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Games Entertainment

GT Interactive Sued for piracy 69

Posted by Hemos from the how-dumb-can-you-be dept.
Ripp writes "Seems that somebody's gotten themselves into a bit of trouble! ZDNet Reports that GT Interactive slapped their label on someone else's product and sold it as such in Europe. " Specifically, a private-computer games company has said, and supported that GT Interactive took their game, and sold it in Germany under their German affiliate's label.
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GT Interactive Sued for piracy More

GT Interactive Sued for piracy

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  • I'm not going to defend the actual values quoted, but the difference between "the potential" and "the actual" is that GT actually SOLD copies to people who paid for those copies, who would have just as likely bought legitimate copies (at the same cost). However, with pirated sofware (ie Warez), there is only the potential, in that a pirate may or may not have actually bought the software in question if it had not been available for free.

    To provide a slightly more personal example. When I was younger, I did pirate some games for my old Apple IIe. I had a significant, but relatively small collection. I certainly could not have afforded those if I hadn't had access to the pirated versions.

    An important use for this distinction is in discussions of "lost revenue" due to software pirates that the software industry will toss around from time to time. It is inaccurate (or blatantly deceitful) to say that all software pirated should be considered lost revenue. They are confusing the actual with the potential.

    There may be ways of converting some of those potential sales to "lost revenue" but it must be based on very careful assumptions. For instance, it might be correct to assume that any lost OS sales due to corporate piracy is "lost revenue" because they require (from a corporate standpoint) a specific OS to run the applications they use.

  • Actually it was closer to weeks than days. I got the strategy guide out of it for free but I don't use them so it wasn't all that great a deal.

    [John]
  • I had pretty much the same rig...and it played nice in multi.

    sometimes the problem is right over the keyboard
  • If I remember right, the doublespace thing wasn't quite so clear cut as this sounds. This would be the equivalent of Microsoft buying one copy of Stacker, then making a bunch of copies, labeling them as doublespace, and selling them.
  • I find it difficult to believe that GT would just go straight out there and steal a game they knew not to be theirs.

    I find it more likely that they entered negotiations with StarPlay to distribute the title in parts of Europe, and there was some form of glitch in their communications. Perhaps it had looked like the deal was about to be sealed, so the German GT office started manufacturing the game. The contract negotiations then fail, and the German office is either not informed or the message is misunderstood or lost somewhere along the line.

    I'm quite sure that the above scenario is quite possible. My own experience, publishers often get many details wrong, and the appropriate information never gets to the proper person. This gets even worse when a language barrierr is involved.

    Another possibility is that the contract went most of the way through, they started production, and at the last minute StarPlay backed out. GT decided that since they had already invested considerable resources into running the product, that they would try and force StarPlay's hand by going ahead with the rollout anyway. They probably figured that StarPlay would then relent and accept the contract.

  • Your machine just sucks then. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I played unreal on a P233MMX with 64megs of ram plus a VooDoo 1 card and it ran perfectly. I have no idea what would make it run so slowly for your machine, but it isn't likely to be the software.
  • GT did not provide the only access to this product in Germany. Sure, they probably made it more visible, and some people who bought it from them wouldn't have bought it otherwise because they never would have heard of it. But anyone in Germany who really wanted the game could have bought it without GT's help from Starplay's website [starplay.com].

    (Yeah, the order form is Amero-centric, but surely they won't refuse to ship to a customer who lives in Europe...)

    But I agree with the fundamental issue here. A company selling software for $10,000 a pop can NOT legitimately claim $10,000 loss for every pirated copy. Some people pirate things they would NEVER dream of purchasing (e.g. Photoshop, FrameMaker, etc)
  • I still remember the people who took advantage of a GTI offer to pre-register DOOM II (which they distributed.) Those lucky enough to fall for this got their copy 3-5 days after it hit the shelves in stores, and usually for a higher price. I knew then we weren't dealing with rocket scientists here.

  • No, his machine does not "suck". I have a P233 MMX with 64 megs of ram and a V2. Unreal worked well enough in single player - but sucked eggs if you did multiplayer. Even on a LAN, having more than about 3 other people in the room with you was enough to have you doing the lag dance.

    Now.. my K6-350 is another story.

