Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Posts Tagged ‘piracy’

Payback: Game Dev Tycoon Fights Piracy With Piracy

By Nathan Grayson on April 30th, 2013.

We may have reached a point where many developers are attempting to coexist semi-peacefully with the big, bad, money-chomping wolf that is piracy, but that certainly doesn’t make the situation ideal. Pirates are still sauntering away with sloshing tubs of developers’ blood, sweat, and tears, so I think a little (or more than a little) spite is only fair. In the past, that’s meant theft-thwarting failsafes like Batman: Arkham Asylum’s flight-impaired hero and Serious Sam 3′s immortal pink scorpion, but Greenheart’s recently released Game Dev Tycoon might just be the best yet. In short, the pirated version makes your games crash and burn once they’ve hit the market because of – wait for it – piracy.

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Hotline Miami Aids Pirates Instead Of Murdering Them

By Nathan Grayson on October 27th, 2012.

Unfortunately, there aren't any pictures of Hotline Miami's main character aiding someone.

If you can’t beat ‘em, well… that’s not actually a phrase that exists in the world of Hotline Miami. It’s either beat (with a colorful assortment of bats, drills, pipes, and katanas) or be beaten black and blue and red and neon pink. There is, as Yoda says – presumably as a result of some LSD-induced hallucination – no try. Hotline Miami’s creators, however, are nothing like that. They, perhaps better than much of the rest of the gaming industry, understand the art of compromise. So when pirates started peddling a slightly glitchy version of Hotline Miami in the Internet’s seediest alleyways, Jonatan Soderstrom – aka, Cactus – decided to offer them a helping hand.

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Ubisoft Boss Declares F2P Is Because Of 95% Piracy Rates

By John Walker on August 22nd, 2012.


Rock, Paper, Shotgun is read by over 92% of the Earth’s population, and our most frequent readers are in the top 15% most attractive people on Earth! Yes, we all love statistics we don’t provide any evidence for. There’s so much fun to be had. Ubisoft have also been revelling in that fun, by telling GI.biz that they experience “93-95% piracy” rates. Which is odd, what with all their boasting that their always-awful DRM has been so darned effective at combating piracy. How incredibly confusing! Anyway, this, says bossman Yves Guillemot, is why they’re heading down the path of F2P games.

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Ascii What You Did: Syndicate Dev’s Message To Pirates

By Craig Pearson on February 24th, 2012.

STARING EYES
The humble .nfo file is a business card, instruction manual, and score-setting rap song in ascii form. They’re the files that the piracy scene drops into their releases to claim bragging rights for that particular chunk of nefarious code. So why the hell did Syndicate Developers Starbreeze stick one in the legitimate release of their first-person shooter? Redditor MikkelManDK spotted the file in the game’s directory: it’s there to partly to mock the scene a little — the install notes read: ’1) Insert disc 2) Play ;)’ — and partly to bring the Warez groups into the games industry: Starbreeze’s .nfo asks them to apply for jobs.

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Legal Threats Endemic Among Games Pubs

By John Walker on January 16th, 2012.

Fishface.

Last week we celebrated CD Projekt RED’s decision to back down from the practice of demanding cash settlements from alleged pirates. The gambit, that subverts the legal process of innocent until proven guilty, and is based on threatening people with spurious lawsuits with only flimsy, unreliable IP evidence, has been condemned on many occasions, and when tried in the UK led to some rapid backtracking. Many have viewed it as extortion, frightening people into paying fees in the region of €800 in order not to have to go to court to prove their innocence or argue against the notion of piracy equating to lost sales. And as TorrentFreak revealed yesterday, it’s something being done by a huge proportion of the publishing industry.

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Opinion: Me And CDP On Legal Threats

By John Walker on December 19th, 2011.

A court, which no one will likely see over this.

You’ll likely remember that last week it was revealed that CD Projekt had hired a firm to send out letters to those they believed had pirated copies of The Witcher 2, demanding large sums of money. It’s a practice that is widely despised, due not only to its propensity for threatening the innocent, but more significantly, because it’s based on threats in the first place. A person receives a letter demanding an excessive amount of money (evidence for this story suggests in the region of €750, corrected from 900+ that was previously reported), or the recipient will be taken to court where they may end up paying a great deal more. These apparently necessary court cases will be dropped if the fee is paid. And that’s why I consider it such a serious issue. Never mind the severity of the act of piracy, this process subverts the legal process, avoids actually providing evidence and proving guilt, and depends upon scaring people into paying money they likely can’t afford. This is something I wanted to discuss with CDP themselves, who I thought had given unsatisfactory responses to other outlets who suddenly picked up on the story after RPS reported TorrentFreak’s week-old article. My discussion is below.

