Free Games As a Solution To Game Piracy 806
christ, jesus H writes "PC gaming may not be dying, but it is in a state of flux. We're seeing developers and publishers blaming piracy for all the ills of PC gaming, but attempts to rein in pirates with the help of DRM only annoys and mobilizes the legitimate customers of your games. The solution? According to David Perry of Shiny Games, PC games are going to be free." (And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below.)
A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:5, Insightful)
I prefer the term "stealing games" myself. It fits well, does away with the positive connotations that the term "piracy" has gained in some circles, and -perhaps most important- it really makes the pirates mad.
I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
I would still be willing to BUY games (I don't pirate them, I just haven't found much to interest me, console OR desktop alike).
Again, I would still be willing to BUY games if they would stop rehashing half witted half finished games. So few companies really release good games, and everyone expects insane growth. Always "growth". Perhaps some retards somewhere forgot that you can only grow so much before your body either collapses under its own weight or you evolve into something else. Otherwise, no luck.
Blizzard always releases late. People understand them. Why? Because Blizzard, ID, Ravensoft and no others I can think of, have managed to release a bug free or complete product. Most of their fixes, in my memory, have been playbalancing, rare bugs on rare configs, etc. But their games WORK. Other people's games... often hit and run.
Why is it that so FEW companies actually put out workable, GOOD products? Perhaps if more of them did, and if shoddy products were to be refunded in FULL, then perhaps better products would "revitalize" the market.
Games don't need to be free. Shitty ones and incomplete ones should be. The "no return if opened" policy is bullshit. It just allows a company to sell a shitty game and get away with it. It allows a store to carry a non tested product and get away with it. But hell, if pharmaceutical companies and electronics and even car companies can get away with shoddy products, why not the software industry? If the customers keep waiting for governments to step in and save them, they ought to realize that it is MUCH easier to buy off bureaucrats and politicians than ten thousand pissed off freemen customers, some of whom might be willing and able to use their rights (from the vocal to the physical) when other means fail to extract remedy for shoddy product and vaporware sold as an actual, complete product. Fraud of this sort should be held accountable by the victims, the customers. Until the customers demand quality, and stand by that remark... and demand refunds on shitty products, until that occurs... well, nothing's gonna change.
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Funny)
Other people's games... often hit and run.
Hit and run games are fun, too. Now hit and miss games I could understand not liking. ;)
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:4, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The "no return if opened" policy is bullshit.
This is actually a very good point. I didn't pirate things anywhere near as much as I do not before that policy. Back when Egghead or wherever would accept returns, I bought a game and, if it was horribly buggy or just plain sucked, I returned it. When they changed that policy, that is when I started looking on pirate BBSes, etc.
The natural extension of that is the Internet and technologies like BitTorrent.
The same kind of thing applies for the ridiculous anti-piracy measures that publishers take (e.g., Sec
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Again, I would still be willing to BUY games if they would stop rehashing half witted half finished games
I realize that you personally haven't used it to justify piracy, but I see this all too often from pirates. This is not a valid excuse. If games really sucked so much, you wouldn't even be interested in pirating them!
Why is it that so FEW companies actually put out workable, GOOD products?
What games don't work? List some, and I will list you twice as many that do ship in a reasonably working, bug-free form.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh. I (and a lot of my friends) own full copies of many games, but still get the cracks and pirated versions. It's just a hell of a lot easier to play, I can keep the disc images on my machine (or not even need them), rather than trying to cart around a bunch of CD's or trying to keep them in pristine condition going in and out of the drive all the time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I wouldn't classify most pirates that way but quite a few.
you can't return a game once you opened the box. therefore if the game doesn't play well on your hardware, or if it really sucks and the demo has all the good parts in it(like some movie trailers). Console Gamers can usually rent games from blockbuster, etc.
PC gamers have to shell out money to even find out if they might actually like it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Most of the people I know that pirate PC games end up buying the game a few days later if they like it, or dumping it if they don't. These are the same people that rent console games from blockbuster and then buy copies if they like it after the weekend.
If you could return PC games, or rent them, their piracy would stop.
Myself, I just wait for someone else to buy it, and then play it at their place, and buy it if I like it, since it isn't worth the time and effort to locate a working pirated version and do
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
Ditto on games. I will try them and buy it if I like it.
CD cracks are a completely different issue. I do NOT want to be bothered to search my huge collection of CDs, then find out the blasted thing is scratched. Not only that, I've only got so many 5.25" slots for CD drives. I have two slots, but I could, in a given week, play about 7 different games. Currently, I'm working through Oblivion, Civilization IV (with some friends), Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 (with some friends), Diablo II (III's coming out "soon", I hope), TrackMania Nations, Need for Speed: Underground 2. I need to finish Neverwinter Nights (I got the expansion recently), I may reload Fallout at some point. And all of this does not even touch my Valve Software collection. Five of the seven games I just mentioned required the game CD when they were first released. Diablo II, I think, no longer needs it and Fallout is old and the company released a no CD patch themselves. GRAW2 was legally purchased from a website and downloaded. I burned the install files to a disk for archiving purposes, although that was not necessarily the intent of the download.
Interestingly, Civ IV failed to work for one of my friend's legally purchased copy because of the CD checks. I pointed him to a place to acquire the no CD crack. His game works perfectly now. I use a certain set of software to create an image of the disk that will circumvent the disk check and allow ISO reads. So Civ IV, Morrowind, Oblivion, NFS:U2, and NWN all have their image stored somewhere on my hard drive.
