“And where did (a large portion of) those pirates learn their behavior? Childhood, when they were broke. So, the only way to solve piracy, obviously, is to ban all children from the Internet. Retroactively.”

I lol’d.
I have pirated games before, but I have also bought games. Interestingly enough, every game I’ve bought is still on my computer, while every pirated game I’ve downloaded has been gone within a week.
It’s not because I finish the game quickly. I just lose interest in the games at a very rapid pace.
Don’t really know why this happens, but, whatever.
The comparison to sneaking into a movie theater was a good one, nice article.

Aghh, I would have wanted to post this here first but I didn’t click on the right article, ah well I hope you don’t mind if I do it again.

Someone on another thread said:

I wouldn’t say that theft and piracy are equally wrong. As others have said, piracy doesn’t necessarily deprive somebody of something that they rightfully own: if somebody was originally going to buy the game but decided to pirate it instead, you could say that it costs the company money — but if somebody pirates the game who didn’t plan on buying (or couldn’t) in the first place, then the company doesn’t “lose” money, because they weren’t going to get it anyway.

People have already discussed whether piracy is stealing or not but this is actually a good argument against the whole “PIRACY IS KILLING PC GAMING” crap we get from publishers and developers

If we assume that indeed 80% of PC games are pirated, would that mean that if there wasn’t piracy PC games sale would go 80% up? How does that makes sense if most of that 80% of people that pirated a game would have never bought it in the first place?

Piracy is a problem but not “THE” problem and it has become a convenient scapegoat for publishers and developers alike for lackluster games sales.

What I am trying to say is that implementing draconian DRM on games is not going to make their games sell any better, indeed if internet outcry over Mass Effect’s DRM is any indication it makes things worse.

What I would do about games with idiotic DRM is this: I will buy the game and play along with their online registrations and whatnot but the first time that I have to deal with any issue because of it I will crack it, I have already bought the game and I don’t care about “breaking the contract” just so I can use something I legally own.

Screw it, i wrote a huge post about whats good with piracy, but i know most people wont even consider them to be valid for a multitude of retarded reasons.

Piracy is just a medium for another generation, it will be replaced by another medium when the time for that has come. Its being fought just like every other medium has been, and it will win, just like every medium before it. huzzah!

Quick edit: Hehe, i just saw this on one of my favorite torrent sites:

(PC-ISO) Mass Effect-DETONATiON

S: 23
L: 555

Been up for.. less then two hours ^^ if i didnt already own it on xbox360, i might just try it to see how the crack works :P.

I commend your stance. It’s honest and straight-forward and its morally upright.

Not to claim otherwise is immoral or spineless. I’ve pirated before, but not usually games.

In either case, an excellent bit of opinion.

Console DRM is effective, because it’s a pain in the ass to circumvent a hardware key. Most people don’t think of consoles as having DRM, because the DRM does not inhibit any part of the expected behavior of the machine.

DRM can be made to work (obviously it’s impossible, but it can work well enough) on game-playing appliances, but it can’t work on a general-purpose computing device.

I wonder why normal software’s copy protection isn’t considered good enough.

Dolleater said:

Piracy is just a medium for another generation, it will be replaced by another medium when the time for that has come. Its being fought just like every other medium has been, and it will win, just like every medium before it. huzzah!

Piracy is not a “medium”. It is taking things that don’t belong to you without permission from the rightful owner. I very much hope that you “younger” kids get to spend the twilight years of your lives living in the communist dictatorship you so obviously yearn for where everything you EVER produce is taken from you without your permission and distributed free to the unwashed masses. Maybe then you’ll understand just why us stubborn old people (28 years old in my case) object to your obscene entitlement complex.

Hey, I’m taking video game design courses. If I ever start my own game company, I’ll expand my games to computers and apply your measures for combatting piracy, even when people are telling me to put SecuROM on my games. I’ll also humiliate EA for you, even though I did like their Playstation games(like the Harry Potter games – why don’t you play those? They’re magic and wizards, but they have much nicer copy protection.)

Vegetable pirates. As the incarnation of the god of fruit and vegetables I approve of this post.

I think it’s sad that you pretty much can’t play ANY games without an online connection anymore. Even the less intrusive games almost always require you to access the internet to authenticate once. It’s kinda sad for people that don’t have any internet access (I know from being one for a long time) to see all these good single player games out but not be able to buy any of them because they all authenticate online. Either way, I’m not going to buy any of these games anymore, thanks for warning us Shamus!

