The Witcher 2 - Roundup #3

Well, I am really curious to know why you think these monks and my friend who choose to go work as a volunteer is greedy….. since you reply yes to the question without any hesitation, do you perhaps have a motivation for saying yes? in what aspect are they greedy? because they still eat and don't starve to death giving food to others? Well, I could actually find someone doing that too if you really wanted. In order to break the statement "All human are greedy" I just need to prove that there is one single person who is not and it falls.

There is no way to prove it. Greed is not exclusive to the material. Note that I'm not saying we're "equally" greedy - as that's impossible to measure.

All I can say is that I've met thousands of people in my life - and I know at least a few hundred on a personal level. Some people are greedy for attention, some people are greedy for admiration, some people are greedy for pity, and so on. It's been my experience that all these things depend on a subjective idea of what being "good" or "beneficial" really means - and there will always be something neglected that will have to be downplayed. It could be personal relationships or family that doesn't get enough attention. It could even be personal neglect - which will result in a short lifespan and as such, not the best way to make a lasting difference.

While motivations will invariably differ - we all react to basic needs or desires. Whether our greed results in harm or benefit - is pretty incidental.
 
The war against shoplifting has been lost long ago anyway.
What? No it hasn't…

I can see it already: "Pirate Promo week!" First one to successfully illegally distribute our game, gets our next two games for free! Send cracked exe and proof of 1000 illegal downloads to our cardboard box under Brooklyn Bridge by the end of the month!
Or there can be an alternative method of distribution that's not idiotic.
Your straw men here aren't very good.

You probably know that the music industry reacted with similar hysteria when radios started becoming popular. (It's probably an overused example but very characteristic nonetheless) They eventually accepted that they wouldn't go away and that people will always listen to their music for free with them, and they figured out a very efficient way to take advantage of them.
 
Joined
Sep 18, 2009
Messages
693
What? No it hasn't…
Not really my point, but it is quite rampant:
http://www.evancarmichael.com/Retail/3869/Retail-Loss-Growing-Problem.html
The point however was - it is not rampant because it can be and is controlled by security measures and penalties are envoked, keeping most people from doing it. My "strawman" was meant to "highlight" how problematic it is to expect an industry to just give up on measures to control its revenue stream.

Or there can be an alternative method of distribution that's not idiotic.
Your straw men here aren't very good.

You probably know that the music industry reacted with similar hysteria when radios started becoming popular. (It's probably an overused example but very characteristic nonetheless) They eventually accepted that they wouldn't go away and that people will always listen to their music for free with them, and they figured out a very efficient way to take advantage of them.

Radio worked, because instead of the consumer, the radio stations payed for the music (licensing it), AND that radio was "inconvenient" enough to still leave buying music attractive. Radios stations are easy enough to control, and "pirate radios" were always a rather rare thing.

This is simply not the case for digital downloads. The only "pirate embracing" method I could imagine working is having a worldwide taxation of internet use and hardware, that is used to set up a fund that then finances the producers of content. That is both unrealistic (especially the "worldwide" part), and would have unfavorable consequences for the market as a whole, I am quite convinced, as it would basically put buereacrats in charge of what kind of content is funded.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
3,508
The sooner the industry accepts it the sooner they can embrace it and try to find a way to benefit from it
Yay, more console development and action games!

It's not like we want PC, non-mainstream games anyway.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
1,877
There has to be an efficient alternative. I remember reading some articles on the subject that seemed convincing (but 'unappealing' because they gave part of the big guy's profit to the little guy ;)). But that's for the industry to figure out…

If there is indeed no alternative then this is the best it's going to be. I'm with DArtagnan here… I also believe it's human nature to want more for less, it just makes sense, so I am honestly convinced that piracy is not going to go away.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Sep 18, 2009
Messages
693
There has to be an efficient alternative. I remember reading some articles on the subject that seemed convincing (but 'unappealing' because they gave part of the big guy's profit to the little guy ;)). But that's for the industry to figure out…
Sometimes all the wishing in the world does not create a reality...
I don't think embracing piracy is the way. What I see coming is that content will move serverside, and permanent internet connections will become standard even for single player games. While that too is DRM and will inconvenience some, it also opens new design opportunities, so I actually have some hopes for this.

If there is indeed no alternative then this is the best it's going to be. I'm with DArtagnan here… I also believe it's human nature to want more for less, it just makes sense, so I am honestly convinced that piracy is not going to go away.