I really like Valve Software's model. They don't care how often I reformat my computer or even what computer I'm on. If they can validate my account, I have access to the game.
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a hint, if you truly can't return the game, you can't reject the EULA, and as such aren't bound by the terms.
Which means that you'd be able to distribute as you like.
What are you smoking? The EULA doesn't take away the right to distribute, copyright law does. That is in effect whether you agree to the EULA or not, so no, you could not distribute the game if you refuse the EULA. You're stuck with a box of discs that are essentially worthless unless you can sell them to someone else. Of course if it was an online game or application, then that person would be stupid to buy the opened box b/c you could have already gotten the CD Key from it and they would not be able to use it online. Of course sites like Ebay will probably shoot down your auction of it too. Sucks to be a software consumer these days.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've never asked for a movie ticket refund because the movie sucked, so why would you expect to refund a game if it sucks?
Actually, if you leave during the first 15-20 minutes and tell the manager "The Movie sucks, I'd like a refund" they will generally oblige you.
Source: http://www.startribune.com/lifestyle/yourmoney/11349201.html [startribune.com]
Do you honestly think that if more people knew they could get refunds by leaving in the first 15-20 minutes of the movie, they would just say "fuck it, nothing I can do now!"?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Except writing a bad game review gets you fired [slashdot.org] so they're not at all accurate and doesn't give you any idea how it will play on your computer, xbox or TV screen.
The history of game reviews is littered with bribery and it's still the case. Reviews are complete bullshit.
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:4, Funny)
I think you unintentionally found the replacement for the term "pirate".
it is MUCH easier to buy off bureaucrats and politicians than ten thousand pissed off freemen customers
The Fremen [wikipedia.org] fought CHOAM and the Sppacing Guild. Perfect name for copyright infringers!
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Interesting)
+50, Nailed it!
The no-refund policy leads to horrible products with fantastic marketing budgets. What's a scorned gamer to do, sue the company ? On what grounds ? You can't prove "lack of fun" in court.
I'm of the opinion that piracy / software theft / whatever you wanna call it, helps the good game houses and hurts the bad ones. The whole try-before-you-buy excuse is a very valid one IMHO. There's a crapload of software out there, that I would have never heard of, were it not for some illiterate little shit in Norway posting it on Usenet. Not just games but apps too... prime example: O&O Defrag. I saw it on some FTP eons ago, gave it a whirl, and have been a paying user for over eight years now. Why the *&@^ am I paying for a defrag tool ? Because I like the damned thing, that's why. Had it not been pirated, I would still be cursing at MS Defrag / Diskeeper on a daily basis.
Same thing applies to games. You mentioned Blizzard, well a long long time ago, when I was just a teenager with lots of BBS accounts, I stumbled upon the original Warcraft. I had no clue what this game was, nor did any of my friends, but it was an addictive little thing. Chop wood, mine gold, kill stuff - FUN! Warcraft 2 came out, I trotted down to EB and picked up the War2 battlechest. Then Starcraft, War3, and WoW.
Had it not been for that pirated copy of the original Warcraft, I would never have bought the 2nd and 3rd installments.
The same is true for a bunch of Lucasarts games... Day of the Tentacle, anyone ? If it weren't for those massively distributed copies of Monkey Island, I would not have been hooked, and they would have sold $250 less games to this one guy alone.
Meanwhile, when companies release shitty games, the kind that's not even worth pirating, you can be damned sure I'll never buy their stuff, and I won't bother downloading it either.
If games didn't cost $60-70 to "try", maybe they would sell more. There are very few shops that release demos anymore, and the ones that do, often pull a Hollywood on us, where the full product only adds filler with no substance. The business model needs to be redesigned from the ground up - new distribution, new (smaller) budgets, greater emphasis on gameplay... it's not so hard, just look at all the runaway hits of recent years like Portal or Sam & Max - inexpensive to make and tons of fun.
Sure, blockbusters can be good too, but so many of them flop because the money takes over, release dates get bumped up and salaries get chopped. What, you actually believe those no-experience foreign sweat shops with mile-long resumés are going to cut development costs while delivering a superior product ? Ever heard of EA and Activision ? Ever seen them release a top-quality product ?
The game industry is fucked, much like the music industry. Pointing fingers will not change that.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't want to get stuck with a bad game, find a reviewer that has similar tastes and stick with what they recommen
You can't compare Blizzard to most of the rest (Score:5, Informative)
Blizzard puts the customer first and only delivers polished products, release dated be damned. And that's why everyone loves them. Now compare that to, oh, just about everyone. It's a shame Looking Glass died, but the retail version of System Shock 2 was unbeatable for most people because a crucial window wasn't breakable. Piranha Bytes' The Gothic 3 gold master was so unready for production that they had to release the first patch on launch day. BioShock is a prime example of DRM gone bad^H^H^Hworse as many players are locked out of the game for too many reinstalls before they even played the game once - reinstalls which they accumulated trying to get the game to work.
To put it like Zero Punctuation's Yahtzee might: The video game industry is a sea of vomit and that's the qualitative standard against which new games are measured. The better ones are usually very nice and pretty examples of vomit but they're still vomit. The few gems people like Blizzard release can't change the fact that we're waist-deep in gastric acid.
Re:You can't compare Blizzard to most of the rest (Score:5, Insightful)
How exactly can they justify not shutting that down?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
On a related notice, I'm really pissed I can't find my copies of SC and BW anymore.
