Many Forms of Piracy

[Darth Mandarb]

edit: And nowadays, games suck anyway. In golden DOS age, a game was released when it was ready. Now what the fuck do you mean by "update", "patch" etc words anyway? So, we pay for game, ISP - so we can do validation/registration, and also the damned updating every month? So basically we buy uncompleted and buggy crap! And pay further so we can move step-by-step (time-internet-updates) to a thing we actually wanted to buy in the first place.  And it is so with most games, ain't it?

For me, this is a double edged sword.

I think the idea of 'updates' being made is a good idea in principle.  The internet is a great tool for allowing that sort of thing.  The problem, as I see it, is that now-a-days developers hide behind that as a reason to release a game before it's finished.

Also, related to that, I remember what a pain in the ass it used to be to make games work in DOS mode.  We used to have to set up different loading methods to run certain games, editing config.sys and autoexec.bat and messing with files and buffers and dos=high umb.

Back then the game makers made the games to run a certain way and you had to make your computer work that way in order to run the game.  Now-a-days all games must be made to work on a million different combinations of setups and I think that's why they're so buggy.

As long as the cost of developing the copy protection is less than the profit they make from additional sales, copy protection doesn't raise the price of the game. Pirating a game instead of buying it does.

If I get a pirated copy of their game for free, and I was never going to buy it in the first place, they haven't lost money.

I can't wait for the software company that markets themselves the right way ... they begin developing a game which they are ONLY selling online.  Cut out the retail stores, deal with it ALL internally.  No booklets, no CD/DVDs, just a download for 10 dollars.

They'd sell MILLIONS of them.

With some clever marketing (say around 300-500 dollars a month for SEO and Pay-per-click advertising) they would get their name out there and they'd be millionaires.  (that's assuming, of course, that it was a good game.)

It could easily be accomplished this way and prove that over-priced software is ripping people off big-time.

Sincerely,

Cyberobbin Hood

[InCreator]

Oh, my phrase, "Golden DOS age" was distracting.
Actually, this goes to all games at this era, and was pointed to game development (culture?), not the machines or OS's. Like - console games for example? Buying a console game does not cause extra paying, or even if - then it's minimal. This nice thing stands until today - if I'm not mistaken. But only for non-PC games.

* A patch that is decribed as "adds support to new GeForce card" or something similar is okay with me. This is called product support (in some way?) and is very nice thing.

* But a patch called "You won't get stuck in a wall near house X" or "Removes nasty bug from here or there" isn't quite the same thing. This is more like something game development team should be ashamed of and avoid at any cost!

Do they?

"Oh, bugs. Games are so complex nowadays and every devloper makes some and this is what whole programming is about blah-blah --"

-- Well, not for the money the games cost right now!

[Bad voo-doo man (lazy)]

Personally, I think that when a company sends you spyware or something, that it just pisses people off and causes them to rip more stuff from them.. But thats just me

[Snarky]

If I get a pirated copy of their game for free, and I was never going to buy it in the first place, they haven't lost money.

True, and I agree that probably a majority of the things people pirate they wouldn't have bought. But I also think it's true that there's a significant number of people out there who think "Why should I buy it when I can get it for free?" and that sales suffer because they don't bother paying.

Incidentally, I copied quite a lot of software and media illicitly back in school and at uni (starting with floppies of Sierra and Lucas Arts adventures, and culminating with .torrent files of DVDs and application suites). Now that I've got a job and can actually afford to buy the stuff I want, I'm making a point of acquiring more and more parts of my library legally. I may not be living totally clean still, but when you're putting your money away in stock options and IRAs it's a lot more difficult to tell yourself that you should have the fruits of other people's work for free.

... Besides, there are all these AGS games that people are just giving away!

[TerranRich]

Helm: What's so hard about comparing price to enjoyability? I can put the two into proper perspective just fine. For example, I've played Doom III. It was OK, but to me not worth the price ($60). Because it's just not my thing. Now give me a good adventure game that costs $50, and I'll definitely scrounge up the money to buy it. Now, if an adventure game was released that I paid $50 for and didn't quite enjoy, then I'd feel gipped.

It's not that hard a concept, no offense. It's just a matter of questioning whether a game was worth paying its price for.

