By Kieron Gillen on August 27th, 2008 at 12:02 pm.
Browsing Quarter-to-three, I discover that Tom “Tom Bramwell” Bramwell’s interview with John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead has caused a little internet drama, picked up by 1UP. To paraphrase, Hollenshead argued that PC manufacturers secretly like that there’s piracy on the PCs, as it’s something which makes people buy PCs. After all, unlike console manufacturers, they don’t make any more profit if people actually buy games or not.
Which left Jim and I a little bewildered on a couple of points.
The first one is… well, yeah. Thinking back to school, when people were buying Amigas there was a knowledge that one of the advantages of the format was that while it may cost more, owning one meant your money on games went further. You bought what you could and pirated the rest. This is an obvious boon to the consumer. Equally clearly, since PC manufacturers aren’t stupid, they’re aware of the reasons people buy a gaming PC, so they’re aware of this. If you did a cold analysis of the numbers, I suspect the optimum level of profit for PC manufacturers would be one where there was just enough piracy to still count as an attractive thing, but insufficient to make the market unsustainable.
The second one is… well, why? As in, why are you saying this, Mr Hollenshead? For example: “I think that if you went in and could see what’s going on in their minds, though they may never say that stuff and I’m not saying there’s some conspiracy or something like that – but I think the thing is they realise that trading content, copyrighted or not, is an expected benefit of owning a computer.” If he’s aware of the fact they’d never actually say it, why is he? How does it profit him to state something that’s clearly true when all that stating that truth will do is get on the PC manufacturers back? As Jim puts it, what does he actually want them to do? “Please Download Responsibly” stickers on every new PC? About the only answer which makes sense is that as a long-term PC developer he’s just being really pissed off – which, to be fair, I suspect happens to almost every PC-developer given time.
27/08/2008 at 12:07 Chris Evans says:
Yeah it confused me, confused me so much I just filed it under my ‘ignore, crazy devs talking shit after smoking too much skunk again’ category.
I just made that category up =[
27/08/2008 at 12:11 Tarn says:
I suspect he wants anti-piracy measures to be implemented at the hardware level, rather than just at the software level. That’s the only conclusion that can really be drawn from what he’s saying.
Which, I have to say, is a rather terrifying thought.
27/08/2008 at 12:14 subedii says:
Well I for one wholly support a complete lock down of the PC format. Who needs things like community mappers and modders, right id?
27/08/2008 at 12:19 Stefan says:
Surely nobody would buy hardware with built in anti-piracy measures though… Or would they? Will PC hardware become as standardised and unmodifiable as that used in Macs?
27/08/2008 at 12:24 subedii says:
I sincerely hope not.
Granted I would like to see some standardisation of the format, but making PC’s all uniform monoliths would pretty much defeat the point of having one. The PC is shaped by the user and what they want to put it to work as. If I want to turn a work Mac into a gaming Mac I’d be better off buying a new machine (and even then, Mac’s capable of gaming are poorly priced).
27/08/2008 at 12:26 Rook says:
I think the rather obvious reason is probably because the level of piracy is pushing past the point at which PC gaming is sustainable and developers are the first to see this.
27/08/2008 at 12:27 phuzz says:
I think perhaps ‘crazy devs talking shit after smoking too much’ should become a new tag…
Isn’t the technology there with TPM modules in PCs to lock particular copy of a game to a particular motherboard already? Of course that would have two problems, it would break for some people and the pirates would find a way to bypass it as well.
27/08/2008 at 12:34 James G says:
One of the main reasons I’m a PC gamer is due to the lack of content control, and I don’t have a single pirated game in my collection. Anti-piracy methods at the hardware level would risk cutting into some of this, and would certainly disrupt legally dodgy but morally okay practices such as NO-CD cracks. It is absence of this PC freedom on the consoles which feels so restrictive to me, and means that I am one of the few saps who brought an R4 card for my DS solely with the intention of running home-brew.
27/08/2008 at 12:34 EyeMessiah says:
Some American think-tanks have discussed the possibility of getting a requirement for hardware level anti-piracy (and other dmca type stuff) written into the law that regulates hardware manufacturers.
Now that is scary!
27/08/2008 at 12:35 Max Cairnduff says:
Rook,
I’d suggest that’s because developers insist on putting in anti-piracy measures so draconian that legitimate purchasers actually receive a worse experience than pirates.
Stardock treat their customers with respect, and sell like hotcakes. The chaps behind Bioshock by contrast had a system where as a purchaser (which I am) I receive a flawed version of the game compared to that obtained by a pirate.
Fundamentally, you can’t combat piracy by giving legitimate users an inferior version of your game to that the pirates have access to. I think some developers need to take that on board. There are games I haven’t bought because the legitimate versions of them contained anti-piracy protections I was unhappy to have on my computer (I didn’t pirate them though, I just played other games).
And that’s not even getting into the question of whether pirated versions represent actual lost sales.
27/08/2008 at 12:39 Turin Turambar says:
Well nothing new. He could have said that the sky is blue.
One of the reasons people (read: normal people, not geeks) buy computers is the piracy: free movies, tv, music, games, etc. If piracy was impossible, the sales of hardware wouldn’t be as strong. Therefore, hardware makes are secretly happy of piracy, it helps to “foment” the pc. At least in the short run, let’s see in the long run…
27/08/2008 at 12:42 Sam says:
I still think it’s terribly ironic that this is the CEO of id software – the company that made its first millions by selling things on a shareware model – complaining about the lack of hardware-level piracy restriction.
Because, as we all know, everyone pays the requested price for shareware…
27/08/2008 at 12:46 James says:
And the Piracy comment thread bomb is incoming in 3…. 2…. 1….
27/08/2008 at 12:49 Al3xand3r says:
@Sam:
Eh, surely they only made their profits from the people who did pay though. Also, since when does shareware mean unprotected? If anything, shareware has built in DRM, since it requires a purchase to unlock the full thing, otherwise it’s basically a demo. Surely you don’t think he’s suggesting to make DRM that locks out demos, trials, and all sorts of such offers? He’s not. Of course, shareware gets pirated as much as anything else but that’s irrelevant really.
27/08/2008 at 12:49 subedii says:
“Incoming”? It’s already here, surely.
27/08/2008 at 12:51 James says:
Indeed. It arrived as I was typing, which is oddly fitting.
27/08/2008 at 12:53 PetitPiteux says:
>”Short of some industry wide agreement, which seems unlikely, I don’t see it happening”
What if the market was monopolized by one unique OS which could kind of dictate its law? Hardware is nothing without proper software…
But I think hardware lost when power went IBM->microsoft, and software is loosing now that it goes microsoft->google. So perhaps the true threat is something around network neutrality?
27/08/2008 at 12:54 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
Well, it’s been said before. You can’t pirate a graphics card.
But hardware DRM… yeesh. Wish there were more Stardocks in the world.
The only thing keeping me going in my bit of not-pirating-things is this: Pride. Pride in being a legit customer. There’s no strictly pragmatic reason for me not to pirate. Piracy saves money, and in most cases the user has a more convenient play experience. In some infamous cases, pirated materials are safer than the legitimate product. (We all remember Starforce.)
The only thing keeping my string of legit purchases going is Pride. Devs and publishers shouldn’t take that and turn it into shame.
