Mac Version Of Halo Exemplifies Piracy Problem?

An anonymous reader writes "MacSoft takes popular games and ports them to the Macintosh for all the Mac users to enjoy, but according to a TwinCities.com article, apparently there are far more users pirating Mac Halo than actually buying it A MacSoft spokesman 'didn't release sales figures [for Halo] but said illegal downloads number at least in the hundreds of thousands.'" The article uses this specific game to discuss how PC and Mac publishers are "...making gamers enter special codes, authenticate themselves online and jump through more hoops." It ends by describing the pain of the developer in seeing their title pirated: "It was a dagger in the hearts of guys who worked 12 to 14 hours a day [on Halo]... We're on an emotional high, and it all comes crashing down."

Re:But not all *keep* it...

[Xzzy]

> Now come on, this computer is less than a year old
> and yet it wont play a game that was made a few
> years ago.

But it wasn't made a few years ago. Sure, it released on the xbox a ways back, but as far as your mac is concerned it's a brand new cutting edge game.

It has rendering features that prior to the mac/pc release, did not exist in any other game. It uses features that Doom3 and HL2 are heavily reliant on.. neither of which you can buy yet.

That's not to say there aren't some speed issues, the next update of PC Halo promises some real advances in efficiency. But mac/pc Halo is only an "old" game by virtue of it's artistic content.

Re:But not all *keep* it...

[iwadasn]

Here's my take on this matter....

Most mac games are vastly inferior to their windows counterparts, at least as far as performance goes. Sim City 4 runs better on my girlfriend's year and a half old laptop than it does on my G5, and that's just completely unacceptable (not that it's that bad on the G5 though). There is no way on earth that her laptop has even half the horsepower of my G5, in any subsystem, so clearly maxis just slapped together a half assed mac version and kicked it out the door.

Basically, my advice to those out there looking for mac games is to look no further than Blizzard. Get anything else, and it'll probably be way too slow. Actually, any game that is released simultaniously on mac and PC will be ok, but anything that goes through a long porting process, don't waste your time, it's going to suck.

Here's another example, Tropico. The performance of tropico (under OS 9 or OS X) is terrible beyond words. The game hangs at the slightest provocation, and horribly crashes OS X ALL THE TIME. In fact, with 10.3.2 it crashes the OS so badly every time you start it up that you can't get back to the desktop, it somehow corrupts the video system, so though the rest of the computer (the BSD part) continues to run correctly, you can't see anything on the monitor even after quitting the game.

All I have to say is let the buyer beware. And in addition, we really need reviewers who can bring themselves to comment on HORRIBLE stability bugs. I always read the reviews before getting a game, and they never mention bugs, even if the game is so buggy that it doesn't hardly run, the reviewer will never mention that little tidbit. Don't you think that is maybe more relevant than anything else?

Another developer's perspective...

[j450n]

First, I'd like to re-iterate some of the things expressed in a previous "Developer's perspective" post: The fact that there is no demo isn't an excuse to pirate. It means that if you don't trust the developer, you just don't bother yourself with it.

Moving on, from my own personal experience, I can refute some of the claims that I see a lot of people make about "how it could be". The game that my company recently released was an online multiplayer only title, with the only form of copy protection being a unique key that could only have X active instances at any given time. No CD checks whatsoever. We made it that way because, as gamers ourselves, we hate stupid copy protection schemes. Also, the game was available for purchase on the web, as both an installation package and an ISO, for both win32 and Linux. The retail CD included both versions as well. We released a demo that included two maps, and one of the two playable races in it's entirety.

Initially, the number of instances of a key that we allowed play simultaneously was rather forgiving. After the game had been out for a while though, we noticed that many keys were often in use up to their maximum number of instances. Obviously people were doing a whole lot of sharing, so we tightened down the number and saw a moderate spike in sales follow immediately, without a noticeable decline in player base.


I guess the real point I'd like to make is this: it's completely debatable how much harm is being done by piracey, but the fact remains that it's not doing anybody any good.

Companies track P2P usage

[TubeSteak]

For the life of me, I can't remember the company, but /. had a few stories a long time ago about radio stations siging up with a company that tracks music trading on kazaa and some other networks. The Co. gives them regionalized breakdowns of what songs are being traded how many times... this way, the radio stations can play what people want to hear in northeastern kentucky or western massachussets. I don't see how it'd be terribly hard to track one specific game, and its easy as pie to track usage from bittorrent, just keep getting the data from the trackers.

all that aside, my guess would be that their figures probably aren't all that far off. A lot of the trading that they haven't/can't track happens in places like IRC or DC or Hotline or FTPz and then there are the copies that get handed around on CD-R.

I've downloaded games I should have bought, but then again, I've bought games that I should have downloaded.