Talking Cloud  Posts: 813 Joined: 10 Jul 2006     | |
Anonymous Source Posts: 1 Joined: 25 Apr 2007 | I have to admit, this article brought up some nice memories; writing this from Croatia, where (sixteen years ago) you couldn't buy an original copy of a game even if you had the money. Back then I thought Razor 1911 was a game developer LOL |
Muckraker Posts: 249 Joined: 25 Nov 2006     | What a fantastic article! In the Netherlands there's an organisation called BIG (Ban Illegal Games & software) that aired a commercial with a high tech FBI-like team that searched out illegal gamers! With sirens and in black suits with black sunglasses and high tech red lasers (why?) they would find all illegal gamers. They resorted to scare tactics, spewing various lies (they don't search out illegal gamers, they just try to prevent it with... well there's no better word for it than propaganda). It is very much aimed at this 'playground piracy', as can be seen from their various posters in schools. And as helpless as developers are as each of their copy protection mechanisms get swatted away like flies, I can understand the desperation of their side. I can understand the reaction to resort to fear tactics, but I don't think it's an effective solution. As Kieron Gillen said, essentially playground piracy is an act of love, while lying to get people to pay for games is an act of fear (which is an interesting duality as the one is a crime, while the second is born of a sense of justice). The solution for developers, is to accept reality as it is and either produce games for free with a paypal link or bank account to allow contributions or go the other way and make sure your game can't be played without being connected to your server (with unique key of course). |
Beat Writer  Posts: 202 Joined: 8 Sep 2006     |
The other solution is to forget about copy protection, servers, keys and all the related admin and just get on with making and selling games. Whilst this viewpoint does not prevent piracy, this doesn't necessarily matter. |
Anonymous Source  Posts: 5 Joined: 27 Sep 2006    | That article really made me remember how much we were trading floppies back in my childhood... And that today's games are better played hacked than legit... Those copy-protections that installs itself without your consentment isn't something that you really want... Hacked games removed those, they are fairly easy to find for a computer-literate gamer, and they usually have a help file to take you by the hand to install the game itself... I used to get pirated copies of games i wanted to try out... Now i get pirated copies for games that i want to buy, then buy the game but keep in still in the wrapping because i know it's much more of a hassle to install and play the legit version than keep the Hacked version... Downloading games is now something that i do because it's better for the health of my computer system and it's a lot less stressful for me as i don't have much to worry after installing it... |
Beat Writer  Posts: 138 Joined: 24 Aug 2006    | You know DRM is bad when people are more concerned about the damage from DRM than the viruses they might get while searching for pirated content. |
Copy Clerk Posts: 117 Joined: 12 Oct 2006    | This brought back memories for me, also. These days I have the money (but not necessarily the time) to play original games, but I still see a lot of piracy around me, sadly, even among grown-ups. However, I still think that's the main way for kids to get access to lots of games (with all the benefits such exposure brings). |
Paperboy Posts: 13 Joined: 12 Apr 2007 | Kieron, you must be a long lost brother of mine, because that article could just as well been written about me. The memories it brought back. I'm still smiling after finishing reading it. I remember the arms race between copy protection schemes and the copy software on the C64. The copy software was actually more difficult to get ahold of than the games. I used to have an arsenal of different copy software, because there was always that one game you couldn't copy but with one particular version of a particular copy software. The friends of friends of friends who always used to get the latest games faster than anyone else were admired and almost feared, because if you offended them, the trickle of new games to you would suddenly come to a halt. The whole scene at the "amateur" pirate level was most certainly social to the core. It was all about who knew whom and how well. The social network of computer game pirates would extend into the entire city, loosely aligned within school districts. The kids who knew other kids from other schools were very valuable indeed to the "network". Not that we saw it that way back then. The whole social networking phenomenom was still more than a decade away. I had a friend (kind of) who was a writer with the biggest computer games magazine in my home country. We used to do anything to get into his good graces. He was much older than any of us, of course, and I can't imagine how annoyed he must have been about all of us runts hanging into him and the games he would occassionally drop our way. Almost all of my friends who blatantly copied anything they could get their hands on now work with computers, just like me. If we hadn't had access to all these pirated games in our youth, I strongly believe far fewer us would now be involved with computer related work. Good times... |
BANNED Posts: 91 Joined: 16 Sep 2007    | Pretty interesting article. I find myself on the piracy side of the spectrum a lot with PC, though not necessarily out of lack of money, but rather because of several other factors. 1. I want to know if a game will work correctly on my computer. Demos don't help, since the full games can be much larger. If a demo works for me, empirically, the full game might not. This helps me weed out games that don't work. 2. Demos are always insufficient of the experience. A demo will give you one level most of the time, cut out all sorts of features and try to give you the 'basic experience'. A lot of the time, I find that a game might shift focus, or become more complex later on from the full games and whether this sinks or swims for me determines how much I enjoy the game. 3. I don't feel like leaving the house, or I don't have time to go buy the game, so I download the game to give it a spin. This is a pretty flimsy argument, but still, it also coincides with the above two points. As an example, a friend of mine who is an incorrigible pirate downloads almost every game he plays and doesn't think twice about it. Lately, he's told me about the original Condemned, prior to last weeks Zero Punctuation review. I actually downloaded the game as well and played it through in one sitting from Tuesday-Wednesday the morning of the Condemned 2 review. I loved it, and even though I had some problems with it running, these problems are actually something common that's developed recently. It works fine, it's a great game and even though I beat it and have no real desire to play through it (though I might load it up to bludgeon people silly), I am going to find someplace I can pick up a copy of the game anyway solely to show my appreciation for the entertainment. Almost every PC game I own, about 60 of them, I pirated before I bought them. The only two exceptions are Hitman: Blood Money and Oblivion, because I know the series' by both experience and reputation to be worth it. It also helps my current computer was built specifically to play Oblivion on the best settings. User was banned for: Zero Punctuation: Awards for 2008. (Permanent) |
Playground Piracy