27/08/2008 at 12:57 araczynski says:
anti-piracy on the hardware level? please, it doesn’t work for the consoles, where there’s a single spec per console, and it sure as heck won’t work on the pc where it can be a free for all sometimes in terms of functionality specs.
the only thing that has so far more or less worked on the console is PS3′s use of blueray discs for gaming. the sheer size of the images, price of burners, and the price of the media all but make it a waste of time pirating anything from the ps3.
granted that will only work for so long, anyway, what are we talking about? or yeah, pc makers liking software piracy… i guess that means about as much as car manufacturers liking gas thieves because they get to sell them a car to steal gas for?
kinda remotely related i suppose, and just about as meaninful of a correlation.
27/08/2008 at 13:00 Max Cairnduff says:
PetitPiteux, we’re already in that world with Windows aren’t we?
Network neutrality, interesting, how would that become a threat?
If the US made it a matter of Federal law that PCs sold in the US had to have anti-piracy measures built in, that would do it, but it would also herald a move to post-PC computing as I suspect any such measures would have a wide range of other adverse side effects on legitimate software developments. We’d soon move on to some other computing paradigm.
Hey, that’s the first time I’ve got to use paradigm in a proper sentence in years, what a lovely site this is.
Dorian, Starforce, I was trying to remember that name when I was making my point above. Precisely, malware sold to legitimate purchasers, absurd.
27/08/2008 at 13:01 Sucram says:
Trusted Computing, Piracy!, Dongles, secret plots to sell hardware. Where’s my spade? I need to build my shelter quick.
On the other hand, maybe Hollenshead just said it because he thought it was a bit odd that people don’t say it, so he kinda wanted to pop the idea out of his cranium. No secret plots to make developers bribe hardware companies and system builders.
27/08/2008 at 13:05 cliffski says:
Pirates don’t always get a superior copy. If you get a cracked copy of my last game, it crashes during the election apparently. All the pirates whine at me for making buggy crappy software, but a few who admit to having tried the pirated version and then bought it say the bug isn’t in the full copy.
Some Russian kid hex editing a game without source code is not the most stable way to modify a game.
27/08/2008 at 13:10 nakke says:
I actually read the title as “PC game makers like piracy. Secretly”, which I thought was pretty interesting. I wouldn’t really think that’s true either, except maybe for some games.
Now it’s just somebody rambling the same thing yet again.
27/08/2008 at 13:11 Max Cairnduff says:
I can’t think of any possible justification for pirating a Positech game in any event, so I’m glad to hear those who do get crap versions. Kudos and Rock Legend were both pretty cheap as I recall, and neither had any nasty DRM on them or anything of that sort that I noticed.
Must download the Democracy 2 demo now I come to think of it.
27/08/2008 at 13:11 Sam says:
@Al3xand3r: Well, sort of. The shareware model always admitted, implictly, that the owner couldn’t be compelled to pay money for the product, especially in the 80s and early 90s when copy-protection for shareware games was close to nonexistent. Doom, and to a lesser extent Quake, both made lots of money by being easily distributed in their shareware form, with additional content being the reward for paying money to id. As the additional content had no protection at all, presumably loads of people got “free Doom” – and yet id made tons of money out of those that did pay.
This is to the extent that I’ve seen Doom used as an example of how relatively unrestricted copying can be beneficial to your business model – which is why I found it ironic that Mr Hollenshead seemed to be so aggressive on the issue.
@Max Cairnduff:
Windows isn’t a total monopoly, as evidenced by the rapidly growing popularity of OSX in the mainstream (as well as the persistent popularity of Linuxish OSs in the geekier side of things), though.
27/08/2008 at 13:11 SpielerZwei says:
I don´t get the point in Hollensheads arguementation:
What does it matter for the games-industry if his theory is true? Pointless bullshit!
In my eyes, there´s a more interesting (and believable!) conspiracy-theory involving the games-industry and hardware manufactors: Programmers of pc-games do bad engine-programming on purpose, so that the hardware manufactors can sell new hardware to the pc-gamers every now and then. Look at the consoles. There you have a fixed hardware-setting and the games are getting better and better over the lifespan of the hardware, cause the developers are constantly trying to get more and more out of the given hardware. On the pc you have to buy a new graphics-card every 1-2 years and a new cpu every 3-4 years to play contemporary games. The programmers do not optimize their engines to match the common hardware. Instead you have to buy new hardware to run the sub-optimized engines…
And if you keep in mind that there is an Nvidia- or ATI-Logo on the intro of nearly every shooter game, this theory is nearly proven.
(sorry for my bad english, folks. i´m german.)
27/08/2008 at 13:16 Sam says:
SpielerZwei: Unfortunately, your conspiracy theory is harmed somewhat by the reports of the Wine developers on their conversations earlier this year with nVidia (and ATI, I think)’s Windows driver developers. Apparently, they’re a little sick of having to devote about half their drivers to workarounds for terrible coding in computer games… (and they were reportedly amazed that Wine worked so well with so many games, as the Linux drivers don’t have any of those workarounds in them).
27/08/2008 at 13:18 Rii says:
“Why are you saying this, Mr Hollenshead?”
Because the interviewer asked: “What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?”
Hollenshead correctly noted that this is the wrong question to ask, that a more fundamental issue exists. It doesn’t matter what hardware manufacturers could do because it’s not in their interests to do anything. Question asked, and answered.
27/08/2008 at 13:20 Kieron Gillen says:
It’s more why answer the question in that way. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.
KG
27/08/2008 at 13:21 Rook says:
I think Stardock actually makes money because they spend less on their games and target a wide variety of machine specs, rather than them being super fantastic sellers, or that their anti-drm stance really resonantes with gamers. I’m sure their games get pirated a lot as well. Whilst I’m sure they sell well, they just don’t hit the million units that other big budget triple A games need to move to make money.
27/08/2008 at 13:23 giovanni says:
It’s a bit like saying that music piracy boosts iPod sales. But iPods also help legal music downloads. But people don’t think that Apple is evil (well yes, for other reasons). At the end of the day hardware makers aren’t really responsible for how people use their products. Ask any firearms maker.
27/08/2008 at 13:27 slang says:
Wow, what a secret he discovered;-)
Took him quite a while though. After all, piracy was always a major factor in hardware sales…pretty much since the beginning of the 8-bit stoneage. I don’t think the Commodore 64 would have ever sold so well if it wasn’t for the ability to copy software easily.
What’s next Mr Hollenshead? Arms dealers profiting off wars and criminals? Oh, wait a minute…that wouldn’t go down so well with America, right;-)
27/08/2008 at 13:28 Tom says:
I noticed Asus has started shipping MoBo’s with TPM’s now – ESPECIALLY the enthusiast models… funny that.
Wouldn’t be in the least bit surprised if the next gen of consoles come with them as well.
Personally I don’t think it’s a bad thing. (I’m crazy like that).
A non intrusive, hardware based implementation. If your game can’t decrypt itself because you’re using a dodge version nout will happen, simply as that.
( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Platform_Module )
27/08/2008 at 13:29 MetalCircus says:
I hope and pray for the day when people stop referring to one another as the “consumer.”
We are people for fuck sake.
27/08/2008 at 13:32 Max Cairnduff says:
The historical parallel to draw would be with video recorders and tape to tape decks in the 80s.
There basically were no legitimate uses to either, people used them for taping stuff off the telly and for copying tapes they’d bought (often into mix tapes).
The point on Stardock by the way isn’t that an anti-drm stance in itself shifts units, I doubt that very much, the point is you can be a commercial success without going down the hardcore drm route that Bioshock and others pursued. The Stardock games succeed on their merits, what’s interesting is that the lack of drm does not prevent that success.
