The gaming industry is driving more and more Gamers to Piracy

seriously, what do these big publishers think is going to happen when they:
1) Remove LAN
2) Add some type of DRM
3) Require internet connection to play Singleplayer
4) Keep rising the price of games
5) Shorten the length of games
6) Release buggy/unfinished patches

It seems like gone are days where I can just pop in a disc and get 20+ hours of enjoyment for less than $50, and not be required to download mal-ware or stay connected to the internet the whole time.

 

I remember Eidos Games (Boxed) were about 29$ on release time. I bought Thief and others around that amount. Westwood, EA, Blizzard and others were ALWAYS expensive.

 

I agree with the OP. Guess what? Every game i've purchased i'm now running an alternate version of it just to avoid the DRM crap.

 

It's the big publishers though, there's gems to be had from smaller lower-profile developers who don't treat all of their potential customers like pirates.

Indie games can be fun and don't break the bank on system and user tolerance, but if the OP's wish is to highlight the faults of the big publishers and their influence on the industry as a whole I can't help but agree.

 

Video Game Pirates ARGGG m8ie!

 

Inflation has been soaring recently in not only the U.S but Europe. I am surprised that the price has not jumped up at all...

 

While inflation might be going on, people arent making more money these days, most are making less. You would think companies would find a better price point to drop games to in order to sell more copies.

 

Companies like nintendo took a big hit and I am sure that most game companies are just as strapped for cash as the consumers.

 

At least Nintendo cut the price of the 3DS by $100 and gave everyone who bought one before the price cut 10 free games downloads off their online store.

 

It's not so much inflation that has hurt games it's the investment in making games for complex systems like the PS3 and Xbox 360. A typical AAA title can easily cost tens of millions, then add marketing, retail space etc. So yeah i'm amazed that prices have not gone up for those reasons. That's why we see so much DRM especially on the PC side because no hardware changes need to be made in order to play a pirated PC game.

Hopefully the trend is to move onto a unified game console and the iOS/Android games are going to make that happen much sooner than expected which publishers and developers are also cheering on.

 

After reading your post I can tell that you have low blood pressure. Here's the cure:
Ubisoft calls time on second-hand game sales | thinq_

 

DRM drives people to piracy? What? That's like saying that storing my electronics in a a locked house instead of out on the sidewalk drives people to burglary.

Playing Bad Company 2 or Skyrim or whatever isn't some inalienable human right. People worked hard to make it...people who have kids and mortgages and student loans. They expect to get paid for their labor, and rightfully so, because it's their job we all need to make money. If everyone did the right thing, and paid for it up front, the game company wouldn't have to mess around with various methods to make sure that people had paid for it. Game companies don't do DRM for the fun of it. They only do it because, without it, people steal their stuff. If nobody stole, DRM wouldn't have been invented in the first place. So don't say DRM makes you steal.

 

The whole list causes PPl to pirate.

Case in point. That is shady and unnecessary this harms other businesses such as Gamestop and I am sure it will of gamers.

 

No. A refusal to respect law and other people's rights cause people to pirate. Don't like a game because it's too short, doesn't have a LAN option, is buggy and in need of patching, and requires an internet connection? Don't play it. It's that simple.

If I don't like a restaurant because of its food and/or its service, I don't eat there. I don't dine-and-dash. I just don't eat there.

If I don't like a gas station because of its bad gas and/or its poor service, I don't fill up there. I don't gas-and-go. I just don't fill up there.

Same thing with games. If you don't like what they've done with a game, just boycott it. Don't steal it. Conversely, if you're going to play a game, have the integrity to pay the folks who made it.

 

The only game I know of that has not been pirated yet is Guild Wars. Even WoW has hundreds of private servers but none exist for Guild Wars.

 

Cause ArenaNet is honest. You pay for the game and everything else to it is entitled to Free to Play and all the microtransactions you can get for the game are all optional and won't affect the gameplay in a biased way.

 

the only non pirated games are guild wars 2 and runescape... ROFL

 

Incredibly long post, incoming...

