A PC Dev on Piracy and PC Gaming

I never said some games aren't worthy of a demo. I just said most high profile games have demos. I don't know where you got the 'not worthy of a demo' came from.

I can equally say, from my experience games that are bad don't sell well. There's more that goes into poor sales than lack of a demo. If a game is good, it will sell by word of mouth alone.

Way to completely miss the point. We're not debating business strategy here, we're discussing why your pseudo-justification for piracy doesn't hold water. As I said, not having a demo doesn't give you the right - morally, legally, or otherwise - to simply download the game for free. What you do have the right to do is to speak with your wallet - if you're not willing to throw money at a game you haven't tried, simply don't buy it. If enough people do this, the game will fail and maybe the devs will notice.

Your thinking implies that game developers are somehow obligated to let you try their game, no matter what, and if there isn't a demo then you get to pirate it for a test-drive. There really isn't any rational basis for this kind of thinking.

Re Dr Strangelove:
Whether or not "everyone pirates" is irrelevant, and I think it's a pretty safe (and well-known) assumption anyway. The question above is whether you can justify it; given the rationales I've seen, I'd have to stick with a solid "no" to that question.

Again, the main reason people have no problems doing it, with or without justification, is because most people don't really consider intellectual property to fall into a moral domain - it's not good or bad, it's just something people do to get cool stuff for free. I'm no longer amazed at the number of people I see in tech forums all over the internet that honestly believe that music should be free - it's as if it didn't occur to them that people's livelihoods depend on getting paid for their work.

The fact that it's nigh-impossible to get caught certainly doesn't help either. People's sense of morals tends to go askew when there aren't any noticeable consequences of their actions.

Wow. Hyprocritical much? All I was saying that I still think Crysis is a good game despite what everyone was saying (AKA "I dont care what anyone else says"). You didnt have to be a prick about it.

Again, I was only putting forth my opinion on the game and refuted one argument where someone said it looked like WoW (WTF?). I wasnt forcing people to like the game so I don't know what your problem was. As you said, some people are going to like it and some won't. Big deal.

And in case you missed it, I DID agree that the technical issues made it impossible for the game to succeed.

I pirate quite a lot. I even have an eye patch, a cutlass and a parrot. Ok, ok, so the parrot is styrofoam and the cutlass is plastic, but I do a good "O, argh me mateys"

Seriously though, rent the game if you want to try it, at least for consoles. I'll admit, I sometimes get pirated copies of PC games I want to try from mates. Install, try, if I like it, I buy it. If not, uninstall and delete. Too much, um, other stuff, yeah, that's it, other stuff I need space to store.

I've thought of the topic of pirating as a corrolary of the free/open-source software movement exemplified by Linux. From the OS kernel up to the most important applications (Open Office, The Gimp, Blender), people among the best programmers in the world have attempted to present a more open side to software, leaning towards the free (but "open" does not equal "free", you can see the difference between the GPL/Stallman's stance via GNU and Linus Torvalds take on the issue). To the point where I've seen many, many times people expecting software to be free, and of course the data they use, video, music, text files.

The next important element that explains piracy is fairness, or rather the lack of it from the "major" companies that have exploited the unconsciousness of people. I can only give one very big example I personnaly consider disheartening: the creator of the tv series Babylon 5, J. Michael Straczynski had to give away his rights to taking money from DVDs when he created the series (the studios decide and impose the rules), which until last year made half a billion dollars of profit and he didn't see a peny, not one. That explains why the authors guild was on the biggest strike ever until a few weeks ago. The problem is the same with CDs and DVDs at an unfair price, with more and more knowledge of the business models of these companies, the customer feels he's cheated by them on the price, the price does not reflect the reality of the cost but is much higher and rather explains their big profit margins.

Of course, there are many other sides to the piracy discussion, but to me free/open-source and fairness explains a large amount of things. It's not about right and wrong, though very often it's wrong (I've attempted as much as I can to buy the DVDs/comics/CDs from stuff I downloaded), it's rather on what becomes (un)acceptable in a social context (look at the silly lawsuits of the RIAA, where grannies were on trial for downloading songs ...).

