CD Projekt - Going Medieval On Pirates

[blatantninja]

I personally don't care one way or the other. However, I generally consider this whole piracy thing blown completely out of proportions. It's basically just shoplifting. Every local super market has significant losses due to shoplifting, but I have yet to hear anyone talking about a crusade against shoplifters. Pirates should just be renamed "internet shoplifters" as far as I'm concerned, because right now the term is getting out of hand - you'd think they were responsible for all the evil in the world.

As for the penalty of internet shoplifting? The same as all other shoplifting, depending on the country you live in: A small fine and a warning never to do it again, or getting your hand cut off.

I don't think that is a valid comparison. Piracy has gone through the roof since the advent of the internet. Not that it didn't exist before, but it was much harder to facilitate over large numbers of people. And sadly, I do know several people that basically have no paid for a game in years.

If 1/3 of the people that walked into your grocery store suddenly stopped buying stuff and just started shoplifting, the comparrison might have some legs.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

There is no such thing as "illegal download", legality of obtaining information is established by receiving information from a public domain - which what Internet IS. You can't illegally hear a song on a radio, you cant illegally see a move on a TV, and you cant illegally receive information from the Internet.

I had once dreamed about the RIAA forcing a sharing network to be closed down, but me, on the other hand, forcing the RIAA to keep it opn to dustribute MY own public domain songs with this, because he RIAA had then effectively closed down a distribution system for THEIR "costomers" (the music indistry), to which I would NOT belong to, then.

And, my dream went on, they couldn't force me to withdraw my OWN songs from that sharing network.


I was fantasizing about this, because th RIAA and others usually clos down networks or sue filesharers on behalf OF THE INDUSTRY.

They don't bother even the slightest bit about on how PERSONAL, DIY, SELF-COMPOSED music would be distributed. They just wouldn't care. And the conspiracy theorist in me would even say that they'd want to effectively interrupt or even close personal, DIY music (self-composed) distributors, because they would believe that people SHOULD BUY music, not make it themselves.

Because, at its essence, every music that is NOT bought is = lost sales. And people who make their music THEMSELVES are therefore the worst, because they just diconnect themselves from the music indistry COMPLETELY.

And how should a person who makes his or her muic completely on his or her own distribute his or her music if every private-based distribution systems are shut down ? This is effectively crippling the ways of becoming internationally known, and it affects only "the small ones", those, who hve no lobby.

This is my rather philosophical approach/view on it.

 

[Benedict]

CDP are going after the wrong people - They'll be fining (if indeed they do fine anyone) those who perhaps made a mistake or pirated for the first time. Those who do it on a larger basis are sat behind their PCs right now with a trollface grin.

Most serious pirates probably start small, put them off early on before it becomes second nature.

 

[Benedict]

skavenhorde: did you know that drm has been in games long before the internet became a tool for piracy and has been there since nearly the beginning of PC gaming. If piracy was entirely to blame for drm then why did it exist before piracy was a known problem for PC gaming.

There was piracy, it just involved copying floppy disks . . .

 

[KasperFauerby]

People wouldn't need to make excuses, if there was a legitimate way to test the game.
That's what you don't want, apparently - and so we don't agree about the system.

Interesting! I wasn't aware that I ever said anything about not wanting games to have good demos.

And if the demo suck, and is not able to convince the gamers that the game is any good, then no one is forcing anyone to buy anything. That's just too bad for the game company who will have lost a sale.

If that isn't providing people with legitimate ways of testing the products, then I don't know what it is...

 

[Maylander]

I don't think that is a valid comparison. Piracy has gone through the roof since the advent of the internet. Not that it didn't exist before, but it was much harder to facilitate over large numbers of people. And sadly, I do know several people that basically have no paid for a game in years.

If 1/3 of the people that walked into your grocery store suddenly stopped buying stuff and just started shoplifting, the comparrison might have some legs.

Through the roof? If anything, it's gone down. Back in the days of C64 and floppy disks, piracy was the only way anyone distributed games. To be honest, I still don't know where we got our games - everyone just copied everything from someone else, so where did the original copy come from? No idea, but I do know that for every original copy there must have been tens or hundreds of pirated ones.

Also, it's not at all comparable to "1/3 stopped buying" - we're dealing with a 3rd that would not be buying anyway. It's the same thing with shoplifting - most of them wouldn't actually buy the stuff they're stealing; they're grabbing it because it happens to be free and accessible. However, in the case of shoplifting it's more serious - the goods they steal actually disappear from the store, so the production costs are still present, but the sales income is not.