I’m of a variety that sneaks in and then decides if movie worth paying for. More often than not I run out screaming obscenities after first half an hour of movie.

For example, I just had to try TMNT game from last year. But PAY for it?! It’s developers DESERVE to go out of business for such a terrible product!

Sometimes, you CAN use demo-version to decide the worthiness of the game. But Fallout 3 will not have demo. Will I buy it? Of course NOT! After all I’ve heard there is only a SLIGHT chance I’d like this game. Will I download it? Probably, just to give it its SLIGHT chance.

And sometimes demo version just showcases the best part of the game, or as it was in case of Test Drive Unlimited for me, it doesn’t show how BORING and REPETITIOUS this game is. Sure, the game was fun for first hour or two, but when I finally understood that you’ll have to give a ride to 30 IDENTICALLY LOOKING people to get some obscure bonus – I quit it. Without paying.

I sort of have a foot in either camp. I’ve pirated a few games, generally ones that are years old and nearly impossible to find outside of usenet or a torrent. But as I write this post I’m downloading painkiller legally off Steam. It cost me about 12 dollars AUD, and for that I get the original Painkiller and the expansion, all of it not counting towards my download quota because my ISP has its own Steam content server.

On the other hand, I pirated Bioshock after reading about the rigmarole of issues PC users were having with the game. I really did want to play it and would have bought it were it not for the restrictive DRM and high likelihood I’d have had some technological issues. I’ll pirate a game if it’s more convenient to do so than it is to buy, most times it isn’t because you lose multiplayer content or have to lose a big chunk of your download quota, but the game publishers seem to be trying pretty hard to make piracy attractive.

I might end up pirating Mass Effect and/or Spore as they’re both games that I quite want to play but don’t want to be shafted by publishers. It doesn’t help that the retail market in Australia has been screwing the pooch for years. Despite the fact that the Aussie dollar and US dollar are nearly on parity, we’re still paying a hundred dollars Australian or more for games at dedicated games retailers here.

It’s sort of like I want to do the right thing and give them money to support them making more games I enjoy, but numerous factors at a publisher/retail level are making it extremely difficult to do so. Why should I do the right thing by them if they won’t do the right thing by me?

Just my two cents.

* The console version of BioShock outsold the PC version by a factor of ten.

Keep in mind the console version came out a lot earlier than the PC version – a lot of people who may have bought it on PC already had it, played it, saw it, or rented it in advance.

And this is even aside from DRM – and from this blog alone, a lot of people (myself include) believe strongly enough to *not* buy a DRM laden game.

Where do second-hand sales come into the equation? The publishers see zero revenue from the secondary market and I would bet they don’t like it.

I bought (second-hand) more PS2 games than any other format I’ve ever owned, because I knew I could get at least 70% of the price back in exchange for another game. It mostly cost me £2-3 to play a game through, sometimes due to price fluctuations I broke even or made a profit.

The value I place on games just doesn’t match the price asked, and so I just don’t buy them. The only game I bought new was the Orange Box for PC, which worked out at about £3 a game. That’s my level.

I won’t support or do piracy either. However, according to Danish law it is legal to crack (or break) a region coding on game-dvd or a movie-dvd so that you might play or see it in the player (machine) of your choice.

One of the Bioware employeers have said that the Securom servers for activations are region coded which makes the Securom copy protection….well, I think, you can figure this one out for yourselves…smart people as you all are.

I also witnessed how people struggled with this game – just to play it, or even to get it activated over the net. I warned Bioware and EA about this. And yet the activation servers were down for a long time, it seems; I witnessed how people got frustrated as they couldn’t connect to the activation servers…

I also witnessed people having to disable virtual drives, their Deameon tools or Alcohol 120% (or Nero), all perfectly legal programs – just in order to activate the game. People behind firewalls were also needing to disable their firewalls…just to activate the game, MEPC, over the net. (which sort of is a contradiction-in-terms, I think…)

And apparently someone did forget to tell Bioware to test the game on quad core machines; people with Nvidia’s Geforce 8800 graphics cards were also not able to play the game – sometimes not to install the game, too…

And if you just look in the tech self help forum at the bioware boards for MEPC forums, you will see a lot of people having trouble plating this game – because of the drm scheme…

Someone mentions that devs. etc. should provide an incentive for people to actually buy the game. I agree 120% on this. Back in the olde golden days of gaming (in the late 1990′s) you would get a nice box with nice cover art, a nice cloth (sometimes a paper map), and an nice bound manual i.e. you got extra content with your game. The pirates did not get this, of course.