As for the whole issue about pricing CDs in the first place, I know a LITTLE bit about pricing things (Web development projects), so I can take a few educated guesses and guess-timate that even if Doom III, as popular as it is/was, came out with an initial price of $30, it would've given the company GREAT profit, if not better. Think about it, how many times do you pass by a game that costs $60! And you go, "Man, I wish I had the money, the game looks so good!" I've done it plenty of times. I bought Halo 1 when Halo 2 came out. Because it took me so long to get the money for it. Now, if it had cost $30 innitially, I would've bought it much sooner.

Software Companies overprice games. We've discussed it in our Principles of Marketing class. It's usually all in the advertising, packaging, and copy protection. The first tiwo I can see, but I agree that copy protection has become an art in itself. Needing a word from a ccertain page in the manual is just fine.

I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that if you don't treat your customers like thiefs, they won't ACT like thiefs. Nicely put.

[Gilbert]

Well to divert this thread a bit, apart from games there are actually lots of softwares that are not worth the money but you ]should play for them.
One such example is called Windows...

However, for games and other entertainment stuff you're not forced to pay for them, if you don't feel they're worth the price, just don't pay for them them and don't play them. Noticiably when you can try most of them before paying nowadays (more silly about softwares is that most of teh time the trial version is already the full version...) already, so just get the feeling of them and decide whether you should get the full thing (though there're still lots of cases that after paying for a game one gets disappointed). For example, I won't pay for DOOM3, so I won't play it (Well I won't even try to see what it's like, I'm enough with FPS already...).



And don't tell me to use Linux, I won't fall for it, I'd rather use DOS.

[Ishmael]

I shot throught D3 in a week or two. And I probably wouldn't play it online. I bought Halo around when Halo 2 was coming out. It cost 30â,¬. It took me a month to comlete the single player, and I've played it online, but not that much. That was not at all too much for it. The moment free record shop tags D3 or UT2004 with the "2 products for 20â,¬" sticker, I'll be buying them.

For CDs, I've bought every CD I wanted to listen to, if I have got the chance to get hold of it. I don't have any complete albums on the computer that I don't have in my shelf aswell.

[Kinoko]

I have no problem with playing stuff I haven't paid for. If I really like something, I'l buy it. In fact, I do. I play/listen/watch something for free if I can, and if I think it's genuinely good and something I want, I buy it. Not out of obligation either, but because it's just plain nice to have the stuff you really like.

I totally agree with that "thieves" phrase too ^_^

[Radiant]

I agree with Sharky. If I bought it, I want to be able to sell it when I'm no longer interested. Basic economics, no?

Oh and yes, spyware is annoying, but the triad of Firefox, AdAware and ZoneAlarm personal firewall should deal with 99.9% of it. Works for me.

[Darth Mandarb]

@ TerranRich
That's exactly right about passing by the game that costs $60.  If they'd have released it at $30, sure that's 1/2 the price, but they'd probably sell 10 times as many.  How does this not make sense to them?

What I really love is when you see the software in the store for $60 but you see that you can get it cheaper online!  So you check it out when you get home and it's $54.99.  A whole 5 DOLLARS cheaper!!  Only now you don't get the pretty box, the shiney CD/DVD, and the fancy booklet that comes with it.   Wow!  Thanks for letting us know that the materials used for the game only cost 5 dollars.  Now we can REALLY see how badly we're being ripped off.

I understand about paying the guys for developing the game and all that but a 55 dollar mark-up is rediculous.

Mark my words, someday somebody will do what I mentioned in my other post, and all the other software companies will suddenly be 'the bad guys' when people realize how badly they've been scammed over the years!

My feelings towards software these days are right in-line with my feelings towards CDs.  They're far too expensive and I'm not going to 'feed the greed' that is running rampant.

When CDs are $2 each and software is $10 each I'll start buying them again.

[Squinky]

For music Cd's I generally am willing to pay ten to twelve bucks, which means I have to wait till its on sale or old.....but thats what I do. I just can't pay sixteen bucks, silly huh? I don't pirate music because it's normally low quality or recorded on different sound levels etc.....

Now software I am horrible about. I justify windows because they want me to buy a version for every damn computer I have, screw that.....so I pirate it...Games too, but I have no real excuse for that. I rarely buy $50 games and normally only buy ten to twenty on a game....