Piracy ratio is about 20:1 ?!?

[Ionstormsucks]

I still haven't quite been able to figure out why it is suddenly okay to steal when the product you're stealing is digital instead of physical.

It is not. And hardly anyone claims it is.

If you go into a store and grab a nice pot roast, shove it under your shirt and walk out without paying for it, then you're a thief and everyone goes: "No! no! no! Bad form". But if you go onto the internet, grab that brand new album of your favorite band, shove it onto your hard drive and close down your BitTorrent/P2P application without paying for the album you're suddenly an "innovator in an economical sense" and you're apparently "part of the bigger debate about copyright in general".

Well, first of all there is the law. Obviously the law makes a difference between these two acts of criminal behaviour. That's why it calls the one thing theft and the other copyright infringement. And that's why there are different penalties for these delicts. And then there is of course one very obvious difference. If I walk into a store and steal a physical CD the store has one less CD to sell. If I download an album from the internet, the copyright holder has not necessarily lost a sale. Nonetheless both things are illegal activities and who claimed it would be otherwise?
On the other hand it's fairly hard to deny that the file sharing community is also an "innovator in an economical sense" as I called it. Pirates were first to recognize the potential of digital distribution via P2P technology and the MP3 format. Further development of that technology was driven by pirates. But MP3 was never something that only pirates could use. It took the music industry a long time to realize that the MP3 format held a huge potential for legal sales (they even tried to legally prohibit the first MP3 player). Same goes for P2P. P2P is not something that can only be used for trading warez, but also to distribute legal stuff. The problem is, that again the industry is rejecting this technology and the whole idea of sharing stuff. At the moment the very idea of sharing stuff is taboo to the industry - you share, you're doing something illegal. Instead of making use of that new technology they try to outlaw it. What will happen is that companies which are absolute strangers to the content industry will take over this market and make a lot of money. Because that's what happened to the online music market. A total stranger to music - Apple - suddenly dominates the legal online music market. The same will probably happen to P2P. The famous client Azureus has recently renamed itself to Vuze and implemented a business model that allows creators to sell their stuff legally through the prominent P2P network.

And yes, even if you don't want to believe it - piracy is a part of the bigger debate of copyrights in general. Because it vividly shows to us that traditional forms of copyright as we know them might not be suited for a "digital age". People always think that copyright can only be managed in one way, but that's not true.
People tend to limit the debate about piracy to illegal file sharing, but let's face it - that's not were it ends. The content industry is not only fighting a war against illegal file sharing, it's fighting a war against the customer. If I give a game I bought to my brother and he's installing it on his computer we're both violating copyright law (not that I have a brother, but you know what I mean). Something that was perfectly legal for almost 40 years is suddenly illegal. If I get rid of a DRM to transfer a MP3 file I legally bought to my MP3 player, I'm violating copyright law. What I want to say is - everyone is talking about what pirates do, but no one is talking about what the industry does, although that's part of the discussion.

There is one reason and one reason only that this could possibly happen and that is that people can get away with it. There is no difference between the two examples I mentioned earlier except for the fact that you're much more likely to get caught robbing the store than you are downloading an illegal copy off the internet.
If I was to go around beating up everyone wearing blue jeans and I was big enough and strong enough that nobody could stop me, I can assure you that before long there would also be a debate going on about the need to make jeans in another colour or perhaps phase out jeans altogether but that sure as heck doesn't make me any less of a bully or a menace. Beating up people wearing a certain colour and kind of pants is not a fashion statement, it is criminal behavior.

Pardon me, but you really sound like a representative of the industry. Did you know that it's part of the industry's propaganda to constatly compare copyright infringement with violent crimes? The very terminolgy used in the debate shows what I mean. Piracy is usually a crime which includes an element of violence. The same goes for the German term "Raubkopie" (pirated copy). "Raub" (which means armed robbery) is a criminal act that according to German law includes acts of violence. Now look at your own example. Illegal file sharing is not about beating people until they give up their property. File sharing is about the most non-violent crime imaginable.

Piracy is a fact. It is not going to go away anytime soon. The industry has to deal with, that is true but I'll be damned if I'm going to give credence to piracy just because it is not just a figment of someone's imagination. It is still an ILLEGAL activity. End of story.