Interesting point on the sales numbers for profit though, still, that being said I don’t see the Bioshock solution as ultimately a good one for the industry.
27/08/2008 at 13:34 Rii says:
“It’s more why answer the question in that way. It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.”
I don’t see a better way of answering the question asked, though. What’s the alternative? A meaningless answer (“hardware manufacturers could implement X technology…”) to a meaningless question? Dismissing the question outright with no reason given?
27/08/2008 at 13:38 cullnean says:
who really cares? oh yeah thats right pirates!
I as a lawful pc gaming type dont care about anti-piracy features as they dont effect me.
27/08/2008 at 13:43 subedii says:
I as a lawful pc gaming type DO care about anti-piracy features as time and again they’ve inconvenienced me in ways that the pirates NEVER are, and have on more than one occasion wrecked my PC requiring a complete re-format (Helllooooooo Starforce). All whilst devs refuse to listen to reason when I tell them that their DRM does not work and has hindered me in trying to use their product.
27/08/2008 at 13:44 Max Cairnduff says:
I think subedii it’s best taken as a piece of clever satire, which in fairness it may well be.
27/08/2008 at 13:44 bluesh says:
I don’t know why he’s complaining, anyway. I imagine vast numbers of people bought a PC for teh mp3z, and don’t really pirate games because they’re a lot slower to download and more complicated to get working. More potential customers for him.
Actually, these days PC ownership is practically 100%, even among people who’d never imagine you can download software for free. So, how could it expand a market that would be totally saturated anyway?
27/08/2008 at 13:47 Dorian Cornelius Jasper says:
@Cliffski: Ah, that’s actually pretty funny. Especially since it sounds like you didn’t intentionally code it that way.
First time I’ve heard of pirates accidentally duplicating the effects of an anti-piracy crash “bug” by their own negligence.
27/08/2008 at 13:49 Sam says:
Tom: I’m still not clear on how TPMs solve the piracy “problem”, though. Okay, your TPM lets you register “your copy” to a particular hardware/software configuration, but that only lends itself to the most hated version of DRM (the one that stops you from installing your software on more than one machine). In addition, it is clearly vulnerable to OS-level attacks using modified TPM drivers that dummy the requests to some other (presumably software) service – presumably, pirates are not incapable of doing such a thing.
27/08/2008 at 14:19 Downloads_Plz says:
@cullnean
The problem is that many developers try to combat piracy in ways that end up impacting legitimate consumers in a negative way, resulting in the pirated version of the game actually being better or easier to use than the legitimate version.
Granted I suppose if you never investigate the other side of the fence you’ll never know whether the grass is greener or not.
27/08/2008 at 14:31 Subject 706 says:
I suppose the point of the TPM chip is not to be 100% priate proof, since nothing is. But I’m willing to bet that it will make it massively more difficult for casual pirates, since it moves the protection from the software level to the hardware level, i.e. you’ll need to physically alter your motherboard to play cracked games.
If it doesn’t inconvenience the user, why not be happy about it? It could be the end of annoying shit like SecuROM.
27/08/2008 at 14:31 Paul Moloney says:
Why does this article have a picture of Fabio at the top?
P.
27/08/2008 at 14:34 m. says:
@Downloads_Plz
Nod I heartily concur, and today I felt the cold sting of the DRM barrier to the mirth of a legitimate purchase when I cracked open my freshly delivered copy of Anno 1701 after a bit of a personal bout of nostalgia starting with Settlers 2 Anniversary. Unsigned DRM drivers + Vista 64bit = bad times for poor little Anno. It looks as though I’ll have to crack (presuming there is such a wonderous thing) the game I paid for with my hard-earned cash to play it. Woe, woe betides!
Having said this, I wouldn’t have considered piracy as an alternative had I known this in advance, I’d have just ensured that I installed aforementioned on my XP partition instead. That said, I shouldn’t have to hop OSs courtesy of any combination of oppressive measures to prevent me from doing things that I want to do.
AND ANOTHER THING! etc…
m.
27/08/2008 at 14:37 Azradesh says:
@ Rook: I have bought two Stardock games so far simply because of their anti-DRM stance, and so have many of my friends. That is how much people hate DRM.
Turns out they are both great games, so that helps too :)
27/08/2008 at 14:49 Theory says:
So what would you have said? We regularly scoff at politicians dodging questions, so where does that leave us when we criticise a person who goes straight to one’s heart?
27/08/2008 at 14:49 SuperNashwan says:
USB dongles can be made to be extremely hard to crack but retail for less than £30. Common sense might indicate that if a major publisher was really that certain they were losing billions to piracy, we would already have an EAKey in our USB ports.
27/08/2008 at 14:52 Azradesh says:
@ cullnean: You’re an idiot frankly, the one and only set of people NOT affected by anti-piracy measures are the pirates themselves.
eg: I have the Neverwinter Nights 2 Collectors Edition and I recently wanted to replay it so I put the DVD in my driver and it wouldn’t even read and damn disc! At first I thought the disc had become damaged some how, but there wasn’t even a scratch on it. So I tired it on my slow little old laptop and the disc read fine. So I then took to the net to solve this little problem, it turns out that my new DVD drive was not registered by fucking sercurom and so in my new drive the damn thing won’t even read! (my old drive broke)
Solution? Download a disc image of the game I paid 40 pounds for, mount the image, install and put in my valid cd-key.
By the time I’d done all that my urge to play it again was gone. Fuck sercurom!
27/08/2008 at 15:29 Al3xand3r says:
@Sam:
It’s still basically a demo, or a trial, which you have to buy to unlock the full thing, which you call “extra content” here. It’s a small treat to try and compel you to buy it, much like a ny demo of any form, whether it offers little content and comes on a disc or more content and comes as a trial or whatever. It has nothing to do with legalising or liking piracy or anything like that. You can call most any protection “minimal” these days, anything gets cracked within hours.
27/08/2008 at 15:41 Mindtrap says:
The topic of every day: piracy
I think the developers are asking the wrong question here…they are asking “how do we stop piracy?”
instead they should ask: why do all those M”&!#$!”# pirate our games?
The point is…most of the people pirate to try out the game, and to avoid ridiculous protections on the originals (look at bioshock)
For example, i will never buy Alone in the dark 5. Why? Because everyone says it’s a bad game but i would love to try it by myself…and i can’t, there’s not a demo out, not a trial version, nothing… so i wont buy something that i might not like.. games are expensive, and that i$ the other problem.
27/08/2008 at 15:53 cliffski says:
“Programmers of pc-games do bad engine-programming on purpose, ”
Total and utter bullshit.
A pc game programmer.
27/08/2008 at 16:09 cullnean says:
@Azradesh
never being adversly affected by anti-piracy mesures makes me an idiot how?
@Download-plz
“Granted I suppose if you never investigate the other side of the fence you’ll never know whether the grass is greener or not.”
and by that you mean what? that i should download some cracked games? please clarify
27/08/2008 at 16:22 Downloads_Plz says:
@Mindtrap
I would love to see some type of chart showing the correlation of pirated games with a demo vs pirated games without a demo. I know personally the lack of a demo has caused me to pirate games as a way of testing them out in the past and will continue to do so in the future.
27/08/2008 at 16:25 Sam says:
@cullnean: I think what the combative Mr Azradesh means is that you’re an idiot for assuming that anti-piracy measures don’t adversely affect non-pirates, not for not being affected by them yourself.
