Quake 4 Dowloaded Almost 1 000 000 Times

[gandhi]

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.

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I can't buy the Mona Lisa.. for some reason I just don't think they'd sell it to me..

And besides, what if they want to do a full release for it over here?

[Infinite Monkeys]

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?

Firing your security guards and leaving the shop doors wide open every night will increase the amount of stuff being nicked. Removing anti-piracy stuff from games (PC games, at least) will have almost zero effect as almost everyone that wants to 'steal' already can without a hitch.

In my mind the money spent on useless protection would be far better spent improving the relationship between dev teams and customers. Some people would think twice if they realised they're actually hurting someone with their actions. Those that wouldn't think twice are going to pirate games whatever you do and, realistically, no amount of programming effort is going to stop that.

I think this boils down to a difference of opinion over the rights of Steam.

Definitely. The problem for me is that it restricts your right to sell the game if you get tired of it, and restricts my right to return it if it's not usable ... A right that's supposedly enshrined in UK law and that Valve ignore. Doesn't sit well with me, really, but I can certainly understand that the majority of users don't care. It's really just me being paranoid.

To be honest I can see that Steam isn't necessarily evil. When all's said and done it's just a game delivery method, after all. My argument is that it's 100x more evil than it actually needs to be, though. Still... I'll clearly be buying the 'Aftermath' expansion the moment they release it anyway.

[gandhi]

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

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No. Its the same as buying a used car, or.. anything, really. You're buying a copy and the right to play that copy.. the seller is selling a copy and the right to play it..

..but in exchange they get moneys and they then use that money to perhaps purchase another game, or whatever.

[SomeNaiveChump]

I can't buy the Mona Lisa.. for some reason I just don't think they'd sell it to me..

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no, but if you loved the art you'd be perfectly entitled to have a copy hung on your wall.

[gandhi]

Definitely. The problem for me is that it restricts your right to sell the game if you get tired of it, and restricts my right to return it if it's not usable

Surely this should be the choice of those that make the product.. ie. its a part of the product. Just like you get different licensing schemes for music and DVDs.. and people purchase or don't purchase because they take those into account, the same should be said of steam games. Don't like the rules, don't buy.. but definately don't steal on the basis of the way they've made their product, its their choice and should be left that way.

[gandhi]

no, but if you loved the art you'd be perfectly entitled to have a copy hung on your wall.

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Uhm, there's no such thing as a carbon copy though.. a print is immensely different to look at from a painting. And no, I don't have a 'right' to have a copy.. they have a right to sell me a copy, if they so choose.

[christaylor]

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

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Sorry, just noticed that's for the special ed. the normal version rrp is £34.99. That's a bit more like it.

[Fry Crayola]

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.

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This is where we start to get into the same area as downloading SNES Roms. Although this whole "import" nonsense needs to stop. It's utter bullshit from publishers.

I find downloading delisted games fair game. There's no other way to get it. Of course, in every good-game case I'd much rather have the real thing and as such I'd pay for it at a decent price. With these games we've reached a point whereby the game can no longer make money for the developers who have put in a lot of effort.

[A Hen]

Definitely. The problem for me is that it restricts your right to sell the game if you get tired of it, and restricts my right to return it if it's not usable ... A right that's supposedly enshrined in UK law and that Valve ignore. Doesn't sit well with me, really, but I can certainly understand that the majority of users don't care. It's really just me being paranoid.

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I think that's a very good point and I don't think you're being paranoid in the slightest. While the UK isn't going to collapse if Steam violates the law here, this is part of much bigger movement where international companies increasingly have carte blanche to violate "local" laws, and therefore ultimately undermine democracy and the rights of the people. As I said, Steam is a (very) minor example of this, and this is very much a separate issue to the main discussion here anyway, but it's still part of a much more serious problem that goes beyond videogames.

Or maybe I've just caught your paranoia.

[A Hen]

This is where we start to get into the same area as downloading SNES Roms. Although this whole "import" nonsense needs to stop. It's utter bullshit from publishers.

I find downloading delisted games fair game. There's no other way to get it.