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CD Projekt Threatening Alleged Pirates

By John Walker on December 15th, 2011.

Just why?
Remember how we all cheered when CD Projekt removed the DRM from The Witcher 2? Although the GoG version was always free of the legitimate-customers-only punishing code, all other sources came with the straitjacket. Post launch, however, they patched it out, letting customers enjoy the game without concern. It seemed an all-round sensible way to behave, and despite piracy they sold over a million copies of the game. A happy story. Except, well, now according to TorrentFreak (and seemingly corroborated here, along with mentions of a few other titles) the publisher is reportedly threatening alleged (but unproven) pirates with ludicrous legal letters demanding large amounts of money.

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Volition Boss Says No More Duff PC Ports

By John Walker on March 17th, 2011.

Shoot it in its physics!

There’s some lovely comments from Volition‘s studio manager, Eric Barker, over on Eurogamer. Discussing why it’s always worth developing for PC when creating cross platform titles, and how Volition will no longer be using external developers for their PC versions, he drops this gem of a comment that I’ll be quoting for some time to come.

“I don’t think [piracy] is something at the forefront for us. First and foremost, we want to make sure we’re making a game people would want to pirate. Let’s make a game that’s worth stealing, and then we’ll worry about making sure they don’t.”

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Oh, Ubisoft: Torrented Their Own Music?

By John Walker on March 16th, 2011.

Are we under arrest?

Ubisoft, you do like making mistakes. The publisher’s strange habit of incorporating piracy into their products seems to have reared once more. Remember back in 2008 when they thought it would be a good idea to officially patch Rainbow Six Vegas 2 with an illegal NO-CD crack? Today Eurogamer brings us news that those copyright infringing scamps may have been at it again. This time it looks like they’ve included a torrented version of their own soundtrack in the Digital Deluxe Edition of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood on PC.

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Opinion: Let’s Not Celebrate DRM Just Yet

By John Walker on February 23rd, 2011.

Woo! Party time!

Correction: It seems that Ubisoft’s new DRM will be requiring one activation at install, and then not again. While this is problematic regarding DLC, and I continue to argue (as the post below explains) still not okay, it’s not quite as it was understood from the ambiguous statements given before the article was written. However, the “always on” DRM continues to torment users of Ubisoft games like Settlers 7. Apologies for the confusion caused, and to Ubisoft for the incorrect statements.

Don’t be fooled, I say. Ubisoft, amongst others, have been getting a lot of good press lately, including from this very site, for the apparent backtracking on the DRM that had crippled a number of games. By insisting that players be always online as they played, Ubisoft’s games became a subject of headlines – gamers’ progress would be lost, players dumped out of their games, because BT pressed a wrong button somewhere, or the Sun’s flares caused a blip in a wifi signal. It took Digital Rights Management to a whole new level of pointlessly ruining valid customers’ experiences; while the pirates they were pretending to fight continued to enjoy a far better game. And so we celebrate as they remove this, and we compliment them for backing down from the nonsense. But I (John Walker, whose views don’t necessarily reflect those of his (inevitably wrong) colleagues) say: let’s just think about that a little more carefully.

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An Actual Crisis: Crysis 2 Leaked

By Quintin Smith on February 11th, 2011.

'Holy shit!' 'I know!'

EDIT: Read EA’s curt response here. “Piracy continues to damage the PC packaged goods market and the PC development community.”

I have no words. Actually, I have some words- according to a thread of the Facepunch forums (which may or may not be deleted any second depending how the Facepunch server holds up), a developer build of Crysis 2 containing the full game, multiplayer and the master key for the online authentication has been leaked, and is currently freely available from all sorts of astonishingly illegal websites. This sounds like it might be a serious tragedy for Crytek. Crysis 2 was scheduled for release on the 22nd of March, so the leaked build could be dangerously close to finished. More on this as we hear it, and thanks to RPS reader James B for letting us know.

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