I think you're talking about the Unreal 3 engine, whereas I'm talking about Unreal Tournament, which sold quite badly for such a big release.

I've seen movies that are not released into Australia. (3-iron) Some people have to go to U.S sites such as Amazon to get some international movies. And then Pay for a region 4 DVD player to play since people don't sell region-less DVD players anymore.

RED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GORED ENGINE GO that.

About demos:

Game lacking demo means it lacked some "dev love":

* Either creators know that game is so terribad that demo would scare people away.
* Or they had no resources to do demo, which means they lacked resources for normal development, again, resulting game is less than desirable.
* Or they didnt care. If devs dont care about marketing game, do you think they care about making game actually good?

All this means that game without demo is not worth pirating or even buying. Hence, pirating it is stupid.

About graphics:

"... if game devs didnt push us we would stil have 640kb ram".

Bull shit.

Anything my brand new 2008 PC does 1998 one Did, and it was faster for some odd reason. There is essentially no difference, really. There was no revolution or anything requiring one to upgrade. Nothing interesting happened.

For reasonable person, once we got 1240x1024 screens with 32bit color, 10 mbit connection, 100gb disks, 500Mhz procesors and 128mb+ ram, there was never reason to upgrade other than e-peen. Ever.

Seriously, i and sick of having to explain to people that they definitelly should not throwaway money just because neightbours kid b-washed from gaming forums and sites told them that their home PC must be replaced immediatelly (or they are failures or anything).

I am still laughing at 64bit madness.

Just say not to forced Obsolence.

On a side note, Stardock games are very high quality. I take a long look at anything they publish. Galactic Civ II with it's high-quality uber expansions are truly remarkable pieces of software.

Because of this thread I looked into Window Blinds. I'm thinking of purchasing it when I get my new computer in a few months. It's pretty slick.

Guild Wars forced me to buy it, the piracy is impossible with this game, I think all games should take a similar path.

About system requirements, I really love all games able to run in computers three year older than game itself, and at the same time looking awesome; The list of games inside this category is very small unfortunately, because normally developers sell their souls to nvidia, intel, and so on.

Did Oblivion have a demo?

Truth there, but then again, ALL of my games had some sort of demo.

I'm in agreement on what you say, except the above: modern CPUs and GPUs allowed to have fast video and image editing of great quality. Adobe even have a lightweight Photoshop option.

Modern programming haven't progressed according to "Moore's law", but it's starting to catch up (look at Beryl for Linux or Xen virtualisation for running Windows and Linux in parallel). But this is not possible because of the hardware-graphics-pushing-the-envelop thing. Look also at Mac OS X.

I'm using their ObjectDock application (the free version), which gives you the equivalent of the nice Mac dockbar, and it's truly wonderful, light, fast, beautiful. (I also saw this afternoon that the last UK magazine PC Zone has a review of Sins of a Solar Empire, I'll start to take a look at that) I tried windowsblind a year ago for switching the windows interface to the mac one, it looked great but my slow laptop would run 20 to 30% slower, so I'll wait until I've got a decent desktop. (zwei2stein: here is another example of how HW progress has enabled some nice things, but the forever arms' race they're engaged in is ridiculous as you mentioned)

And Grand Theft Auto? and Half-Life 2? Portal? KOTOR? Neverwinter Nights 1 & 2? Morrowind?

I cringe everytime i see a games chart, its just purely dictated by sheep-like casual gamers, anyone who buys a Tom Clancy or football game really has no idea about games, they just buy them to sit next to their console and serve as bookends.

There really is a lack of exposure for decent games, so many go under the radar because of some sports game or disney game getting all the hype instead.

Interesting read, as it justifies the reasons why ANet should not just cater to hard core gamers who dictate how skill nerfs should be in GW. It also justifies the arguments on why "skill over time" should always out weigh "grind". Game development is a business and if you drive away your market (you know the "noob" casual gamer crowd) you end up with less sales. Hard Core gamers do not dictate markets. Casual gamers dictate markets because casual gamers make the most purchases of very good games.


