106 réponses à ce sujet

[AlexMBrennan]

There are other reasons why they do it, but realistically there's only one reason where something can be done to curb piracy. That reason is that people want to try the game before they buy it, which is, to my knowledge, the biggest reason.

Those people are either lying hypocrites (in which case they'd find another excuse to not pay for the game), or will go on to buy the game so your idea achieves nothing.

 

 

 

The only way to stop those people from pirating it, is to provide the free version they want to try. You do this by releasing both a paid version & a Free-2-Play version, one that is completely playable from start-to-finish in the same amount of time as the paid version

You know, we used to have something called "demos"... whatever happened to that? I mean, seriously, would you expect to be allowed to go to a book store, and read the entire Game of Thrones series (because you have to read it from start to finish before you can decide whether you want to buy it)?

 

 

 

The only difference between the two being, that all of the unique content (weapons, armor, & accessories) that would normally be gained as quest rewards or loot, are now microtransactions in the Free-2-Play version.

Except that you are using the opportunity cost here - even assuming that this cunning plan converted every would-be pirate into paying customers you still lose business from players who would have paid for the game but don't care about fancy hats enough to justify the extra expense. 

 

 

 

It is my hope that BioWare, or more likely their publisher EA, will at the very least, take my idea into consideration. Possibly even implement it and change the Games Industry, as a whole, for the better.

The only developer who, IMHO opinion, has an acceptable micro transaction business model is Valve's TF2 - you can play the entire game, for free, and optionally spend way to much money on hats and golden guns. I would never pay for it *but* it is fair... but before you suggest that everyone should try and copy TF2, remember that Valve could probably write off the cost of developing TF2 as a advertising expenditure for the Steam cashcow. 

 

 

 

No one is losing money by file sharing. If you are not willing to buy it you were not going to buy it. If File sharing did not exist then yes you would be forced to buy it. But it does so why do so? If you feel that "supporting the devs" or whatever is important then good on you. Others would rather support themselves..

Newsflash, developing games costs money - at the very least, the developer has to eat. If everyone did what you suggest - since pirating games hurts no one, after all - the game developers will all starve to death and there will be no more games to for you to pirate. 

 

The simple truth is that you are a parasite, and your "way of life" depends on there being enough honest customers to pay for the development of games. If you want to continue stealing games which other people have paid for I'd suggest keeping your mouth shut because the last thing you want is more pirates (and thus less money for the game you're going to steal)

[Kantr]

People will pirate even if affordable. Some say they want to try it out.

 

Denuvo is apparently DRM for the origin client/ steamworks drm. Probably cost a lot less then thinking up their own exe protection

[MooseheadMcMoose]

 

The simple truth is that you are a parasite, and your "way of life" depends on there being enough honest customers to pay for the development of games. If you want to continue stealing games which other people have paid for I'd suggest keeping your mouth shut because the last thing you want is more pirates (and thus less money for the game you're going to steal)

 

Sorry, but if he's a parasite then he's a benign or beneficial one.

 

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...study-1.1894729

 

The facts don't support your "harm" assertions.

[TheGreenLion]

Loss of sales is loss of sales. Companies don't like that and will continue to pursue methods of stopping it so they get those potential buyers back, even if they have to force the issue with DRM. Meanwhile they also pursue methods of 'making up for it', again forcing the issue but this time on their paying customers. Essentially we've got a monkey on our back called a pirate that we're paying for. You don't really think we're just paying the flat cost for producing the product do you? 

[Battlebloodmage]

If I were already a pirate, I would pirate the full version for free or download patches that unlock the hidden stuffs. Pirates don't often buy games to test them. They're more likely to do it to save money or don't have the money at the time. Either way, it's a terrible idea. The game will likely to be more accessible to more people but it would make less money for EA because even if I don't pirate the game, I would rather play the game for free or find ways around it like I do with a lot of freemium games. Considering there are mods to improve stats already. There is no reason for people to pay for armors on the PC. Also, most of their revenue comes from the console. That's why the game is optimized for the consoles. Why would they make a separate free game for PC if the revenue is not as much as consoles?

[MooseheadMcMoose]

... get those potential buyers back, even if they have to force the issue with DRM. 

 

Is it too much to ask that they get the customers by releasing a well designed, well coded game? Or in your mind, is restrictive, intrusive and buggy DRM the only way to get people to buy a game?

 

Simple fact - pirates aren't hurting the gaming industry. In DA:I, the incompetence of the programmers and the general slipshod manner of the development is far more to blame.

[scrutinizer]

Loss of sales is loss of sales.

Ugh.

 

http://tommyrefenes....ous-than-piracy

 

Read it, folks, You just may learn something.

[MooseheadMcMoose]

Ugh.

