Quake 4 Dowloaded Almost 1 000 000 Times

[GinzaUK]

More to the point why would you pirate Football Manager 2006 when it's a) such a brilliant game and b ) SI deserve every penny.

Soong you are a prized cunt.

[213]

Downloading a game that you'd never pay money for is like borrowing a game from your friend.

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Obviously the physical limitation and the fact that somewhere cash has changed hands for that game limits the impact though ,doesn't it?

213

[Fry Crayola]

Absolutely. If Steam has managed one things its to show me that I actually prefer downloading games (legally) instead of buying a boxed copy. I don't have to take up more room with useless plastic cases and horrifyingly lazy manuals. The occasional limited edition uber fancy tin box set would still be welcome though.

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Serious question - what happens if you have a failure and lose all the stuff on your hard drive? Say it broke somehow. Does Steam store account data to allow you to re-download the game?

[Corrupt Rose]

I don't know where this "half-finished" "non-working" PC games crap comes from. I buy a fair few PC games, and not a single one of them has been "unplayable" without patching.

And yes, I have a DVD writer too. That isn't an obstacle.

[213]

HMV lose money if I steal from the shop, the kid in the street can't get home if I nick his bike.  If I want a go on his bike, and magically produce a duplicate, the kid couldn't care less.

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The analogy is wrong, the kid thats the owner is not suffering true but you don't go around worrying if my copying of a game is affecting the other players do you?

It's the bike shop owner and the company that spent the cash on R&D that are losing out there, hey I don't think it's as clear cut as it's made out but you need to get your analogies correct.

If pc gaming is so shit why bother? Just give up and go on to consoles, 10 day returns, rental, borrow off mates, no compatability issues, everything sorted, unless your terrified of having to then actualy spend money?

[dreamylittledream]

To be honest if I could download Xbox games legally then I'd probably do it that way. If they were cheaper than boxed retail versions anyway. It's a lot less hassle downloading a game in a couple of hours than waiting 2-3 days if you buy online or heaven forbid, go to somewhere like GAME and actually give them money.

The only reason I own HL2 with every expansion, etc is because it was pretty cheap and I like the way Steam operates. I even bought RDFU.

It's about time some big publishers look at the possibilities of things like Steam and produce something similar to that/ Softwrap.

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So has itunes stopped you from yarring music?

Nope thought not...

[Infinite Monkeys]

I buy the vast majority of my games, but I certainly aren't going to pretend I don't have the odd yarred title. I'm sure most around here would say the same if they weren't clamouring for an opportunity to take the moral high-ground... :huge-winkage:

While I don't really agree with what they're doing I completely understand those that rip-off all of their PC games. You can't expect gamers to have any respect for an industry which quite blatantly treats them like shit.

It really is about time all of the customer-spiting 'anti-piracy measures' were ditched. Tycho's latest update at PA is absolutely spot on:

With a barely concealed rage, I returned my DVD Collector's Nonfunctional Edition of F.E.A.R. for the five (!) CD version, which installed and played like you would expect a piece of retail software to do. I wanted elaborations upon the action-packed gunplay I saw in the demo, and that urge was stronger (although just marginally so) than the urge to set the DVD ablaze and instigate some kind of consumer march.

I haven't discussed it for a while because I find it so frustrating, and I honestly believe that nothing could change their approach to software protection. What made it come up again was the copy protection that came along with the King Kong demo. Oh, you heard right: the wave of the future is apparently copy protection on freely available software.

Someone needs to emphasize this in such a way that the right people see it: people who pirate software enjoy cracking it. The game itself is orders of magnitude less amusing. And their distributed ingenuity will smash your firm, secure edifice into beach absolutely every Goddamn time. There are no exceptions to this rule.

The first thing I have do after picking up proper retail copies of most titles? Hit the pirate sites for a crack to remove all of the ridiculous bloody protections. If I've got 4GB of game installed to my HD I don't want to be dicking around looking for 'CD 1' purely to prove I actually coughed up my £30, or trying to convince some program that I have a lot of drive letters because I have a lot of drives, not because I'm running bloody piracy tools.

