Some personal thoughts on piracy (warning - long post)

[Mjarr]

They've been pretty successful with the closed architecture systems like the 360. Sure, there are plenty of mod videos on Youtube, but how many of them are just script kiddies that wind up getting banned the week following their leet hax0r skillz?

Far less people are willing to monkey with their consoles. That Frictional has stated a desire to move onto those platforms I think is a smart move provided that the quality is there from release.

Keyword here is 'closed architecthure', it's sort of sad fact that PC is the free market of gaming platforms while consoles are what are so-called planned economies just for the sake of this really weird comparasion. The industry likes to consider the customer as a wild, deadly spider that must be kept in its cage at all costs and while it has certain reason behind it, it also gives bad generalisation about your customers as a whole. Sure it's a freedom vs security (or protection) situation, but how often we've been hearing that PC gaming is dead even though suddenly it's been claimed not dead yet again? The piracy is just one lovely reason to rationalise from industry's point of view to make more money by switching from one platform to another to gain more profit. Yes, that is obviously the meaning of business but it also is interesting sign about how the whole gaming industry is going to the Hollywood routine of things.

Now I am fully aware gaming costs have gone up alot and they are more risky, but what is your typical mediasparkle you'll see these days? 50-60$ AAA title which single player is shorter than premature ejaculation and the multiplayer is mostly just one excuse regarding the single player. Now while there is nothing wrong with mutliplayer, how long is your average multiplayer game lifespan on consoles? It's pretty damm short, and it's totally dominated by the few mainstream titles, everything else is niche. Now looking at PCs there's Starcraft, Counter-Strike, Warcraft and other games which have had longer lifespan on multiplayer as a single game than consoles have. Even Red Orchestra is over 4½ years old now and it still has moderately active playerbase and it's not even that much of a mainstream title. These days most games are short and capitalize on the hyping box office success (so to speak) and have some additional layers on the ice just to give it slightly further lifespan, and once the profit is gained make a new one. Yes, this is business and in the long run it can give you alot of profit, alot of people still are going to buy it but how often you've heard the common complaint about industry being half dead, bored out of its mind or not innovative at all? People used to complain alot about WW2 games in the past even though now so-called' modern' warfare games are taking over and no-one gives a crap, even when yo ucan't tell visually the diffrence between Killzone, MW2, BC2 and MoH if they were lined up together and all of them are relatively speaking shallow.

Keeping that and the so-called free market thingy in mind, PC platform has the problem that it can't be caged as you can cage consoles. It has both good and bad effects but when you consider that some amount of piracy is caused by generally speaking poor service, it requires diffrent approach than just make a shiny title big massive guns, some polish and it'll sell well. For small\indie the piracy can become dangerous issue especially when plethora of PC gamers are cynical bastards who have lost the faith in industry and some which just would pirate a live clone of [insert some well endowed female here, going with the stereotypical nerdicus gamicus joke] if they could, but when Frictional Games posted their blog about one month after Amnesia's success and the notable spike caused by Zero Punctuation episode, it implies about the 'good service' the game gives the customer. An entertainer who is known to bash mainstream titles in interesting ways gives a green light for something unknown even when the adventure gaming genre - what you can call some sort of dinosaur in the market - is a sign of good service. Or look at Minecraft, it's very lovely target for piracy yet it makes tons of money per day. It's a difficult paradox to live with, but focusing too much on pirates is bound to lose customers in the long run, as it inevitably results into weird DRM schemes.

Now before someone goes batshit, on paper I would not have anything against DRM as long as it does not severely limit the basic functionality of the product, but I'm going to give few examples. First I'll use Soldiers : Heroes of WW2, an old RTS-action title that has Starforce protection. Now I've never had problems with starforce until I tried to install it on Windows Vista, because they are incompatible. The options how to get the game running were quite limited: 1. install it on another PC, copy registery and folder and manually mess with registery etc to make it working, 2. re-buy the game from digital distribution (which on the other hand defeats the purpose, as I already bought it and own the boxed copy with manual and discs) or 3. pirate it. Doing #1 would be 'wrong' in its own ways, #2 is silly and #3 makes me a pirate. Now second example is Assasin's Creed 2, and I actually bought the game on PC when it was released as it's one of those rare more mainstream titles (besides AC1) that got my attension and I found pretty decent\good, but I was unable to play it because of its DRM. Now I have perfectly fine broadband but something between the game, my router and ubisoft servers was not really working as expected and I couldn't play it due DRM. Now the tech support was quite useless, asking it on other forums gave me the automatical "zomg u must have pirated it\haxed it!!!" response and even after I tried another router I have around and messing with it for few days, it still refused to function. My only option to play a game I legitly bought was to wait for someone to crack it and apply it, which also is 'wrong' in sort of ethical point of view and also from industry's point of view, but on moral point of view I don't really have that much of a choice.