This is why gas stations have cameras recording you just in case you do “gas and go” and why restaurant staff are trained to be vigilant in their watch for “dine-and-dash”ers. Not saying those actions would be right if no one was watching, but people do horrible things when they think they won't get caught, pirating video games is probably one of the lightest offenses in terms of this tendency

More on topic:

Problem here is the fact that electronic data was not made with the idea of the data being someone's property. In fact, the general idea of property tends to fall apart when things can be copied ad infinitum.
DRM is an attempt to stop that, but since its enforcement is on a per item basis, it tends to cause a lot more trouble than it should. But even worse than that odd restrictions DRM enforces on legitimate customers, the people who do pirate games are hardly inconvenienced.
At present, if you take gaming companies at their word, the model of viewing games as a product meant to be bought and sold hitting a dead end in terms of piracy (despite sales data that there are still many, many gamers out there buying games).

Yet, because of the industry’s obsession with pirates, (whom could at best be referred to as a fringe group within the group of gamers as a whole), we have more and more games marketing themselves more as a service rather than a merely a game. This seemed to start (and more importantly: make sense) with MMOs. But it's generally branched out from the multiplayer realm even into single player games, where whatever “service” is provided probably provides little value to gamers as a whole. Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed 2 and Settlers 7 were among the first to do this, providing little more than some unlockable content in exchange for a pretty much crippled game.

Though, really… nothing’s changed. There are many, many games and not all of them are good or even worth the time spent playing them. But to go through the list:

1) Remove LAN
2) Add some type of DRM
3) Require internet connection to play Singleplayer

These all sound like variations of DRM to me. Blizzard’s stance on removing lan from SC2 and then their recent announcement about Diablo 3 requiring a constant internet connection is a bit troublesome… but at least they do give you something for this DRM that they’re forcing on you. For SC2, it’s a sometimes finicky, but overall good online multiplayer. For D3, it’ll be a multiplayer/coop/trading system that sounds like it has the potential to be amazing.

There are some games that just force DRM on you without giving anything in return. Avoid these. Their single player mode may be amazing, but it’d be better just not to buy it or pirate it and just mail a complaint to the company. If enough people cared to do this, maybe this wouldn’t be so much of a problem.

4) Keep rising the price of games

Prices don’t seem too bad or even too changed since years ago. Of course, you’ll always pay a premium to play a game very soon after its release, but prices drop pretty sharply after about half a year. But of course, the price difference isn’t enough to make a serious impact, not for an economic argument toward piracy.

5) Shorten the length of games

I feel games are being shortened for DLC, which I also feel is more movement towards the whole games = services idea. But I feel the games of old weren’t particularly long anyhow and there are still some games that are hours upon hours long.

6) Release buggy/unfinished patches

Bethesda needs to be shot on this count. But so do about a billion MMOs that go to release long before they should. Of course, this is probably a publisher level choice and not a developer level choice, but still. There’s no excuse for this. I don’t know why it’d drive you to pirate, but there’s no excuse for it. Pirated version isn’t going to be magically unbuggy, if anything it’ll be worse.

tl;dr: Piracy is bad, but it’s the product of trying to force a system into doing something it wasn’t originally designed to do. There needs to be a reform, possibly just in the way people buy video games and software. The service model is one possible solution, but it’ll take more ingenuity from companies to reach an even better one.

This may have contained more rambling than I intended.

Best,
Cassy

 

And I think most people who pirate games would also dine-and-dash and gas-and-go if they thought they could get away with it. Trust me, I'm not overly optimistic about human nature.

No it doesn't fall apart. It's called copyright law, and it's been around since at least the 1709 and the Statute of Anne in Great Britain. It's right there in the name--you have the right to control the copying a work you've created, whether that work be a book, music, painting, or computer game.

Statute of Anne - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The moral and legal questions surrounding piracy are exactly the same ones surrounding unauthorized printing presses mass-producing an author's books without payment to the author or his publisher in the 1700s. The ONLY difference is that legal authorities have a harder time enforcing copyright law in the 21st century than the 18th century because all you need is a laptop instead of a big printing press in order to steal an author's hard work.

 

THIS is what absolutely sucks.

90% of the time I have no access to an internet connection for my personal computer... and even if we were allowed to install personal software on our workstation computers, they're not capable of playing much of anything.



edit - I guess I should add that I work on ships and spend a lot of time underway.

 

Is that logic surprising? You lock something up and people want to get in? If money was freely accessible, they wouldn't rob banks. What you stated was obvious.



What if you had to be connected to the internet in order to listen to your mp3's or CD's? That'd would be a lonely *** road trip, or bike ride, or plane ride, etc...

