Pirates Vs. Publishers 175
1up is running a piece looking at the fight between pirates and publishers in the games industry. They use StarForce, and their frustrating copy protection scheme, as a basis for their discussion of both sides of the issue. From the article: "The goal isn't to encourage people to be honest, or to drive innovation in the hacker community, or to be an irritant because you've lost your CD and want to play. The goal of a publisher in picking a copy protection service is to make more money by selling more copies. The logic is that if it's impossible to pirate the game, then people have to buy it if they want it. Why doesn't that work? If your copy protection is StarForce, then it doesn't work because people are boycotting your copy protection. StarForce, which installs a hard-to-remove driver onto your computer, has an unproven but generally accepted track record of causing computers to slow down -- at best. Some reports have complained of permanently damaged physical drives or hard drives."
Pirates (Score:5, Funny)
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History has proven otherwise.
Unfortunately in this age those who plunder are the publishers (in the music business at least.) Have you seen the contracts new artists end up having to sign?
I know...RTFA, it's software publishers not music.
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Someone at Something Awful said that software piracy would decrease if it was called software faggotry. Makes sense!
.exe. As a
On a more serious note, I personally know one instance where the copy protection turned againts the user (me). System Shock 2 stopped working after Service Pack 2, and the only way I could make it work was to unwrap the copy protection software from the
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Actually, I've never heard those who complain about pirates say a thing about those who steal software. Instead, they condemn copyright-infringers.
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A while back I decided to pull out my old copy of Starflight I. This game had one of those wheels that you had to align and read out some silly code. While I probably do have the wheel somewhere around here still, it was faster to poke around the internet and find a utility which let me type in the two settings on the wheel and then gave me back the possible codes. I have a feeling that if you spent a few minutes with Google, you could have the codes to get the game worki
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BTW, on a glancing, that site looks as if it would have the manual and stuff for other games too. I didn't even know it exists. Now i won't feel like it is such a gamble when looking to buy old games found at yardsales and stuff. Although the real old ones are getting harder to come by.
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They have just about all of the information on old games you could want, and are also useful when you have a dead disk. While 5.25" disks hold up ok, I have had more than one original disk die.
And while I'm pushing ideas DOSBox [sourceforge.net] is invaluable for nostolgic gaming.
YOU Might like not being able to save anywhere... (Score:2)
My rant on the topic (caused entirely by Ghost Recon:Advanced Warfighter for PC). Great game, but the save system destroys ANY fun that I might have been having with the game. I PAID MY MONEY, let
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The options should be there, if you use
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So maybe creating a new level called Noob and making it quicksave without the extra hurdles is the answer. In
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>being available,
The point was not to put it there AND rebalance the whole game. Why would you need to rebalance the whole game? The point was to put it there, nothing more. Those who feel the game is allready to hard, or that likes to be able to stop playing and save progress so far at their own descision and so on, can then do it. Those who likes to only save at specific points can do that as well. No need to redesign
Ever hear of a pirate stealing software? Not yet. (Score:2)
Of course the two are different crimes. All you have to do is consider what words mean, and silly "debaters" who confuse one crime with another will vanish. I have yet to hear of any kind of pirate who has ever been involved with stealing software, though I guess it might have happened in the China Seas in recent years.
Pirates make a superior product (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Pirates make a superior product (Score:5, Informative)
It doesn't support Starforce, but I refuse to install any of those games on my PC anyways. They offer a free trial so you can make sure the games you want to play are supported as well.
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Now that is a PITA.
Re:Pirates make a superior product (Score:5, Interesting)
I had waited with much anticipation for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I went out and bought it the day it came out, so you can imagine my surprise when it refused to run! Why? Because I'm on XP x64. The copy protection wanted to install a low level driver and it didn't come with an x64 version, so it wouldn't let me play. So I went through all the fun of returning an opened game. A little over a year later a crack was released for it and I finally got to play the game. Thank you, RELOADED, for letting me play the franchise I love. And shame on Ubisoft, which I held in very high regards before that experience, for tainting their software with such crap.