On a side note about security:
I used to play games that used STEAM (HL2, Portal, Counter Strike, etc) but after an issue of them screwing up my user name & password I will never touch another game that uses STEAM again. Their indifference and lack of personal response to issues I've had with STEAM again and again will forever cause me to never purchase another STEAM powered game again. Too much security paranoia drove me the casual gamer away forever and that means no sales from me or my family ... forever.

HL2 demo: http://www.download.com/Half-Life-2-...-10349536.html
Portal demo for Nvidia customers: http://www.joystiq.com/2008/01/10/po...customers-onl/
NWN demo: http://nwn.bioware.com/downloads/demo.html

Just a note on this point and in particular the highlighted sentence: this is an issue that I think is absolutely essential (not security, but rather perceived and felt security which are much more subjective in nature and close to the notion of "trust", but I digress) and I think that security paranoia is really very, very bad (terribad as some say). It's actually worse than having no security because it will lead you to making the wrong decisions.

Sorry for the slight thread derailment (we can talk about that in a different thread if you're interested) but I felt it was important to mention.

I really don't see what skill balance has to do with anything here. The article is about the pieces of a game independent from gameplay - graphics, playability, media hype and piracy. However, I liked what Burst Cancel said about the hardcore vs. casual thing:

One of the biggest points in the articles is that casuals do not, in fact, dictate the market despite having the most purchasing power. The hardcore gamers are dictating what's cool, while the fabled casual gamer is either following along with that or playing The Sims.

I'd actually argue that the only place people care about security is when their credit card is involved. After that point, the huge amount of copy protection, security checks, and logins just serve to annoy players. With Guild Wars, the security for buying it online is fairly extensive, while the security that protects against people logging into your account is remarkably light.

I am one of those 80000 people, I'm running dual 8800's 4GB of ddr800 and a quad core processor. I uninstalled the game after a week, too much tearing, and jumping about when it got busy. Personally I think theres too much emphasis on realistic graphics rather than gameplay nowadays.

Take the call of duty series for example. The only thing that really changed throughout the whole series is the quality of the graphics. As the series progressed, it got pretty. They didnt address the piracy, the cheating/glitching or the many, many bugs. And if anyone says PB is adequate protection against cheaters.. LOL! Even though the series started to look better the gameplay got worse because graphical glitches, bugs and cheaters made players move away from it. Graphics and advertising are what attract you initially to a game but to maintain any longevity the game needs to be maintained and looked after, bugs need fixing, updates and patches need to be applied in a timely fashion otherwise people move on.

True, and false. People care about their personal experience. So if their account or computer was hacked, their private data was spywared or access to the services they paid for was denied (either for failed authorisation or denial of service), they'll react and push the enveloppe towards certain sectors of the security domain. Because of its nice SW design, GW pushed the problem onto "local security", i.e. the security of the customers' computer/credit card, which is outside of Anet's responsibility (see the book "Exploiting Online Games" by Hoglund and McGraw). On your last statement, I'm unsure but I also read a thread on GWG (shall we trust it? some kids here are ready to say anything to be in the spotlight).

That ignores the history of (personal) computing. People, private as well as business, used pirated software on their XT's long before the GPL came in to being, and long before the x86 was even capable of running anything *nix like.
If anything OSS offers free and completely legal alternatives to pirating paid-for software.

No it doesn't, because at the time of the *nix boom, there wasn't 1) an application market; 2) FOSS. Piracy was not really an issue because there wasn't a business and not even a solid business model. People would pay for the pack workstation+OS, and sometimes get the "free" upgrade, that wasn't really free.

FOSS is not an alternative to piracy, as it does not have atm a long-term business model. Think about it. Free software? How is it paid? Linus is paid by a bunch of grateful companies. Other kernel major developpers are (well) paid by their main job. A few hundred thousands developers get more or less money for their soft (see Redhat and co). The lucky ones work for a company acquired by a major corp (Novell for Suse). So FOSS developers sell a free product, but the service is not free. But this is difficult to live from, because it's unstable atm.