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:4, Interesting)
The no return with open package isn't just because of piracy... it's because people would use big-box stores as rental stores. Get a game, play through it, return it and get another one, all "free". What I'd be most impressed with is if they did a return policy like Gamestop does. 7 days, no questions asked, after that, you're SOL. 7 days is long enough that you can return it if it sucks, but short enough that you can't play through most games worth money, assuming you're a normal person. There may be a few people who abuse it, but I think that would be a solution that would appease the greatest number of people, and get more people buying games again.
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> Blizzard always releases late. People understand them. Why?
Having shipped & worked on a few titles the answer is simple:
Because no one remembers if a bad game ships on time, but if a good game is late, no one will really care _too_ much. In order to do this, you need:
1. Money, to "buy" you the time to polish.
2. Faith in your good team to produce a great product.
Most game studios are short on both.
Blizzard is not innovative -- they just copy what _works. BUT, they DO put a ton of work into UI and b
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:5, Informative)
Having worked for blizzard, I can assure you we shipped at least diablo, diablo II, starcraft, broodwar, lord of destruction, warcraft III, frozen throne, and wow with lots of software bugs.
Not many fatal bugs, but plenty of bugs. I personally fixed about 300 non play balance bugs that went into various patches.
Bugs are unavoidable in large software projects. Avoiding serious bugs that will make your customers unhappy is mostly about devoting sufficient testing resources to finding that class of bugs before shipping, and planning for extended work hours right after release to quickly fix the most serious bugs that escaped your testing.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Forget DEVELOPERS... it's why _I_ like consoles more than PCs for gaming. I stopped gaming on my PC back in 2002 and I couldn't be happier with the decision. Last time I upgraded my PC in 2003 and I'm still happy with the performance for everything else I use it for which includes audio and photo editing with the occasional CA
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I've got an acquaintance who was an engine developer for Neversoft (he works for EA now) He explained it to me like this: If(hard drive attached) { cache } else { don't cache }
Though you don't need a devleoper to explain these concepts.. just time how long it takes for a game to load with the hard d
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I feel like I've stepped into a Twilight Zone thread, where you say one thing, and people respond as if you said something completely different.
The original point (now GGGGGGGP or something) was that it's not uncommon for a game's demo to be heavily tested and bug fixed so that it is not representative of the quality and stability of the retail version of the game. You try the demo, exercise as much due diligence as you are able to with it, and you are satisfied with the game's quality. But then when you
Re:I prefer this idea: (Score:4, Funny)
I agree that the "no return if opened" policy is hurting consumers
I used to tend to steam my PC software open when possible. Not really steam, just get the glue weakened and soft so it'd peel off. Open, install, play, beat in like 4 hours... close back up and return. A game needs to take a week :(
Console games shrink wrap so this is a non-option.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not stealing as copying does not deprive the original owner of anything. Copyright is an artificial monopoly provided by the government as an incentive to create and release creative works.
Am I stealing from you if I choose not to buy from you, but from someone else? No? Yet I am depriving you of revenue, isn't that stealing? No? Then depriving you of revenue by copying your product isn't stealing either.
It is copyright violation, which is wrong, but not stealing. It is wrong because it violates the social contract you agree to by continuing to live in our society.
That is important: you wouldn't even have a moral claim against a person who renounced society and all its benefits who then violated copyright. They would not be a party to the social contract, and would have no moral reason not to copy.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Kinda like when I screwed your wife while you were at work. You could still use her, so there is nothing wrong with it. Me and the twelve other guys all agree on this.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Funny)
Kinda like when I screwed your wife while you were at work. You could still use her, so it wasn't stealing
Fixed that for you.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Interesting)
This is a quite (unintentionally) interesting post. The words "stealing" and "piracy" are criticized here because they are inaccurate metaphors for the thing being described, chosen to sway the debate by their emotional impact. Here we have an AC troll who is trying to veer the conversation back into emotionalism by yet another inaccurate metaphor.
You can see that the words "stealing" and "piracy" obscure the issue, without necessarily thinking that copyright infringement is acceptable.
Some cases of piracy are reasonably close to theft: unauthorized commercial duplication for example. In this case, the copyright holders aren't deprived of the material, they are deprived of the revenue, which the infringer enjoys. Other cases are not very much like theft, but are still not very admirable. They are more like freeloading.
Still other forms of copyright infringement represent the user trying to exercise a right he believes he has but which the copyright holder does not believe he has. In some cases that may be a legal right (such as archival copying), in other cases it may be a moral right, like replacing a CD lost in a fire. Such infringements have to be viewed on a case by case basis. Some are be reasonable and others are not, some are legal and others are not, but none are precisely "stealing" nor are any "piracy", which technically means robbery on the ocean without a valid legally recognized license from a sovereign nation.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Am I stealing from you if I choose not to buy from you, but from someone else? No? Yet I am depriving you of revenue, isn't that stealing? No? Then depriving you of revenue by copying your product isn't stealing either.
That's quite a leap there. If I steal your product, that implies that I want it. Do I want it badly enough that I would pay for it if there was no possible way to steal it? Maybe, maybe not, but the product clearly has some value to me, since I was willing to go through the trouble and risk of stealing it.
However, if I'm buying someone else's product instead, that implies that your game has no value to me, since I believe your competitor's product to be superior enough to spend my time on it rather than
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I steal your product, that implies that I want it. Do I want it badly enough that I would pay for it if there was no possible way to steal it? Maybe, maybe not, but the product clearly has some value to me, since I was willing to go through the trouble and risk of stealing it.