I tend to immediately rip any software I buy to HDD, and mount it with Daemon Tools when I need it. This created an extra problem for many other games, which will refuse to run if it detects any virtual drives. Thankfully Daemon Tools tends to keep ahead of them.
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(btw, I was a beta tester for XP x64. Chaos Theory came out a month before XP x64 went gold, when the OS was in final RC testing.)
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They didn't just "not support" xp64, they artificially disallowed it. That's an essential difference in my mind: the former is reasonable, but the latter is not.
The only thing "silly" here is the use of DRM to begin with.
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And yes, the differences between windows XP and XP64 isn't all that apearent at first glance. It probably will take most nongeeks one or two of these problems to figure that out. And i don't blame them either. They buy or have an athlon 64 computer built and it comes with this cupon for windows XP-64 and not much more in the being differe
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That's the plan, but you can still have multiple computers logged into the same Steam account at the same time. I've never tried getting two people on the same account to log into the same online server - but I can log in to a lan server multiple times with the same account.
At most, Steam will tell you your 'ticket has expired' and
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Yeah the "watchdog" potential for things like Steam is definately a bit worrying. Of course in the event that they did ban my account, I would never again spend any more money with Valve.
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or change the content... (Score:1)
If the game publishers would start putting out good games rather than absolute crap (listen up EA!) then maybe we'd all start buying things again. Same goes for the music industry.
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Re:or change the content... (Score:4, Insightful)
If you've ever listened to any song on a CD before buying that CD (or iTunes track), then you're a hypocrite.
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Whereas with a music album, you are likely to listen to it many times.
I'm not completely disagreeing with you - I have done the same thing. I've paid for games I felt were worth it after playing a pirated co
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As you point out, there's absolutely NO way to preview a game before buying it.
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I agree: there are one or two titles that I'm interested in purchasing in any given year. The difference is that I'm looking at games from last year and the year before to decide what to purchase. This has some major advantages: if people are still talking about it after two years, it's probably a pretty good game. Any bugfixes have already been released, so I'm not stuck with an unplayable game. The mod community has had
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If only this were true of all games. Battlefield 2 I'm looking at you!
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Piracy Encouraging More Sales (Score:5, Insightful)
If they want to bitch about lost sales to me, I'll call them on their lying marketting and slanted, paid-off reviews. It's all about publishers wanting control when it comes down to it, and pointing fingers when a shitty game doesn't sell.
If they could spin it they'd have people buying the most terrible crap out there for $60 a pop (haha), as every magazine review and media outlet hails it as a hallmark of interactivity. No thanks. I'll continue to bittorrent and decide for myself who gets my money.
Re:Piracy Encouraging More Sales (Score:4, Funny)
Lying marketing? Aren't you repeating yourself here?
This is like calling someone a "stupid idiot".
P.S. If I've offended any marketing people here, that was my intention.
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P.S. If I've offended any marketing people here, that was my intention.
They might be offended, but as long as they are your Target Demographic and your Reach is high through this Medium, they should be happy for you.
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I just want the big review sites to bury games that are buggy or detrimental to your computer. And if the game is a cheap update to the last ga
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I'm not sure that's purely a function of "teh interweb," since Gamespot in particular sells premium accounts to turn off the ads. Meanwhile print media is *completely* advertiser funded. The subscription fee you pay only covers a meager portion of the costs for, and is only maintained because, IIRC, giving out the publications for free tends to lower their credibility and, in turn, their readership. When the reader
Futile (Score:5, Insightful)
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Pirates do simultaneous world wide releases (Score:4, Insightful)
I already have a pre-order in, its ship date is the 9th, today.
Its in most US shops from the 10th onward.
In the EU we'll be lucky to see it after the 24th/27th.
I could wait the 2 weeks to get it, or I could just snatch it off of a torrent site or emule or the like and have it very shortly after the pirates upload it.
This in my mind puts the pirates WAY ahead of the publishers, and more to the point makes the common games buying public, IE me feel more supportive of them.