@Al3xand3r: Yes, but historically (not Now), a lot of shareware didn’t have any protection on the content you bought with your money. I assume, therefore, that it was copied all over the place – pretty much all shareware programmers in the 80s were aware that the money they got represented a small fraction of the total copies even of the full game. Yet, as the argument goes, id software managed to make a lot of money from Doom (and, indeed, many other software houses at the time made a reasonable amount, although not in id’s league), despite the total lack of any attempts to stop piracy.
(And, indeed, there was quite a lot of shareware where you didn’t get anything for paying for it – the ability to give money for what you already had was simply a matter of your personal rating of the value you assigned to the product. Even those games made some money – although the vast profits that id made on Doom were almost certainly due to the “free demo” approach, I admit.)
27/08/2008 at 16:26 cullnean says:
this testing out stuff is a load of crap, are we supposed to belive that after testing if you like a game you will by it?
ok heres a new question put your hands up if you condone piracy?
27/08/2008 at 16:28 cliffski says:
Not true. there was not bit-torrent and broadband when id started. You could not trivially leech the latest games on release day from people you never met. The situation regarding piracy now compared with twenty years ago is totally and utterly game-changingly different.
27/08/2008 at 16:28 Sam says:
@cullnean: As someone who has downloaded music before, and then bought the back-catalogue of the artist involved… yes?
27/08/2008 at 16:31 Sam says:
@cliffski: Yes, I admit that. However, pretty much everyone I knew as a child in the 80s had pirate copies of games, which they must have gotten from somewhere – it may have been harder, but it was still the case, and increasingly so in the early/mid 90s when id made their money from the shareware thing.
I accept that today’s market is a differently, and more widely enabled, thing – but hasn’t the market itself also grown, with the increased use of computers?
27/08/2008 at 16:34 Sam says:
@cullean ‘s edited question: I believe that there is some evidence that, in at least some markets (the book industry, possibly the music industry) the existence of free copies of a product can have beneficial, as well as harmful, effects on the paid market for that product, yes.
However, that’s not the same as “condoning piracy” in the sense that you’re trying to spin it.
27/08/2008 at 16:36 cullnean says:
@sam: you did well in avoiding that question.
edit= also im a server tech not a politician im not trying to “spin” anything and good answer about the music as i have no way of disproving your statement or you proving it
27/08/2008 at 16:45 sinister agent says:
Oh come off it, it was clearly a loaded question, and Sam gave a reasonable answer that avoided the false dichotomy you were presenting.
27/08/2008 at 16:45 perilisk says:
How exactly does a hardware fix stop piracy anyway? Surely pirates will be able to upload a modified version that doesn’t attempt to apply the protections in TPM.
@cullnean: While I don’t pirate, I have little concern for any industry that attempts to protect its “property” (ie, legally sanctioned monopoly) by violating the property rights of others. Even if you ignore Securom, Starforce, rootkits, lockin, the DMCA and all the anti-competitive, anti-hardware-owner, and anti-consumer laws and technologies, there’s still the question of copyright extensions (not so much for software as for music and movies).
Imagine the relentless barrage of wailing and bitching if the government arbitrarily cut existing copyrights back by 20 years, and ask yourself why transferring copyright from creator IP portfolios to the public IP portfolio is tantamount to theft, but the same transfer in the opposite direction is just a slight change in incentive structure. Whining about theft while hoarding giant piles of stolen goods isn’t likely to inspire sympathy in me.
27/08/2008 at 16:49 JonFitt says:
“Programmers of pc-games do bad engine-programming on purpose”
Gwuh??
How about this:
On the PC the programmers have a sliding scale they can work on: at one end they add all the bells and whistles (rendering passes, pixel shaders whatever) that modern technology allows but few will own rigs to play it, on the other they have the simpler graphics of last gen and a huge potential audience.
So some guy has to look into his crystal ball and predicts what the limits of the scale will be 2 years in the future, and then decides where to pitch it to get the best return on their effort.
On a console there is no improvement in the platform so instead somebody just has to trade complexity/content vs. graphical quality. Just look at the lack of anti-aliasing in a lot of console games, and poor draw distance (GTA4) , and occasionally sparse environments and you’ll see places where trade-offs have been made.
As for the optimising, it’s not only consoles which get more efficient as they go, PC games do too, but because they’re continuing to break new ground you may not notice it because something else may have been added to take advantage of the extra headroom the optimisation allowed them.
Also, some engines are bad because some programmers aren’t that hot. Sorry, but they’re human beings and not every programmer is a John Carmack, some are just ok.
27/08/2008 at 16:50 Max Cairnduff says:
Cullnean,
I don’t support piracy.
That cleared up, as a legitimate purchaser of PC games this is an issue for me because some DRM techniques impair my ability to play games I have actually paid for. Worse yet, Starforce (and I think there have been others) has been shown to cause problems with the running of the PCs it is installed onto, which effectively makes it close to malware.
As such, I have a strong desire to see the industry avoid DRM techniques which punish the legitimate purchaser and which remain ineffective against pirates.
If you disagree, that’s your right. But it is perfectly possible to be a legitimate purchaser of these games and still be adversely affected by DRM issues.
As an aside, this is a really old and massively familiar topic, with most people having heard all the arguments many times, which I suspect you may not be aware of (I’ve done the same myself on other topics actually, posted without realising how wearisomely familiar it might be to the forum I posted to), which may be why some responses are a touch hostile.
Hope all that helps.
27/08/2008 at 16:50 cullnean says:
@sinister agent: sorry im just not that clever
its a simple question with a yes/no answer
27/08/2008 at 16:54 rocketman71 says:
PC Gamers hate Hollenshead. Openly. And with reason.
While he’s asking hardware manufacturers to give a hand in stopping piracy, he could also ask to borrow some programmers to, you know, make id’s games GOOD again.
Because that’s what it takes to sell well. You idiot.
27/08/2008 at 17:04 Azradesh says:
@cullnean
No, saying that anyone that cares about anti-piracy measures is a pirate and anyone that isn’t a pirate would never have a reason to care, is what makes you an idiot.
27/08/2008 at 17:06 subedii says:
Cullnean: Simple question with a yes/no answer:
Should companies implement measures that prevent paying customers from playing their purchased product?
I assure you I am simple minded and that this is not a loaded question.
27/08/2008 at 17:09 cullnean says:
@azradesh: Eh? less rambling more clarity please
honestly in all the time i have been reading rps i never knew the Piracy thread were so much fun
27/08/2008 at 17:11 cullnean says:
Should companies implement measures that prevent paying customers from playing their purchased product?
no they should not
now ask me why they do.
(ill set up an ask cullnean site, this shit is fun)
27/08/2008 at 17:11 Max Cairnduff says:
Hurrah! I’m despamfiltered.
Cullnean, I answered you pretty clearly upthread.
27/08/2008 at 17:12 Ian says:
An argument about piracy on RPS? I never thought I’d see the day.
27/08/2008 at 17:12 subedii says:
Good, then we’re agreed that the majority of, if not ALL DRM is immoral and should not be implemented. I’m glad we had this conversation.
27/08/2008 at 17:12 sinister agent says:
So, Fallout 3 then, eh? I bet that’ll be pirated.
27/08/2008 at 17:14 Azradesh says:
@cullnean
If that’s not clear enough for you then you are merely proving my previous statment about you complete lack of intellect.