What if you had to be connected to the internet in order to watch your DVD"s or Blu Ray's? Again, that would be a horrible PITA, and you wouldn't be able to watch anything on the go unless you found a wifi spot. Even then, most portable standalone DVD/BLU ray players don't have this kind of connection ability, so that would raise the price of the hardware.

What if you had to be connected to the internet in order to read books on your kindle/nook/e-reader? That would almost defeat the purpose of the portability of a book.

Doesn't this all sound so asinine in relative terms? You want to recite a poem, you better be connected to the internet? You want to quote an actor, you better be connected to the internet?

If we don't fight Videogame DRM...where does it stop? Almost everything has a copyright now, so therefore we must verify it's integrity in order to use it?

"Sorry sir, you can't wear that t-shirt because it's authenticity hasn't been checked yet. Please log in before continuing..."

 

As far as I've seen it, the pirating community is benevolent to the smaller indie groups and malevolent to the big name companies, and honestly I don't see anything wrong with that. Ubisoft, and others, always complain about monetary losses but I don't think they've once posted a financial statement to support their complaints.

Honestly I feel like pirating is a scape goat to implement DRM and the requirement of online connectivity so they can continue to withdraw money from your wallets through DLC and extra "services." Just look at the used games market companies are trying to shut down.

We used to get a full deal for $30 years ago and now for $60 we get half of that (of course this is generalizing). As previously pointed out, games are being turned into services to milk you and I don't plan on legally obtaining anything on the PC from big name companies. Smite me if you will.

 

The problem with DRM is people, or I should say gamers, for most of the time cave in to these ridiculous DRM scheme.

And then to defend their lack of will power, they reason like: "if we all buy the game then there will be no need for DRM", "dark human nature"...etc...

Funny thing is, only consumers have "dark human nature", and all of a sudden, however, developers/publishers become holy angels that bestow their "creation" to gamers.

I don't get this mentality.

 

I agree with the above post, I have lost count of the number of people who simply could not resist buying a game despite its useless 24/7 online DRM. Do people have absolutely no will power left?

I remember people saying that they hated the DRM on AC2 yet still made a purchase. The only way to vote is with our wallets and regardless of what we think, buying a game that has stupid online DRM because you simply can't resist will make it worse for the future ofgaming.

 

I was going to type all those nicely said..

 

Counter arguments posted in this thread are highly irrelevant. Please name another product in existence where the legitimate purchasing customers are screwed over more than people who steal it?

Here is a more relevant example: You purchase a Ferrari. The dealer puts a tracking device on your car, and even though you own it, they only allow you to drive it 8k miles a year before they activate the remote kill switch. They've also installed a speed governor that only allows you to go 5 mph under the speed limit. It is also in your contract that any day, even though you "own it", they can take the car away from you. Also, there is a constant wireless connection required to drive your car. If, for any reason, this connection is lost, your Ferrari will immediately turn off. Oh, and if you decide that you no longer want the car, you can't resell it. You have to take it to the incinerator.

So, for all you people trying to give "relevant" examples. Please find some more appropriate ones like the one I offered above. I don't condone piracy. But it's getting tougher to stomach this crap that the industry is forcing on us (if we want to remain gamers).

 

Yea, no kidding!

Do you know how many games make it common place to release Day 1 - DLC for $$$, but also have the BALLS to release Patches resolving game-breaking bugs from day 1? What ever happened to shipping games AFTER BETA. Not during! And we just bought your F****g game, why not include that DLC content in the original if it's done for release day?!

Why should we pay $60 for pre-order game + $10 DLC, only to have

A) Game-breaking bugs from day-1
B) Pirated copies running flawlessly
C) Steam sale 3 weeks later for 10% off
D) DLC gets packaged with the game 3 month later (Free)

 

Wal*Mart shutting down DRM server, nuking your music collection — only people who pay for music risk losing it to DRM shenanigans – Boing Boing
The Escapist : News : Ubisoft DRM Authentication Servers Go Down
Ubisoft DRM servers down due to attack ? Video Games Reviews, Cheats | Geek.com
Dragon Age DRM Servers Down - Blue's News Story

 

That's a poor argument. You can't buy the same game from another publisher like you can food or gas from another store. Also, the problem is that customers have no recourse. You buy a game, it sucks, doesn't run great on your system, whatever, you can't return it! You're stuck.

