I've pirated a bunch of games to see how good they are. I likely will buy one of the developers games such as a sequal. (e.g. I pirated SC: Broodwar, but bought Sc2) I bought Borderlands for my 360 and the pirated it for my PC for the modding lulz. I borrow games and don't pay for those. Isn't that somewhat Immoral? I feel guilty doing that as well as pirating. I plan to buy minecraft and various other games once I withdraw some money from the bank and get around to it. In the meantime I am building stuff in minecraft that I can carry over when I buy it. I admit I pirated Fallout: New Vegas and haven't bought it and don't plan to. Unless I am confronted I don't feel as guilty about it as I should. I have bought other games by the same companies so they aren't getting completely ripped off by me.
As MadZombie! said If games were priced accordingly to how fun they were I would buy more games but how fun games are is open to interpretation. People would whine more about not getting their monies worth. People would still pirate and we can't change that until we can control the internet with no room for error (which is mostly impossible). I admit I am a bit cheap considering I'm not exactly poor or anything but some games I feel aren't worth buying after trying them out for a day.
Bulletstorm gave me maybe 2 hours of playing time tops.
Had it taken me say maybe 6 or 8? I would've purchased the game after the first 3 hours. If it had better than average multiplayer possibilities, maybe even a 3rd party map editor - I would've bought it straight up. The game simply didn't deliver, and had I purchased it straight up at a shop for £40/£40/£22 (x-Box, PS3, PC respectively), I would've been disappointed and put a big red cross in the Evil Game Company category.
If there is a sequel, I'll definitely purchase it.
I used to download movies, then, I suddenly stopped. What happened? I found something easier than pirating. Downloading a movie and burning it to DVD used to take a full day. Now, I found Netflix. I pay $8 every month to watch an unlimited amount of films. The movies are streamed instantly. Why would I want to pirate now that watching a movie is painless?
I believe that if the gaming industry wants to stop game piracy, they have to come up with a better way of doing business. Give pirates an easier way of obtaining the game. If the price is worth it, people will go for it.
Time is worth more than money, in a way.
Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Jun 19 2011, 2:09 am by Apos.
Bulletstorm gave me maybe 2 hours of playing time tops.
Had it taken me say maybe 6 or 8? I would've purchased the game after the first 3 hours. If it had better than average multiplayer possibilities, maybe even a 3rd party map editor - I would've bought it straight up. The game simply didn't deliver, and had I purchased it straight up at a shop for £40/£40/£22 (x-Box, PS3, PC respectively), I would've been disappointed and put a big red cross in the Evil Game Company category.
If there is a sequel, I'll definitely purchase it.
I wonder how many people pirate games with the pretense of paying for it if it's worth it or not after they have completely finished playing it. I can't imagine the ratio of people buying a game they have already played to be higher then people who have played the game after pirating and not buying it anyway.
A well seeded torrent will give you a game in less time than it will take you to go to a shop and buy it. Or order it online and deliver it.
And this is why most games are moving towards digital sales. Less investment = cheaper game = more sales = larger profit.
I used to download all my music also. Mostly because the market for buying physical CDs here in the UK is terrible, and my music taste is diverse. But my old hard-drive failed and I lost over 300GB of musics ... So now I just use spotify. £5 a month, infinite music, and for everything else, there is youtube.
Would you anti-pirate crusaders consider listening to music on youtube a crime? Almost all of my friends have play-lists of songs (from YouTube) saved on their laptops, who plugs an ipod into speakers to listen to music these days anyway - an infinite number of songs are already on youtube, more than any one I-pod is going to hold.
I used to download movies, then, I suddenly stopped. What happened? I found something easier than pirating, I found Netflix. I pay $8 every month to watch an unlimited amount of films. The movies are streamed instantly. Why would I want to pirate now that watching a movie is painless?
I believe that if the gaming industry wants to stop game piracy, they have to come up with a better way of doing business. Give pirates an easier way of obtaining the game. If the price is worth it, people will go for it.
If they can make games that easy to distribute I will bow down to them. games are large files. Demos are in essence a short taste and enough to tell me If I want to buy the game or not. A video game netflix I can imagine with something like REALLY high quality flash games or something. that'd be revolutionary.
Would you anti-pirate crusaders consider listening to music on youtube a crime?
[quote youtube] Important: Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts, or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself.
By clicking "Upload Video", you are representing that this video does not violate YouTube's Terms of Service and that you own all copyrights in this video or have authorization to upload it. [/quote]
Only the person that uploaded it agreed with that, I don't think the person that uses Youtube agreed to anything.
If there is no demo and you can't get enough of an idea from reviews and videos, email the devs and say you won't buy the game till there's a demo version available. Otherwise, just simply don't play the game.
A few things on this:
1) I've seen games that look amazing and have great reviews, and when I finally get it, I end up hating it. 2) Reviews are almost always hit-and-miss. You can look at reviews saying a game is the greatest thing ever made, and other reviews saying you should avoid it like the plague. 3) If the developers didn't design a demo version of a finished product, very rarely will they go back and do it (unless there is a very significant amount of requests). They're usually already working on the next project by that point. 4) Ignoring those who would play the whole game and not buy a copy legally, the only harm pirating would do for demoing a game is prevent someone from buying a game they wouldn't like.
Also, you never acknowledged my second reason pertaining specifically to PC games. Some games (this isn't very often, but it happens) do not release a complete or accurate minimum requirements details on their game, so you won't know if your system can handle it. Additionally, if you have an off-brand piece of hardware and aren't sure if the game would run properly on your computer, why should you risk spending money on it until you're sure it will work? Again, emailing the developers and asking them to test the game on some obscure hardware is not usually going to happen.
For the most part, I agree with your stance on piracy, but you have to admit when there are exceptions in which piracy is more helpful than harmful.