I've seen Steam being brought up a couple of times. My yarr-happy mate was playing HL2 by the time I managed to get my genuine pre-load copy unlocked. Even the 'low-tier' pirates waiting around for public torrents were playing the game pretty quickly, and now the pirates have it sussed you can guarantee any other releases will be cracked immediately. All Steam really managed to do was strip rights away from actual customers. If I had my tin-foil hat on I'd suggest Steam and its ilk have far less to do with stopping piracy and far more to do with cutting out that second-hand market that devs hate so much, but of course, I don't have my tin-foil hat on today...

[MK-1601]

So has itunes stopped you from yarring music?

Nope thought not...

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Well, the product is different. With iTunes you're paying (almost as much as you would for a CD, I think?) for the convenience of having music pre-ripped for use on your one specific device.

Whereas yarred music doesn't have to be shittily compressed and DRMed, but is less convenient (now the completely no-brainer P2P networks have been shut down) for your average technical illiterate to obtain.

[Lasers are brilliant]

tax or benefit fraud in this country has approximately 40 million victims.

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And VAT on videogames is 17.5%, so that's another 40 million victims for every pirated game, by that rule.

To introduce a MASSIVE tangent, could advertising in games be a way forward, not only for reducing retail prices but also in providing a heavily subsidised free download?

If one million people really did download Q4, then that's roughly one million people who saw the cracking team's ident in the .nfo file or saw its name in the torrent post. Getting a brand to one million consumers generally costs a lot of money and to be the sole brand (aside the product's manufacturers) costs even more...

[Jack]

Serious question - what happens if you have a failure and lose all the stuff on your hard drive? Say it broke somehow. Does Steam store account data to allow you to re-download the game?

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Yeah, it keeps a record of what games you "own", either from the disc or bought from Steam, and lets you play them whenever you're logged in and if they're installed on that machine. I'd love to be able to buy any game through something like Steam - never had any real bother with it.

[SomeNaiveChump]

So has itunes stopped you from yarring music?

Nope thought not...

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it's more expensive to buy an album from itunes, in inferior form, than it is to just buy the CD.

it's like selling downloadable games for £45 a throw.

[SomeNaiveChump]

And VAT on videogames is 17.5%, so that's another 40 million victims for every pirated game, by that rule.

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nope. only if it's a lost sale. obviously.

[Infinite Monkeys]

So has itunes stopped you from yarring music?

Nope thought not...

When iTunes offers me non-DRM-crippled files that have been ripped at a decent quality then it just might do that.

If iTunes were offering 192Kb/s MP3s or nicely ripped FLACs then yes, some people's pirated music would be copies of those files. What the music industry don't seem to understand is they can't ever stop piracy... Right now the pirates are still getting that high quality non-DRM music, they're just getting it from torrents/usenet/their nerdy mate down the road. The only people being remotely inconvenienced by their anti-piracy nonsense are their customers.

[Sng]

So has itunes stopped you from yarring music?

Nope thought not...

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It has actually. Well not completely but I use the iTunes Store quite a bit. The reason I don't use it exclusively is because I do think it's a tad overpriced still. But that's no fault of Apple, I guess. But when you see a CD for less than it costs to download an album on iTunes then you have to wonder why people are using it so much. NOT because it's cheaper, but because it's just so much less hassle.

[Tom*]

just thought I would say:

I personally don't really get the criticism levelled at Steam. It works pretty much perfectly (apart from Friends).

If your mate got a haxxed copy of HL2 before you on Steam, then tough. Steam is a huge network dealing with thousands of people so the speed of download is going to be a bit slower.

All those people who have stayed away despite wanting to play HL2 because of initial problems, why? The few problems they had at the start no longer happen. It runs fine, and more often than not any software problems people have are to do with their hardware and not Valve.

And those upset about an internet connection being needed - I was annoyed too but I simply waited until I could get one to play it. If you actually think about what an acheivement Steam is, you'll realise it's something that will probably lead the way for all games distribution.