Either that or you are merely a good troll. If so, well done you got me :P
27/08/2008 at 17:18 Azhrarn says:
@cullnean: Well, why do they? :)
Mainly to delude themselves into thinking that their rather bad game sells badly because the pirates were better than the DRM they bought and which prevented 50% of their fanbase form even playing the bloody game?
27/08/2008 at 18:16 cyrenic says:
These piracy threads were long enough already without readers trolling and inflating the post count even more.
27/08/2008 at 18:19 sbs says:
Hnnnh. Couldn’t you say the same thing about… alot of people?
like this:
ISP’s who offer flatrates like piracy. Secretly.
Blank CD/DVD manufacturers like piracy. Secretly.
That’s retarded.
I mean it’s certainly a part of it, but it is it substantial enough to call them out on it like that? I doubt that.
27/08/2008 at 18:47 Champagne O'Leary says:
Surgeons like drunk drivers. Secretly
Oh, and James G
One of the main reasons I’m a PC gamer is due to the lack of content control…[and the rest of your post]
Are you for real? Fair enough if you are, but really, you’re a PC gamer because of that? What? It seems every time a piracy debate comes up, a million people come out of the woodwork with “Well I downloaded a game once but I’d bought it 4 times before and my house burned down and my CD drive was broken and it had been declared illegal to buy games that week”.
If you’re genuine, then sorry.
P.S. Why say you’re a “sap” for buying the R4?
27/08/2008 at 18:52 Azhrarn says:
sbs: here in the netherlands there is a tax on all empty recordable CDs and DVDs aswell as on all MP3 players to compensate the dutch equivalent of the RIAA for supposedly lost royalty revenue.
27/08/2008 at 19:22 Newblade says:
@Azhrarn: In Spain you must pay a tax on every storage device, from hard drives to usb sticks.
27/08/2008 at 19:27 James G says:
By content control I wasn’t referring to restrictions on pirated software, but rather on the editorial control console manufacturers are able to exersise. Some of the propose piracy restrictions would all but prevent the running of unsigned code, potentially disrupting no only the mods scene but also a lot of indie development. (My appologies if you got this, but I hadn’t expected my comment to seem quite so surprising, so wondered if you missunderstood.) One of my favourite games at the moment is Dwarf Fortress, and there is no way that would get past MS screening process for XBOX Live Arcade, even if it did come with a free mouse and keyboard.
And I referred to myself as a sap with respect to the R4 card as the popular perception on places like Kotaku is that no one could possibly be buying an R4 card for anything but piracy, and that homebrew is just a convenient excuse. Sap was a deliberately self mocking word selected to reflect this attitude, as though I was the only person in the world who had even brought an R4 for legitimate uses, thereby keeping an argument afloat.
27/08/2008 at 19:29 Tom says:
@whoever asked me about this – I don’t really know, this is all just guess work…
Maybe it could be use like this:
Someone buys a game. Through TPM DRM the game is limited to 2 installs (if multiplayer, just the once).
Install game -> During install a unique identifier based on the hardware of the PC is created and sent server side -> This is registered server side and associated to a decryption key -> decryption key is sent back and installed on to the TPM -> installed game data can now decrypt and be used.
Repeat install on 2nd PC et all -> game dials home, notices it’s already been installed once -> 2nd decryption key is associated to 2nd PC ID server side and sent back -> etc
Try again on 3rd PC -> no go because the devs or publishers server already has two decryption keys associated to two PCs.
Common sense would suggest the ability to release encryption keys from the TPM enabling installs onto as many PCs as you want, but at no one time can the game be installed on more than two PCs (or one if multiplayer, or if the devs are assholes).
My ethernet address is 001*92b*d3ee, and my disk volume serial number is 36*5*6ca – this is data being pulled from my PCs hardware, but it’s only being used at a software level so it’s easy to create a work around (something I take advantage of every time I use a lovely fellows immoral software to crack a certain 3D animation package (… did I say that out loud?!)).
However cracking said 3D software past the version 2008 is considerable more difficult because the devs implemented dialling home. This hasn’t stamped out piracy altogether, it’s greatly reduced it, but not stamped it out.
So how much more difficult will reverse engineering DRM be if the DRM itself could access data from your PC at a hardware level. Obviously not impossible, nothing is, but many, many times more difficult. Cracking would surely have to involve virtualised hardware? You’re no longer creating replacement exe’s that fool the software in to thinking it’s kosha or has the relevant CD or DVD in a disk drive. Or reverse engineering the algorithm a developer uses to generate viable serial numbers, there’s interaction at a hardware level. I dunno. But from what I understand the reason all software protection eventually fails is because it’s a software implementation, so much easier to fool. You can add dialling home which greatly helps, but introduce a hardware level to it and it’s a whole different ball game.
That’s my vague understanding of it anyways. I’m probably wrong on many points.
27/08/2008 at 20:30 Pidesco says:
The first thing that came to mind after reading Hollenshead comments was a big “WELL, DUH!”
The whole computer industry has grown based almost solely on piracy. Among the general public, who the fuck needs 500Gb hard drives, or CD/DVD recorders, or 6Mbit internet connections? Pirates, of course.
27/08/2008 at 20:43 subedii says:
The heck?
I’ve got a 250 GB drive, I’m already nearing the limit on that. CD / DVD writers? The amount of stuff I’ve burned on them (Gasp, non infringing) makes them well worthwhile (Unless you’re suggesting we go back to good ol’ floppies?). As for a 6Mbit internet connection, I guess watching streaming movies over the internet is out, as is downloading demo’s, software packages or playing hi-speed internet games.
Oh wait, you couched it in the term “the general public” so that you can say it doesn’t apply to anyone here, since you know, we’re not members of the general public. Nobody ever does those things except nerds and other technophiles and things right?
You know, I don’t even really have an issue with your stance, but your example sucks. Technologies improve. As they do we find more and better uses to put them to. Who needs 6Mbit internet? Then who needs broadband at all, just stick to that 56K, you’re only reading e-mails anyway right? Well, we were at one point. Expectations are a little bit higher these days, and as we get bigger and better pipes we’ll put them to even more uses, yes even “The General Public”.
I hate the attitude that being at home with advancing technologies makes you a frigging pirate now. Fifteen Years ago “The General Public” didn’t even have an e-mail address. Who needs an internet connection? Pirates of course!
27/08/2008 at 21:03 Sam says:
Indeed. I’ve not pirated anything since I was about 14. I’m now happily using about 100Gb of harddisk, and a 2Mb broadband connection, for entirely free purposes. Yes,I have several gig of music, but it’s all either free or I paid for it.
I don’t even run Windows (but, of course, I bet someone’s going to suggest that only Pirates don’t run Windows ;) ), so I didn’t pay for anything much but the games on this computer…
27/08/2008 at 21:10 Pidesco says:
What do you have stored in your 250GB drive?
Also, it isn’t just about about improving technology, it’s also about decreasing costs of said technology. a 1TB hard drive costs close to 100€. The point is that before, say, a DVD recorder reached a low enough price to be a feasible purchase for the general public, there had to be a significant percentage of the population buying the DVD recorders at a premium until economies of scale kicked in and allowed for production costs to plummet. That growth would have been a lot slower without piracy.
27/08/2008 at 21:11 subedii says:
Sam I know for a FACT that you didn’t pay anyone for that copy of Ubuntu. You think it’s honest to just download that kind of software as you please?