It's getting worse and worse. Publishers keep pushing the limits with no resistance, and no protection for the customer.

We really need customer protection. We need a return policy. I bet the whole industry would stop churning out crap pretty quickly if a reasonable return policy became mandatory. In addition to the customer being allowed to resell their key code as they see fit. There's no reason it should be tied to one person.

 

I could not agree more!!! Right now DICE is doing the same thing. Making the "Physical Warfare Pack" to sell as DLC or with the pre-order, even though they have it ready for day 1.... Why cant game developers actually make a whole polished good game for release.... its so damn annoying!

 

Agreed , thats why i dont buy shogun 2 total war and street fighter 4 till they release a "gold edition" that contains game + all DLC . even though i wanna to play them real bad ...... .

For me the most annoying DRM :
- Activasion limit -> gives me the impression that i pay 20 dollar for "trial plus" edition .....
- "assassins creed 2"-like DRM -> what happened if Ubisoft server down ? what if i have no connection ? .

 

wow, glad to see I sparked some good conversation.

That Ubisoft thing is rediculous. There are many businesses, big and small, that rely on used games to stay in business.

I really don't see piracy much different as how we used to trade/borrow games from friends back in the day before everything became so digitalized. Publishing Companies were still losing a decent % of money due to this, but there wasn't anyway to track it.

Now that piracy is something that can relatively be measure over the internet the publishing companies are crying because they actually have some proof. So would you consider it stealing/wrong to borrow a friends game until you beat it and then give it back? If not then it's incredibly hypocritical to chastice current day pirates.

When we used to buy games we actually owned something. Now it's more like renting. People complain about MMOs costing money every month, but then they'll drop $15 on a modern warfare DLC without even thinking about how wrong that is.

 

What if the restaurant makes the food look really delicious (on ads and the menus), and after you buy it, it's bad?
And you complaining does nothing.

What if the gas station has bad service and the gas is low quality (don't know if this is possible)?
And you cannot do anything about it.
*Not trying to justify pirating, justifying my next point*

Like others said, the only reason pirating is a threat is because people feel like they are not getting their moneys worth from the game. You can say "Oh, then just not buy the games!", What if almost every single developer is not making quality games?
(though there are still people who just want free games...)

AND this is why I love Arenanet:
‪Guild Wars 2 - Why there is No Monthly Fee?‬‏ - YouTube

My friend's policy is that he torrents a game and then plays the singleplayer, and if it's good he goes out and buys it for the multiplayer or to support the company. This way, he knows if there is good content or not.
P.S. I'm not for pirating, but I'm against getting screwed over because games aren't worth 60$
*cough* Brink *cough*

 

I agree with HTWingNut. If we had a return policy the game companies, might sit up and start to take notice.

The returns would start to stack up.

 

One problem with us PC gamers is that we have little clout and influence in the gaming industry, compared to console gamers at least. If we pirate games, boycott games, etc, the game industry will just stop developing games for the PC altogether or scale back their efforts. They've already done this (eg. Epic, Crytek, etc.) Many companies have already done this.

They feel that console gamers will give them more than enough profits and us minority PC gamers are just a drop in the bucket for them. They can survive without us.

So they can get away with invasive DRM for instance and if we pirate or boycott the game, then simply no more games for us and they don't lose sleep over it.

Now if they upset the console gamers and they take a negative action against the company, you bet they'll pay attention that time. It feels like us PC gamers just cannot win. We accept horrible DRM in their games or no more future games period!

 

We also have laws against theft as well, yet you don't see mass stealing daily. Yet, you do hear about thousands of people on bittorrent committing copyright infringement on a daily basis, because they can. If that's not "property rights" falling apart, I'm not sure what would be.

The 1700s were an interesting time when the US government supported the piracy of British books and the British government supported the piracy of US books. But this is a gigantic degree of difference as this was major publishing companies pirating off of each other, internationally. The British Statue of Anne and the US's Copyright Act of 1790 originally provided for ~14 years of protected status, because both were created to encourage learning and in effect the entire public domain. Copyright's more recently been extended (in the US at least) to the point of being ridiculous, and thus undermining the original purpose of copyright: to encourage authors to contribute to the public volume of work, with the promise of a short term monopoly.

To further complicate the matter, we then have countries such as Spain that while party the Berne Convention back in 1886 as well as the more recent WIPO Copyright Treaty in 1996, has had its courts effectively say that file sharing is legal.