As for PC games in general, I have a dvd writer and all games I've bought work fine. Never had a situation where a game I have bought won't work. It must be system conflicts or something, and I can't see how the companies have cheated you, really.

[Sng]

More to the point why would you pirate Football Manager 2006 when it's a) such a brilliant game and b ) SI deserve every penny.

Soong you are a prized cunt.

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I've given SI more money than you, so ner ner.

And like I said, I'll probably be buying it if I think I'll get into it and the online play. I didn't buy it because the last two SI games I bought I only played for a few days.

EDIT: Oh and how does a prized cunt differ to a normal cunt? I've never really known.

[Mogget]

As an ex manager of Game, I'd personally much rather someone downloaded a game off the internet, played it for a bit, and wiped it off, than come in and bought it, played it for 10 days then brought it back with a made up excuse.

That's GAME's fault. I never did understand that ludicrous "bring it back within 10 days for your money back" BS. I dread to think how many people played an entire game, and then took it back for a full refund.

Utter madness.

[Mogget]

play.com have the RRP up at £49.99. 

Is that correct?!

Surely not ? No PC game on Earth (bar Microsoft Flight Simulator) is ever sold for a ridiculous price like that.

[Mogget]

I don't know where this "half-finished" "non-working" PC games crap comes from. I buy a fair few PC games, and not a single one of them has been "unplayable" without patching.

Exactly. Like I said earlier in this thread, even Boiling Point worked on my PC.

[F-zero]

The question that i'm most interested in is why Raven didn't include sufficent copy protection.

Any game released now is going to have this happen, if i was in the industry i wouldn't release anything without something like "Star Force" to protect it.

I assume most of the people in this thread will know what Star Force is.

[Infinite Monkeys]

I personally don't really get the criticism levelled at Steam. It works pretty much perfectly (apart from Friends).

I'm all for online distribution. If it's more convenient for me I'd happily pay full price for a downloaded product, just not when I'm being treated like a crook and being expected to waive my rights as a customer.

Steam takes the previously mentioned 'Sale of Goods Act' and stamps all over it. There are plenty of people (even around here) that were waiting months before the multiple patches finally fixed the stuttering for them. Those that complained and asked for their money back were told they had absolutely no come-back.

There were people whose accounts were mistakenly locked during Valve's first clamp-down on dodgy copies. The pirates lost nothing and just moved to the new hacked version, genuine customers get it in the arse and lose every game they've bought through Steam. What about when this happens a few years down the line and you're losing, say, 10 games just because you happened to play on the same server as someone with a dodgy copy of HL3? If you read Steam's T&C you'll notice that, to put it bluntly, they have the right to do whatever the hell they like and you have the right to like it or lump it.

Surely you've seen the ranting game companies do about how the second-hand market is hurting them? THAT is the only issue Steam actually manages to solve.

If your mate got a haxxed copy of HL2 before you on Steam, then tough. Steam is a huge network dealing with thousands of people so the speed of download is going to be a bit slower.

My point is, why should I have to go through the (admittedly minor) pain in the arse when those who aren't paying for the game have it easier?

As for PC games in general, I have a dvd writer and all games I've bought work fine. Never had a situation where a game I have bought won't work. It must be system conflicts or something, and I can't see how the companies have cheated you, really.

Some program telling me it has detected non-existent 'drive emulation tools' on my PC has nothing to do with system conflicts. Even if it did have the program has no business being on the disc in the first place... Pirates naturally remove it in about 7 seconds while customers get screwed. Again. It's achieving absolutely nothing so why have it there and have the chance of it going wrong?

[Fry Crayola]

The only people being remotely inconvenienced by their anti-piracy nonsense are their customers.

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Indeed. This has been the case right since Lenslok if not before.

The simple truth is that every single game every released has probably been pirated, and those that haven't are probably so obscure they've just slipped under the net.

I reckon publishers would do better to stick with the simple "insert any CD from the game" method of copy protection that we had at the end of the nineties. None of this drive-letter nonsense or anything. Barely any inconvenience and serves only to stop incredibly casual copying.

Someone who can find a no-cd crack can easily find any other kind of pirated game, so the rest is a waste of time.

