jstnomega on 30/1/2004 at 01:22
kinda hard to warez your games fr a console terminal, isn't it?
(
http://www.macgamer.com/features/?id=1766)
Why are anti-piracy measures such as these so important now in 2004?
Piracy caused hundreds of PC games not to get made during 2003 because the major game publishers shifted their development budgets to console games, which have fewer piracy issues. Many longtime PC games developers closed their shops in 2003 because they couldn't get their new PC games funded by publishers (laying off hundreds of workers). Through November of 2003, PC games sales were actually down 12% and console games sales were up 25%. Piracy is killing PC and Mac games.
How can they determine for certain that the sagging sales are due to piracy?
Publishers are beginning to track online piracy through a variety of means, including counting the number of times a fake-cracked (we call it a "spoofed") version of a game is downloaded. In one case, the PC version of a particular game sold under 100,000 units through stores in a 4-week period and the console versions sold many hundreds of thousands of units. But, in this same 4-week period over 11 MILLION people downloaded the spoofed PC version. If even 1% of those people who stole this game had purchased the game instead, it would have DOUBLED the PC sales of the game.
Renzatic on 30/1/2004 at 01:35
Sad as it is there really is no easy way to stop it from happening. The only feisable way to do it would be to something similar to what Valve is doing with Steam...but that's such an annoyance that it could possibly drive people away from the PC scene altogether.
Course that isn't to say that warezed console games are nonexistant. I know of quite a few places where you can get Xbox, PS2 and GC games easily, but it is far more difficult to do since you have to have a modded console (in most cases) and a DVD burner to produce working copies.
Uncia on 30/1/2004 at 02:12
Quote:
Originally posted by jstnomega Blah.
Preaching to the choir. Also, could we be any less specific than "some game", "some console", "under a hundred thousand" and "hundreds of thousands"? If you want a piracy discussion, there was one on CommChat a week ago, go there, but enough with the fucking preaching.
jstnomega on 30/1/2004 at 02:42
I'm not preaching, just reiterating the thinking of those w/the power to determine which platform gets the attention & why, but yeah, you could say we have seen the enemy & he is us.
icemann on 30/1/2004 at 03:08
Since all warez whether it be console games or PC games is downloaded onto a PC yes.
Talgor on 30/1/2004 at 07:35
...which is not to say that game developers are totally innocent either. If they want to manufacture crappy games and charge 40-50 euros for it (or 60-80 on the console side), it's no wonder that people prefer downloading the games rather than risk their money. It's not as if there would be any reliable source where Johnny Average could find out if a particular game is crap or not (since all gaming magazines are pretty much under the thumb of the game makers these days). I'm perfectly willing to pay good money for something as brilliant Silent Storm, but I'm not paying a cent for a crappy sequel to any game, no matter how good the first one was. And let's face it, 95 to 99% of all published games are utter and total crap.
My personal solution to the problem is to play the demo and judge if the game's any good based on that. If there is no demo (or it's a console game), I find it a perfectly acceptable moral solution to warez the game and see if it's any good that way. Either way, if it's worth playing, I'll go and buy it. That's one tic to both counters...
icemann on 30/1/2004 at 09:52
Talgor: Agreed 100% on the price issue. Game companies charge wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much money for games these days. Which is why many people including myself refuse to pay ridiculous prices when you can download it for free. The exception I make is when its a game I REALLY have been dying to play for quite sometime or if its just a really good game.
Though the last game I bought was ufo: aftermath. What a mistake that was. Meh. Been waiting for 2 months for them to fix the bugs so that I`ll be able to beat the damn thing. Besides the bugs its a damn good game. But this is one of those cases of developers rushing a game out of the door before sufficiently beta-tesing it :(.
twisty on 30/1/2004 at 10:51
You know, in Australia, it takes a lot less effort to get your hands on a pirated PS1/2 or XBox game than a PC game. Its not that pirating a PC game would be hard, if you wanted to do it, but copied console games are readily available in many shops and are advertised openly in the most popular newspapers, whereas pirated PC games aren't.
Freddo on 30/1/2004 at 11:29
I think it's wrong to blame the prices when it comes to PC games. They aren't more expensive now than they were 10 years ago. And really, wait 18 months and the price have dropped by more than 70%. Not to mention that a PC launch game is cheaper than a console launch game.
People who blame prices are nothing but greedy brats who wants to "justify" their illegal activity. :mad:
Uncia on 30/1/2004 at 11:53
I bought Speccy games for 5 pounds a pop. Also, we actually had a radio station that would transmit one game a day, you just had to record the signal on a tape. And yet, PIRACY HAS GOTTEN WORSE AND THE INDUSTRY IS SELF DESTRUCTING!
Things are as they always were. People just whine more. It's a market with a limited income pool, you can't expect kids to pay $50 a game twice a month. Nor most adults, for that matter. Food is nice, and stuff.