See and that's exactely the mindset that got the music industry where it is now. The line between legal and illegal is not as clear cut as it seems at first glance. Copyright law is not something that was invented once and has never changed since that day. What's legal one year could next year be illegal - and vice versa. Sometimes it simply makes sense to give up part of your copyright to get out of a crisis or invent new business models that could grant you even bigger revenues.

And the whole stealing vs. copyright infringement semantics that is going on (especially on slashdot) is getting out of proportions. Whether you call that huge steaming pile that your neighbour's Doberman just left on your doorstep a sh*t, a doo-doo, a number 2, feces, excrement or whatnot, we all KNOW what it is and we all know that it stinks.

The same could very well be said for the behavior and propaganda of the content industry. To think of piracy as a purely destructive activity is a very conservative mindset and in no way helpful to solve the problem. You said it yourself piracy is not going away anytime soon. So instead of seeing pirates as useless parasites the content industry should rather start regarding them as potential customers and indicators in which direction potential new markets could develop.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

when the product you're stealing is digital instead of physical.

In my opinion, exactly this is the point ! :

People don't realize it.

I mean, to us "computer people", there's normally no difference.

To other people there is.

I know it is weird, but give me that example : The smell of a cup of coffee vs. a physical mug filled with it standing before you.

The one is - in a certain sense - digital, and other one is physical.

I'm very sure that this has something to do with it.

Or words : You can print them into newspapers : Then it is physical.
Or read them on-screen : Then they are digital.

Some people - like me, for example - just need something to grab. That's why I don't buy anything that's "download only". I just don't do it.

In my - admittedly very special case - this is also the reason why I don't pirate software. Pirated would mean that it is there only in digital form, on my harddisc, held by some magnetic fields.
Physical would mean it is on a disc.

A tale of Nasreddin goes like this :

Someone had had the smell of a piece of roasted meat.
The shopkeeper wanted to have hard money for this.
Nasreddin payed him : With the sound of several money coins ...

This is digital vs. physical at its very core.

 

[JemyM]

I still haven't quite been able to figure out why it is suddenly okay to steal when the product you're stealing is digital instead of physical.
If you go into a store and grab a nice pot roast, shove it under your shirt and walk out without paying for it, then you're a thief and everyone goes: "No! no! no! Bad form". But if you go onto the internet, grab that brand new album of your favorite band, shove it onto your hard drive and close down your BitTorrent/P2P application without paying for the album you're suddenly an "innovator in an economical sense" and you're apparently "part of the bigger debate about copyright in general".
There is one reason and one reason only that this could possibly happen and that is that people can get away with it. There is no difference between the two examples I mentioned earlier except for the fact that you're much more likely to get caught robbing the store than you are downloading an illegal copy off the internet.

You fail to understand because you have drawn a connection between a regular shop and a business that was only briefly available due to new technology. The idea that you could sell a song as a product rather than selling a performance as a service was developed as late as the early 1900. There's new technology available now, and looking at the new market with old eyes will just make you fail. We are going back to the situation in which entertainment is a service, not a product.

Piracy is a fact. It is not going to go away anytime soon. The industry has to deal with, that is true but I'll be damned if I'm going to give credence to piracy just because it is not just a figment of someone's imagination. It is still an ILLEGAL activity. End of story.

Doesn't matter. Piracy is a force majura. If a business cannot adapt to force majura it will fail. Blaming the force wont help them.

Also, most people do not consider it illegal. People decide what's illegal, not businessowners.

 

[fatBastard()]

I'm not a representative of the industry. However, I AM one who firmly believes that the word illegal is binary. Something is either legal or it is illegal. There are no shades of gray, no degrees of illegality.

If I walk into a store and steal a physical CD the store has one less CD to sell. If I download an album from the internet, the copyright holder has not necessarily lost a sale.

So, there is nothing wrong with me going to the movies without paying? I'm also pretty certain I'll have a hard time explaining the ladies of the local Red Light District and their pimps that I can get a "ride" for free as long as I leave the "merchandise" undamaged.