Yes, but we are not talking about stealing, unless you can prove otherwise. We are talking about copyright infringement.
That was kind of the point.
However, if I'm buying someone else's product instead, that implies that your game ha
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You are both depriving the producer of revenue AND making use of their product without paying for ownership. It's much like 'stealing' wifi access from your neighbor. The only physical aspect of the theft involves electrons/impulses/etc...
"the wrongful taking and carrying away of the personal goods or property of another; larceny."
Copyright (whether you approve or not) denotes ownership...making it intellectual property. The wrongful taking of makes it theft.
Funny how the slashdot crowd considers it t
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the slashdot crowd considers it copyright violation is Microsoft includes GPL'ed code, and we consider it copyright violation if someone copies music, movies or software. See how that works? It's a different word, denoting a different action, with different consequences, but it is still wrong.
Using someone else's wifi is stealing, as you are depriving them of a limited resource: their bandwidth. You can make unlimited copies of a digital work without depriving the owner of anything.
You can argue the point all you like, but the law sees it differently than you do. Jaywalking also isn't littering, in case you were confused about that, too.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
We could equate it with boarding a ship at sea, taking its cargo, murdering its crew, and leaving the ship to burn while we sail away.
Oh.
Like dropping a house on a witch (Score:5, Funny)
"Using someone else's wifi is stealing, "
only if you don't have authorization. If the system lets you in by design, then you have authorization.
The incoming house analogy will inevitably show how little the person knows about how computers communicate.
Stealing wifi is like dropping a house on a witch. It will make strange looking midgets dance around with glee, and get her sister to send flying monkeys after you.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright (whether you approve or not) denotes ownership
No, it doesn't, not in the US according to our Constitution. The public OWN the work, the work's creator is given a limited time monopoly.
If you rent a house you have a limited time monopoly to the house, but it is NOT your property. If you OWN the house it is yours to pass to your decendants forever (or until it burns or someone steals it).
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me throw this wrench in the works. What if I buy a used (game/book/music) at Half Price Books [halfpricebooks.com]? What if I borrowed it from a library and returned it? This still deprives the producer of revenue beyond the first user. I am paying for ownership in the first case, but that's only going to the store has the game, not the intellectual owner. And that, in essnce, has been their argument--it doesn't matter if Joe Blow bought the game, the minute he started sharing it with others, that's suddenly illegal.
What it
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Actually, no, because the copy wasn't obtained by lawful means. You are depriving its rightful owner of a product it could sell or otherwise dispose of as it saw fit."
Hate to break it to you, but no he isn't. You haven't in any way taken a physical item from them, or prevented them from making more. Your logic sucks.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:5, Informative)
If you violate the law, you are a criminal.
Not true. Some laws specify civil torts while others specify crimes. You become a criminal by violating the laws that specify crimes. This isn't philosophical bullshit.
Copyright infringement (my favorite replacement term) can either be a civil tort or criminal depending on the purpose and circumstances. In most cases, especially involving P2P sharing, the infringement is a civil tort.
However, theft is always criminal. Sure, it might have to exceed a certain threshold to be a felony, but stealing even a fraction of a penny is a crime.
Theft is always a crime. Copyright infringement is only a crime in certain instances. Again, this is not philosophical bullshit.
Arguing that theft and copyright infringement are the same thing demonstrates a lack of understanding the difference between civil and criminal law not to mention the purpose and nature of copyright law.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:5, Insightful)
The physicality of the item, or the lack thereof, is not important.
Wrong. The "physicality" is fundamental to the issue.
Your bank account scam analogy is fatally flawed. You said "shaved". As in, people's bank accounts are being reduced. That is theft. A whole lot of people lost a little money out of their accounts. That does not happen with copying.
Even the immaterialness of your bank account example is flawed. Money is a convenient representation of all scarce resources, and as such must itself be scarce. Easily done by using some sort of material representation such as coinage. But if it's done electronically, then it must be kept scarce by other means. Otherwise the economy would have to go back to barter. Creating more money, which is what copying money would do, is another crime known as counterfeiting. Unlike money, information is not scarce. And information does not need to be kept scarce to be valuable, just the opposite in most cases.
when you pirate software, you have deprived the copyright holder of something which belongs to them: the copy you made.
No. Information is not a good, and cannot be owned. It isn't material. Now, information can be "fixed" in a medium, and that material item can indeed be owned. But the author has a copyright, not a property deed. Copyrights can be owned, media can be owned, but information cannot be owned. We often say of people who have paid for a medium containing a copy of something that they "own a copy of" or even just "own" some album, book, movie, or whatever, but what is meant is that they own the medium, not the information on it. There are many things they can legally do with the medium such as sell it, that they can't do with the information. Fixing a copy of some copyrighted info to a medium does not somehow assign the ownership of that medium to the copyright holder, that's not how the law works.
We can't have a good argument on these issues until we can agree on the terms. Your logic is founded on redefining the basic terms to mean things they do not mean. There's nothing more to say until you stop equating copying with theft. Copying is NOT theft. It's not even similar to theft. Copying isn't always a crime, theft is always a crime. Copyright infringement is always a violation of the law, but not all copying is copyright infringement. Murder, speeding, perjury, vandalism, fraud, and counterfeiting are always violations of the law. But none of those are theft. There are many, many crimes that are not theft. Copyright infringement is not theft. Copyright infringement is not theft. One more time: Copyright infringement is not theft.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's revisit your example, but in this case somebody starts murdering anyone who bought the game. After a couple news reports, people might stop purchasing the game for fear of being murdered. Obviously the murderer is depriving the developers of sales revenue, so by your logic
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This talk about meanings is not meaningless. Quite the contrary. It is fundamental to whether the grievances against "piracy" are righteous.