 

http://tommyrefenes....ous-than-piracy

 

Read it, folks, You just may learn something.

 

It's an easy excuse for publishers to point their fingers at. "Our game didn't sell because of rampant piracy!" - is easier to say than "Our game sucked balls and nobody wanted to play it."

 

But for the economics, study after study fails to show any harm. People that pirate and don't buy probably wouldn't buy the rubbish anyhow. And pirates that do buy tend to buy more. Turns and roundabouts, it comes out even or in favour of the publishers.

[scrutinizer]

Agreed. Now, instead of actually putting an effort and creating a quality product, while caring for the customer (which generates TRUST), companies focus on anti-piracy measures.

However, it all boils down to whether the game is actually good or not, and what kind of attitude the developer has toward its customers. 

As with Inquisitions, the marketing strategy was based on flat-out lies (how are you gonna generate trust with lies?); the game itself is buggy and the original fanbase (those remembering BG times, up to DA:O) discards the game as crap. The newer fanbase (ME, DA2 and 'I do not like Origins, it's too old-school' folks) considers DA:I a great game - not going to comment on that, cause don't want to insult people's intelligence.

Anyway you slice it "Our game didn't sell because of rampant piracy!" - is easier to say than "Our game sucked balls and nobody wanted to play it."  and "People that pirate and don't buy probably wouldn't buy the rubbish anyhow. " - you made great points.

Unfortunately, it is automatically assumed that whoever pirates the game would have bought it, if there was no piracy. There is no way to estimate that, and, as you mentioned, it's the other way around. Those who pirate wouldn't buy, so where is the harm and loss? 

 

Peace.

[SwobyJ]

Ah, pirates. Just like the privateers/pirates of old, 'everyone' hates them, they do 'so much damage' (that is never calculated properly), and yet everyone either depends on them or enjoys the positive consequences of them (you can bet your ass that online pirating has spurred media companies to improve their service and distribution methods much faster than they otherwise would).

 

Big business is still moving too sluggish for technological and societal pace, and if this continues... well, I don't know, really. I'd love to see and find out.

 

We're now in a world where insider employees are the ones pirating and file sharing, not even outsiders with a cam in a theater. How many years until we see a major exec just go right out and say "Yeah, I torrented ___ a while back." A decade? Two?

 

http://www.dailytech...rticle36928.htm

 

http://blog.metricho...e-peak-pirates/

 

Something is gonna give. I just want to see how it does - and whether it really does bring economic ruination, or an economic boom, or anywhere in between.

 

Personally, I consider this all just the beginning. I can't wait to see the arguments surrounding 3D printing! I didn't steal that chair - I copied it, paid for the cheap material myself, and used a blueprint I found online!

 

"If you want to move a generation away stealing your products: first, make a legal analogy that makes sense. Second, don’t patronize your customers by saying they are naturally born thieves. Finally, don’t threaten to brainwash their children with bizarro world economics. Copying files is a twenty-first century economic activity that we still use nineteenth-century language to describe. It’s a different kind of activity, with more nuanced and fluid implications. That isn’t to say you can’t make the case for legal retention of copyrighted products, but there needs to be a stronger case made for why an individual should engage in their market rather than scare tactics."

[MooseheadMcMoose]

Something is gonna give.

 

Why does anything have to give, if there's no economic harm?

 

Follow the evidence.

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...study-1.1894729

[StarcloudSWG]

There is economic harm. The pirate who downloads a cracked game for free and plays it is *not paying for* that game. While aggregate losses to piracy are not calculable, *specific individual* losses to piracy *are*.

 

Downloading and playing a game that is normally available for money, without paying for it, is a specific loss to the publisher of the game.

 

"Oh, I wouldn't have paid for it anyway" does not fly when it comes to making a copy of a physical product, why would it be acceptable when the product is digital? The principle is the same; the pirate possesses something that has not been paid for, something that the pirate is not authorized to have by the owner of the intellectual property.

[MooseheadMcMoose]

There is economic harm. The pirate who downloads a cracked game for free and plays it is *not paying for* that game. While aggregate losses to piracy are not calculable, *specific individual* losses to piracy *are*.

 

Downloading and playing a game that is normally available for money, without paying for it, is a specific loss to the publisher of the game.

 

"Oh, I wouldn't have paid for it anyway" does not fly when it comes to making a copy of a physical product, why would it be acceptable when the product is digital? The principle is the same; the pirate possesses something that has not been paid for, something that the pirate is not authorized to have by the owner of the intellectual property.

 

Show the harm.

 

You don't have a case to point to where there is no piracy of a game, so you can't actually show what the sales WOULD have been.

 

Also, the evidence doesn't actually show that sales suffer as a result of piracy - "the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in [the] sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available". In essence - your assertion that every pirate copy equals a loss of a sale is not based in fact.