    --

  • The subject says it all. -awc
  • It's mindboggling that someone would do that for a *bowling* game. Sounds like the next thing they need to steal is a marketing research department...
  • Thge game wasn't even worth pirating, even from an end-user standpoint! Alley19 bit so badly I was pissed that I wasted a half hour of bandwidth on it.. If GT wants to pirate a game, they could at least have picked a decent one and mede some real money..
  • Looks like M$ isn't the only big ugly giant
  • Indeed. I hope they get what they deserve.
  • Bah.. You're just delusional if you think you were first..

  • Good. (I'm no fan of GT) (Score:3)

    by Jburkholder ( 28127 ) on Wednesday September 01, 1999 @08:11AM (#1711313)
    This may start a whole flame war, I don't care.

    I have been ticked at GT ever since they pushed Unreal out the door, oh, about a YEAR before it should have been published. I was all psyched up for Unreal but was horribly dissapointed at how poorly the game ran on my 'recommended' machine hardware. After following the discussions for a while at epic megagames' board, it seems obvious that GT was to blame for understating the system requirements and pushing an incomplete product out the door.

    Sure, most new games have bugs and developers push numerous patches out the door soon after a game ships. My problem with Unreal was that it was so horribly broken right out of the box, and that it took sooo long for some of these issues to be fixed. The game shipped with Glide support only, IIRC. D3D and OpenGL were promised to be supplied in a patch, but it too forever, and I gave up. The multiplayer was horrible and has not really ever been fixed to my satisfaction.

    I'm not really sure what my point is, just felt like ranting a little. Oh yeah, I remember: GT doesn't seem to be sharpest/ethical software publisher I have ever bought from.

  • There are lots of big ugly giants. M$ just happens to be the most blatant - if this was a small software company against M$ (AGAIN) it would probably just result in a small settlement, followed by M$ buying the company and firing them all off...

    In this case its more likely that GT will have to pay realistic damages and the small company suing them will come out ahead of the game.

    /*He who controls Purple controls the Universe. *
  • I get the feeling there are facts that aren't showing up in that article.

    Call me naive and optimistic, but I have a hard time believing the people at GT Interactive are really stupid enough to think they could get away with marketing someone else's software without eventually getting busted big-time.

    Someone, please tell me there's more to this story, or I may lose what little faith I have left in humanity.
  • (Hm. Does Hasbro own GT Interactive? And, if so, has Hasbro released a statement?).

    I'm seeing two scenarios here.

    The less sinister version is that somebody at GT thought that this was a publicly redistributable game (somehow; I don't know the game, so can't comment on licensing terms, or how clear it'd be -- so this scenario might be impossible) and thought that they might as well make a buck. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but sillier things have happened.

    The more sinister option is that GT knew full well that it was not legitimate to redistribute that (legally, not just ethically), but made the calculation that they would, most likely, come out fiscally ahead somehow. If so, it would appear that they have miscalculated, as this publicity is not going to be good for them...
  • I remember buying the packaging and disks for shareware versions of Duke Nukem and Commander Keen from those guys, back when modem access wasn't common. It was a bit of a rip-off, selling shareware levels at $20 a pop in some cases, but many people didn't know better and neglected to read the fine print about shareware.
    Most likely..... I'd guess that Alley19's shareware version, but it is not COMMERCIALLY DISTRIBUTABLE shareware. Meaning that GT had no right to make money off of selling the shareware "media" that they are so accustomed to doing....

    If that _is_ the case, I can't tell yet. Here is StarPlay's press release [starplay.com].
  • Let's raid GT headquarters at 4:00am with about 500 swat team guys busting out windows, yelling and screaming. We'll steal all their computers, televisions, audio cds, phones, and anything else electronic. Then we'll make a huge publicity stunt out of it, and arrest the CEO on charges of international conspiracy! Yeah! We'll keep him locked up for 2 years without a trial, and hold all the electronics we confinscated for 5 years - evidence you know. After that, we'll let him rot in jail on 3500 counts of pirating software.

    Or not.

    --

  • You make some good points. I would, however, challenge the assumption that Europeans would not have bought this game had GT not "helped".

    I don't know about you, but when I'm looking for a new game I don't browse the shelves at CompUSA or Best Buy. Anyone who's purchased even one video game knows that the screenshots on the package and description of the game tell you exactly nothing about how good the game is. Instead, I look for the game online, download the demo, and if I enjoy it head out to a retailer to purchase the full version.