And as another user commented, not having to find disks, not having PC destroying crap installed on my machine is a big plus to me.
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1. NOT using Starforce. I believe they use Securom, which while annoying, doesn't crap up your computer.
2. After a few months, at least, they removed the copy protection from Dawn of War and Winter Assault with the 1.5 patch. A comment from one of their team was: "SecuROM is great for that first couple months, but after that, it's just a pain. CD-Keys are absolute, so we still have a form of copy protection."
From what I understand, their newer game, Company of H
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I recently bought Civ 4: Warlords off Direct2Drive because it was on sale. I really like not having to put the CD in to play the game. I used to use a miniso with my Civ 4 to play, but now I don't have to bother with mounting that and running the SDkiller app.
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define enough profit (Score:4, Insightful)
In the effort to make every possible dollar the business world ends up destroying the reasons their clients were willing to pay them in the first place.
Isn't StarForce dead? (Score:2)
StarForce? I thought StarForce was dead or about to die from being annoying to the user/potentially harmful to the hardware, posting torrents of games which didn't use StarForce on their forums (GalCiv2) and being cracked anyways? I thought Steam was the latest fashionable hard-to-crack protection.
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I pulled down a torrent of the full install, and played through the entire game while Steam sorted itself out.
Then I played through it again (on Steam) for the commentary dialogue.
-c.
What I think (Score:4, Interesting)
The thing is, if no one pirated games, then the overly restrictive copy protection would not exist. Now they add copy protection. Copy protection would not be so horrible if they just did what they were intended to do: make it difficult for others to copy and distribute their games to others. Unfortunately, we have copy protection that infects our system causing it to slow down the game, the system, and sometimes even make parts of it fail to function. All that copy protection does is cause more people to go down the pirate route.
Ok, so this next part is important for the game companies: THERE IS NO COPY PROTECTION, NOR WILL THERE EVER BE, THAT CAN STOP PIRACY. They will always be able to crack it or find a way to get the source. They will then distribute it. I am going to say something that won't be popular to Slashdotters now: copy protection is necessary. Because people will always justify their piracy, they need to make it hard enough so a casual user is unable to take their discs and stick it online. They do not need to license some expensive, over-bearing copy protection that install drivers or root kits. Just something cheap that prevent a casual user from doing it. Why do I suggest this? 1) If you put no protection on it, you are guaranteed to sell less units 2) It's going to be pirated anyways, so spending money on licensing expensive copy protection is pointless 3) A simple scheme will make it hard enough so that Joe User will have to go buy it, but unobtrusive so that it will not turn people off from the game.
But really, not much will change as long as we don't prosecute the pirates. The Internet is still very much the Wild West...anything goes. Until authorities actually go after people pirating software (and I am betting in 10 years, cyber crimes will account for the majority of fines and penalties), people are going to do it. Using what I stated above is the best "in the middle" approach that I can think of.
Re:What I think (Score:5, Insightful)
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Oooh, look at all the cool civil disobedience on eMule today...
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Civil disobedience isn't downloading dodgy free copies of computer games in a near-anonymous manner.
If visiting your favourite bittorrent site and downloading the latest game crack resulted in an immediate knock on the door from the police, would you still do it?
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>relatively simple copy protection, you had to have the CD in the drive, or there was a
>CD Key and it was checked against a server to make sure it wasn't in use.
That is not copy protection though, it is access protection. Quite different. At least from a legal persepctive in many countries. Ture, it is often called copy protection since it makes people less prone to actually copy but from the legal perspective it do
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They have and they do. The difference is that federal crackdowns on piracy of software have at this point targetted either large distribution points (whether it's CD duplication or FTP hubs) or the crackers themselved. Many groups over the years have had members arrested but someone else always steps up to fill in the gaps.
The other area where crackdowns occur is in large scale business software piracy.
Compare this to the RIAA and MPAA actions whic
Quit with "you are still breaking the law" crap (Score:2)
I hate when people do that.
Laws are not abided because they are just laws. They HAVE to be civil, developed and applicable enough for the contemporary times they are being used in. Else, they would have no meaning.