Rewarding yor trusted and loyal customers is really the to go, imo. I have suggested that Bioware hold a rafle of some sorts between all the registered MEPC owners to see who will get a cool item, unique to only them. A signed copy of the new Mass Effect book, Ascension, maybe??

Imo, the developers behind The Witcher, is doing to right thing. They are holding contests right now that last for two weeks. But the contests are only open to those with a registered copy of the game; if that’s not an incentive to go out to buy the game…

“But look at all the people who went out of business or who gave up and sold out.”

More often than not it’s the result of bad management, stockholders’ treason, internal team quarrels and other piracy-unrelated things.

Dana, while I agree with your point of view, there is some problems with advertising. For one thing, “Generation Y” seems to pay less and less attention to general ads (there was an article about it somewhere recently). Another problem – it’s hard to integrate advertising into some kinds of games. How do you integrate Coca-Cola ad into High Fantasy setting RPG? Or BMW ad in WW2 strategy game?

Well, in the latter case, on the sides of German fighter planes, of course.

But yeah. The reason people these days pay less attention to adverts is because we’re so inundated with them. The average person sees something like ten times as many adverts per day than they did 20 years ago, so we get better at tuning them out, or we’d have no time to do anything else. So the advertisers dream up new and exciting ways to push adverts at us.

I mean, even ignoring actual adverts on TV, I can’t watch a show without them taking over a quarter of the screen every five minutes to tell me about some other show that I don’t want to see. And product placement has gone from being something that happened occasionally to a typical revenue stream.

Embedding adverts into games isn’t going to be much more popular than forcing you re-register every time their servers hiccup, but it might be less likely for people to actively try to circumvent. Or it might be more likely to make people decide they just don’t want it. Who knows?

“is it moral to break a law that you feel is unjust?”

There are those who would argue that it’s immoral not to.

“First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing because verbing weirds language.
Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing because I no verbs.”

Oh wait, wrong poem.

“First they came for the Communists,
- but I was not a communist so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Socialists and the Trade Unionists,
- but I was neither, so I did not speak out.
Then they came for the Jews,
- but I was not a Jew so I did not speak out.
And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me.”

Blackbird71 Something telling me that BMW would not like to be associated with nazi fighter planes ;)

Dana (#73), thanks for a thoughtful reply. I certainly agree that there are serious, important discussions to be had about the nature of information as a commodity, and about how we should measure value independent of the value-as-scarcity model that has applied for most of history.

Most people who pirate games are not interested in those questions, or at best they pay lip service to them, along the lines of: “Richard Stallman says information wants to be free, so . . . Dude! Free Mass Effect!” This isn’t helping.

You are clearly not a member of that particular camp, so thanks for chiming in. I still think that the best solution is to either support developers or boycott them, not try to have it both ways by “boycotting” them in the form of taking their creations for free. Essentially, I think people have a right to their business model, even if others think it’s archaic and flawed. But you’re absolutely right that it feels like there ought to be a way to make the free, wide-spread distribution of your creation into a strength rather than a weakness.

Sort of a tangent, but I was talking about this sort of thing to a lawyer friend (yes, they do exist) and I mentioned the slogan I keep seeing online, “I don’t believe in imaginary property.” His response was interesting: “But all property is imaginary.” And he’s right. Property (ownership) doesn’t exist in nature, it’s created by a set of rules (laws) that everyone agrees to live with. Your ownership of your house is an abstract thing supported by the laws of the country you live in. Digital property has some characteristics that make it more imaginary than most, like the ability to be infinitely replicated for free, but the idea of being able to own something is still an abstraction, just like in the real world. Interesting take, I thought.

PC games are starting to look pretty sad in comparison to consoles nowadays, though. I recently bought a PC copy of the orange box, and portal bugs out once the game starts, and TF2 crashes every other second (supposedly known bug).