Your hypothetical independent game developer-- does this person even exist, or is he a figment of your imagination? Do you have any idea of the organization needed to produce a hit game these days? Anyway, he needs a different business model. Yes, there are different business models. You write as if it's copyright or nothing. Not true!
you will not be able to recoup your costs for development or make a profit.
Bull. WoW, Everquest, 2nd
Inappropriately conflated "Illegal" w/ "Steal" (Score:5, Interesting)
You make a reasonable argument on why its wrong to violate copyright. That does not mean its "stealing."
Possession of something that should lawfully belong to someone is not theft on its face. The means by which one takes unlawful possession indicate different crimes.
There are a number of other variations on the above. Simple possession of another person's rightful property does not necessarily constitute theft.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:5, Insightful)
False assumption. Some, if not most, people who download illegal copies of software have no interest in purchasing the software in the first place. They were never potential buyers.
You might as well claim, "Hey, slashdot should start charging for pageviews! They're serving a million pages a day for free! If they started charging $1/page, they'd make a million dollars a day!"
As you raise the price of an item, (from $0 to the actual MSRP) the number of people willing to buy at that price decreases. Basic economics.
I understand that you want to get paid for you work. So do I. But copyright violation is not theft, and you can't assume that every copyright violation is a lost sale.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Informative)
Not according to US law (yet). You can argue all you want about the way things should be, but the way things ARE, copyright violation is not stealing.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's stealing: you're depriving the intellectual property owner of one of their property rights, i.e. exclusivity. The same way I may choose who gets to stay in my realty (i.e. I control the exclusivity of the property)
You seem doubly confused. If someone violates the "exlusivity" of your property, that's called trespassing, not theft.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you think that buying stolen property is theft, plain and simple? Is fraud also theft, plain and simple? Then if you own any land, you are a thief, plain and simple, as all property was either stolen from its original owners, or they were defrauded of it.
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:5, Insightful)
> favorite replacment term for "piracy,"
market correction
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Insightful)
I prefer the term "raping children" myself. It fits well, does away with the positive connotations that the term "piracy" has gained in some circles, and -perhaps most important- it really makes the pirates mad.
See the problem?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The term is actually already being used by some people; it gets ~2000 Googles and most of the first-page hits seem relevant. Howev
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Under no rational analysis can it be said to be, "stealing."
Schwab
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I prefer the term "stealing games" myself.
If you go into a store and take a game without paying for it you're stealing. If you download it, even illegally, you're not.
If you steal a game the store owner is out the cost of the game he bought from the publisher. If you download a game illegally nobody has lost anything, particularly if it is a game you would not have otherwise paid for (too poor, just want to check out a new genre etc) and most especially if, like some do, you want to see if you actually like
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
How about the term "anonymous offsite back-up with frequent integrity testing"?
But honestly, I don't see much point in pirating the games. Most aren't good enough to be worth the effort and those that are should be bought just to support the companies that make good games. When I was younger (kid, had no money), I "acquired" some "back-ups" and frequently "tested the integrity" of those back-ups, but now that I'm older and have money, I just buy the ones I want.
Layne
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And when you can prove that one person "stealing" the game makes it impossible for somebody else to buy it, you might have a point. Until then you really ought to actually spend some time learning about the subject.
Realistically, piracy has always been rampant, and despite the FUD to the otherwise, there's still a game industry. It's just that back in the late 80s and early to mid 90s the vast majority of game companies didn't waste money or effort fighting it.
I personally won't buy games which have copy pr
Re:A favorite term to replace 'piracy'? (Score:4, Informative)
I prefer 'piracy'. The group ethics of freebooters during the golden age of sail is identical with the ethics of digital encryption-circumventors and copyright-ignorers.
To understand, you have to realize that sailing in the 17th century was a miserable occupation, especially with the Royal Navy. The hours were wicked, the breaks short, and the work back-breaking. Officers (who were paid about 10 times what you were) were rewarded for treating you harshly. Rations were insignificant and insufficient (the practice of giving lime juice to sailors didn't start until the 19th century, so scurvy likely). You could even be forcibly press-ganged into serving on a ship, if you happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
As a pirate, however, there were many more men on a ship, meaning less work and more free time for all. Food and fresh water were easier to come by, since you didn't have to make long trans-oceanic voyages, so nutrition was better and servings more filling.
The captain still earned more booty that the rest of the crew, but only by a factor of three or four, as shares of treasure were distributed proportionately. And speaking of captains, they were elected by acclaim, rather than imposed by remote authorities from the Admiralty.
The characterization of pirates as bloodthirsty is mostly a historical relic inserted by the authorities to frighten children and to discourage sailors from becoming buccaneers. A few were psychopathic, it's true, but the punishment they meted out as victors was no worse than what they would have faced themselves at home. All the talk of bargains with the Devil or Death was a metaphor for the pirates exchange: they earned freedom and sovereignty, but had to pay for it with a price on their heads.
In many cases the pirates proved better men than their opponents. Jean LaFitte fought alongside the Americans in the War of 1812, Capts. Morgan and Kidd plundered vessels in the name of the Crown, and Great Peter fought at sea to protect Friesland from its belligerent neighbors.