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Of course, the industry can argue that by downloading and playing a SNES game, you're not spending your time playing (and by extension, buying) a current release, and you're therefore "stealing" money from the industry. I don't agree, but it's an argument that could be used.

[Infinite Monkeys]

Surely this should be the choice of those that make the product.. ie. its a part of the product. Just like you get different licensing schemes for music and DVDs.. and people purchase or don't purchase because they take those into account, the same should be said of steam games. Don't like the rules, don't buy.. but definately don't steal on the basis of the way they've made their product, its their choice and should be left that way.

As far as I know there isn't a court in the country that would argue a 'license agreement' attached to a physical product trumps your statutory rights. If they were ever legally tested most 'end user license agreements' would be torn to shreds. All the legalese in the world doesn't change the fact that I'm well within my rights to flog my old copy of 'Windows 98' when I'm done with it. When you purchase a physical product I'm pretty sure it's yours to do what you like with unless you're breaking actual laws.

I accept that it might be seen as a slightly murkier issue when it comes to something intangible like a downloaded product. At the end of the day I knew the agreement I was entering into when purchasing HL2 and still handed over my money. Doesn't mean I have to like that fact.

[gandhi]

Of course, the industry can argue that by downloading and playing a SNES game, you're  not spending your time playing (and by extension, buying) a current release, and you're therefore "stealing" money from the industry. I don't agree, but it's an argument that could be used.

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Or the more obvious argument that you're not buying SNES games people are selling second hand.. therefore they're not getting any money, you're devaluing their possession through reduced demand and they won't be using possible money to buy more games.

Additionally you're also not going to be buying a re-release.

But most of all, just because you're not hurting the industry directly.. doesn't make it okay to hurt the second-hand market..

[Fry Crayola]

Of course, the industry can argue that by downloading and playing a SNES game, you're  not spending your time playing (and by extension, buying) a current release, and you're therefore "stealing" money from the industry. I don't agree, but it's an argument that could be used.

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It's quite a spurious one though. If the current releases are good, they get bought. What the industry ought to do instead of arguing a point that'll go on for ever is make it possible to play these old games legally, just as Nintendo are doing. Then I'll have no excuse... and I'll also be quite happy to pay for stuff like Super Metroid.

So long as it's not £15.

[Sng]

No. Its the same as buying a used car, or.. anything, really. You're buying a copy and the right to play that copy.. the seller is selling a copy and the right to play it..

..but in exchange they get moneys and they then use that money to perhaps purchase another game, or whatever.

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But it says on a lot of games, something like "FOR HOME USE ONLY: Unauthorised rental, blah blah, re-sale, charging for use, etc are prohibited."

So you's still breakin' da law.

[Fry Crayola]

But most of all, just because you're not hurting the industry directly.. doesn't make it okay to hurt the second-hand market..

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The second hand market is already hurt through overpricing in cases. It's an interesting argument for another thread though. I still feel making all the games available for download for a few quid apiece is the solution.

[gandhi]

But it says on a lot of games, something like "FOR HOME USE ONLY: Unauthorised rental, blah blah, re-sale, charging for use, etc are prohibited."

So you's still breakin' da law.

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No, the reseller is breaking the law..

..and by pirating you're affecting the law breaker's law-breaking activities negatively, which is wrong.. much like if there was a homeless man, and this homeless man was begging and the begging is prohibited.. so you go up to this poor homeless man; kick him in the nuts; knock his teeth out; bludgeon his dog to death and then steal his money.

[gandhi]

The second hand market is already hurt through overpricing in cases. It's an interesting argument for another thread though. I still feel making all the games available for download for a few quid apiece is the solution.

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I think the second hand market is big enough and with the likes of ebay to mean its far too efficent for overpricing to be a possibility.. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.

[Sng]

Stop trying to justify it! OMG you're buying second hand games so the developers children won't be able to eat tonight cos their Dad isn't getting your money so will get sacked!!1!111!

[gandhi]

Stop trying to justify it! OMG you're buying second hand games so the developers children won't be able to eat tonight cos their Dad isn't getting your money so will get sacked!!1!111!

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I haven't been here for a while, is Soong one of the less gifted (slow) people?!?