27/08/2008 at 21:17 subedii says:
@Pidesco: Plenty of games. Plenty of compiler software and programming environments, software for embedded systems, level design tools, that sort of stuff. I like to tinker in my spare time. Plenty of windows stuff too (the core OS and things like Office probably take up the bulk of my HDD space).
And there’s also such a thing as an “early adopter”, without which, no technologies would ever flourish. People like to talk about the “Wii success story” at hitting the mainstream, but often forget it was that first wave of hardcore techies and geeks that really pushed it through that first few months.
If you’ve got stats to back up why hard drives and dvd burners should be so much more expensive, I’d like to see them. The tech becomes available, people adopt it, it goes down in price. The tech becomes better and more efficient, people get newer and better versions and put it to bigger and more expansive uses.
I’m not saying piracy isn’t a contributing factor to things like price drops. Your post essentially said that people in the general public only have the high end stuff because they’re pirates. There’s no way that I can agree with that.
27/08/2008 at 21:23 neoanderthal says:
some people will pirate just about anything, regardless of cost or the hoops that one must jump through in order to do so. copy protection and all of that annoying BS doesn’t stop these people from pirating stuff, but it does make me wary of buying materials with undue burden put upon me (the legitimate purchaser of said material). An example – I picked up ‘Loki’ from Cyanide Studios not too long ago. The game play is ok – it’s not amazing, but the game’s all right. But the hoops you must go through to play this game! Install the software, use the key, install the copy protection driver, reboot (after installing a game, for christ’s sake), connect to the internet so it can verify that you’re a legitimate user, and make sure you leave the disc in the drive as the game frequently (every few days) checks it to make sure you’re not running a copied version.
This is utter BS. I am back to playing the Dawn of War series – there’s no BS there. I install the software, put in a key, and that’s it. No disc in drive, no untoward hassle.
Quality issues aside for Loki (and there are some rough edges that, after 3 patches or so should no longer be present), this nonsense with the “copy protection” ensures that I won’t play it again.
You know, if these game studios just want to feed off of the teat of the console industry, why not just admit they’d make more money off of it and stop looking for excuses as to why they don’t want to develop any more PC games? If they don’t want to make more PC games, fine – I am sick of hearing how people’s unlawful acts with the PC are driving them to the holy land of the console. Given that (as mentioned above by others) game quality isn’t so great on some games, I’m not keen on purchasing their product anyhow.
27/08/2008 at 21:34 Pidesco says:
“Plenty of compiler software and programming environments, software for embedded systems, level design tools, that sort of stuff.”
General public? C’mon. The general public are the people who use the internet for youtube, e-mail, porn and messenger. Their crap PCs are used, for MSOffice, internet, solitaire and, maybe, the occasional mainstream game.
27/08/2008 at 21:38 subedii says:
Whilst I was initially nodding along there, and thought to agree with you on that, in the end I can’t.
PC games developers don’t want to head off on to being console exclusive devs. Ultimately, the games industry needs a healthy and vibrant PC games industry. The PC games indutry is where all the real advances in graphical processing occur, where the physics technology and theories are allowed to be created and developed. Gaming hardware for the consoles isn’t developed in a black box, all those theories and designs have been designed, tested and advanced in the PC market first. It’s the PC that any would-be games developer is going to start working on first, be it modder, indie developer, or just someone messing around changing texture colours. Any future talent HAS to pass through that filter first, there’s no escaping it.
Leaving the industry and financial stuff to the side, these are people who fundamentally grew up gaming on, working on, and programming for, PC’s. There’s a strong connection there.
I don’t think devs want to leave the industry. Those that wanted to have pretty much done so by now. Other companies like Valve, Stardock and Blizzard have found their own, self-created places in the industry. In between, you’ve got the average software developer looking at the PC industry, wanting to create for this amazingly open and freeform platform, and they see a problem in the form of piracy. They see that people are pirating their games, they see that whilst they want to develop for the platform, it may not BE viable to do so.
From that point, you get this discussion.
27/08/2008 at 21:49 Pidesco says:
I’d just like to add that I’m not saying that people are evil(or good , for that matter) because they are pirates. Or that the computer industry is run by Machiavellian magnates.
What I’m saying is that piracy is a reflection of a change in the way the public perceives intellectual property and in the way technology affects the availability of cultural products which traditionally have always been luxury items. And this is a good thing.
What this means is that piracy shouldn’t be stamped out (because it’s a pointless, impossible effort), but instead should be analyzed, learned from, and used to develop alternatives to it.
27/08/2008 at 21:50 subedii says:
Technically a home user could probably get by on a dumb terminal with net access. Expectations rise as more people adopt. What I use for games, another person will use for home movies, to store their record collection. Crap, I have a friend that’s a hobby photographer, he’s got gigs and gigs of images in .raw format. I don’t know how many DVD’s he’s had to burn to back them all up, and loads more just to pass the photos on to friends, but it’s a lot.
You’re right in that I’m probably a more technically minded adopter than most people. But ultimately, what the early adopters start off using eventually becomes the mainstream norm. And as it becomes the norm people WILL put it to use. Like I said, back in 1993, nobody would have had ANY use for an e-mail address. Now it’s an indispensable part of living for pretty much anyone in a developed nation today. It got adopted, it grew, it became the norm, and now it’s standard.
27/08/2008 at 23:20 caesarbear says:
Wow, a sober and forgone argument sure does stir up a lot of internet rage. Why are so many of you becoming hostile to these comments?
All I usually hear from the more casual PC gamers is how difficult life is between PC hardware and software. “OMGWTFBBQ! You mean I have to patch?!? What do you mean these dozen or so resident memory programs are conflicting with my game??” If PC gaming wants to attract more of these people, the evident way to do this is through standardization. People want Steam-like providers, they want Microsoft to create a useful system of standards, they want to know how it works before they buy. How do you accomplish this without some modicum of cooperation with hardware makers?
Here’s Hollenshead implying that hardware probably won’t help, and you guys say it’s developer whining?
27/08/2008 at 23:25 neoanderthal says:
@subedii – you make some interesting and valid points, but I don’t believe that as many games developers look to the PC as their first platform of choice as was in times past. I think (and I admit, I could be wrong here) that there are a significant number of studios who now see the consoles as easier to develop for, with more immediate return on their investment. I don’t point fingers – who could blame anyone for wanting to make more money with less effort? In the case of Valve, Blizzard, and Stardock, it seems to me that these companies release software for the PC because they seem to think it is in their best interests to support the platform, for whatever reason (flexibility, more freedom to innovate, etc.). I think some studios, however, are acting as if piracy on the PC is something new, and that it is something that needs to be addressed to bring the platform more in line with consoles. I’d be surprised (and possibly wrong, I admit) if piracy were significantly worse now than it was say, 10 years ago. I’d agree that games probably cost more to develop and distribute now than they did then, and it’s a lot easier to get ripped materials via Torrent than it was to pull stuff from some Warez BBS, but piracy is hardly new. Mentioning Blizzard brings up a good point – I think it’s safe to say that in their heyday, games such as Diablo II and StarCraft were stolen at a significant rate, and yet Blizzard managed somehow to stay afloat, and even release new material afterward such as Warcraft III and WoW. What about Relic, or (though they’ve now moved to the horrendous copy protection schemes like Loki’s) Bioware? They still seem to be making money – enough that they can sell games like Jade Empire or Neverwinter Nights or any of the Dawn of War series at a significantly reduced rate.