Now we're back to the semantics part I mentioned. We both know that the deal is that the developers spend time and money making the game that you in turn pay for to play. It is not the packaging, no matter how nice, that you pay for, it is the content. But unlike the content of a beer can, the content of a game is digital in nature and that apparently makes it okay to grab without paying for it. We are not talking about the actual act of infringing copyright here. Nobody cares who many untouched copies of whatnot you have on your hard drive. The problem is when you play the game, watch the movie, screw the prostitute - THAT is when you break the deal if you haven't paid for the "privilege" to do so.

On the other hand it's fairly hard to deny that the file sharing community is also an "innovator in an economical sense" as I called it. Pirates were first to recognize the potential of digital distribution via P2P technology and the MP3 format.

And by "digital distribution" do you perchance mean "quicker and easier way to get that new album by whomever for free"? If so, I agree. Otherwise, no I don't believed they had innovation of the economy on their minds when Napster and the other P2P applications had their hey day. The widespread digital rip offs through P2P may very well have been the main cause for the spiring digital distribution we see today, like Polio was the cause for the Polio Vaccine. However, I don't think anyone thought along the lines of: "Hey, let's create a use for Quinine" and then went ahead a created malaria.

People tend to limit the debate about piracy to illegal file sharing, but let's face it - that's not were it ends. The content industry is not only fighting a war against illegal file sharing, it's fighting a war against the customer. If I give a game I bought to my brother and he's installing it on his computer we're both violating copyright law (not that I have a brother, but you know what I mean). Something that was perfectly legal for almost 40 years is suddenly illegal. If I get rid of a DRM to transfer a MP3 file I legally bought to my MP3 player, I'm violating copyright law. What I want to say is - everyone is talking about what pirates do, but no one is talking about what the industry does, although that's part of the discussion.

And did this trend start before or after piracy went bezerk? Without the widespread use - and apparently general public acceptance - of P2P networks, there would have been little to gain and much to lose with these, I admit, rather draconian DRM methods the industry is employing today. However, even though they may very well be going about this the wrong way, they have to do something.

I'm not particularly happy about some of the methods/systems they have tried, but when even intelligent people like yourself do not speak out against piracy, there are few other options than to try to stem the flow as much as possible. I can understand the reasoning even if I don't think it will do any good.

The same could very well be said for the behavior and propaganda of the content industry. To think of piracy as a purely destructive activity is a very conservative mindset and in no way helpful to solve the problem. You said it yourself piracy is not going away anytime soon. So instead of seeing pirates as useless parasites the content industry should rather start regarding them as potential customers and indicators in which direction potential new markets could develop.

How? I mean, the reason most of these people pirate stuff in the first place is because they don't have to pay anything and the chances of getting caught if you're only downloading it for personal use are so infinitesimally small that they are virtually non-existent.

P.S. Here in Denmark it has ALWAYS been illegal to make a copy for your brother. Until InfoSoc you could make a copy for yourself legally but never for friends or family.

 

[fatBastard()]

You fail to understand because you have drawn a connection between a regular shop and a business that was only briefly available due to new technology. The idea that you could sell a song as a product rather than selling a performance as a service was developed as late as the early 1900. There's new technology available now, and looking at the new market with old eyes will just make you fail. We are going back to the situation in which entertainment is a service, not a product.

So we shouldn't be paying the developers for their years of hard work. Is that what you're saying?

Doesn't matter. Piracy is a force majura. If a business cannot adapt to force majura it will fail. Blaming the force wont help them.

Also, most people do not consider it illegal. People decide what's illegal, not businessowners.

That pretty anarchistic don't you think? The LAW decides what's illegal, not people nor business owners.

 

[GothicGothicness]

Most importantly and what I always say in these discussion to ( especially young people ) but also sadly these days older people who say like it is not stealing to download, and digital works should be free. This people failed to understand one very important point! If everything was free, NONE would produce movies, games , DVD's. Is it really that hard to grasp? I know games that everyone and their mother played, but the company still went bankrupt, because everyone pirated it. I hear people here complain how the PC games market is dying, yet in this thread some people are speaking in supportive terms about piracy? You can already buy most PC games online on steam or direct to drive, so that the "developers do not keep up with the times" is a very poor excuse.

Second, I think you have to separate music and movies from this discussion as they have one MAJOR difference from games. Movies earn money in the movie theatre, music earns money on concerts. I do not think it justify free downloads! But at least they do not starve to death if a lot of people pirates the stuff.