Piracy is still internet shoplifting from my point of view, though it's possibly only a mild form of shoplifting since the product is copied from the store instead of removed.

Bottom line: Stealing a game from a store is the same as stealing it online, but slightly more serious due to the costs of the box/CD.

 

[DArtagnan]

Interesting! I wasn't aware that I ever said anything about not wanting games to have good demos.

And if the demo suck, and is not able to convince the gamers that the game is any good, then no one is forcing anyone to buy anything. That's just too bad for the game company who will have lost a sale.

If that isn't providing people with legitimate ways of testing the products, then I don't know what it is…

First of all, FAR from all games have demos.

Second of all, MANY demos are based on selling the game - rather than representing the true experience.

But otherwise, yeah, demos COULD potentially work - and in some cases they do.

 

[blatantninja]

Through the roof? If anything, it's gone down. Back in the days of C64 and floppy disks, piracy was the only way anyone distributed games. To be honest, I still don't know where we got our games - everyone just copied everything from someone else, so where did the original copy come from? No idea, but I do know that for every original copy there must have been tens or hundreds of pirated ones.

The sheer number of pirates has exploded and unlike before, where youonly had access to what your friends had or maybe a BBS, now everyone has access to everything. Piracy is far more prevelent now than it was in the 80's (not to say it did not exist).

Also, it's not at all comparable to "1/3 stopped buying" - we're dealing with a 3rd that would not be buying anyway. It's the same thing with shoplifting - most of them wouldn't actually buy the stuff they're stealing; they're grabbing it because it happens to be free and accessible. However, in the case of shoplifting it's more serious - the goods they steal actually disappear from the store, so the production costs are still present, but the sales income is not.

Piracy is still internet shoplifting from my point of view, though it's possibly only a mild form of shoplifting since the product is copied from the store instead of removed.

You bascially just said that it is nothing like actual shop lifting. It's not a valid comparison.

 

[Maylander]

The sheer number of pirates has exploded and unlike before, where youonly had access to what your friends had or maybe a BBS, now everyone has access to everything. Piracy is far more prevelent now than it was in the 80's (not to say it did not exist).

I honestly think you're way off here - we're talking about a time where an original copy was rare. Hardly anyone even had a single original game. How is the situation worse today? Sure, pirates have access to more today than they did back then, but there are so few pirates these days - *everyone* was a pirate back then, it just wasn't called piracy and the people doing it were called "geeks" instead pirates.

You bascially just said that it is nothing like actual shop lifting. It's not a valid comparison.

Sure it is, but shoplifting is worse, which means my original point still stands: This is all blown completely out of proportions.

 

[zakhal]

Through the roof? If anything, it's gone down. Back in the days of C64 and floppy disks, piracy was the only way anyone distributed games. To be honest, I still don't know where we got our games - everyone just copied everything from someone else, so where did the original copy come from? No idea, but I do know that for every original copy there must have been tens or hundreds of pirated ones.

Bottom line: Stealing a game from a store is the same as stealing it online, but slightly more serious due to the costs of the box/CD.

Didnt they kill amiga with all that piracy?

I did buy C64 games. Main reason was that I wanted certain games that were not available othervice. Friends had cassettes full of copied games but finding or getting certain one especially new one was very hard if not impossible.

Nowadays pirates dont have that problem anymore. All they need to know is one internet address and they can pirate any game they want new or old.

 

[Maylander]

Didnt they kill amiga with all that piracy?

I did buy C64 games. Main reason was that I wanted certain games that were not available othervice. Friends had cassettes full of copied games but finding or getting certain one especially new one was very hard if not impossible.

Wouldn't surprise me at all if it did. I'm amazed the amount of piracy back then didn't kill all the companies developing games. The only possible reason is that the costs of developing a game were very, very low.

I didn't buy any C64 games, but I think I bought a couple of floppy games for my first Pentium machine. I also remember that my father bought Championship Manager (2 I think). Considering the massive collection of games I had though, those numbers are pretty horrible.

 

[DArtagnan]

No, they didn't kill Amiga with piracy - though it certainly didn't help the platform.

Commodore killed the Amiga themselves, by not evolving the platform to match the pace of the PC evolution.

PC soundcards and games like Wolfenstein and Doom killed the Amiga platform, because the x86 processors handled vector calculations much more efficiently than the Amiga ever could. It didn't help that PCs had a harddisk per default, and were ridiculously expensive to buy "on the side" for the Amiga.

The Amiga 1200/4000 came out way too late, and they weren't powerful enough for the price they were asking.