I think that some developers are simply using the piracy argument as an excuse as to why they didn’t make money on their games. It’s not, of course, because consoles are cutting into PC sales for the kind of gamer who feels that a control pad is as acceptable as a keyboard and mouse or joystick, or because their game doesn’t get such great reviews because of technical flaws resulting from pushed release dates or horrible gameplay or anything along those lines. It’s because of piracy! Crysis didn’t do as well as intended, so it must be piracy. It’s most certainly not because there are people like me who will not pay the $50 US that it still costs to give it a go, but would pay $30. I think a lot of the ‘flagging sales’ has more to do with a misunderstanding about pricing on the PC platform. I mean, we have a choice as to whether we want to buy Crysis or Gears of War or whatever, or make do with something cheaper until the price comes down. Console gamers don’t. They can’t really load up Planescape:Torment or another of their old favorites from 199x and play it until whatever game they’re really wanting comes down in price. I’m kind of rambling, and this isn’t particularly coherent, so hopefully you can see my point in all of this.
28/08/2008 at 00:59 Muzman says:
I would try and join in on this debate about Tom Hollenshead and hardware, but I’m too mesmerised by that picture up there of Henry Rollins trying to impersonate Michael Bolton.
28/08/2008 at 03:53 James T says:
For my money, I don’t know if it gets any better than when he sings “Burned Beyond Recognition”.
28/08/2008 at 08:37 Irish Al says:
monobrow! monobrow! monobrow!
28/08/2008 at 09:30 cullnean says:
teh reason for “evil” software protection.
devs want to protect their work, but buy the cheapest method which can not ever be configured for every possiblehardware config, there for some people will have trouble when said anti-piracy software kicks up a fuss at their new cd drive.
this is not ideal but understandable when people want to protect their hard work.
i also understand that we as user’s should not be expected to trawl websites to see if our new gear is accepted by the various portection software.
i only hope that we as a fairly new industry figure something out.
28/08/2008 at 09:59 Sam says:
@cullnean: Yes, we understand that.
However, there are several issues with that position.
Firstly – what do you mean by “protect their work”? It appears that what you actually mean is “control precisely who uses their work” – have effective copyright enforcement – which is something different to the wider concept of “protection”.
Secondly, you speak as if “all” devs want to “protect” their work in this way. This is manifestly not true, as not only does freeware exist, but open-source freeware exists (and, indeed, in some cases is better than the closed-source payware that it competes with).
Thirdly, you automatically assume that people have the *right* to protect their work, and that this is reasonable. While this is generally accepted, the existence of the open-source lobby (as distinct from open-source as a community) suggests that some feel that this right should be limited or curtailed to some degree. To be fair to id, here, they have always open-sourced their game engines after a certain period of time, as Carmack does believe in something like a “limited” period of copyright on works, apparently.
Fourthly, there’s the matter of degree – you’ve admitted that the devs may “buy the cheapest method”. Great, so this means that you’re implicitly accepting that it is okay for a dev to value their copyright over the rights of the individual customers – remember that when Sony tried to install rootkits on people’s computers to stop them copying CDs, everyone agreed that this wasn’t “understandable” but was, in fact, borderline criminal.
Fifthly, there’s a assumption of criminality that some object to. By installing onerous DRM, devs are implictly saying “if we didn’t stick this on then none of you scum would bother buying it”, at least from the point of view of some of their potential clients. This is, partly, at the crux of a lot of the complaints about the stuff – most people who buy software would probably still buy it even if there was no protection at all (didn’t the PopCap games experiment suggest that “really awesome copyprotection” only got about 1 in a 1000 of the copiers to buy it? That, conversely, implies that a minority of people are “opportunistic” copiers.), so you’re not really doing much but making yourself look bad.
Sixthly, accepting your points, there’s no excuse for not doing “value-added copyprotection” nowadays – Steam gives people additional value for having it manage (and protect) the software they buy on it, via the community resources, the Steam Achievements, and the ability to reinstall/download any game it believes you own. While people complain about Steam, it also has a lot of customers who support it, which is much better than any other DRM solution is doing. Or, look at MMOs, where the most important “copyrighted” bits are server-side and an essential part of the game. Or DEFCON, which has an effective server-based copyprotection scheme, which Introversion are smart enough to use to lure those who’ve pirated the game into buying it.
There’s no excuse for devs complaining about how they’re “only trying to protect their product” with shoddy DRM solutions when there are now so many shining examples of how to do it right, if you want to.
(And, it is worth noting that, on my lovely open-source, free, non-Windows computer, the only commercial thing I’ve bothered to get working in it is… Steam. Because it’s actually worth it.)
28/08/2008 at 10:16 cullnean says:
my ignorance of of the suject dictates that i blow a rasberry at you and disgarded any well thought out statement.
(And, it is worth noting that, on my lovely open-source, FREE, non-Windows computer, the only commercial thing I’ve bothered to get working in it is… Steam. Because it’s actually worth it.)
where did you get a free computer?
28/08/2008 at 11:20 Himself says:
As far as i’m concerned the only way to actually make me start buying games is to offer some benefits that i can’t get using the pirated version. Co-op modes, free content, updates, live community etc- these things will pretty much make some sence. And there’s no point in wasting time and money on implementing new anti-piracy methods since any kind of protection gets cracked the day the game is released.
28/08/2008 at 11:25 Paul Moloney says:
“As far as i’m concerned the only way to actually make me start buying games is to offer some benefits that i can’t get using the pirated version. Co-op modes, free content, updates, live community etc- these things will pretty much make some sence. ”
Yes, because obviously noone has ever pirated games with these options. *sarcasm* Presumably you don’t buy games at all then? Or
28/08/2008 at 11:26 cullnean says:
@himself
this is the part i cant get my head round, you admit to stealing, what eles would you steal? and if you get caught i asume you will happily pay the fine or do the time?
28/08/2008 at 11:59 Sam says:
Of course, not to continue being pedantic, the correct term is “infringing copyright”. “Stealing” is legally reserved for situations where the process involves depriving someone else of a rightfully owned copy – “copyright infringement” deprives no-one of a copy, and only harms the profits of the producer.
It is precisely this distinction that lets “himself” cope with his actions in his personal moral universe – it is much easier for someone to rationalise damaging an anonymous “producer”, especially if they are a large corporation, than it is for someone to rationalise depriving an individual of an item.
28/08/2008 at 12:09 Max Cairnduff says:
Cullnean, just curious, how do you get internet access from under that bridge of yours? Is it a wifi hotspot or something?
28/08/2008 at 12:55 cullnean says:
yep wireless hotspot
28/08/2008 at 13:05 Mr T says:
lol at people trying to make excuses for piracy.
one day you will get burned.
while he’s comes off as a troll cullnean made his point in a few words which i think is “piracy is bad” where as others seem to think that 300 words of waffle makes them clever.
I pity the fool who disagrees
28/08/2008 at 13:30 alphaxion says:
I have almost 4tb capacity (not filled) at home.. what’s on it?
Ignoring the space that the OS and installed software/games take up, it comprises of:
ISO’s of OS’s that are legal (windows, linux, firewalls, nas boxes and pda upgrades), software and games I store purchased so I don’t need the disks and can speed up installation.
I have about 10gb to 15gb of pictures from digital cameras, screen caps and things I have drawn.