Thirldy, I am no expert in music or movies, so I do not know how much they are affected by piracy. But I know the games business by heart! and I know the people who buy games. Listen to this quote about Bioshock ( it took almost a week before the hack was out for the PC version ). This is taken directly from users of a forum that deals in piracy "I gave up and bought the game, since there is no hack out yet!"

I do not really get the direction this discussion took from some people. First of all, if a game is so bad that I would never buy it, why on earth would I download it from a piracy webpage? Just to kill sometime when I was bored? yeah might be? But fact remains there were developers who spent several 1000 hours of there time to make this game, and they might be going to sleep without food, and unable to feed their family while millions of people enjoy killing time with their work for free, this kind of thinking is just horrible! It is from them you steal, if people saw this perspective they might at least feel bad before they pirate a game. Why do people have to be so cheap, if you play it buy it! if you don't like it enough to buy it, don't play it.

 

[blatantninja]

According to Harold L. Vogel, who is an expert on the field (in 2007 he published the 7th edition of Entertainment Industry Economics) it costs about 4 to 5$ to produce a DVD (in most economies anyway), so it's pretty much impossible to sell them at such a price.

The actual material and manufacturing cost is about $1.50 for a mass market DVD. He gets to that number by incorporating all the costs associated with creating the various editions and the DVD transfer (not sure if he is including the cost of production), etc. Those are fixed costs, whether you sell 1 DVD or 100 million. The variable costs aren't anywhere near $4-5. So it's only impossible if you don't expect to sell additional units at a lower price. The key is how many additional units on average would people buy if the price were lower? I would by probably 10x as many. My parents might buy 1 or 2 more a year. So it's hard to say.

They also could reduce their cost by not producing 3, 4,5 or more versions of the same film for DVD. Do they really need that many?

It was Napster and its heirs that forced the music industry to greatly reduce its prices for music. So in a way, even the honest customer profits from piracy.

Maybe where you are, but CD prices aren't significantly cheaper today than they were 10 years ago, at least in the parts of the US that I've lived in.

 

[blatantninja]

I think one of the main reasons that people 'steal' via P2P or other downloads is, besides the ease, you never have to look someone in the face. It's one thing to stick a cd under your shirt. Maybe you are scared of getting caught, maybe you don't want to look at the person who owns that store (assuming it's not some big box) that just lost something they had actually paid for.

still haven't quite been able to figure out why it is suddenly okay to steal when the product you're stealing is digital instead of physical.

It is not. And hardly anyone claims it is.

I think the other thing is that the industries claim ANYTHING that is downloaded without paying them is theft, when in many cases (probably not the majority) it's really fair use.

For instance: I download a lot of TV shows to watch on my Archos on the subway. I don't do this because I want to cut out commercials (though that is a nice benefit) or because I don't want to pay for TV (because I do), but because the media companies do everything they can to restrict how I use their media!

I have Dish network, so I can download directly to the Archos from the DVR, which is one of the main reasons that I bought the Archos when my Zen died. However, it doesn't download HD, and since the Dish DVR will only record locals in HD, I'm SOL if I want to watch anything on local channels. And my wife has a Zune, which it won't download to at all.

Additionally, it forces me to make a decision that I don't want to make when I record anything else: record it in SD and have it look like crap if I decide to watch it on my HDTV or record it in HD and not be able to transfer it to my Archos.

Sure I could record the HD programs to my PC via video capture, but that would be time consuming. It's just much easier to download it. I don't want to download, but they've left me no choice. I only download shows from stations I already pay Dish network for (or grab off my antenna for the locals), so I don't download HBO, Showtime, etc. That probably won't hold up in court, but I feel fully justified in downloading the shows I do since I'm already paying for it.

Games are often the same way. I don't do it that often, but I've been known to download cracked versions of games, AFTER buying them, simply so I don't have to have the disc in the drive or in the cases of those games that came with SecureROM or some of the other malicious DRM schemes, so I don't risk bricking my PC. I'm sure if the game companies caught me doing that they'd claim I was a pirate, but really, I just want to be able to use it the way I want.

Until the media companies understand, and accommodate, people like me, they aren't going to get any sympathy or support in their anti-piracy endevours.