PCs were already "out there" as business machines and were relatively common in every household - and the Amiga wasn't perceived as a serious machine to compete with that.

The first Amiga did very well, and together with the C64 - dominated much of the home computer "gaming market".

Piracy was just as easy on the PC, if not easier - because you could install games on the harddisk - which meant they couldn't "protect" games through the disk based medium, like they did on the Amiga.

 

[blatantninja]

I honestly think you're way off here - we're talking about a time where an original copy was rare. Hardly anyone even had a single original game. How is the situation worse today? Sure, pirates have access to more today than they did back then, but there are so few pirates these days - *everyone* was a pirate back then, it just wasn't called piracy and the people doing it were called "geeks" instead pirates.

So few pirates?!? Seriously? The sheer number of computer users have gone up exponentially in the past three decades.

Here is an example of the numbers:

According to TorrentFreak, the clear winner for 2009 was Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 with 4.1 million pirated downloads in November and December 2009 – a shocking number when compared to the estimated PC sales of 300,000 in November, of which approximately 53,000 were for the UK in that same month.

Read more: http://www.techradar.com/news/gaming/the-truth-about-pc-game-piracy-688864#ixzz1677o1Dln

That's one game, in two months. Do you honestly believe that in two months, Ultima IV or Bard's Tale was manually copied 4.1MM times?

And people we're called pirates back then too. I remember seeing anti-piracy warnings on games and they referred to it as piracy.

Sure it is, but shoplifting is worse, which means my original point still stands: This is all blown completely out of proportions.

And you act like shoplifting is no big deal either. The fact remains that people are stealing and think it is ok for a number of reasons, when in fact they are just thieves while no morals or ethics.

 

[Maylander]

That's one game, in two months. Do you honestly believe that in two months, Ultima IV or Bard's Tale was manually copied 4.1MM times?

And people we're called pirates back then too. I remember seeing anti-piracy warnings on games and they referred to it as piracy.

Not at all, but I'm thinking percentages. I'd say that back in the days most games were almost exclusively pirated. The same thing goes for who were pirates - 100% of the user base were pirates in some form, because everyone had copied a program or game from someone else. Do you honestly believe that 100% of the current user base is a pirate?

Ever met a C64 user that didn't pirate anything? I haven't, yet I've met many who are not PC pirates.

And you act like shoplifting is no big deal either. The fact remains that people are stealing and think it is ok for a number of reasons, when in fact they are just thieves while no morals or ethics.

Please read what I wrote. I said no such thing. I'm against piracy. However, I'm no more against it than I am against shoplifting (which I'm also against, obviously), and that is my whole point: I see no reason to go ALL RELIGIOUS MENTAL CRAZY BAAHHH WARRR!!! in this case but treat the other as if it's insignificant. The amount of fuss, media coverage and general bitching and whining over the years is way beyond disasters killing millions, people losing their homes and women getting raped. The music/movie/gaming companies want to involve every major politician in the world RIGHT NAUU!! because this issue is SO INCREDIBLE IMPORTANT COMPARED TO EVERY OTHER PROBLEM THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN that we need to go on a bloody crusade to kill it off! YES!

It's nothing short of ridiculous. Calm down. Shoplifting is usually penalized with a small fine and a warning - that should be the case for piracy too. Dragging people to court, claiming they've "stolen values for millions" because they happen to seed a couple of songs on the internet? It's absolutely mad.

The worst case is the poor woman who actually lost in court and got sentenced to pay the RIAA $1.5 million because she had downloaded 24 songs and shared them (which happens by default when using torrents). You could rob, rape and kill someone and get away with a smaller penalty than that.

People are way too emotional about this whole thing.

 

[Krzychu]

Sounds harsh, but that's only because it's not common, and hey, piracy is stealing, isn't it? And this solution actually targets pirates instead of the freaking customers.

 

[kuki]

Bah,

so many talk over nothing. Someone will buy, someone will pirate.

The ratio will ONLY be determined by how GOOD the game is. If game proves to be good and not the "dumbed down" shit, people will support it. If not ... /shrug

Games that I liked and loved I bought and always in CE if available. I am now looking into my praised set of boxes on my shelf like: Bg1 , BG2 CE, Icewind dale I and Icewind dale II CE, PT, FO1, FO2, Arena, Daggerfall, Morrowind CE, NWN 1 CE, NWN2 CE Evil and Good, Gorthic 1-3, WIthcher 1 CE, Dragon Age CE, Mass Effect 1 and 2 CE (preordered ME2 CE, because of ME1 but if i knew how it would turn out ....) and I am happy that i have them. Notice there is no Oblivion and FO3 as I consider it crap.