The parallels to modern-day software/content piracy should be obvious. They believe in freedom, rather than monopolistic autocracy; they risk severe punishment; they advocate sharing the fruits of their labor; they are generally nicer people than most of their adversaries (game designers tend to be the best of the lot, but when it comes to music, movies, books, etc. the contrast is much more clear).
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"stealing games"
That is exactly the thought in my head when I played on some "private" World of Warcraft servers. Which are already offering this model of business. In that market rules of the game often relaxed to increase the rate of character progression for more casual players. Also often times the group running the emulated World of Warcraft server will accept donations and in exchange offer in game items of various levels. From 5USD for 5k gold to 250USD for collections of vastly overpowered items. Needless to say th
ooh, ooh, I've got one! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yarr, I be a clever pirate.
make good games that run on reasonable hardware (Score:4, Interesting)
Instead of mediocre games that require incredibly expensive stuff few people have.
Re:make good games that run on reasonable hardware (Score:5, Insightful)
Even if you look back to the NES where we only had a few major developers there was a lot of quality games made, games that pushed the hardware to the limit. In the SNES/Genesis era things stayed the same. But once we got to the PS1/N64 era, we got flooded with a ton of really crappy games. Think about it, once Disney games were good, at least decent, and worth playing, then midway into the '90s something started to go terribly, terribly wrong. Every movie had some lame video game tie-in, games started to all be the same, originality seemed to be confined to first-party developers. We are still there, you only need to take a look at the Wii.
Re:make good games that run on reasonable hardware (Score:4, Informative)
Quick question (and not meant to be rude): are you old enough to have been in peak game-playing years during the NES and Genesis/SNES era? You must not be if you are attempting to distinguish those systems from the current ones based on "crap games."
Lousy movie tie-ins? Those have always existed. Hell, the legendary ET game for Atari (so bad that it is often partially blamed for the collapse of an industry) is a movie tie-in. In the NES and SNES/Genesis era, LJN, Flying Edge, Acclaim (or, as many jokingly called it, ACK! LAME!) and plenty of other publisher/developers were responsible for literally hundreds of shovelware titles between the three systems. We are shielded from those titles by the virtue of 10 to 20 years of passed time that have gradually allowed the gaming community to repress those awful, awful memories. If you're curious, go look at the wiki pages for LJN or Flying Edge; 9/10s of the games on there were garbage and a good number are all movie tie-ins. Better yet, go check out the wiki page with the list of NES games. If you grew up during that era, you'll pick out a few great games, a bunch of stuff you barely remember as being mediocre or never worth your time, and some true stinkers.
We also have the virtue of being able to group the "hardware-pushing" games all into a particular era, rather than recognizing that months and years passed between what we now just blanket-label as NES-era games. For every developer that figured out how to bootleg up some parallax-like scrolling on the NES, there were a TON of devs pimping out simple side-scrolling platformers or shooters that look basically indistinguishable from Mario 2 (for example, ANY NES movie tie-in game that was a side scroller or shooter).
I assure you, not much has changed. There are still some worthwhile gems sprinkled in among garbage. If anything, the lowered cost of physical CD/DVD production has allowed more quality, niche games (tactical combat games, for example) to be ported from the Japanese market than the cartridge medium allowed.
Bootlegging (Score:5, Insightful)
Bootlegging [merriam-webster.com]: to produce, reproduce, or distribute illicitly or without authorization
This helps to distinguish private copying from for-profit counterfeiting by organized crime.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
No, doesn't work. Appropriating and taking imply that the original owner is deprived of their property.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
to take exclusive possession of
That DOES imply that the original owner is deprived of their property. You aren't taking exclusive possession when you copy.
TAANSTAFL (Score:3, Insightful)
They'll be encumbered with ad- and mal- ware.
Problems... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Problems... (Score:5, Informative)
- US PC Gaming Revenues 2007 - $2.76 billion +12%
- US PC Gaming Revenues 2008 - $3.1 billion +14% (forecast)
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2007 - $8.3 billion +14%
- Worldwide PC Gaming 2008 - $9.6 billion +16% (forecast)
Those numbers are from the May MaximumPC. PC gaming is *not* dead, it's growing. Stop spreading the FUD.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, someone please mod the parent post up!
PC Gaming is dying because people are tired of the "latest, greatest" games not only including a $50 price tag, but also another $250 price tag for a new video card to play them well!
People constantly complain that the Mac is "not a viable computer" for them because they don't have enough games out for them, not enough graphics card options, etc. But I can see the flip-side of that. Sometimes it's nice watching Apple "hold the line", saying "What?! These configu
Call it what it is (Score:5, Informative)
"And if anyone has a favorite replacement term for "piracy," in the context of electronic copyright violation, please suggest it below."
Umm, a copyright violation? Copyright infringement? Why not just call it what it is instead of bringing in some new word that's going to have a specific connotation?
Spore Creature Editor (Score:2)
If the future of free games means installing DRM crap on our computers, such as SecuROM, then they can keep their "free games". It's only going to become an entry point for companies to install their malware on our computers.
Why do they need to be free? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just make them good. I have no problem with paying for my games (I do so for every game I have a copy of), but I'm not going to go out and buy a crap game if I can help it.