 

[JemyM]

So we shouldn't be paying the developers for their years of hard work. Is that what you're saying?

If one wish to earn money one need to come up with good ideas on how to make profit. What's profitable is always fleeting. What can make huge money today might be gone tomorrow. Customers are not there as a charity for what's left of changed markets. What about all those companies that broke down when the IT-bubble burst? Should we pay them for their years of hard work? Or should we accept that their business came and went with the technology? The market have changed, and what used to be a more reliable source for profit now need a different approach. Coming up with new ideas in how to make a profitable business ideas is not up to the customers, but the companies. Business is never fair. Business is brutal, unfair and can kill you. And you cannot blame your customers for following their nature.

That pretty anarchistic don't you think? The LAW decides what's illegal, not people nor business owners.

It's not anarchistic, but a realization in why laws are made. In a parlament, the law is decided by the people through democracy. A government that cannot agree with it's people about what laws they should have will eventually loose their support. A such government is in the free world without power. This is an important thing to remember whenever one wishes to pass a new law or uphold obsolete ones. Most politicians are aware of this.

Pirates act on their nature and due to changed technology there's insufficient resources to uphold old laws in the new environment. Laws that goes against human nature have the habit to fail.

 

[Ionstormsucks]

I'm not a representative of the industry. However, I AM one who firmly believes that the word illegal is binary. Something is either legal or it is illegal. There are no shades of gray, no degrees of illegality.

There are always shades of gray.

So, there is nothing wrong with me going to the movies without paying? I'm also pretty certain I'll have a hard time explaining the ladies of the local Red Light District and their pimps that I can get a "ride" for free as long as I leave the "merchandise" undamaged.

You're constantly insisting that anyone here would claim that there is nothing wrong with copyright infringement. But at least I never claimed that it is not morally wrong to pirate stuff. To say that there is a difference between theft and online piracy does not automatically mean that the one is wrong and the other right. It just means there is a difference. You cannot compare the visit to a brothel or a cinema to online piracy because it is simply not the same.

Now we're back to the semantics part I mentioned. . . . THAT is when you break the deal if you haven't paid for the "privilege" to do so.

Forget for one moment the moral side of the whole story, because you're way too much concerned with that. This is not about breaking deals - the industry will break any deal anytime if it means more money. Because from a moral point of view you're right of course. There are people who pay for something and then there are people who get the same thing for free... no doubt this is kinda wrong. Every single one of these people who listens to a music track, watches a movie, or plays a game he or she pirated shows a behavior that is morally... well let's say it's at least questionable if not outright wrong. But from an economic perspective that is of absolutely no concern. Here the question is, does everyone who listens to a music track, watches a movie, or plays a game he or she pirated harm the industry? And here the answer is: no - even the content industry admits that.

And by "digital distribution" do you perchance mean "quicker and easier way to get that new album by whomever for free"? If so, I agree. Otherwise, no I don't believed they had innovation of the economy on their minds when Napster and the other P2P applications had their hey day. . . .

It does not matter a bit what they had in mind - what matters is what they did. Just as good intentions can have bad consequences, bad ones can have good consequences. To constantly say "These guys are bad and we should punish them" will not solve the problem of piracy, but new business models and/or a different copyright might. To find these we simply have to acknowledge that file sharing has opened up a new market of business oportunities - id doesn't matter who did it or with what intentions: it's simply there.

And did this trend start before or after piracy went bezerk? Without the widespread use - and apparently general public acceptance - of P2P networks, there would have been little to gain and much to lose with these, I admit, rather draconian DRM methods the industry is employing today. However, even though they may very well be going about this the wrong way, they have to do something.

It did start long before the internet, at a time when hand spreading was still the pirating method of choice. Nowadays copy protection systems have developed into a business market of its own. Developers of games do no longer create their own copy protections, they buy them from companies that practically do nothing else but developing bigger, better and harsher DRMS all the time. That companies should do something is perfectly fine, but very often extremly primitive DRMS would do the trick just as well. The only one who suffers under harsh copy protections systems is the honest guy who buys the game. The file sharer who downloads a pirated copy will have no problem with SecuROM, etc. because his copy comes more or less directly from the release scene where the copy protection system has been disabeled by a cracker.