At the end of the day, stealing is wrong.. do what I do and admit it.. then do it anyway, for christ's sake can people not cope with doing a few morally wrong things? How on earth do you lot cope?!?

[Fry Crayola]

I think the second hand market is big enough and with the likes of ebay to mean its far too efficent for overpricing to be a possibility.. I haven't seen any evidence to the contrary.

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I was talking more about rare items which get priced way above their quality thanks to there being less of them.

Think of the difference between paying £50 for an out-of-print film, or simply getting it from the net for nothing.

[gandhi]

I was talking more about rare items which get priced way above their quality thanks to there being less of them.

Think of the difference between paying £50 for an out-of-print film, or simply getting it from the net for nothing.

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So?!? Just because you won't buy it on the basis of it being alot for it's quality (or lack of), certainly doesn't mean its overpriced.. clearly people are buying, they can't be overpriced..

..would you rather they be sold for much less and then for it to just be the first person to snatch the purchase?

Madness..

[Login876]

One of the best things to improve the videogames industry is not to pay for software. Never ever.

A lot of people talk about how important is to pay for the games that deserve it. Well, there's no console game in the world that worths the money you pay nowadays.

In the PC case, users should be payed because they have to fight with all the security crap that tries to avoid you from playing the game, while a user with a pirated game can relax and run it at the first try. So if a pirated copy that runs fine costs cero, an original copy that needs you to work and spend your holy time without playing should be given for free and with some pounds inside the box.

[213]

One of the best things to improve the videogames industry is not to pay for software. Never ever.

A lot of people talk about how important is to pay for the games that deserve it. Well, there's no console game in the world that worths the money you pay nowadays.

In the PC case, users should be payed because they have to fight with all the security crap that tries to avoid you from playing the game, while a user with a pirated game can relax and run it at the first try. So if a pirated copy that runs fine costs cero, an original copy that needs you to work and spend your holy time without playing should be given for free and with some pounds inside the box.

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Theres a joke login if ever here was one.

[Login876]

Theres a joke login if ever here was one.

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It's not a joke. It's a holy truth. You only get it after 20 years buying videogames.

[dumpster]

My Old Post about Preowned being the same as Piracy:

10 (chain store, computer games) managers from the north west of England, sitting around a plasma screen watching a marketing guy from one of the other software companies (that means, not EA), demonstrating “Die Hard Vendetta”, about two months before its release. It’s a nice little first person shooter, and we are happy enough to watch the guy enthusing about it. After all, it’s better than yesterday where we sat and watched someone play a very much unfinished “Haven” for a whole hour, watching him pointlessly enthuse about how great this game was, when we could all see it was a load of crap.

As you can tell by the names of the games, this all happened some time ago. And yet, the star games of the conference were “Red Dead Revolver” which still isn’t out, and… erm… very little else actually. In fact, we were starting to believe the guy telling us how wonderful Die Hard was going to be – it looked like it could be excellent when it was finished. Then he lost us all with just one sentence. “To be honest”, he said “We believe it’s even better than Goldeneye”

The taunting and jeering took a while to die down. I doubt he used that line with any subsequent groups that day. The night before, the chairman of the company had made a speech in which, he politely requested us to be positive about the products we saw. Apparently, many developers and publishers were having a very tough time, which amazed me because our store was showing excellent growth. And it was only afterwards, back in the hotel bedroom, that I realised how upsetting our laughter at Die Hard would have been to the publisher. They have banked so much on this game, and there we are, making money selling the games, but the developers are dropping like flies, and worrying desperately about the future. And I thought “Why?”

About a year later, I left the industry. I am happy to admit that the offer of something better had come along, but a big factor my reasons for leaving was seeing the way that the high street games industry doesn’t seem willing to give anything back to the industry it requires to stay profitable, and are totally unaware of the big crash they could well face in the future.

For the small number of you that don’t know this, when you read a book from the library, or rent a movie at Blockbuster, the authors of the work are rewarded in some way. A small residual is paid to the author when the book is put in the libraries, and the rental copies of films are priced in a way that takes into account the number of people who will see that 1 copy.