    It took me less than a minute to find the demo of Alley 19 on HappyPuppy (cheezy name, decent site). Part of that listing was a link to StarPlay's homepage. On StarPlay's front page was a link to their online order form.

    So, yes, Europeans could have easily found out about and purchased Alley 19 had they so desired. GT was not providing them with access to anything that they could not already obtain.

    Oh yeah. There's also the fact that GT had no right to market the product regardless of what StarPlay was doing. What GT did was no different than if I stole cars from dealerships in the US and opened my own lot in Berlin. This is clearly wrong even if GM chose not to market their cars to Europeans.

  • Perhaps the problem is in thinking of companies as coherrent entities. Say some vice-president of sales had just turned in three bad quarters, and was desperate to turn in ONE profitable quarter, so he wouldn't be fired, so he gets this idea for how to pull in a bit of cash with zero overhead...
  • Yeah, that's the kind of brilliant insight that always comes into this 'discussion' around unreal. How does a PII -333 w 128 MB and a riva 128zx "suck"?

    Face facts, the game looks pretty but is about as much fun to play as a slide show.

  • Yeah, but MS got away with it. (Where's Stacker now?)
  • Look at this from the angle that no matter how it happened, evil or accident...both companies will still get a ton of publicity out of this. Most people wont want to believe GT did it on purpose. Besides, they'll settle out of court for a lot less than 5 million. Seriously, if I were an evil little software company needing to boost sales and I found a legitimate mistake it might be tempting to call a press conference and blow it all out of proportion.
  • which very well known piece of software?
  • Really, I would think that it would be quite a bit worse to charge no money for stolen goods, for the reason that the customer is that much more likely to choose the illegal product over the honest one. (Infinitely more likely to use your "math").


    The rub here comess down to web savvy. I have friends who consider themselves "computer literate" that have trouble downloading and installing new programs. For them to find a Warez site, gain access, and eventually get a working game on their system, is really unthinkable. Compare that to those who buy the game in a story and you can see how the market potential is so much higher for the game sold in stores. Combine this with the fact that the people who bought it were (redundantly) willing to buy it at a store price, and you get 100x worse.

    Tons of people able to buy it in stores vs. an 3133t few who can find it for free. Plus, it was a bowling game, definitely NOT aimed at the computer savvy.
  • Oh yeah. There's also the fact that GT had no right to market the product regardless of what StarPlay was doing. What GT did was no different than if I stole cars from dealerships in the US and opened my own lot in Berlin. This is clearly wrong even if GM chose not to market their cars to Europeans.

    I hate set fire to this debate, but it's not exactly the same. If you stole the specifications for Ford cars and made them yourself (as in stole the binary code and made CD's out of them), that would be the same. Starplay is only losing intellectual material, not tangible material. It's just that in the software industry, the intellectual material is 99% of the value of software, whereas in the car industry, the raw material is worth more. So, comparing the two doesn't really make sense.

    While it may not be legal for someone to steal Ford's car specifications, use them to make a Taurus, and sell them in some place where Ford doesn't sell cars, I don't think it's really "wrong."

  • It wasn't all that long ago that Microsoft got caught pirating software. Remember MS-DOS 6? Remember Double Space?

    In other words, "Yes, Virginia, people are stupid enough."



    Mister programmer
    I got my hammer
    Gonna smash my smash my radio
  • They took a product, not theirs, and charged money for it. This is actual theft of income, not the theft of "potential" income that the Warez practive involves.
    Actual income vs. Potential income(or free advertising if you prefer) = 100x worse, like I said.

    Anyway, this allays any feeling of guilt or remorse I have about "getting" any GTInteractive (or any of their partners) products. If they want to play be those rules while trying to be a "respectable" company, I can play by them as a "concerned" consumer.
  • You seem to confuse Germany with China.
  • Unreal did, and still does to some extent, suck on anything but 3dfx cards. Back when I had my P233mmx, I had a Voodoo Rush Card (Intergraph) and "upgraded" to an STB Velocity 4400. Unreal crawled on my TNT card compared to the Voodoo Rush. Every 2 months or so, when they released a patch for Unreal, it got marginally better, but never as fast as the Voodoo Rush was.
  • You made the point yourself that in the sofware industry the intellectual material is 99% of the value of the software. I could argue for 100%, but it seems silly to argue over one lousy percentage point. :)


    In both cases, the part of the product with value is being stolen, so the scenarios are, if not the same, very, very similar.