Oh, I am convinced of that as well. But I post to make clear I am not supporting piracy. I was a pirate as a teenager. But I eventually realized that I can't expect to have great games made, when I am not willing to pay for that. So I post sometimes on this issue - to maybe, maybe, do my little part in creating an atmosphere of "piracy is not OK", at least on this here PC CRPG enthusiast site.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
3,508
Oh, I am convinced of that as well. But I post to make clear I am not supporting piracy. I was a pirate as a teenager. But I eventually realized that I can't expect to have great games made, when I am not willing to pay for that. So I post sometimes on this issue - to maybe, maybe, do my little part in creating an atmosphere of "piracy is not OK", at least on this here PC CRPG enthusiast site.

You do appreciate, I hope, that talking about piracy as we might perceive it - is not the same as supporting it?
 
Sometimes all the wishing in the world does not create a reality…
I don't think it's so unreasonable.

Partly because of this:
Radio worked, because instead of the consumer, the radio stations payed for the music (licensing it), AND that radio was "inconvenient" enough to still leave buying music attractive. Radios stations are easy enough to control, and "pirate radios" were always a rather rare thing.
What you say here is that they figured out an efficient and profitable way to use the radio.
It's not different at all to what I'm saying.
 
Joined
Sep 18, 2009
Messages
693
Quite a leap to link piracy and great games.

The fact is that the developpers go where the buck is and will always do, piracy or not.
I wish there were no piracy to exhibit explicitly this situaiton as piracy is just a diversion when it comes to games.

As to having 'great games', they will always be 'great games' no matter their quality because it is a necessity of perception. Something has to be great somehow, no matter the quality.

It is made easier in the video game industry as the past can get outdated on mechanical progress like graphics, game mechanics and all. As a tomorrow game will look better than a today game, easy path to throw in the great qualifier.

This is different for other sectors like musics or painting as they cant rely on a fast evolving technology as much as the video game industry to distort direct comparison to past production.

But of course, it does not prevent from having great music pieces and great painting, no matter their quality as something has to be great somehow.

Continuing to sell the past on the ground that a sector production has peaked in its quality and that any production coming forward is unlikely to surpass prior production is not that good for the growth paradigm. And things need to grow or they die, it is well known.

Great games incoming no matter their quality and no matter their genre.
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2011
Messages
6,265
There has to be an efficient alternative. I remember reading some articles on the subject that seemed convincing (but 'unappealing' because they gave part of the big guy's profit to the little guy ;)). But that's for the industry to figure out…

Free to play, server hosted, microtransactions based model seems to be winning out at the moment. But it's not been hugely popular for single player games. (largely) Multilayer ones have been more successful, though that again limits the type of game quite heavily.

Social gaming is seen as the single player take on the same solution - create a reason for player to want to connect to other players/the server and you can take better advantage of the microtransactions model. I know Atari stated they'd focus on online-enabled games a while back, I think EA and Activision have made similar statements in the past as well.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
1,877
Check out http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html for the most in depth look at pc piracy I know of. It change my opinion on the use and effectiveness of drm. Also it explain the negative impact piracy is having on the pc gaming industry.
 
Joined
May 15, 2011
Messages
108

I'm currently reading through it.

I especially like this part (bold printing by me) :

Mike Russell, QA Manager of Ritual Entertainment, makers of the SiN Episodes games, discusses the impact of the scale of piracy on tech support in this article:
Some recent calculations revealed that, last week, gamers with pirated copies of Emergence requesting support outnumbered gamers with legitimate copies of Emergence requesting support by a ratio of nearly five to one. This, understandably, is a source of great frustration for Russell, who is essentially performing two jobs at Ritual and who only has a finite amount of time to spend on each. Responses he has received when attempting to troubleshoot problems have laid painfully bare which users are playing the game illegally. "What's Steam?" one asked. "I don't have one," replied another when asked for his Steam ID. "Oh, my copy didn't come with an installer," replied yet another user, "it's in a folder on a DVD. I just drag it to my machine and then run the game." For an independently funded developer such as Ritual, these time sinks and lost sales have a clear and measurable impact on the company's income and, thus, its long term self-sufficiency.

Bethesda Softworks, makers of The Elder Scrolls series and most recently Fallout 3 had this to say on the issue of the scale and costs of piracy-related tech support:
The amount of times we see stuff coming through where it’s like, the resolution to the problem was [the] guy had a pirated copy of the game… The amount of money we spend supporting people who didn’t pay us for the game in the first place…it’s f–ing ludicrous. We talk to other developers, guys who are [like] ‘Yeah, it’s a third, it’s 50% of our [customer] support.’