 

Furthermore, to hammer another nail in the coffin of your argument - increased piracy actually increases the public exposure of the product and as such increases the sales. So any losses you claim must be counted against increased sales from people who ended up buying something they might not otherwise pay for.

 

Your argument is not supported by the facts. You can keep railing on about the evils of piracy, but the evidence doesn't support your claims.

 

Follow the evidence.

[SwobyJ]

Why does anything have to give, if there's no economic harm?

 

Follow the evidence.

http://www.cbc.ca/ne...study-1.1894729

 

I meant primarily culturally. Whether piracy gets successfully near-totally clamped down on, somehow, or it becomes part of a new technological and media paradigm that regards computer programs (which may encompass all of media and more, as time goes on) as sharable and never exclusive.

 

Some movements go in the latter direction, like gaming companies going "Oh, we'll let you share your game with other people as long as it locks you out on you PC/console while that happens.", which is a lot more friendly than "Oh, you can only play on your console, if you check in every hour, and the disk doesn't even register on other consoles."

[Kantr]

So if people pirate an ebook. They arent stealing? Increased piracy doesnt benefit book sales or game sales. It might beneift GoT for Word of mouth.

 

 

I dare everyone to go to the games developer and say "Hey I pirated your game. Not it wasnt stealing and in fact you benefited from me and my friends not paying for it"

[MooseheadMcMoose]

So if people pirate an ebook. They arent stealing? Increased piracy doesnt benefit book sales or game sales. It might beneift GoT for Word of mouth.

 

 

I dare everyone to go to the games developer and say "Hey I pirated your game. Not it wasnt stealing and in fact you benefited from me and my friends not paying for it"

 

I've linked studies showing the lack of harm, which you're asserting. You can continue to spout assertions which fly in the face of the evidence, all you want. I suppose you must be in turmoil which to continue arguing against - piracy or evolution taught in schools. Or perhaps you are arguing the Earth is flat.

 

Follow the evidence.

 

As to going to the developer with such a statement - sure, so long as anyone who ends up buying the game as a result of sampling it via piracy, is also represented. An accounting ledger has two columns for a reason. You want to show one column while ignoring the other.

[SwobyJ]

So if people pirate an ebook. They arent stealing? Increased piracy doesnt benefit book sales or game sales. It might beneift GoT for Word of mouth.

 

 

I dare everyone to go to the games developer and say "Hey I pirated your game. Not it wasnt stealing and in fact you benefited from me and my friends not paying for it"

 

'Owning' a product for exclusive sale (though copyright law, etc) is a legal convention that determines more definite sales. It is a monopoly of a thing, of ideas. And really, I'm actually fine with that.

 

I just don't think it'll last. The producer of media, art, whatever, feels an ownership over what they created, but when that something is simply copied (not stolen, copied), then it becomes closer to an ego thing. And a perfectly fair ego thing. You made it, you want it to be yours and not cheap knockoffs everywhere that you can't benefit directly from. Yet its still gonna happen. You don't think major game developers haven't d/led these games before in their private lives? You don't think major musical artists haven't pirated music before? Its like the media version of pot smoking, for how much its done yet how much it is denied.

 

More consumer friendly sales channels help this immensely though. And they will continue to. When it becomes super easy and rather cheap to get media, almost everyone will opt for the official version. One may torrent a music album, but a week or month later spend $100 on iTunes. No company can actually determine that as a sale lost, as they don't know whether that person would have ever bought that torrented music album in the first place.

 

I think there really needs to be more accepted discussion (on this matter and in general) about what is the law, and what is lawful. And especially about why and how the law is applied. What is clearly illegal in USA is clearly legal (or at least decriminalized) in China, and vice versa.

 

 

What I do think that is rather more on the anti-piracy side is that if we lose a culture of copyright, we do lose a lot of creative competition. Sure, the best stuff will still rise close enough to the top for you to notice if you look, but knockoffs will be abundant, more than you'll ever think. And I think that's a real negative for us. I just don't think that fighting piracy like its some kind of war will solve, well, anything. Its gonna happen. People are going to get it. The tighter you hold onto your old model, the more people *want* to pirate. Be adapting to new technologies and culture shifts, copyright can still be relatively maintained and profits still damn high.

[MooseheadMcMoose]

Some movements go in the latter direction, like gaming companies going "Oh, we'll let you share your game with other people as long as it locks you out on you PC/console while that happens.", which is a lot more friendly than "Oh, you can only play on your console, if you check in every hour, and the disk doesn't even register on other consoles."

 

Aah, always-online game play. That's worked out so well.

 

Brilliant.

[SwobyJ]

As to going to the developer with such a statement - sure, so long as anyone who ends up buying the game as a result of sampling it via piracy, is also represented. An accounting ledger has two columns for a reason. You want to show one column while ignoring the other.