    Another factor that you're leaving out is that if I steal StarPlay's code (or Ford's design specs) and market the resulting product in a place where the owner is not marketing, I am severely damaging their ability to market there in the future. How much success will StarPlay have marketing Alley 19 in Europe if GT has already sold the game to everyone who wants it. This is a real loss. This does actual damage to their ability to generate revenue in the future by effectively eliminating one avenue of generating said revenue. (Just look at how Microsoft uses the vaporware strategy to prevent people from buying competitors products. This is done to preserve a potential market even when they have no product to sell. If potential markets were not extremely valuable, why would they bother?) The same argument could be easily adapted to tangible product such as your Taurus clone. It is also not relevant whether StarPlay actually intended to expand to Europe. Alley 19 is their product to do with as they see fit. If GT wants to market it to Europeans then they need to obtain a proper license agreement from StarPlay and cut them in on the profits.

  • GTI as a game publisher, like a music publisher or book publisher, is part of a market that maintains tight control of distribution, and is generally able to pay fairly low royalties to the authors they distribute for. Nearly all companies in these markets are very vocal against piracy.
  • its a goddamn bowling game who gives a shit about it after all its bowling

    It's money. Some people like bowling games, and so want them and pay for them. If this company is losing money for a definite reason, and they can solve it legally, they are within their rights to sue.
  • I have to hand it to a small company willing to go after a much larger one like GT Interactive. It is a dangerous precedent (if the story is true), if GT Interactive is let off the hook just by agreeing to not sell the pirated software anymore.

    I wonder though, what the laws are in this situation ... seems like the justice system generally lags behind "new" technology and the abuses within ...

    YS
  • Not that I'm an economist or anything, but how can you say they have stolen actual income? The original product was apparently not sold in Germany, so it cannot be said GT was competing with the legitimate owners of the product. Nor did anyone from GT intercept transmissions of money from customers to the legal owners of the copyright/patent.

    This appears to be no different from the infrigement of Warez. If somebody cracks a piece of software, then sells it at a price of $0, I don't see how that is fundamentally different from reselling it at a price of say $1. Certainly not by a factor of "100". Really, I would think that it would be quite a bit worse to charge no money for stolen goods, for the reason that the customer is that much more likely to choose the illegal product over the honest one. (Infinitely more likely to use your "math").

    -konstant
  • When I was younger, I used to download warez all the time and I didn't really feel too bad about it. Then once the games got bigger and CD-R's became cheap, there were a fair amount of people who would bundle a bunch of warez on a CD and sell it for $50 or something. I'm not in the "scene" that much, so I don't know how popular of a method this is to distribute warez (though I guess I was never in the "scence", just a unattached "consumer"). I always had a sneaking suspicion that paying someone else for warez is worse than downloading it for free, but I don't know how sure I am about it.

    I'm not sure, but maybe this game wasn't available in Europe, so maybe they wouldn't have sold any games in Europe if it weren't for GT. And at what price? With the example of a bunch of warez for $50, the "actual value" of the CD is really probably at least a thousand dollars, so I wouldn't have bought all the software on the CD if I had to pay full price. In fact, I probably wouldn't have bought any of it.

    Let's say this is actually a good game and I'm some guy in Europe that really wants it, but I can't buy it, because there are no stores that have it. Then GT comes around and sells it in Europe for less than the price it's supposed to be. So I buy it. The original writers of the game don't really "lose" anything, because no one in Europe would have been able to buy the game because of its inavailability and/or price. Anyway, I guess that's just the GNU Manifesto way of looking at it.

    Sure, GT's going to be sued and they probably deserve it, if only for the sheer stupidity of doing something like this as a large company. I don't really have much sympathy for either of them. Many, many computer and video game console games are not worth the $60 you have to spend on them. Unless you have some way to try them out (i.e., warez), it's not worth the gamble of buying them if you have a limited budget.
  • After all the crap GT interactive has done to hurt the computer gaming industry (Unreal's way early release, as well as how they screwed id), I hope StarPlay wins enough money to buy those suckers out. Or put them out of business at least.

    &ltwith_feeling>
    Bastards!
    &lt/with_feeling>
    ---
  • Toss 'em in jail with the rest of 'em. Oh wait, this is a modest sized company, so no one will go to jail. Where's all that 10 years in jail and $250,000 fine that FBI logos threaten everyone with now? Hmmmmm? It applies to everybody and everything equally right?

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