I have raw audio and video of podcasts I have produced
I have a massive list of podcasts that I download and archive
I have home movies of holidays and random nights out
I have 14 years worth of freeware apps
I have 15 years worth of documents
I have 10 years worth of website archives from sites I’ve written
I have ripped copies of DVD’s that I legally purchased for the purpose of re-encoding them onto portable media devices where no solution exists.
I hate burning crap to CD’s and DVD’s when I can have everything in one storage area and accessable at the click of a button and can be organised far better and transferred to new storage devices as time goes by without hunting down a thousand disks to find some have degraded beyond readability.
Not all data is illicit!
Also, Trusted Computing is a threat and has been brewing for about a decade now. It’s about far more than piracy since it can lock you out of viewing documents and running certain apps. You couldn’t share data from an unauthorised machine to one that runs the trusted computing platform (wasn’t it known as palladium at one point?).
It would kill freedom as we know it on computers.
28/08/2008 at 13:53 Sam says:
@MrT: No, some of us seem to think that complex problems in the real world require thought out answers. It isn’t clear that piracy is bad in all cases (even for the producer), and lauding people who are prepared to reduce things to simplistic responses simply encourages more people to not bother thinking about things in the future.
So, yes, I do disagree, vehemently, with your stance on “simplicity = good”.
28/08/2008 at 14:37 cullnean says:
hmm………. revalation! pirates and hippies use linux
28/08/2008 at 14:47 LionsPhil says:
Well, I suppose pirates might use Linux if the only commercial games they ever wanted to play were Unreal Tournament, Neverwinter Nights (first one only), and a few flavours of Quake.
And if they didn’t mind spending a week making hardware accelleration work properly under X without system stability going to hell.
The great thing about being a hippy is that you’re happy with Nethack in a text console.
28/08/2008 at 15:01 Himself says:
Dammit, i’m not making any excuses for piracy, i’m just pointing out that IF the developers will choose the path in question, both them and gamers will be happy. But instead of making these implementations, they put tons of energies into different copy-protection systems that a) get cracked really fast and b) make players suffer from the installation process (see the thread) instead of enjoying the game they’ve just bought. That’s that. Since you can’t shoot all the pirates with the shotgun, this is by far the only way of saving the industry.
28/08/2008 at 15:31 dhex says:
Since you can’t shoot all the pirates with the shotgun
not until i finish my FPS pirate game: AARRRRGHS of Warrrrrr!
28/08/2008 at 18:39 andy says:
speaking of piracy, what’s up with Steam removing the resale rights (if they still do that) of any game you buy through them after some time?
I uninstalled their trash a while ago due to this. And this after buying both the Gold and Collector’s editions of HL2.
If i buy something tangible from someone (i.e. not services), who the fuck are they to tell me i can’t turn around and sell it when i’m done with it whenever I want.
Do the other guys do the same thing? Direct2Drive and whoever else is in the biz I mean.
The same should be said of Live/PSN/Wiistore. I suspect sooner or later a class action suit will be brought against all these shits for stepping on consumer rights somewhere along the line.
28/08/2008 at 18:45 nakke says:
andy: Err what? Customer rights? And what do you mean “after some time”, afaik it’s not possible to sell games you’ve bought on Steam at all.
28/08/2008 at 19:22 dhex says:
The same should be said of Live/PSN/Wiistore. I suspect sooner or later a class action suit will be brought against all these shits for stepping on consumer rights somewhere along the line.
i’m willing to bet a lot of money the EULA covers all this.
28/08/2008 at 21:00 sinister agent says:
Isn’t the very concept of an EULA settled on somewhat infirm ground, though? You can’t sell someone a TV and then when you get it home force them to agree to never watch ITV in order to switch it on, after all.
28/08/2008 at 21:53 dhex says:
a “thou shalt not transfer” clause seems straightforward. i don’t know how legally sound it is, but i’m sure it’s in there.
28/08/2008 at 22:27 Deuteronomy says:
LionsPhil: Actually Hardware acceleration under X has come a long way. Been playing Penumbra and Quake Wars on Ubuntu, installation was actually pretty easy, and I haven’t really had any issues at all with the games themselves. Playing QW on Linux was especially trippy.
Which leads me to believe that gaming under Linux could be quite viable.
As for piracy here’s my 2 cents. There’s no point wasting time and money trying to lock down the PC. The big game studios should just go after the torrent sites. Shut the ones they can down. Upload poisoned versions of their games or DDoS the ones they can’t. If they get personal details on the warez-people send hitmen. Cut off their right hands. A combination of the above would solve piracy.
29/08/2008 at 00:04 kadayi says:
Interesting thread. I can see Todds point. What surprises me is that eleventy hundred posts or so in, so far I haven’t really seen anyone really holding up their hands and boldly proclaiming they are a pirate. In fact quite a few people seem to be earnestly claiming the opposite. Do I pirate things? yes. Do I pirate games? Only the long dead ones (and not often), I’m hoping that GoG will be the cure to my abandonware addiction. With new games If I’m unsure about a purchase, I tend to wait for the reviews to hit, or hold out for a demo, and if the games ok, rather than brilliant I wait until it hits the cheap seats rather than buy it straight away. So what do I pirate? Well with me it’s mainly American TV shows because frankly I can’t be assed to wait 6 months for them to show up here, though as I’m a sucker for commentaries I generally end up buying them on DVD later on if they are good. Music? occasionally, but I have so much legitimate music anyways I’ve kind of given up on collecting more. Software? Yes, but never for commercial use, more for home learning and exploration. Has piracy lead me to buy things I ordinarily wouldn’t have through lack of exposure? Damn straight it has, I’d of never have gotten into BSG, The Wire, Deadwood, Man Men or stumbled across musicians like GSUBE, or Susumu Yokata, or Sigur Ros otherwise.
02/09/2008 at 13:36 Eisenhorne says:
I believe pirates will continue to illegally compromise games regardless of what protection is available. I also think this illegal activity can be greatly reduced by software protection. Not something as intrusive as securom or starforce but another method left to better minds to figure out. I think the goal should be to reduce piracy.
I believe game publishers like piracy to an extent. I bet numerous games publishers received recognition from a pirated game they would have otherwise not received from a standard release. I think copy protection only hurts the legitimate owners. Take DVD’s as an example. If a pirated movie is played you can go straight to the movie but if a legitimate movie is played you have to watch that stupid (none skippable) anti piracy banner then another government banner (again non skippable). These banners are ONLY for legitimage owners because the pirates take them out. So why have them!! The same goes for piracy.
If your game is good it will sell. If it sucks then the first thing to blame is piracy. Good game sell and have few pirates because people WANT the game. Although a lot of pirates will also want the game the developer will lose a smaller percentage of profits if the game doesnt suck.
There seems to be a fine line between piracy for the sake of wanting a game because it cant be afforded and piracy for the sake of piracy. I dont think anyone will see hardware anti piracy due to the customization of the PC. People will avoid the products with the anti piracy because think beyond the gamer. Think about the hundreds of thousands of employees at a company that has private or proprietary information. That company will never allow something inside their network which they cant completely control. So the PC gaming community just isnt enough of a factor for anti piracy hardware to be developed.
I think piracy is bad and a lot of good companies lose money they definately deserved but companies need to stop ripping off consumers with half baked poorly performing games and make something someone wants and is willing to give a company its due by buying. Take Blizzard for example, Starcraft 2 will be hard to pirate because it connects to battlenet and has to be unique but mainly because it is a great game and people will pay Blizzard and say thank you for entertaining us. Same with Diablo 3.