Torrent freak.com survey of most pirated games of 2010
- Thread starter Rangers
- Start date
Well thats true but I am talking for this source alone. You then have Usenent and filesharing sites and pirate version distribution that is legal in quite some countries especially in Asia. I would think physical console version pirating is far great in such countries as a console is cheaper than a higher end gaming rig and no need to burn the game after downloading it. PS3 will probably have the most piracy by this way due to game ISO sizes. I am sure you can find right now quite a lot of PS3 game ISOs in Filesharing sites and Usenet.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
"People who downloaded" would not automatically turn into "people who bought" if they couldn't download. People download because they can, but with no emotional or financial investment, they are just as likely to bin a game when they've played it for a few minutes and realised it isn't for them.
I bet a lot of those people don't have the money or time to play all those games they can torrent. There is the argument that they shouldn't get to play the game if they didn't pay for it, but it's not about stopping people playing games they don't pay for, it's about making them pay for the games they play. If you invent some magic copy protection that never gets cracked, you still won't get all those people to pay up for the games they used to get for free and then throw away uncompleted.
Why has copy protection been so unsuccessful, and thing like Steam so much better at converting pirates to paying for games? Copy protection is about stopping people playing games, treating all your customers like criminals and giving them more hassles. Steam is about selling you more games, and making things easier for paying customers.
I bet a lot of those people don't have the money or time to play all those games they can torrent. There is the argument that they shouldn't get to play the game if they didn't pay for it, but it's not about stopping people playing games they don't pay for, it's about making them pay for the games they play. If you invent some magic copy protection that never gets cracked, you still won't get all those people to pay up for the games they used to get for free and then throw away uncompleted.
Why has copy protection been so unsuccessful, and thing like Steam so much better at converting pirates to paying for games? Copy protection is about stopping people playing games, treating all your customers like criminals and giving them more hassles. Steam is about selling you more games, and making things easier for paying customers.
Silent_Buddha
Legend
That's fine, if you didn't pay for it you shouldn't be able to play it. Playing it at a friends house or borrowing? Sure. But that's a lot different from someone at a duplication company, distribution company, press, or store employee sending a copy off to the cracking groups and then millions of people downloading and potentially playing it for free.
If even 10% of people decided they still wanted to play games, that would still be a quite significant boost to a publishers bottom line. And a better chance for some of the smaller developers to actually get OK'd for funding of another game rather than being closed down.
As to whether pirater's can afford games... Well, that's never been my experience from school during the 80's through professional life and now semi retirement. The vast majority of pirater's I've run into have all been perfectly capable of buying games, but just choose not to. But we'll never know for sure. I've had people try to tell me they can't "afford" to buy games even though they make 30k+ USD a year, are single, and spend 500-750 USD a month partying and binge drinking.
But then again, I can't say I'm surprised by that as I've known people that were supposedly living in poverty sporting big screen HDTV's and expensive surround sound receiver and speakers.
Basically pay for what you have to. And steal everything you can.
Regards,
SB
itsmydamnation
Veteran
BC2 has a single player ????
Silent_Buddha
Legend
And the single player for it was actually fairly good and of decent length.
I certainly didn't buy it for the multiplayer. Regards,
SB
corduroygt
Banned
And the single player for it was actually fairly good and of decent length.
Regards,
SB
I actually feel the other way around. BC2 SP wasn't bad, but Black Ops SP was better. OTOH, BC2 MP is way better than any COD MP. Having to account for the flight time of bullets alone makes it better before we get to the vehicles, maps, etc.
Err, say what?
There's hardly any games whatsoever released on the PC that DON'T have copy protection of some form or another. Unless you want to go all full-blown trusted computing platform BS (and why would you want that?), there's no feasible way to secure a copy protection scheme anyway. Regardless how onerous and complicated, it'd just get reverse engineered and disabled/circumvented.
Lol, it's not in the customers' interest, and I kind of put that above any of the industry heavyweights.
The only one getting punished by copy protection crap is the honest paying customer. ONLY them. It doesn't affect the pirates at all.
I want to go full blown trusted platform bullshit, was the problem with that? The current copy protection on PC´s is crap. The CPU or the GPU check´s the exe files, they have to be encrypted and signed by a private key. Everything check´s out, and you can run your game. Or whatever it takes, imagine a world where PC games generate the amount of money they should, where it´s about satisfying PC gamers and not Console gamers. Where the hardware can be pushed to PC lvl´s and not just aimed for Consoles..