Today state of games and so called "AAA" titles is such a pile of shit that I will not preorder any game in the near future for sure except being it BG3 ....

I can say right now that the CE edition of Witcher 2 looks amazing and I would like to have it in my collection, but it was the same with FO:NV which I preordered 6 months before release at gamestop, but when I saw how game look likes in movies before release I decided not to buy it. I download for:nv, try it for 30 min and uninstalled it. I will for sure download witcher 2 and check how it is. If it is any good I will be happy to give my money for CE.

And at the end, my point is that I would be happy to give my money for a good game, it is just that there are not many left out there and the future looks grim ....

best

 

[Benedict]

I honestly think you're way off here - we're talking about a time where an original copy was rare. Hardly anyone even had a single original game. How is the situation worse today? .

I'd like to join in the general tone of the thread and make a tenuous analogy here, although I'm not sure how to work in wasps or sandwiches.

It's kind of like littering when there's no bins. When there's ample opportunity to do the right thing, not doing it is the act of a total arse. When it's enormously awkward to do the right thing, like it was back then before games started to become mainstream, I have more sympathy.

Possibly there might be sandwiches and or wasps in the bin. I'm not sure whether anyone is too concerned if those sandwiches are inadequately protected from wasps though. Indeed perhaps the sandwiches are in the bin because the wasp protection processes failed, in which case I hope the pirates responsible feel appropriately chastened having seen the true harm their errant ways have wrought.

 

[DArtagnan]

Doing the right thing is an interesting concept, that will vary greatly depending on point of view.

Feeding the greedy fat men smoking cigars (whilst leaving scraps for the hardworking developers), somehow doesn't strike me as such a clear-cut right thing.

 

[blatantninja]

Not at all, but I'm thinking percentages. I'd say that back in the days most games were almost exclusively pirated.

Well you'd be wrong. The percentage of paid vs pirate has increased exponentially in the past 3 decades. In some countries, like Taiwan, piracy makes up close to 100% of the installs!

The same thing goes for who were pirates - 100% of the user base were pirates in some form, because everyone had copied a program or game from someone else. Do you honestly believe that 100% of the current user base is a pirate?

No, and 100% was not then either. You are basing your belief on the small subset of your own friends rather than a sufficiently broader dataset.

Ever met a C64 user that didn't pirate anything? I haven't, yet I've met many who are not PC pirates.

Again, you miss the point. Even if everyone pirated some then, the total number of pirated copies of a game as a percentage of installs has increased significantly. It's about the capture rate of installs, not about individual users.

Please read what I wrote. I said no such thing. I'm against piracy. However, I'm no more against it than I am against shoplifting (which I'm also against, obviously), and that is my whole point: I see no reason to go ALL RELIGIOUS MENTAL CRAZY BAAHHH WARRR!!! in this case but treat the other as if it's insignificant. The amount of fuss, media coverage and general bitching and whining over the years is way beyond disasters killing millions, people losing their homes and women getting raped. The music/movie/gaming companies want to involve every major politician in the world RIGHT NAUU!! because this issue is SO INCREDIBLE IMPORTANT COMPARED TO EVERY OTHER PROBLEM THE WORLD HAS EVER SEEN that we need to go on a bloody crusade to kill it off! YES!

It's nothing short of ridiculous. Calm down. Shoplifting is usually penalized with a small fine and a warning - that should be the case for piracy too. Dragging people to court, claiming they've "stolen values for millions" because they happen to seed a couple of songs on the internet? It's absolutely mad.

People who shoplift once get small fines. People who shoplift regularly go to jail and get nailed with large fines (at least in the US).

The worst case is the poor woman who actually lost in court and got sentenced to pay the RIAA $1.5 million because she had downloaded 24 songs and shared them (which happens by default when using torrents). You could rob, rape and kill someone and get away with a smaller penalty than that.

You're referring to the Jamie Thomas case, and even if it is a different one, you've over simplified. Yes, they got her on 24 songs, but she had shared a hell of a lot more than that. They only sued her on those 24 songs because they had the strongest case. And you can set a torrent client to not upload just about anything fairly easily.

Regardless, you are confusing civil and criminal court. Crivil courts don't hand out jail sentences, which is why in yet another stawman argument, your rob, rape and kill argument is bunk.

 

[Alrik Fassbauer]

Pirates pirate because they want to play.
Cloth maps, coins and statuettes cannot be easily pirated (yet).
Which means that CEs are ALWAYS bought.
Not pirated.