Going back to the whole console vs pc vs piracy, console games also enjoy notable piracy rate. There is no real doubt about that and even with comments like "well there's less 'noobs' on consoles who don't know anything" it doesn't really hold up. Look at PSP or DS or Wii. On Xbox360 most pirates don't ever connect it to Xbla while running the game and you can easily get away with that, it's simple yet inconvenient fact for many. Consoles have greater media value and most developers rarely have free hands, there's usually a publisher or so making most of the demands. Indie developers rarely have that issue, but usually indie games rely on diffrent things to gain profit rather than just the blockbuster box office sales. Now this results into one funny thing: usually when consoles have an exclusive title, PC crowd rarely gives a turd about it. Now when PC exclusive comes out that has more media coverage than the few niche websites the console crowd is producing more decibels than old fashion battleship broadside.

Now quite frankly while it's easy to fall to the pro-industry viewpoint about PCs, some of the pro-piracy arguments are also as absurdly retarded, but if there is one thing where the latter is more truthful is about how the platform is being treated. If you recall that odd free market example and that caged spider, on PC certain things are what you can call self evident 'rights' (not in literal sense, mind you) and taking them away is not exactly a good idea. Now sure these 'rights' are potential for exploits or even abuse, but that is a sad fact over many other things. On closed circuits it's easy to simply keep things as they are or even enforced more limitations because there is no other choice, but on PC's... things are diffrent. Service quality is one thing, and if you are being offered by something that barely qualifies as 'tolerable' on E.G. multiplayer department, it's quite obvious that people are not really going to stand up for it.

While I have to admit Nospheratu for having balls to admit such thing, you should really bear the consequences of your words as on the internet going like that is bound to cause explosions for diffrent reasons and eventually evolve into a mini nuke explosion in terms of fallout. But could someone explain why a piracy discussion ultimately boils down to the PC vs console war of "Which ones are the duds of the master race" ?

[hollowleviathan]

The only real way to prevent piracy is to make either most of the game occur online, on your servers, like an MMO or minecraft.

[Natural]

too be honest with all of ya'll, i pirated Amesia first, i beated the whole game. 2 days later i bought Amnesia, all of the penumbra games + the soundtrack for penumbra.

can you guys forgive me ?

---

btw they should do like a Amnesia soundtrack super_secret thing, you get all the soundtrack and how they made the creepy noises in the game (etc)

much like what they did with Penumbra OST

As long as you buy the game I doubt they really care if you downloaded it or not. I do the same thing from time to time, though in Amnesia's case I just happened to discover it in a gaming review and decided it was probably well worth $20 (which it was). I'll probably buy the Penumbra series as well when I finish the game I'm playing. Needed a break from all the horror. Even if I never play the games I still figure it's worth rewarding the company for the epic experience of Amnesia.

I used to pirate a lot years ago. As a broke student it was an easy choice to make given the ease of piracy. I'm not saying that's a justification, but it is what it is. Now that I'm older and not as poor I've found myself buying almost all of my games and even building a respectable DVD collection -- A far cry from the student with dozens of games, hundreds of movies and a small number of receipts to show for it.

I'm not really sure of the exact moment when I changed my philosophy on it, but I suspect it had a lot to do with entering the workforce and gaining a greater appreciation for the economy. With age comes experience and when I was young I wasn't giving too much thought to how these games were being made; Whether it was a big company or a struggling independent developer.

You're not going to stop piracy right now. Almost everyone is guilty of it, from mothers who can barely use the internet to the kids out there downloading hundreds of titles. The best thing you can do as supporters of Frictional games is raise attention to the fact that they really are a tiny company compared to the big operations out there. This game is getting a lot of attention on Youtube right now, so it doesn't hurt to remind people that sales of this game will have a direct impact on future games like it. If you can't stop piracy at least we can do our best to help make this game an exception to the rule.

[hollowleviathan]

That could also be a big contribution to the eventual decline of piracy - the rising average age of gamers. As the average gamer starts to look more like a 20something at college or in a job, onwards to a 30something living comfortably, piracy could just keep shrinking compared to when most gamers were 14.

[BeefJerky]

Going back to the whole console vs pc vs piracy, console games also enjoy notable piracy rate. There is no real doubt about that and even with comments like "well there's less 'noobs' on consoles who don't know anything" it doesn't really hold up.

It does hold up when we're discussing consoles. We're talking degrees of profit here, not absolutes. The reason consoles have gotten so popular isn't because people suddenly found consoles and all their ridiculously expensive peripherals and subscriptions so appealing: it's more because the gaming industry has pushed them hard because they make more money than PC games. There's no mistake or fluke going on there.

It doesn't matter whether or not a game allows multi-player. All that matters is that there's a single "must have" game that requires an internet connection to play beforehand. "Must have" multiplayer games serve as insurance for non-multiplayer games on consoles. Microsoft and its sponsors knows you're going to forget to unplug that ethernet cord or cave in to playing Call of Duty online eventually. Go try to sell a bricked 360 on Ebay. You're lucky to get 50 bucks for it if you're honest about it being banned on XBL. All it takes is a single second being connected to the internet and your console is virtually worthless.