Of course the industry needs to stop crying wolf as well. While sales from brick and morter stores are going down like a brick, a lot of that is being picked up by services like Steam, because Valve seems to have realised that attempting to screw your customers just doesn't work.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The funniest thing about Steam is, I tried to use it... and ended up with a game that didn't work! Then I went and checked isohunt... oh yeah, there is halflife2... oh look, this version works! Maybe valve should take some coding lessons from the blackhats - or, possibly something else (like they noticed I stole halflife1 and still had it on the pc, hahaha) was going on. They really got owned on that issue
PC gaming's real enemy: (Score:2, Interesting)
Involuntary 100% discount (Score:2)
A good replacement term for piracy is the involuntary 100% discount... which differs very little from the voluntary 100% discount suggested by making 'all computer games free'. That is 100% stupid. If you are charging for services related to the game, i.e. "color t-shirts" in the game or the online service or whatever, then guess what part people will pirate instead of the game?
Piracy is not an excuse (Score:4, Interesting)
People have been pirating games for almost 30 years, but companies have been profitable. Pirating games is a giant pain in the butt, so if you can purchase a game online and legally download it, you're probably going to do it. You can purchase almost any game via digital downloads these days.
Compare to consoles, I own an xbox 360 but do not own a single game. I don't pirate, but I have gamefly. I get 3-4 games per month, which I play beat and return in mere days. The amount of money being made there per game is miniscule, if I had more free time I would probably do the trade-in thing which I understand is all the rage.
I'm not convinced "free" (as in crack) games are a solution to a real problem. Windows is just not turnkey enough for the simple games that consoles do best. For the complicated games, lately people don't buy very many. Who has time for WoW AND Lotro AND MMOG++? PC games tend to be involved, for this reason we won't acquire every game that hits the shelves and will be selective. If a game sucks, we won't buy it, no time, forget money.
Console games...well gamefly will send me anything on my queue, and I'll keep the queue full even if the games on it suck and I just send it back barely touched. If you're EA, this is just fine, that means they're getting more share of my entertainment budget ($14.99/mo or whatever it is). From the standpoint of running a business based on increasing profits, they like it, no risk.
Not free. Digital downloads, easy updates. (Score:5, Insightful)
Valve has a nice vision:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=160866 [eurogamer.net]
Have to say I agree with them.
I recently bought a new, up-to-date PC with dual cores and all the bells and whistles. After playing nothing but WoW, Civ and other less-powerhungry games on my trusty old 1,2 GHz Celeron and Win'98, I could finally check out all the games I missed.
So far: Half-Life 2, Orange Box (consisting of EP1&EP2 too, and Portal). Love it. Also love Steam. It works.
Another case: Galactic Civilizations 2. Stardock's Stardock Central (and the parallel, Impulse), rock.
NO Copy protection. No DVD in drive bullshit. No running through the hoops. Before, when I bought a game it was always running via gamecopyworld.com to get the crack. Another game that I got was Crysis. Fine, gamecopyworld has cracks - except there isn't one for the 64-bit 1.21 version. So I was stuck with the DVD in drive..
Then, as an old Baldur's Gate&Torment&Kotor fan, I heard that Bioware had done a new RPG - Mass Effect. To avoid hassle, I googled for what copy protection it's using - and read about the whole phone-home-schema. I can run Steam in offline mode. Stardock Central doesn't phone home. But these guys seriously thought that spyware in your PC is ok?!
I was already firing up my torrent client, but then I read http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/05/09/2318229 [slashdot.org] about EA loosening the DRM and actually bought the game instead.
Gotta love Valve. And Blizzard.
Call a spade a spade (Score:5, Informative)
It's not stolen, it's not pirated... it's an "Unlicensed Copy". Nothing more, nothing less.
Re:Call a spade a spade (Score:4, Funny)
I often go into the store and start eating the food off the shelves. When they tell me to stop, I just tell them that according to Samuel Gompers, there's no inherent difference to the food in the store and the food on my shelf, so how can they expect me to know the difference? Then I eat the security guards, under the misapprehension that they are also food. I think it works out best for everyone, in the end.
Re:Call a spade a spade (Score:4, Funny)
I think you've been playing too much Nethack.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is inherent difference between an item in my house and an item elsewhere. Mainly, that one item is in my house and the other is elsewhere.
Deprive someone of physical property for the sake of your own use and you have committed theft.
Deprive someone of physical property for the sake of resale, and you've both committed theft and entered the black market.
Copy the property or recipe for the property, you have violated copyright violation because you have an unlicensed copy.
Copy the property or recipe for
what a crock. (Score:3, Interesting)
Games don't have to be free.
And they will never get away with charging microtransactions to PC gamers.
David Perry of Shiny Games is a moron.
Make a decent product. Give us plenty of chances to view it. Give us ample opportunity and convenience to purchase it. If we like it, we will.
Eliminate DRM. It obviously doesn't work. Sometimes it prevents your game from working properly.
Use Steam!!!!! We do. Stop wasting your whole budget on marketing. We don't care about the TV commercials. We don't come to E3 to get posters.
Right 'free' games (Score:3, Interesting)
For those who don't know, these free games are all the rage in places like korea. Instead of buying a boxed game and then paying a monthly subscription ala World of Warcraft, you download the game for free and play it for free BUT all the advanced items are not looted or crafted but bought.
The earliest games just made some useful but not-essential items buyable. Buyable but still lootable or at least tradeable. Think Second Life where 1 person buying linden dollars can buy stuff from players who never spend any real cash.
But that isn't profitable enough, so slowly the "buy" items have become more and more essential to play the game beyond the basics.