 

^^^^^^^^^

I'm sure potential sales are lost due to piracy.

 

But:

1)We can't know how many, as we're not freaking mind readers of everyone.

2)We CAN know, if the stigma died down and people were honest about it, how many sales were GAINED due to piracy. But even then, it would be the direct sales and not indirect sales.

 

Maybe, maybe piracy hurts industries more than it benefits them. Sure, I'll cede that as a hypothetical. But I still sure as hell that fighting piracy itself probably costs more than it benefits anyone.

 

Privateering never ended (it just goes under a different job title now), just as bootlegs and file sharing and whatever else will not end. They can be a manageable chaos though, instead of a chaos that rises up in indignation at The Man and pirates just to spite (which is likely often the case for Ubisoft games).

[SwobyJ]

Aah, always-online game play. That's worked out so well.

 

Brilliant.

 

Personally, I think always-online is the future.

 

But uh, the future of the 2030s, maybe 2020s. Not now. This is definitely the case of an industry being too pro-industry and anti-consumer (setting things up just as they like it, screw the consumers that hate it). You press on them too hard and the blowback may be so much as to topple you.

 

It really should wait until reliable and very cheap high speed Internet connections are widely available. That is just not the case in most of the USA, let alone other regions. But we're on our way.

 

And I may get the arguments against it at that point, but I also think that publishers will be, eventually, successfully grooming their consumers to welcome online features and online worlds. And fine, if it works it works. But it was SO stupid to do that in 2011-2013.

[MooseheadMcMoose]

^^^^^^^^^

I'm sure potential sales are lost due to piracy.

 

But:

1)We can't know how many, as we're not freaking mind readers of everyone.

2)We CAN know, if the stigma died down and people were honest about it, how many sales were GAINED due to piracy. But even then, it would be the direct sales and not indirect sales.

 

Maybe, maybe piracy hurts industries more than it benefits them. Sure, I'll cede that as a hypothetical. But I still sure as hell that fighting piracy itself probably costs more than it benefits anyone.

 

Privateering never ended (it just goes under a different job title now), just as bootlegs and file sharing and whatever else will not end. They can be a manageable chaos though, instead of a chaos that rises up in indignation at The Man and pirates just to spite (which is likely often the case for Ubisoft games).

 

1. Privateering never ended - wrong

Privateering is state sanctioned. If you have a letter or marque, it's a legal activity. So, your statement that "it never ended" is wrong. Once the letters of marque expired, so did the legality. Check your facts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer

 

2. "maybe piracy hurts industries more than it benefits them" - show the evidence

I've linked studies showing the economic impact of piracy on sales figures. It's inconsequential or of small benefit. I don't accept your assertion that there is harm. Let's look at it from the point of view of tort law. If you get hurt in a car accident, you have to show the harm (pain and suffering, loss of income, damage to property, etc). The burden is on YOU to show harm. You can't just walk into the court and say "I was harmed but can't show it", and try to fob off the burden of proof to the burden of showing there isn't harm onto the defendant.

 

We can keep going round and round, but the fact of the matter is that your assertions aren't based in evidence. Nor are they based in common law principles of justice and fairness.

[SwobyJ]

1. Privateering never ended - wrong

Privateering is state sanctioned. If you have a letter or marque, it's a legal activity. So, your statement that "it never ended" is wrong. Once the letters of marque expired, so did the legality. Check your facts.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Privateer

 

2. "maybe piracy hurts industries more than it benefits them" - show the evidence

I've linked studies showing the economic impact of piracy on sales figures. It's inconsequential or of small benefit. I don't accept your assertion that there is harm. Let's look at it from the point of view of tort law. If you get hurt in a car accident, you have to show the harm (pain and suffering, loss of income, damage to property, etc). The burden is on YOU to show harm. You can't just walk into the court and say "I was harmed but can't show it", and try to fob off the burden of proof to the burden of showing there isn't harm onto the defendant.

 

We can keep going round and round, but the fact of the matter is that your assertions aren't based in evidence. Nor are they based in common law principles of justice and fairness.

 

lol what. I 'ceded as a hypohetical'. That wasn't a damn assertion. Silly. I was even agreeing with you. I don't actually think it harms industries, at least in not net measurable way.

 

How about you read over my posts again, and what they were addressing, and come back? Because again, I was agreeing with you, and not making assertions, but instead predictions and opinions.

[MooseheadMcMoose]

How about you read over my posts again, and what they were addressing, and come back? Because again, I was agreeing with you, and not making assertions, but instead predictions and opinions.

 

I stand corrected. I misread. My apologies.

[Eelectrica]

Glad that its been cracked, after some patches have been released, I look forward to getting rid of it from my LEGALLY PURCHASED game.