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.

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.

i’m willing to bet a lot of money the EULA covers all this.

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.

not until i finish my FPS pirate game: AARRRRGHS of Warrrrrr!

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.