I'm not particularly happy about some of the methods/systems they have tried, but when even intelligent people like yourself do not speak out against piracy, there are few other options than to try to stem the flow as much as possible. I can understand the reasoning even if I don't think it will do any good.

I have always said that I am against piracy and I always will be. Artists should be paid for their works so they are motivated to create new pieces of entertainment - whoever says otherwise is an idiot. But I also think that morally questionable behavior is not a privilege of the big industries that over decades conspired to fix cd prices (and were actually dragged to court because of that)... just to give you an example.
I also think that our traditional copyright law is no longer able to manage the current situation and therefore we need a different copyright that gives more rights to the customer. As a consequence we will also need new forms of compensation for the artists.

How? I mean, the reason most of these people pirate stuff in the first place is because they don't have to pay anything and the chances of getting caught if you're only downloading it for personal use are so infinitesimally small that they are virtually non-existent.

As I said before, it is not impossible to compete with free, as botteled water vividly proves. Everyone could simply drink water straight from the water tap (in most European countries that's no problem since the water is perfectly fine) and still botteled water sells. The same goes for coffee... everyone has coffee at home, still a lot of people go to a café and pay a higher price. So there has to be something that makes people buy all this stuff although they have it anyway. Now, you can say even the water at home is not free, but neither are warez. Even pirated copies cost something, but the transfer costs for bandwith are of course much lower than the price you'd have to pay if you bought the product in a store. The same goes for water - the water at home is simply much cheaper than bottled water. Offering additional value and convenience is certainly one way to get some pirates, but probably not all of them.
What I think of as a good solution are different compensation methods together with a more liberal copyright law. I mentioned that several times before - you could introduce a variable flatrate (could be collected by the isp) that everyone has to pay (that is a cucial point). The amount how much you pay depends on how much you download. The money is used to compensate artists and copyright holders. It's simply a very successful system that we're using every day in all kinds of areas. You cannot avoid that someone damages your car or that you damage someone elses car - it's something you do not have full control over. What you can do is insure your car. The same goes for piracy: you cannot avoid that people pirate stuff, but you can make sure that the artists are compensated for it. There are several organizations, studies, experts, you name it and all say that such a system can work - so far the industry did not listened to them.

P.S. Here in Denmark it has ALWAYS been illegal to make a copy for your brother. Until InfoSoc you could make a copy for yourself legally but never for friends or family.

Not in Germany where I live. Until 2003 you could make up to 7 private copies and give them to friends and family. It wasn't really a right that you had, it was more a limit of the copyright. The intention was that even people who might not be able to afford a certain product should not be excluded from cultural life. So basically if a teenager cannot afford a music album, game, movie, whatever he could still get it from his friends so hoe would not become some kind of outsider. This limit of copyright exists until today, but unfortunately with one important change - you're not allowed to copy a product that is protected by a copy protection system or get rid of the copy protection to copy it. And that essentially means that at least movies and games cannot be copied anymore for private use.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Not in Germany where I live.

That's right.

But only for "private use".

Nothing else !

Nowadays, you can make a copy for "backup purposes", too, as far as I've understood it.


The open libraries and the archives, which belong to the towns, have the problem of having to break a copy protection if they want to make archive copies of a software.

A thing that they aren't allowed to, in principle.


I don't know how it is in the U.S. - are libraries and archives allowed to break copy protections if they want to archive copy-protected material ?

Not only softwaere, but also copy protected music CDs ?

 

[blatantninja]

I don't believe that libraries get any type of exemption.

 

[Pladio]

I have to say something. I might be an exception, but it's only thanks to a pirated version of AoE that I bought AoE II and its expansion. It's only thanks to a pirated version of Gothic that I bought it, Gothic II and Gothic III. It's only thanks to a pirated version of Shogun : TW that I bought Medieval TW and its expansion and Rome TW. Same with Masters of Orion II and III

The games I had pirated versions from were only to try the game out. If I liked them enough I'd buy them. I'm not the one pirating by the way, I know a lot of people who do. I even knew someone who could get everything at really high speeds. Within a week of it coming out.