[Infinite Monkeys]

I assume most of the people in this thread will know what Star Force is.

Yes. Already defeated.

I'll refrain from posting naughty linkage that took about 3 seconds of searching to find.

For those that don't know Star Force:

http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000477025364/

[Qazimod]

Me, I've downloaded games in the past but I don't think I have ever kept any of them, because I am a sucker for going and getting a physical product in my hands, a reward for the stuff I've done to earn the cash that was used to get the games. For me, downloading a game is a last resort if I want to try a game but cannot find any demos anywhere. Not to mention the fact that I find BitTorrent a pain in the arse to use: I don't seed* because I'm on a network and I was told that doing so might harm network speed. Anyone who feels 100% satisfied with a game that they have downloaded is clearly mad - I just love going home after snapping up a bargain at GAME and getting stuck in to the experience with a clear conscience.

*don't give me that "you're a selfish bastard" crap: you mean to say that the millions who deny hard-working software developers their cash are entirely selfless? Or that the ones who seed and help others to deny hard-working software developers their cash are selfless? Everyone's guilty.

[Tom*]

My point is, why should I have to go through the (admittedly minor) pain in the arse when those who aren't paying for the game have it easier?

Some program telling me it has detected non-existent 'drive emulation tools' on my PC has nothing to do with system conflicts. Even if it did have the program has no business being on the disc in the first place... Pirates naturally remove it in about 7 seconds while customers get screwed. Again. It's achieving absolutely nothing so why have it there and have the chance of it going wrong?

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yes but people who steal stuff from shops have it easier than someone who has to pay for it. doesn't make it right does it?

and with the error - I didn't get that problem and many, many others didn't either. I'm not saying it's your fault for the problem, because it definitely isn't, but if it was a major flaw in the steam system then alot more people should have got it than did.

I think this boils down to a difference of opinion over the rights of Steam. It doesn't constrict my rights to play the game I bought, or make my system run particularly slow because of it, so I'm not bothered what it does. If it has spyware built in, then maybe I'll think differently. But tell me why I should care that much about that?

[gandhi]

I don't see why people try to justify themselves.

Its stealing, if you wouldn't have bought it anyway.. then don't steal it..

I for one wouldn't have bought any of the games I yarr, because I genuinely simply can't afford it.. but see, can't afford it, go without and don't steal.. yarring helps supply too..

..I know its wrong, thing is I just don't care, I don't know the people making the games or profiting from them, its wrong but it just doesn't bother me.

I do however buy all my music because I've never found anything yarrable at a half-decent bitrate.. ever.. bittorrent, soulseek, etc. I download to preview and that's it.. of course this damages sales in the sense that I never make a bad purchase again..

YARR!

[BeeJay]

I don't see why people try to justify themselves.

Its stealing, if you wouldn't have bought it anyway.. then don't steal it..

I for one wouldn't have bought any of the games I yarr, because I genuinely simply can't afford it.. but see, can't afford it, go without and don't steal.. yarring helps supply too..

..I know its wrong, thing is I just don't care, I don't know the people making the games or profiting from them, its wrong but it just doesn't bother me.

I do however buy all my music because I've never found anything yarrable at a half-decent bitrate.. ever.. bittorrent, soulseek, etc. I download to preview and that's it.. of course this damages sales in the sense that I never make a bad purchase again..

YARR!

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See this the attitude that every pirate I personally know has got. All this stuff about justifying it is rubbish. You are doing it to steal a product that you are not prepared to buy. Simple as that.

[gandhi]

See this the attitude that every pirate I personally know has got. All this stuff about justifying it is rubbish. You are doing it to steal a product that you are not prepared to buy. Simple as that.

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Isn't that what I just said.. ?

Or do you mean every pirate you've known has had the attitude that you can't justify it?

[Spunky Monkey]

What about a product you cant buy? Lets take Raident Silver gun. Legally i cant buy it because its a grey import. I cant buy it new either due to its small production run and thanks to supply and demand of the second hand market im often paying 3 times as much as it was new.

[Sng]

Buying secondhand games is just as bad as downloading them, surely?