Let me brief this idea with an example ; in 1789, law was that there were the highborne, the nobles, and they were above the "common" people and held powers over them to the degree of life and death decisions. This was the "law" by then, and law stated that it was god given rig
Additional downloaded content defeats piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
I can see why some publisher who wants just to shove a game out of the door and forget about it might think anti-pirate CDs are a good idea, but any multi-player game, or indeed any game were content is expandable, unlockable or downloadable should not need anti-pirate measures. You need to access the web anyway, so why not check the CD serial key. Then you can reward your genuine customers with additional content, maps, objects etc. and shut out the freeloaders by barring them from the servers and so on. So they get to play a bugged 1.0 for a while. So what? Meanwhile your customers are on 1.5 happily playing the cool new levels you just released.
Games that force me to insert a CD really piss me off. I end up going to gamecopyworld or similar to acquire the crack. And that's the thing. Pirates can rip the copy protection in seconds and then dump the whole game up for download or provide a crack. So why bother with it anyway? Copy protection licence fees are still money down the drain when the pirates simply rip it out. That money would be better invested in keeping customers happy and "training" them through a positive experience as to why they should buy your game.
That will work for 45 seconds until... (Score:3, Insightful)
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More like Antitrust Lawsuit Computing (Score:2)
Trusted Computing does not require all binaries to be signed. It only verifies that the boot sequence has not been modified. Which "similar technologies" are you talking about that sit on top of Trusted Computing, and how would they pass antitrust muster if one company administers the code signing system in a manner that shuts out hobbyist developers?
Publishers should pirate their own games (Score:2, Interesting)
The reason why this has never been done is because
Copy protection is like adverts (Score:4, Insightful)
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Actually, this is almost exactly what Stardock did with Galactic Civilizations 1 and 2. It has no copy protection and no CD check. It does have an activation code, but yoo
The fight is already over. (Score:2, Funny)
No-CD Cr4kz: How Can You Trust Them? (Score:5, Insightful)
That said, as much as I detest copy protection, I trust w4r3z k1dd13s even less. Despite being colossal jackasses about it, Blizzard at least has an ethical, commercial, and legal obligation not to fsck up my computer or data. If Blizzard does fsck up my machine, I have legal and social recourse. They have a reputation to protect, and so it is in their interest to deal fairly.
Not so with hackers who remove copy protection and other product defects (or, perhaps more to the point, claim to remove such defects). The guy I'm downloading the modded copy from may be a trustworthy, noble-minded hacker seeking only to improve the game's flexibility and reliability. Or, he could be an a--hole trying to steal my identity, build his botnet and spray spam all over the place, concealing his malware inside the game. Or, he could simply be incompetent and end up crashing my machine very unpleasantly. Either way, I have no way of knowing. There is no "reputation marketplace" (that I'm aware of) where I can feel comfortable or safe obtaining such material.
So unless and until the DMCA is demolished, I'm kinda stuck here. The game publishers will not stop incorporating defects into their products, and no one can build a trustworthy reputation for removing such defects.
Schwab
P.S: It's probably worth prominently acknowledging that Epic Games have been very accommodating with their Unreal Tournament game series. They start out with disc-in-the-drive protection, but it's soon removed in subsequent official patches. One of the friendliest policies out there.
You are Blizzard's bitch (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever read World of Warcraft's EULA? THEY have full legal and social recourse AGAINST YOU if you violate ANY of their rules.
no one can build a trustworthy reputation for removing such defects.
Deviance, Fairlight, Hoodlum and Reloaded are all VERY famous/well known inside and outside of PC gaming pirate circles. Razor 1911 is probably the most famous group of them all if only because they were (for a time) completely and utter
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And all those Linux groups have is their reputation, there's no money in it for them, some of them even pay the cost of their distribution out of their own pocket, while Microsoft probably only answers to their shareholders.