The high street presence of games really comes down to 2 specialists, and indie stores. And all these stores have preowned games. The store makes a much higher margin on a preowned game; in some stores I have seen preowned games for only a fiver less than the new game. So when you trade in your game for about £15 and it is sold for £30 to £35, that’s far more money than the store would make selling new games. And this is the problem.

The industry itself makes no money whatsoever on a preowned game. But the friendly store staff are instructed to always offer preowned over new if possible. So if I go into a store to buy GTA, with £40 in my pocket, if the store offers me a preowned one, then I save maybe a tenner (maximum), but the developers, distributors, and basically, the entire industry (except the store) have lost out.

Preowned is self defeating anyway- I am sure that, if there were no preowned sales at all, the sales of new games would be that much higher, so therefore they could be cheaper, negating the need for preowned in the first place.

An example would be Rage. Rage probably deserved everything they got with that awful “Twin Caliber” and then spending all their money on Beckham. When they were on the verge of bankruptcy, no-one would have blamed them for rushing out every single unfinished product they had, just to get some money through the tills. But they didn’t – They continued to work hard and developed the best boxing game ever made, Rocky. And Rocky really was excellent. Didn’t sell very well for the first couple of weeks, and the few copies that did sell started to come in to be traded. The first one I traded in, the customer told me what a fantastic game it was. I played it, and agreed. And over the next few weeks, word spread about how good it was, and the game started to sell. Trouble was, at this time, it was on the preowned shelves for a tenner less. After I had seen the same copy of Rocky traded in a second time, I put an ultra violet mark on the manual, using one of those security pens we used on money. I tracked this copy of Rocky this way. We traded it and resold it 7 times. I am sure that, when people finally realised what a good game rocky was, if they had no choice but to buy it new, then Rage would still be with us. They would have sold lots and lots more copies.

And this is a real issue. Notice how developers are disappearing at an alarming rate. This months Edge says that within 3 years there could only be three developers worldwide. And if you think that is bollocks, go into Game and have a look how much of their promotional displays are sponsored by EA. It seems that EA is the only company that makes a decent profit off this industry.

On this level, I compare preowned to piracy. It seems to be ok to steal (play the game without paying anyone involved in its creation or distribution), provided that you do give money to someone, somewhere (the shop). For every 100 people that went into a shop and bought Rocky, played it and loved it, maybe 20-30 bought it new. That’s 20 games sold on rages accounts sheet, and 100 sold on the shops. Surely Rage wouldn’t care if someone who bought it preowned just pirated it instead?

I won’t type any more. Sorry if I’m boring everyone. And just for the record, I do have my theories of what the entire games industry needs to do to get things sorted out, but I will leave that for another time. I would really appreciate your comments though.

And a new one about copy protection only inconveniencing the legitimate users:

I was talking to a locksmith the other day. He told me that he could cut a key for me, without having the original key to copy from. I asked him how. A lock needs to react differently when the correct key is inserted, and of course, it can only do this by having an exact copy of the key inside the mechanism. Therefore, someone with enough time and patience can make any key, just by examining mechanics of the lock.

Jump back to 1987 - A Saturday afternoon in any town, anywhere. Three lads, age between 12 and 14 have just arrived home from the shops. It's Martin's turn to borrow the game first this time, and in the carrier bag is a brand new copy of 'Elite'. Each week, they all chip in an equal amount of cash, and the game gets bought and shared between the three of them.

The shrink wrap was hurriedly ripped off the box. This game was one of a new breed, the manuals and documentation were very lavishly produced, and there was even a key-ring with the game's logo on! But it was the other thing, the small rectangle of plastic that looked the most intriguing.

It had some kind of prisms in a lens. The word 'Lenslok' was printed on the side. It was something they had never seen before, and they had no idea what it was. Nothing to be concerned about right now though, now was the time to get the tape in the deck, hit 'play', and type Load "".

Six minutes passed. Eventually, the tape noise ended, and the game was loaded. Excitedly, they stared at the monitor, waiting for something to happen. The game didn't begin. Instead, instructions appeared on the screen, telling them to place the 'Lenslok' on the screen, and use the keyboard to adjust two white lines to the size of the lens. After this, they were asked to fold up the lens, and place it over a garbled mess in the screen until the letters "OK" appeared.