I used to play demos instead, and if I liked the demo I'd buy the game (if my father let me, that is). Gamesdomain.co.uk, and many, many other demo websites left the scene and the other ones I had found weren't ever as good. So I had to find another way of trying out games. Buying mags with CDs with demos on them is not for me, because then I'd be buying to play just part of the game and since I might not like any of them it would really be a waste. So by asking friends to either try out their games or for them to help me get my hands on a game, I managed to keep doing what I used to do.

I have over 80 or 90 games, maybe a hundred even, which I've bought from 95 till Gothic III and Stalker last year I think. I can tell you that I wouldn't have bought half of them without having the chance of trying them out. I actually got to chapter 4 in Gothic before I decided I had to buy it. I even ordered it from Amazon and had to convince my father they weren't going to steal his credit card details.

I've played DII too and I didn't care much about their silly protection. I liked the game, so I bought it and its expansion. I also bought Dungeon Siege and its expansion since it was supposes to be an action rpg a la DII. I didn't buy DII from playing multiplayer. I actually started playing it in an internet cafe once, but single player ! I really liked it, so I bought it.

I don't think stealing is good. I do think that people would steal cars if it were as easy as stealing a song though. Just click the button and you have the new Lamborghini in front, or maybe you prefer a Porsche...
I believe pirating is bad, but as long as it's easy people will keep doing it. There are probably hundreds of millions of people who have at least pirated one song, or game or movie in their life and if not they've probably gone to Asia or something to buy bootlegged versions of them. Since the chance of being caught is so minuscule compared to other stuff, people just don't care.

My two cents and pennies...

 

[Benedict]

That's a completely horrible idea and would never work anyways. There are far too many people who enjoy single player games for developers to just stop making them. The devs would lose a lot more money by not making the games at all.

I think it's odd that there haven't been more crossover games - i.e. if you've got a fantastic MMO IP with good graphics, a smooth game engine, endless art resources, finely honed balance, a detailed world and backstory etc surely it would be pretty simple to hire a few writers and create standalone single player version using all of that? I'd like to play a single player game set in the WOW universe but I'm not bothered about playing online, and I can't be alone.

Use the unpiratable community based aspects to cover the bulk of the development costs then spin off single player games for low enough development costs that piracy's not an issue.

 

[Benedict]

Anyway, I think in the UK the problem has been solved. We've got a powerful, hard hitting advert with an idiot in a purpley suit leading a group of office workers in a song about how one of their colleagues that downloads everything for free is a "Knock off Nigel".

Kapow! Take that international game pirates!

 

[Benedict]

Does anyone remember those copy protection wheels they had on the old SSI Gold Box games? Or was that the bards tale games . . .

Anyway, makes me laugh when people complain about draconian copy protection on games these days, nothing modern even comes close to the soul destroying irritation of those things, they were almost as intrusive as having the CEO of the games company come round to take a DNA swab to make sure I'm allowed to play it.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Does anyone remember those copy protection wheels they had on the old SSI Gold Box games? Or was that the bards tale games . . .

Ankh, the new adventure, has one.

Though I haven't come to the place where I need it, yet.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

I have to say something. I might be an exception, but it's only thanks to a pirated version of AoE that I bought AoE II and its expansion. It's only thanks to a pirated version of Gothic that I bought it, Gothic II and Gothic III. It's only thanks to a pirated version of Shogun : TW that I bought Medieval TW and its expansion and Rome TW. Same with Masters of Orion II and III

There were no Demos ?

 

[Pladio]

Shogun only had battle demos and not the real thng(strategic map). AoE did, but I got the copy of the game for a friend before I knew the game even existed. Gothic had the first chapter and I played through it. I wasn't sure if I really like it then and how much the game would offer after it, so I managed to get the game. I didn't know about the Masters of Orion series either, like for AoE. I played the dmo for AoE III and really didn't like it, so I didn't bother.

For GIII and Stalker I actually bought a new graphics card and more RAM just to be able to play those games too. Since then I haven't been able to play any games really, so I've been playing Wesnoth and haven't bought or played any new games.

I don't have the time anymore.

My point though is that it's only thanks to some games I got from friends (pirated) that I actually bought them and/or their sequels.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

My point though is that it's only thanks to some games I got from friends (pirated) that I actually bought them and/or their sequels.

This is indeed the core of the Shareware concept. Try before you buy.

Although Shareware games have rather died out or are not that big as in the 90s anymore.