DaveMc:
Mm . . . sure, all property is imaginary. In that sense your “I don’t believe in imaginary property.” friend is missing a point. But I think he’s reaching for something real nonetheless, just expressing it poorly. It’s closer to the “rival goods” Dana was talking about.
The concept of property is imaginary–it’s an abstraction. But at the personal level, at least, it’s an abstraction with a very compelling philosophical base. There has been personal property as long as there have been people. Sure, in nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes it’s often not considered a big deal, but it’s still there–only one person can use a spear at a time, and the person who made it is the logical one to be able to decide who gets to use it.
When you get into software and other freely copyable things, and the question of using a copy rather than taking away the original, we’re talking about a whole different kind of abstraction, and one which really only makes sense in a modern economy, and specifically one based on markets. The violation involved in theft of property is about taking away what someone else had. The violation involved in piracy of software is about potentially depriving someone of expected profits from selling you a copy. Not only is it more abstract, it’s a different kind of abstraction, and one with much narrower context. Try to tell a hunter-gatherer why there’s something wrong with using something everyone can use without exhausting it, and they’d think you were crazy. In a completely different direction, a socialist would say “well that’s the problem with private ownership of the means of production, isn’t it?”

Incidentally, that also suggests a possible direction for the production of non-rival goods: Public funding. Works for the BBC. If society decides how much money they want being spent making video games, then all the companies can put their games up for free download and the government reimburses the game companies based on game popularity.

I’ve noticed one other thing. I use Linux, and so I pay attention to open source software. When I first started, there were effectively no open source games in the sense we’re talking about–there was solitaire and Frozen Bubble and a few board games, plus some clunky attempts at arcade stuff that tended to look stupid, freeze and die. Even Richard Stallman didn’t really expect open source games to get far, and figured that it didn’t matter that much because copyright on games was probably more about all the artwork and story than about the software, anyway. But lately, I’ve been noticing all these Free Software games and game engines reaching maturity and starting to function well and look pretty cool. I find myself wondering if this has anything to do with frustration at the state of the PC game industry, DRM etc., and whether open source games will start to rise until they become a significant force in PC gaming.

Add to the above another idea:

Make the game free.

Sell downloadable mods for the game online. Make new ones every now and then, to keep interest fresh.

Over restrictive loss prevention always leads to the downfall of the enforcer. The United States of America exist today because business interests in the colonies found it cheaper to fund, run, and fight in, an insurgency than to pay British Taxes.

I can’t help but think of prohibition every time I read these piracy posts. The US government single handedly insured that criminal orginizations would get all the cash flow they ever needed by making alcohol illegal. Certain PC publishers are making sure that the pirates will never have a problem finding customers the same way. They are under the bus, right where they were thrown by said publishers.

PS love the comic, there was much milk in nasal passages

Rewarding yor trusted and loyal customers is really the to go, imo.
No kidding, I had a pirated Oblivion copy available and ended up hiking for something like 4 hours trying to hunt down a copy so I could get me hands on that shiny (fake) gold Septium.

I failed. :(

Although I’m glad I didn’t buy Oblivion. Morrowind > Oblivion. But I’m digressing.

Essentially though, if you look at something like Mass Effect, if the manual was sweet and it had nifty things in the box, I’d buy it even if I had a functional pirated copy next to me. I loved the Fallout manuals… I recall that on at least two separate occasions I actually read them cover to cover when I was bored. Can’t download THAT.

This is akin also to the music CDs of my Current Celebrity Obsession. I’m in Canada, she’s in Taiwan. Her CD/DVDs are practically impossible to find over here. Easier to download… but her CD packages come with the lyric/credit book in which she models, as well as all these nice mini-posters (well, postcards) of her. Thus I hunt them down and buy them.

City of Heroes/Villians had these little Heroclix type figurines in their Collectors Edition… just a dinky little plastic thing like that, and I suspect that’ll give sales a boost.

@Dolleater:

Do you even know what a medium is?

I consider myself a shameless pirate of many things but I have never attempted to morally justify my actions by appealing to some sort of poorly-thought-out pirate’s credo. We are not some “younger generation” ushering in a new “medium” called piracy. We, and you’re apparently two years older than I, are simply pirates. And piracy, of the media kind, has been around for many more generations than you seem to think. Back then, I think our elders called it “bootlegging.” And it wasn’t free, because bootleggers charged you for it. But it’s still a form of copyright-infringement-piracy.

Piracy is not a “medium” of anything. This would imply that piracy was a tool or format. It’s not. It’s an economic and social phenomenon. A prevalent one. And it won’t be replaced by anything. It might be carried out with different methods, or with different distribution channels, but it’s still the same phenomenon.