Trusted computing was killed by some FUD (although many notebooks and motherboards still have TPM or TPM interface). Of course, it's probably not worth doing anyway, since it's an external device so it's not as water tight as PS3 (which is also defeated anyway), probably not even as good as Xbox 360.
It's still possible to make a x86 CPU with a CELL style protection system (Sandy Bridge probably has something like that), but it will take quite some time to be widespread, and it's pointless to release a "protected" version along with a "non-protected" version. So it's going to be a very serious chicken and egg problem.
IIRC this issue had been discussed in another thread w.r.t. how to make a good anti-piracy system on PC, in the Politics & Ethics subforum.
It's still possible to make a x86 CPU with a CELL style protection system (Sandy Bridge probably has something like that), but it will take quite some time to be widespread, and it's pointless to release a "protected" version along with a "non-protected" version. So it's going to be a very serious chicken and egg problem.
IIRC this issue had been discussed in another thread w.r.t. how to make a good anti-piracy system on PC, in the Politics & Ethics subforum.
Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.
Legend
Trusted computing was killed off because people pointed out that whilst such a system could be used to (say) copy protect games, it could also be used to do a lot of things that customers didn't like and could effectively remove people's ownership of their own content, or content they had thought they'd bought.
Just look at the furore recently caused when Amazon auto-deleted a book from Kindles that they decided they shouldn't have sold. It's not a big leap when you see Microsoft banning an Xbox from Live, to consider that the movie studios (who we don't trust anyway) would lock out all your movies if they think you've got any pirate content. We've already seen them lobby for trojans to search and report what is on people's hard drives, we've already seen them want to go to a pay-per-view model for content you thought you'd bought.
Just look at the furore recently caused when Amazon auto-deleted a book from Kindles that they decided they shouldn't have sold. It's not a big leap when you see Microsoft banning an Xbox from Live, to consider that the movie studios (who we don't trust anyway) would lock out all your movies if they think you've got any pirate content. We've already seen them lobby for trojans to search and report what is on people's hard drives, we've already seen them want to go to a pay-per-view model for content you thought you'd bought.
If there was agreement between AMDandIntel to do this for all CPU's moving forward though, then in say 4 years, publishers could quite easily start producing protected games which are effectively unplayable on older model CPU's. Sure there would be some losers but if they're that bothered about gaming then an upgrade to a 4 year old CPU probably isn't such a big deal to them anyway.
I hear the other issues that such a system might present but I'm wondering whether its worth the risk for the potential gain. As tkf said, if PC games made the revenue that they potentially could if piracy wasn't an issue then the PC gaming market could be a lot more exciting.
They can already do that with current system. Do you think they can't do that with Steam? The role of TPM is simply to make DRM system harder to crack. If you don't like these DRM, the only thing you can do without breaking the law is to avoid buying things with DRM. Blaming on TPM is, basically, barking the wrong tree.
Of course, it doesn't matter anymore. Content providers all go for closed platforms. That's why they love iPad, because it's less risky.
That was possibly true if they started a couple of years ago, but lots of PCs bought since then will be good until they die, rather than ready for an upgrade in a few years. I'm not upgrading my laptop until it dies, because it does everything I want/need. Well, they should start now, and eventually there'd be enough of an install base. Although the PC is riddled with issues, like what if you change your hardware configuration? I mean, with a CPU code, upgrading your CPU means creating a new PC identity and you no longer own your software. Consoles don't have the trouble and changing hardware, so it's a workable system to have unit IDs.
Not sure this thread belongs in the console forum any more.
Fair point, but will you be doing any serious AAA gaming on that laptop in 4 years? i.e will you be overly bothered if big PC titles start to be released that won't attempt to run on it.
Certainly you wouldn't want to start copy protecting other apps which can indeed run on much older PC's but where gamings concerned, I don't think a 4 year old CPU not running brand new games is a huge issue.
Perhaps this sort of thing is better done on GPU's to keep it specific to gaming but since I'm not sure how it works, I'm not sure if that's even possible.
That's true, the gamer crowd would need decent hardware. But then you have the issue of upgrades. Gamers will upgrade their hardware. Upgrading your system ends up invalidating your game, which means that hassle of phoned through activations and whatnot.