One example is a game, might be Perfect World, where you get one free sample of a pet. A little pig that picks up loot for you that drops in the world. Handy no? But hardly essential? No, the game drops so much loot that anyone trying to pick stuff up AFTER the free pet has run out will find the game near impossible to play. So where do you get more piggies? From the shop.
And then of course the smart players are going to do a small sum, exactly HOW much do you have to pay each month to play the game succesfully? Oh dear, an amount very similar to the monthly subscription of WoW. Execpt for ONE small problem, that is the MINIMUM sum. You can easily spend more and we all know how addictive these games can become. Blizzard can only charge you the monthly fee, although Blizzard and SOE are learning how to fleece their customer for more, but the Korean games go far further.
Remember all the outcry when console games for the x-box and 360 started charging, one racing game where most tracks and cars had to be bought after you bought theboxed game?
The Koreans go far further.
I don't see this as the future.
Do you REALLY want games entirely designed around selling you items? An RTS where every upgrade for your units has to be paid for, an adventure where puzzle items have to be bought, an RPG where every skill is paid for?
As expensive as single player games have become at least that is a fixed one time charge (oh okay ignoring games like Oblivion) where you know the game can be finished for that amount of money. I really don't want a future in which a company makes its money from me playing the game over and over.
lets not forget also that this means the end of modding. Do you really think that if EA manages to introduce the sale of single pieces of furniture in The Sims that they would allow the countless free mods that exist?
How are you going to sell a FPS with bought items if any modder can add far better weapons?
No, just produce games that are decent value, remove the damn DRM so paying customers ain't punished and accept that perhaps the market isn't in producing the Xth FPS but in producing unique fun games that the people want to pay and play. Remember that the biggest game ever is The Sims. A series that launched WITHOUT drm and allowed open modding and made the company more money then they could ever have dreamed. The PC market is alive and well but you got to stop aiming for the 12yr old boys. I know quite a few The Sims fans and they don't give a shit about buying a new expansion, all they care about is new options to produce free content for EA. That is how you make money. Sell to people willing to pay for your product, not fight a loosing war.
Subscription Gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
The biggest reason piracy is so rampant is because it's so easy and because it's free.
If they added value by putting feelies [wikipedia.org]back in boxes, it could help.
Piracy's a great term for this... (Score:3, Interesting)
Piracy has meant theft of copyrighted materials for a VERY long time. Since 1790. I think 218 years or so is long enough for the definition to be valid.
From the 1828 edition of Webster's dictionary:
" PI'RACY, n. [L. piratica, from Gr. to attempt, to dare, to enterprise, whence L. periculum, experior; Eng. to fare.]
1. The act, practice or crime of robbing on the high seas; the taking of property from others by open violence and without authority, on the sea; a crime that answers to robbery on land.
Other acts than robbery on the high seas, are declared by statute to be piracy. See Act of Congress, April 30, 1790.
2. The robbing of another by taking his writings."
Schwarzkopiererei (Score:3, Interesting)
Not really a replacement for the english-speaking world. But in german, "schwarzkopieren" means "copying something without being authorized to do so", thus somebody who does that is a "Schwarzkopierer".
This is analogous to "schwarzfahren", which means using some public-transport vehicle without paying the fare.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Expensive hardware kills PC gaming (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a very common misconception about the costs for playing games on a PC. I have seen your argument over and over again, so I hope you see my response/correction.
A computer that is used for work or general "home" stuff does not come with good graphics in most cases. These machines are 100 percent focused on non-games related tasks, so as a result, you should not put those functions into the "cost for the games portion of the computer". You can also look at this from another point of view, where if you ONLY buy a computer to play games and NOTHING else, then the cost of a gaming computer is much more expensive than a console, but if you plan to buy a computer for other things as well as playing games, you can now split the costs up.
HP Pavilion desktop computer with AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+, 3GB RAM(DDR2), 360GB hard drive, integrated NVIDIA graphics and onboard sound will cost you $530 from Best Buy. Add a 19 inch screen, and you are looking at under $700 for the complete machine. Notice that there is nothing here that is focused on playing games.
So, what would turn the above computer into a decent gaming computer? The video card, which will run between $200 and $300 for a card that is probably more powerful than what you would see in an Xbox 360 or PS3. That is the only price you are really paying to play games here.
What many people do not think about is how many people use a flat panel TV to play their game console on. If you don't watch TV on that big flat panel screen, you should now add the price of the screen to your game console. That will be upwards of $800. Suddenly, the cost of a game console is quite a bit higher than the computer. In the same way I write off the non-gamer components from a computer, you can theoretically write down the cost of that flat panel TV if you watch TV on it.
So, what platform costs more to operate now? Do you connect your PS3 to a regular TV?
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Micropay for items ingame is slightly harder to patch than disabling serial protection, if properly implemented. But not by very much, and we're really good at it, thanks, pretty much the computer does all the hard work now.
People don't want to whip out their credit card in midgame and use it to buy a +3 sword of shiny metal bits. At least I don't.
Try donations instead. You might be
Re:Unauthorized Duplication (Score:5, Insightful)
"You're doing something that doesn't harm anyone in any way"
Let me guess, you don't rely on selling games for a living do you?
You are talking shit. long winded shit to justify stealing games, just don't embarrass yourself by this rationalizing to people who actually lose sales to piracy...
If I make a game, and you want to play it, and you refuse to pay me for my work, you are a thief. you can type pages of bullshit to try and weasel out of it, I'll always call a thief a thief, a leech a leech and a scumbag with a sense of entitlement a scumbag with a sense of entitlement.