More companies in general need to think like Runic Games who had statistics showing that over 5 million copies of their game were pirated in China. They just shrugged it off and were like, "We're cool with that. People get to enjoy our game and that's what matters. We even got letters saying, "I pirated your game, loved it, so I bought it."
Quote
After getting hands-on with Torchlight 2′s brawlin’, just-announced Berserker class at E3, I had a chat with Runic Games’ CEO, Max Schaefer about T2′s just-announced LAN support, Runic’s refreshing attitude about DRM and piracy (and why “millions,” of illegal downloads in China don’t bother him) and the the possibility of 50-player multiplayer.
Here’s a selection of direct quotes from Max Schaefer, formerly a VP at Blizzard North and one of the frontmen on Diablo.
On Asian piracy: “Millions and millions of copies of Torchlight downloaded from the illicit market in certain Asian territories. And that’s fine with us. We knew it was gonna happen. For us, we kind of see it as, down the road, we’re building an audience. We’ve long since announced that we’re going to be doing an MMO, and y’know, we kind of view it as a marketing tool for us. We’re going to have millions of people who are familiar with our franchise, familiar with our style, and who are going to be ready customers when we do a global MMO.”
Torchlight 2 should be arriving in September or October. On DRM: “You’re fighting against an immovable force by complaining and being paranoid about [piracy] and all that. We figure if we’re just nice to our customers, charge a low price for our game to begin with, don’t over-burden them with crazy DRM, and customers will be nice to us too. And so far, they have been.”
“We got a lot of letters from people saying ‘Hey, I pirated your game, but it was really cool, so I bought it.’ Y’know, we’re cool with that, we’re not as concerned about that sort of thing as other companies, especially if it makes our honest players inconvenienced. We assume that everyone is an honest player, and we want to make their experience as cool as possible.”
On LAN support, which was just confirmed: “I don’t know why everyone else doesn’t do it. I understand that a lot of other companies want to run you through their portal to expose you to the other products they have and make it easy for you to click a button and buy other stuff. But we’re a small company–we have Torchlight and Torchlight 2. There’s really no reason for us to do that sort of thing. And it’s something [fans] have requested, and we’re happy to be able to do it.”
On the prospect of community-created 50-player multiplayer: “We’re releasing the tools that we use to make the game. We’re not dumbing them down at all or disabling anything–you’ll literally be able to change everything in the game, among that the maximum number of players that can get into a game. So yeah, if you make a level that’s appropriate for a ton of guys–we haven’t done 50–but it’s theoretically possible, it should work perfectly well.”
That happens to be less than 10% of the games I've played in my lifetime.
But I don't even play that much anymore. I ain't made of money, and there are so few games worth playing that have been released in the last few years. I'd much rather invest my time into making games I personally enjoy than buying or pirating ones that just make me mad. All these shitty indie devs and big milking companies don't deserve my money until they start putting some effort into their work. Nothing would please me more than seeing them driven out of business. The day Blizzard dies is the day I dance.
Now, production programs e.g. 3ds max and photoshop. No, I pirate all of it. The price tag for this shit is beyond ludicrous and I don't do commercial work under any circumstances. I probably have over $300k worth of pirated material between soundfonts, models, textures, and apps. Across my lifetime I won't ever have had accumulated a total amount of money 1/3 that insane. There's no morals or gray area behind pirating. I'm not sending some intern off the hell because I downloaded something. And if I did, well - good! Put meaningful work into your product updates instead of making it eat up another 2gb ram for just having an ugly as balls black interface and sell it for a reasonable price. Then we'll talk. I love it when people bloat piracy out of proportion by treating every numeral on some random website as a lost sale. If there wasn't piracy I wouldn't be doing anything I do elsewhere. Piracy is accessibility.
I'm not even going to get into music. $15 a cd? Shitty itunes with low-quality formats? No? I could buy a King's meal for that price. If I met the artists in person, yeah, I'd hand them some cash and say thanks. But it's not worth it to buy cds if you want to support an artist. They get next to nothing out of it. You're just feeding the trolls like RIAA. As far as I'm concerned I've no need to justify myself. I have my reasoning and if people don't like it, what the hell are they going to say/do about it? Nothing.
Netflix and stuff like that is currently unreasonable in Canada due to how our ISPs and laws are. In the future, if I wanted to use Netflix reasonably well, I'd have to pay $150 a month for unlimited bandwidth internet on top of it. Currently we have 100gb cap paying $60 a month. Yay!
Show them your butt, and when you do, slap it so it creates a sound akin to a chorus of screaming spider monkeys flogging a chime with cacti. Only then can you find your destiny at the tip of the shaft.
Precisely. I support music artists by going to their gigs and concerts. I'm not gonna spend £8 to £12 on an album when I can listen to that music freely already, either through my £5 a month subscription to Spotify or simply on YouTube, SoundCloud or that derelict neighbourhood of the internet: MySpace.
There are barely any games out at the minute worth paying for, in my opinion. And with so many indie / online game developers releasing their - albeit less than standard quality - games for dirt cheap, why would I pay full price for a game in a shop - when I have absolutely no guarantee it will be worth my time?
Yeah, Jack[RCDF, I kinda want to play through a game's story or try the full game(and not some halfassed demo). "Then don't play it" isn't very convincing. Same with the "If you can't buy it, then you don't deserve to play it" argument. Arguments like those just sound like they're comming from people who got ripped off buying a game and want others to feel the pain.
Vrael shouted: I almost had a heart attack just thinking about calculating all the offsets it would take to do that kind of stuff
With the modern EUD editors, I don't think they're calculating nearly as many offsets as you might imagine. Still some fancy ass work that I'm sure took a ton of effort
... So now I just use spotify. £5 a month, infinite music, and for everything else, there is youtube. 