This is not completely off-topc because behind the piracy problem, there's the question of alternatives, which also redirects to the issue of fairness. At one extreme things should be free, because of FOSS and to break the order created by the major media companies. At the other extreme, we should pay the price because it's illegal to do otherwise, even if some people in the chain of business are taking much more money that they shall. Where's the right position?

Sadly, the open source alternative, while useful, simply isn't viable when everyone else is using the standard options. It's worth the money to most businesses and people to not have to deal with file conversions and compatibility issues. Once an economic norm is set, it's almost impossible to change it.

As for the right position, it lies somewhere in the middle, which is why we see so many shaky rationalizations for it. For instance, it seems perfectly moral to pirate tv shows when they're not available to you otherwise, since you're not depriving anyone of sales. Pirating readily available games, however, is probably a bad idea since the market will shift to stuff you don't want to play.

The best example here is Adobe Photoshop. It currently retails for $650 USD, more than any reasonable individual would ever pay. It's common knowlege that essentially every casual user pirates it, and by all accounts Adobe doesn't care that much. Their true source of income comes from getting amateur users comfortable with their software, then having them buy it for corporate interests. Is piracy really wrong here, considering that Adobe's business model essentially depends on it?

cool, now give me a friggin Panda pet :-)

since this was an OT discussion that introduced the china/panda thing...

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/03/10...-panda-debate/

-=[Kevin]=-

I have to agree.

Is oblivion 'most games'? No, in which case, your comment is pointless.

They should, but not having them isn't justification for theft.

And then they sat down and stared at the blinking cursor?

Off course there was an application market and users pirated these titles as hard as they do now. Software was more expensive then it is now, and currently there are relatively cheap alternatives


Oh, that must be why it's completely dead, and there's no development of OSS anymore. You can think about it as you like, but it's not exactly at a dead end.


How do you manage to believe that people pirate software because of the availability of free alternatives, people use pirated software because they want to use the same software their friends do without paying for it. People still use pirated software despite the availability of OSS alternatives, not because off it's existence.

And software was used for business use, so it did not make sense to make business by pirating software. Of course people were pirating it. Reverse engineering always existed, warez is as old as POSIX! But it wasn't widespread (thank you P2P) contrarily to what you think.

You completely failed to understand my point, pointing at the word "because" shows how you misread my statement. I'm not drawing a direct line between the two, simply pointing at the various links explaining it. IMHO (and I've heard it from computer users) the idea that "software is free" made (some) people believe that everything should be free, consciously or not. As I said before, this was reinforced by the fact that unfair business models were imposed on users.

And believe me regarding F/OSS, I'm working with Open/SuSE and a few edvs told me how hard it is to sustain this mode of operation. If Novell wasn't here (similarly IBM for a bunch of other F/OSS projects), they wouldn't exist anymore. They have yet to find a valid and robust business model (and you also failed to understand that I'm a proponent of F/OSS and knows that they'll find one, it may be SaaS/SOC, who knows). They can exist as a serious alternative by depending on people's generosity or parasitic support, it's not sustainable.

OSS gaming has, however, proven a dead end so far, the only that you could construe as OSS gaming is things like the mods for NWN, ie user generated content which technically isnt really OSS anyway. The above still required a company that built the engine and original game for profit.

So, no, OSS game development is not really a big deal and wont be one either, just the same as OSS music isnt a big deal and wont be one for the immediate future.

OSS Games are alive, they just suck at this time. Mostly because there is little creativity and they all end up as "me-too" clones of whatever developer enjoys most.

But there ARE projects that stand out and which deliver great experience, lots of puzzle and strategy games. Nothing to make it to covers of gaming mags thou.

Btw: there IS opensource MMO. It is pretty terrible thou.

Yes, well, 99% of OSS projects out there are clones of commercial or other OSS programs anyway, OSS tends to excel in duplication of effort and me-too stuff.

If its good people will play it, everyone loves 'free' and with the Internet outlets there really isnt that much need for marketing so, basically, while there may be small and even good projects out there, on the whole there simply is no OSS gaming market.

Nobody is being paid by hardware manufacturers to build and maintain games like the OSS devs on the major applications are, the business model that does work, to an extent, for office applications is a non-starter for the games market.