And don't fool yourself into thinking that that's just a coincidental, unintended consequence on their part. That's a hardcore business decision you're looking at to protect intellectual property, multi-player or no multi-player. The development of Halo for the 360 was as much of an attempt to garner confidence in the system as an outlet to protect intellectual property as it was to sell the damned game.

You do have one assertion right, however, and that's that the gaming industry makes more money on consoles, which is why Frictional would even consider it.

[Mjarr]

It does hold up when we're discussing consoles. We're talking degrees of profit here, not absolutes. The reason consoles have gotten so popular isn't because people suddenly found consoles and all their ridiculously expensive peripherals and subscriptions so appealing: it's more because the gaming industry has pushed them hard because they make more money than PC games.

Main reason why consoles are popular is because they are relatively speaking very simple to use and get into in the long run: Pick it up and start using. If you want Xbox live or something like that it's entirely optional. It's been that since the early Atari homeconsoles, it's not like someone suddenly changed the formulae of simple convenience. Sure PS3 is a rare exception for having nonexistant piracy, but on the other hand on Wii it's quite rampart while PSP is the most pirated console out there (sure it's a handheld but anyway) and DS is quite close being 2nd. Xbox being only 'moderate' on that aspect, so putting in perspective PC got stripped out of its "king of piracy" title quite some time ago. This might be also worth seeing:

http://static.4players.de/premium/Conten...3-bild.png

All it takes is a single second being connected to the internet and your console is virtually worthless.

Considering how cheap consoles are (relatively speaking) it doesn't take that much effort - if you have some sort of steady income - to have another console for that purpose, or maybe I am just thinking too deep into it. It's still quite common on consoles, even when people may brag less about it or if you go by the old joke of console players being 7-14 year old kids whose brain capacity is at hurr durr at most (which obviously is not true)

(edits for missing words)

[Nospheratu]

While I have to admit Nospheratu for having balls to admit such thing, you should really bear the consequences of your words as on the internet going like that is bound to cause explosions for diffrent reasons and eventually evolve into a mini nuke explosion in terms of fallout.

Thanks

Well, I kind of expected such comments to a degree but even so I wanted to present my point of view, regardless of what other's think about it (living in democracy and all ).
Also I don't see myself as a criminal just becouse I admited having received a stolen product from some other guy and then deciding I'll buy it. It's like my friend would steal a car, come to my place and say "Hey, check out this car I got; i'll leave it here if you wanna try it out" (not mentioning that he stole it ofcourse). I'd say "Well sure, I'll try it out!" then drive it for a month. Somewhere during that time I'd find out that he stole it and since I'm a honest guy, I would drive directly to the car shop where the vehicle got stolen and tell them: "Look, one month ago i got this car, which was stolen from you by a friend of mine, but I didn't know that at first; now that I know, I came to tell you that it is a really good car and I'll buy it since I have already driven it for a month and I really like it." Do you think that the owner would press charges against me, even when I buy the car that wasn't even stolen by me? I assume that even the police would only arrest the guy who stole it, not the guy who was given the car and didn't know it was stolen, then returned and bought it. If you wonder, how I didn't know the game was stolen - it was burned on a dvd and I assumed that he made a copy at home, my bad.
But I won't make further excuses for myself; i just wanted to mention a recent case I saw in the news today, where a woman who downloaded 24 songs and shared them for a while is charged with paying the music company about 1,5 mio $; if she (a normal person, not some wealthy celebrity) doesn't pay up, she will go to jail. Becouse of 24 songs, which are probably worth 50 - 100 $ at most (even if shared), the company came up with such a ridicolous price and the judgement system agreed and sentenced her. How can the people in charge even expect for the public to have sympathy with their company and the sentence, if it is so ridicolous? In my opinion they should have just fined her with the price of, say, 5 CD's instead of freakin' 1,5 million dollars or a couple of years in jail.
Anyway, like some posters already mentioned, we probably won't get anywhere with this debate, since any real change will require a shift in the thinking process of both the industry and the consumers/pirates, but for this to happen both sides must first come towards eachother instead of blindly pulling for their side; i for one can see some things already changing for the better but we all still have a long way to go.

[hollowleviathan]

Do you think that the owner would press charges against me, even when I buy the car that wasn't even stolen by me? I assume that even the police would only arrest the guy who stole it, not the guy who was given the car and didn't know it was stolen, then returned and bought it.

Yes, he would. If you didn't return it the moment you realized it was stolen, you become an accessory to the crime and a criminal. If you don't help them find and arrest your friend for carjacking, you aid and abet and become a criminal.

[Murloc]

I think the fact that games in general are overpriced pays a huge role in the popularity och pirating. If games were more reasonably priced like Amnesia then alot more people would buy games and both the companies and customers would be happy.

[anzki]

The only real way to prevent piracy is to make either most of the game occur online, on your servers, like an MMO or minecraft.

Then there are private servers for MMO's. And minecraft? Well made a research and there are pirate versions of it... So yeah...