There actually are situations where piracy can be a good thing, but these all rely on the pirated gaining benefits not directly related to sales of the actual pirated product. Bands letting fans pirate their music in order to build a fanbase that wants to see them in concert, buy merchandise, or even (if they’re awfully sentimental and feeling guilty) buy some CDs or mp3′s. Comics and TV shows from outside a country gaining traction in other markets due to international piracy (sometimes of a benign sort–there do exist fansubbers who stop fansubbing when a show they’ve been pirating has been licensed properly), where they build up an audience for the product proper as well as merchandise.

But these circumstances don’t apply towards games. Unless said games have plenty of physical merchandise they can capitalize on–which the vast majority of them do not. A pirate who downloads a game illegally has no external incentive to actually buy the game they pirated. And that means there’s no reason for them to repay the people who worked their asses off (often in really, REALLY crummy conditions) to make the game. Your primary justification is in building confidence in quality of product by the developers. So that when (or even if) they release another product in the future, the pirate might buy that.

It’s telling that you didn’t try the other excuse. The one where you say you might buy a copy of the pirated game itself. Because, you know, you liked it so much and are assured of the level of quality the developer has established, and would like to financially support them so, hey, maybe they might actually have the budget or the go ahead to make another game?

While your justification might fly for big-name games, who usually sell enough copies in spite of piracy for their developers to afford to make more games, it simply doesn’t fly for games made by smaller companies. Companies that might consist of a trio of people who are in it because they love the games they make and are hoping, with the faintest of hope, that enough others might want to play the sorts of the games they’re making to justify actually making a living off of making games? Yeah. Indie folks. Their games get pirated, too, buddy. And it’d be nice if every person who pirated an indie game would actually do as your half-hearted justification says, and use their positive experiences with the pirated game as reason to support the game developers who put blood, sweat, tears, and their own savings, to make the game those pirates liked so much. And, you know, actually have the heart to buy a legit copy. Using the pirated download as a demo, and giving the dev some payment as thanks for a great game. If only pirate apologists actually put their money where their mouth was.

Aren’t honour systems just delightful?

As a pirate of many a tawdry torrent, one who never attempts to verbally justify his actions to others–and who never apologizes, even when he’s buying a copy of something he’s pirated out of nothing more than sheer guilt–I think you’re full of it. And your justifications sound like some sort of elitist quasi-anarcho-commune-idealist apologist’s

Also, you misspelled compassion. And you call us retarded. (Alright, technically, you called our likely reasons for the dismissal of your arguments retarded. But as that requires the function of cognitive thought, you basically called us retarded by default.)

In case anybody’s wondering, I generally don’t pirate games because if I wasn’t going to spend money on it, I probably wouldn’t bother waiting for it to download and then play it. And it’s not hard to actually buy games. What with having a credit card and all. Perhaps having bad experiences waiting days for a torrent of Oblivion to finish dl’ing, then actually playing it and realizing it was crap put me off to the whole idea of pirating games. It also made me a more careful buyer, too, but that’s another issue entirely.

As a tangentially related aside: Have you seen what licensors and distributors charge for anime DVDs? It costs nearly two hundred dollars just for one season’s worth of episodes! Hell, I could buy four season boxed sets of Scrubs for that much! I’ll buy a reasonably priced anime DVD season set–one season for 50 bucks–even if I’ve seen it a bunch of times on fansub.

Otherwise, I’ll just go loot and plunder off the digital high seas. Yarr.

……

And just so nobody’s confused on the matter, I’m also the guy that went on at length as to why draconian DRMs were futile and didn’t do a damn thing other than earn pirates goodwill from the DRM’s victims. I also hold to the simple and logical truth of: “Piracy is not the issue, sales are.”

Because I believe in that truth very, very strongly, I vote with my money. If a developer deserves a sale from me, then by Jove they’ve got one. Sometimes, I think a developer might deserve that sale solely on their principles alone. That’s why I buy from Stardock on brand recognition alone. Not because I pirated anything from them and thus associate their name with quality–though, after buying GalCivII and Sins, I do make that association–but because they don’t treat paying customers as though they were criminals.

I guess, in some strange way, that makes me “principled,” or whatever you people might wanna call it. Not by how I justify piracy to myself or others, but by how far I’m willing to go just to further the actual principle of it. And by furthering the principle, I mean actually pay money in direct support of it.

Come to think of it, that might also be why I stopped pirating games and started buying them. Hmm. I wonder.

Still a pirate in general, though. Call me a hypocrite if you want–at least I’m not pretending I’m not.

….

EDIT: Dear lordy, I’ve hit the 1d100 mark. Well. This is amusing. And to mark the occasion, I’ve finally gotten a Gravatar account.