Similarly the developers of a popular free mod called Portal: Prelude also speak out about the level of piracy of the game Portal which they've witnessed:
Seriously guys, stop sending us emails because you can't install the game, because you can't launch the game, or because you have weird errors everywhere. We're not going to help you make the mod work on pirated versions of Portal or without Steam. This mod needs an original and legit Portal because it also uses some of the content of Half-Life 2 that extends Portal. Of course, this content doesn't seem to be included in the pirated version of Portal.

In fact piracy of Portal is an interesting case to examine. A quick search on Mininova currently reveals around 30 active torrents for The Orange Box, a game package released in November 2007 of which Portal was a part. For those who don't know, The Orange Box is famous for being one of the best gaming deals of 2007/2008 - five major games in one package (Half Life 2, HL2: Episode 1, HL2: Episode 2, Team Fortress 2, Portal) all for the price of a standard game, distributed via Steam with no intrusive DRM, and receiving nothing but praise from reviewers and gamers alike. Yet here are people who not only pirated this game, but are also requesting support for it.


Update: The game Batman: Arkham Asylum incorporated a deliberate glitch which prevented users from successfully using Batman's glide functionality, but this only occurred on pirated copies of the game as reported here. Many people made forum posts requesting support for this "bug", only to discover that they had inadvertantly exposed themselves as pirates. Similarly, the game Aliens vs. Predator had several issues unique to the pirated version, and once again forum posts such as this one revealed that pirates are not above requesting support for their illegitimate games. It also goes to demonstrate how pirated copies can damage the reputation of developers, because glitches and bugs in pirated versions are often being blamed on the game itself rather than the piracy groups which made these illegal cracked copies.


I've saved an excellent example for last. As an indication that not only is the scale of piracy generally high across all types of games, but more importantly, that it seems to have little to do with DRM, big greedy game companies, or the high price of games, let's take a look at a game called World of Goo, recently released by a small independent developer called 2D Boy consisting of a team of 3 people. It's available as a digital download, selling for less than $20 on Steam, it has no intrusive DRM, and it's received nothing but praise, reflected in a Metacritic Score of 90%/95%. This should be precisely the recipe for preventing piracy according to some, but unfortunately the truth is less convenient: the developer of the game has stated that World of Goo has an approximate piracy rate of 90%. Regardless of the precise level of piracy, the key point to consider is that World of Goo addresses every single item on the checklist of excuses which people usually present for pirating games - yet it is still being pirated quite heavily.


Update: Just to show that World of Goo wasn't an isolated case, there is yet another example of the irrelevance of DRM, big greedy companies and high prices to piracy. The independent game Machinarium, released by a small Czech developer and priced at $20 with no DRM also has the dubious honor of a 90% piracy rate.

And, also from there :

Cevat Yerli of Crytek, the makers of Far Cry, Crysis and Crysis Warhead has publicly stated:
We are suffering currently from the huge piracy that is encompassing Crysis. We seem to lead the charts in piracy by a large margin, a chart leading that is not desirable. I believe that’s the core problem of PC Gaming, piracy, to the degree [that PC gamers who] pirate games inherently destroy the platform. Similar games on consoles sell factors of 4-5 more. It was a big lesson for us and I believe we won’t have PC exclusives as we did with Crysis in future.

Of greater concern is the fact that some games are now being deliberately delayed for the PC, due to explicit concerns that piracy of the PC version will undermine potential sales of the console version. As an example, Tom Clancy's EndWar was deliberately delayed for PC, the creative director Michael Plater saying quite simply that:
To be honest, if PC wasn't pirated to hell and back, there'd probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two. The level of piracy that you get with the PC just cannibalizes the others, because people just steal that version, piracy's basically killing PC.

Update: As yet another example of removing DRM not leading to any reduction in piracy, the game Demigod has been pirated so heavily in its initial release period that it has caused the game's servers to effectively go down. Out of the 120,000 connections made to the game's servers, over 100,000 were by confirmed pirates, leaving only around 18,000 legitimate purchasers.

For the moment, to counter the Spore example, bear in mind that the piracy figures we examined earlier show that the key determinant in how much a game gets pirated is how popular the game is, not whether it has DRM.

DRM is Malware

However there's a world of difference between not liking something that's an inconvenience but a practical necessity, and hysterically hating it based on hearsay and misinformation. Many users have problems with their graphics drivers for example, spending hours reinstalling, configuring and troubleshooting them in an effort to play their games with stability and decent performance - but that doesn't mean everyone should start a hate campaign filled with unsubstantiated falsehoods against ATI or Nvidia.

[...]