Re:No-CD Cr4kz: How Can You Trust Them? (Score:4, Insightful)
The primary suppliers of cracks--the big-time groups, like RELOADED--have their reputations on the line with every release they do, and those releases are thoroughly checked by other groups long before they trickle down to you or me. It's a competition between groups that breeds quality; poor quality releases are nuked. There's more information on the topic here [wikipedia.org].
In this sense, trusting these sources of cracks is entirely rational. You're more likely to get a rootkit from, say, Sony or Starforce, than you are from a cracked game. Cracked games are heavily peer reviewed for benefits to the community, while companies do their work under cloak for benefits to themselves. That's one of the reasons it's said that pirates are successful: they produce a better quality product.
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You should try reading these EULA things you click on. You don't have legal options if software goes bad. You'd have to prove intent, and prove is the keyword there.
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Only when it suits them, and they won't grant you the same freedom.
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If you're in the US... well, you guys have gotten thoroughly rid of all the communist ideas, so "equality" and "justice" are all subject the the One and Only Truth(tm) of the $$$.
In other words: Try enforcing what you said in a court if the other party can send in a platoon of well-paid lawyers.
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The Games I Buy (Score:4)
I have bought the following games in the last year or so...
Half-Life 2, Oblivion, Rome Total War, Age of Empires 3, Doom 3...
Those are games that I want the developers and publishers to continue making money on. I also make a point in trying to pirate anything that EA releases, because I am a Madden fan (I just like football games, sue me) and I am sick of their fucking bullshit when it comes to releasing unfinished "next-gen" shit. I sure would like a good football game to play on my xBox360, unfortunately, EA has fucked everyone who loves the sport and the sport gaming genre.
So my point was... Support good games... and fuck EA
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You could say that you pay for a good steak, a nice meal in a five star restaurant, but when your just hungry, you steal some food from mcdonalds.
If anything its the makers of those s
old methods work bettter (Score:3, Interesting)
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Why not go back to the days of looking up phrases in the manual?
I still remember an engineering application for the Mac which used that approach. Just before shipping the product, they made some change to the manual which forced repagination of some of the later pages. So when the program asked for "the last word on page 20", it would work fine, but if it asked for "the last word on page 250", it would fail. Grrr. Took me weeks to figure out what was wrong, and even longer before the company finally
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Hexedit the answers to all be blank.. so blank compare to enter.. = in.
When the enter is pressed, it does a comparison and if they compare it runs the good code, change the CMP JZ to a straight JMP.. and your off.
Wait.. I must be living in the past..
INT 13 calls to a damaged floppy were interesting!
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Make it worth paying for (Score:5, Insightful)
There is not a major game that isn't cracked within days of release, if not hours. Protections may stop the casual copier, but they are not even slowing down anyone else. All the protection is doing is inconveniencing the consumer who is unable to easily back up their purchase.
There are always going to be those that won't pay for a product no matter what, but I believe that the majority of people will pay for something that's worth paying for. With the hours I spent playing Oblivion, it was well worth the purchase price, and by not putting invasive DRM on it I am much more inclined to purchase Bethesda software in the future.
Supply and demand, nothing else (Score:3)
Demand: Game
Supply, legal trader: Game with Starforce for 60 bucks, and it's legal.
Supply, pirate: Game without Starforce for 0 bucks, and it's illegal.
Demand: No starforce 'cause it already ruined one of my DVD drives. Price doesn't really matter, a good game is worth its money. Legality would be nice, but it's behind in priority to "no starforce".
Decision: Pirated software.
Reason: Starforce.
Good manuals (Score:2)
Aside from what has been mentioned, something that would make me buy a game would be if I got a nice manual. I never read manuals, but I like looking at pictures.
So I'd like an actual manual in one language only, preferably english. Translations are never good and just take up precious space. Instead I'd like to see gloss paper and a good color print. I'd like to see large clear screenshots and (concept) art tastefully arranged in a spacious layout, absolutely no strange typefaces or tiled backgrounds/b
A Pirate Looks At Forty (Score:2)
Samurai, not Ninjas (Score:2)
Yarrr!
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They forgot this game (Score:2)
The list's editors forgot this game [wikipedia.org] ;-)