I can see that you're trying to make a moral argument here, which is based off the idea that creators should be paid for their work. To an extend, I agree, but they should remember that their "property" is unnatural and merely an artificial, legal construction, which was allowed for one purpose: to increase public domain.

tl;dr: copyright reform needed

Best,
Cassy

 

I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone say " you wouldn't download a car, would you?"

Pirating has always, and will always exist, in pretty much every business around the world. Accept it as fact and build your business model around it, don't engage in a silly arms race with pirates because they will ALWAYS win. And that is exactly what major publishers have done - a digital arms race against a faceless opponent, which means that some collateral damage is going to happen (ie, you the innocent, legit consumer gets screwed by DRM even if that wasn't their intention). And what happens when the innocent get sucked into a war they did not bring on themselves? They side against whoever caused the damage/trouble to them, and in this case that means siding with the pirates.

Publishers can easily make tidy profits AND have no DRM involved, as some studios/releases have proven (guild wars, witcher, sins of a solar empire, etc). There are also publishers that have actually made more money than they would have otherwise by being DRM free and encouraging try-before-you-buy models. The invasive DRM today boils down to exactly one thing: greed. Pirating doesn't literally cause a studio to lose money, it counts as a failed sale, you will never see a studio go under because they were pirated out of existence. They'll go under for poor business practices or corruption or whatever. Even when EA or blizzard or whoever is posting record year over year profits in the hundreds of millions, it is never enough, they always want more.

@rahul: pirating exists on every platform, even today's consoles. The major difference being, you usually need some sort of hardware or deep-level software (firmware) change/workaround/hack in order to play the pirated discs. Once consoles shift away from physical media, and it WILL happen eventually, you'll see their piracy rates go up.

 

Were you trying to quote me or Miltov, the guy who actually said that? It looks like I said that when I just quoted him

 

I also hate the constant-internet-connection style of DRM. I wish they'd get rid of that and use other forms of DRM instead. But remember--that style of DRM was only instituted recently, and was only instituted because people stealing games (because that's what pirating is, it's stealing) had subverted each and every other sort of DRM that the manufacturers had used to try to protect their copyrights.

Don't complain about armed security guards at banks if people kept robbing the banks before the armed security guards were hired. If people had actually respected the CD-key method of DRM, manufacturers never would have turned to the internet-connection method.

 

To those who say don't buy vote with your wallet. To me that's the best advice, really. I really wanted to play Rise of Flight (flight sim) and refused to buy it because of a constant internet connection. I waited until they released a patch that allowed you to play offline. That's when I purchased Rise of Flight Iron Cross.

 

What I would do is not go back to that restaurant and post a negative review on Yelp. I wouldn't grab a pot of soup from the kitchen and run to punish the restaurant vigilante-thief-style.

If you literally can't enjoy any games out there because of the list of criticisms (which I think is looking at previous decades of gaming through rose-colored glasses, particularly as to game length and bugginess), then come up with another hobby besides computer gaming. If you can enjoy some, then have the integrity to pay for the games you play.

You couldn't figure that out by the catastrophic reviews Brink got? I read one or two reviews and I knew I wouldn't spend more than $5 for the game... so I didn't get it.

But while not all games are worth $60, many are. Starcraft II and Mass Effect II spring to mind immediately for me. For those that aren't, I wait until they're discounted and then buy them legitimately. I wouldn't have been happy paying $60 for Bad Company II, but I waited for a while and bought it legitimately for half-price. I don't steal something because I think it's worth less than the purchase price.

 

See, THIS is what we need to do to fight the constant-internet-connection DRM! Thank you. If a game manufacturer sees that people are simply avoiding games with that particular sort of DRM (i.e., not playing it at all, legally or illegally), they'll switch to something that allows you to play with no internet connection. Because they want to maximize sales; that's all they're trying to do. It's just that, when people steal the game, it's really not a logical conclusion for the manufacturer that "hey, we should have fewer anti-theft protections, not more, in order to maximize sales." Pirating was just as prevalent before the constant-internet-connection DRM, so no game manufacturer is going to say "hey, if we go back to the other types of DRM we used three years ago, people will quit pirating our games."

If we want manufacturers to quit using constant-internet-connection DRM, we need to avoid those games ENTIRELY until the same thing happened that happened with Rise of Flight.

 

....aaaand we're done with this thread.