So if the same standard of evidence and logic that StarForce and SecuROM have received is applied to Alcohol and Daemon Tools, we see that these tools are indeed rootkits, and hence supposedly lay a system open to malware attacks. Furthermore, if users are genuinely concerned about introducing malware into their system which can compromise security and stability, then you'd think they'd avoid downloading pirated material. It's well known that one of the most common ways in which people pick up malware is through file sharing, because torrents in particular are saturated with fake files deliberately designed to infect a system with trojans, viruses, spyware and yes, even genuine rootkits. Not surprisingly however, no campaign to boycott torrents, or Alcohol, or Daemon Tools will ever gain any momentum, despite the potentially greater threat they represent to the security of users than SecuROM or StarForce ever will.

The article says there's pirating even on the Mac platform !
 
Last edited:
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
And last : This page : "PC Gaming Is Dead" + "The Culture Of Pirating" +
"The Business Of Pirating" http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_10.html

However while virtually no-one likes the protection companies, the other party which is making a massive profit on the basis of pirate activity is sadly getting only admiration and respect from most gamers.

It also reveals the fact that there are millions, maybe billions of dollars up for grabs in the lucrative world of piracy, so for obvious reasons piracy sites love to put on the front that piracy is all about freedom and altruism, that DRM and big companies are evil for opposing piracy, and that there are endless flimsy studies which purportedly show that piracy is actually beneficial, despite actual evidence and logic to the contrary. Plausible misinformation is the key to their survival, so they've become extremely adept at it. It's a very successful business model and there are millions of eager users who are more than happy to swallow any excuses given to them as long as it gives them access to lots of free stuff.
It appears that the idealistic concept that P2P is supposedly all about sharing without profit is not one shared by those who actually profit from it: piracy sites.
 
Last edited:
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
Sheesh, people.

What is it with the Watch these days? All this bickering...
Maybe it's just me, but what I'm seeing around the forums lately is not very pleasant, with some of you jumping at each other's throats every few posts.

Take a breath and relax.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
2,377
Location
Leuven, BE
Check out http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html for the most in depth look at pc piracy I know of. It change my opinion on the use and effectiveness of drm. Also it explain the negative impact piracy is having on the pc gaming industry.

Really the kind of articles that makes me wish piracy comes to a halt to expose the crookery written in such articles.

-Theft not sustainable as a scheme (while this guy is probably a North American who ancestors stole an entire continent)

-Developpers moving from PCs to consoles mostly on basis of piracy.

-PC players more numerous than console players and so much more.

If only piracy could be suspended for a few years...
 
Joined
Mar 29, 2011
Messages
6,265
Sheesh, people.

What is it with the Watch these days? All this bickering…
Maybe it's just me, but what I'm seeing around the forums lately is not very pleasant, with some of you jumping at each other's throats every few posts.

Take a breath and relax.

+1 -> I agree.
 
Joined
Oct 18, 2006
Messages
19,818
Location
Germany
First signs of RPGWatch transforming into a RPGCodex branch of business ?
 
Joined
Nov 5, 2006
Messages
21,908
Location
Old Europe
That tweakguides article is full of BS especially that part about the endless flimsy studies about the benefits of piracy. There has been only one study that doesn't say piracy is hurting and is the only study that isn't biased. That study was done by a branch of the U. S. government and concluded that piracy has very little effect and actually has caused an increase in other industries. Every other study and everything else about piracy that comes out is absolutely biased and can't be trusted because those companies that are putting it out will always make sure it looks good for them.

PS. I have been wondering awhile of the "World of Goo" having 90% piracy. You can't trust Metacritic since it has been proven to be untrustworthy. (crap games having high Metacritic ratings) How many actual copies were downloaded? Was there proper marketing for the game? Was the game actually good? They don't mention the actual sales for the game so what is it? If answers come for those questions then that would give better evidence for whether piracy had an effect or not rather then basing it on flimsy evidence like "90% piracy" and having a 90 on Metacritic.

PPS. The quotes for the tech support actually sound more like the people had bootleg copies of the games rather then downloaded them so the person may not be to blame but rather the bootlegger. Also Demigod was a crap game.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2006
Messages
1,596
Even if everything you say is true(which I don't think it is) it does not change the fact that publisher are worried about piracy and are changing there dev habits(going to consoles) because of it.

And I find it comical what you say about tec support, one game maker put in a bug that only showns up in early released pirate copys of the game and they got numerous calls for tec support about it.

I guess all the devs are lying, all the statistic are untrue. Did you even read the article? The poster above only shown a small portion of it, the whole thing is over 15 pages long in Word(thats a guess, its 10 pages online). Its cite dozens of examples,publishers,statistics,Games sales,etc Its amazing how indepth it is.

Bottom line piracy hurts computer gaming. There is far to much evidence to believe otherwise.
 
Joined
May 15, 2011
Messages
108
Back
Top Bottom