Coelocanth(meaning)

So the thousands of years of human history before video games were invented were a bleak and joyless wasteland of unfunness? There are plenty of things you can do besides video games to have fun, if you can't afford to obtain them legitimately.

For the past 8-10 years I've pirated almost every game I've bought before I purchased it, excepting this one, actually. I didn't care if I hated the game or not, I would have purchased it simply to support stardock and its anti-DRM policy. I have, in fact, since purchased their object desktop suite and a few other things as well, though I'll probably never use them. There are several reasons for this:

#1 Demos are terrible. The last GOOD and ACCURATE(note, more important than good) demo I played was Warcraft. Yes, the original. They gave you 2 maps to play in skirmish mode and that was it. No units locked, everything worked exactly the same as it did in the regular game(except you couldn't play orcs, just humans IIRC) and it was beautiful. It was enough for me to judge the entire game on. Which is what a demo is supposed to do. I gather that the sins demo is about the same, but I haven't actually played it, so no comment on that.

#2 I don't have a gambling problem, so throwing $40+ bucks at a counter in a video game store and saying "Hit me" doesn't overly appeal to me.

#3 Review sites are complete garbage. In order to get even semi accurate reviews you've gotta wait at LEAST 3-4 months after the game comes out and then go slogging through the interwebs hunting down some customer reviews that consist of more than "omgthisgameroxors!!!11one!1" or "This game sux!!!!!! Never buy it!!!!!!!!!!!!!". Don't even get me started on most of the actual professional reviewers. I came to the conclusion long ago that for anything under a 9.0/10+ or equivalent rating, they are either completely retarded on most titles, or paid off. Somehow, as ea and microsoft games don't usually get bad reviews from these folks, I suspect its the latter. Now, to maintain some credibility the game usually actually has to be good to get above a 9.0 ish, so you can usually trust those somewhat, of course this doesn't tell you how the controls handle, what the interface is like(at best you get a screenshot), and generally, unless its EXTREME, tedium is left out all together(or, if they didn't get thier bonus' this year from company x, false tedium reports may be added, as of course, this is purely a matter of opinion). Now there are some reviewers out there that do a good job *most* of the time. But honestly, with the massive bag of reviewers that are out there now, seperating out those that actually played the game they are writing the review for from those who simply posted a pre-typed review that was handed to them by the game company that produced the game. Notice how I said "produced". Thats because there are actually a ton of developers out there that would actually want honest reviews. Not all of them do of course, but there are a lot more than most would think.

#4 Crippling DRM. I always try out several different cracks, wait a few weeks, see if there are any updated cracks, then try those. 99% of the time, if the game fucks up while its cracked, it hasn't got a PRAYER of working right when the DRM is actually running. Point in case, I bought a copy of SW: Kotor and SW: Kotor 2. Neither of them work properly without being cracked with my sony dvd drive. I still thought the developers deserved the money however, so I bought them anyways. They were awesome games, if a tad buggy, but nothing game-breaking, except for the DRM(I think it was SecuRom, specifically). Titan quest I wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole attached to somebody elses computer. I heard about the crashing, and even knew the real reason for it, the DRM. But also heard about all the issues that LEGIT players were having with the DRM. A friend of mine had the game(he actually only recently told me about this, it came up in conversation) bought it, all out legit. Hes one of those guys thats afraid to pick up a cd in a store because they might think hes shoplifting(ok, that might be a bit of an exageration, but you get the point). So he starts playing the game, and boom, it crashes suddenly. No error messages, just crashes. He loads it up again, same thing, crashes. He does everything he can think of to check out his PC to see if theres anything wrong(check drivers, defrag, updates, etc) and when he runs out of options, he goes forum hunting. He finds out that its because of the DRM, and that he should contact tech support. He does this, emails them his product code, cd-key, the works, at one point he even sent them a scanned copy of his receipt. They tell him hes a pirate, and refuse to do anything about it. Repeatedly. For his effort, and his $50 he got a good-looking paperweight. Because, you know, there couldn't ever possibly be anything WRONG with game-breaking DRM. Then theres the rootkits etc, well, thats all just ridiculous. Too ridiculous to think it could ever happen, yet it did, and still does. So, thanks to Titan quest, this same friend, who could very easily have been a pirate before any of this, now does the exact same thing I do. As other people have said in this thread many times already, when the hackers pirating your games are producing a better quality product than you are, something is SERIOUSLY wrong, and you need to review some procedures and make some changes.

#5 There are very few publishers I can trust to release a quality game, and even there, its not limited to the publisher specifically, but more so to the game title series. The last thing I bought before sins without testing it was NWN2: MotB. The only real publisher that I can trust to realase at least a decent game is squaresoft, but sadly they don't make anything for the PC. As a result, I usually buy consoles a generation behind, so that I'm certain whatever games I want have a ton of feedback floating around by this point, as with consoles thats the only thing you have to go on. The only exception to this was my modbox, for obvious reasons.

#6 Major, MAJOR bugs on release. Crap just keeps getting shoved out the door before its finished. There are a lot of games these days that are released, that I wouldn't even call past the alpha testing stage. I'm sorry, but deadlines are not the most important thing in the world, but they do seem to be treated as such. If the game isn't done, delay it. I don't care if I have to wait a few extra months so that the game actually, you know, WORKS. These, a lot of times, are actually caused by DRM. Mostly because the dev team made the game, tested it, said it was ready, and then went "oh shit, the DRM". Which then screws everything up. For the rest of my rant on DRM see #4.


And I'm spent. A lot of this is echoed sentiment already posted, but I felt the need to add my 2 cents worth anyways.

To those of you that are actually supporting this DRM garbage I say: How would you like it if you bought a universal remote control, programmed it, then went to change a channel, and because it though you were not the actual owner, it whapped a blade out and slit your wrist. I figure that this more "price equalized" example may shut up some of the idiots spouting "you can't compare a video game to a car!!! omgwtf!!!". If thats still not enough for you, track down a legitimate copy of titan quest, and a pioneer dvd drive, try getting it to work. Now go have fun with that while you find your only recourse is to crack the game and remove the DRM, which is going to be rather difficult, since you have to find a crack that will also disable the crash DRM, which is a bit harder to find. Don't forget to wear your tin foil hat while your doing it and yell at the top of your lungs "The damned aliens is comin to take us all. We needs more security to stop them durned aliens." While your at it, throw in a few comments about how iraq has WMDs. They're just as legitimate as all the other over-used and abused rhetoric you are spouting.