The letters never appeared. Whoever designed 'Lenslok' probably had their Spectrum connected to a pin sharp monitor. These kids were using a 14" Alba TV, with a penchant to wobbles and blurring. After a few moments of looking through the lens, squinting, one of them decided he could just about make out the "OK", and pressed a key.

"Now type in the letters you see through the lens, and press enter."

Another blur. Is that a "J"? I think it says "D4". Three attempts at guessing the code, and the computer resets itself. The tape was rewound, and reloaded. Another six minutes of waiting around. This time, they would wait until everyone saw the "OK". No-one did. As they knew what they were looking for, sometimes it was possible to make out something that looked vaguely right, but they always faltered at the next stage. Then one of them had an idea.

The game was taken to a friends house, everyone has a rich friend, the guy who had every new gadget, every game going, and of course, a decent TV. After about four attempts they finally got the game to play.

Click! The Multiface3 cartridge was activated, and the game paused as a menu popped up. "Save contents of memory to tape" was one of the options. A blank tape was inserted, and a brand new, perfect quality copy was saved out. Perfect in every way except one - this copy could be played by anyone. The lenslok had been removed. The three kids looked at each other, proud of their accomplishment. They had just cracked a game. The same option was used two more times, and twenty minutes later, each had their copy, plus another one was made for the guy with the Multiface. Finally, through technical know-how and perseverance, they could play the game they spent their money on.

Software piracy has always been a big issue for the games industry, and many methods have been attempted to try and eradicate it. 'Lenslok' should have resulted in higher sales for 'Ace' but it didn't - in fact it did the opposite. People resorted to getting copies instead of buying the original, as copies were the only way of playing the game without the fuss. Why spend £15 on the original, and find you cannot get into the game, when you can get a copy off a mate that is guaranteed to work?

This all happened 17 years ago. The industry has matured, developed and learned from its mistakes. Hasn't it?

During the height of the Amiga's popularity, many Spectrum owners upgraded - the Amiga offered much better games (at least graphically) and the 'Batman' bundles were huge sellers - but there was one major difference between Spectrum games and Amiga games. Price.

Amiga games were usually £24.99, which, with few exceptions ('Soccer Kid' springs to mind) was too expensive. No-one could really explain why the games cost this much, but, as kids, we wanted to buy them. That was why we bought the Amiga - well, that's why we convinced our parents to get one for us, for schoolwork. A computer club was formed at school. We all paid a fiver each and every month we would choose two games, and then go back to computer club to copy them for everyone who contributed. It was after six months of doing that when things changed.

Inserting a game into the Workbench (the Amiga's Windows equivalent) would bring up error messages. The disk wasn't readable. A scan of the boot sectors revealed the message "Copy Protection, Rob Northern Computing". We were stuck. Suddenly, instantly, we were deprived of games - we couldn't afford to buy them individually, and we couldn't club together. We tried everything to get that disk copied, including using a programme called "X-Copy Pro" which we got off some kid at school who "knew all about computers". X-Copy was good, more effective than a straight copy from Workbench, but was still not 100%. Luckily, our public cries for copying software introduced us to that kid - he invited most of computer club members around to his house, and showed us his games collection. How on earth did he have pirate copies of these games when we couldn't manage to copy them ourselves?

Soccer Kid - Still the Amiga's Best Game Ever!

He explained that there were hacking groups, who bought the game, broke into the protection, removed it, and spread the games by post. He was receiving games every day, and he would copy anything we wanted for a couple of pounds.

Needless to say, we never bought games from the shop again.

This all happened 10 years ago. The industry has matured, developed and learned from its mistakes. Hasn't it?

Piracy is a huge problem that costs the video games industry billions of pounds every second - if you copy games, not only will you get viruses on your computer, but also pornography and drugs. And guns. Pirate games fund terrorism and make swans sink to the bottom. Piracy makes your eyes turn into crocodiles, and makes the sky bleed. The Elspa adverts said "Don't play games with criminals" and informed us that "90% of people arrested for software piracy, are involved in terrorism, pornography, drugs, and other crimes" (this quote is not 100% accurate as I can't rightly remember). Does this claim sound stupid to you? What do they mean "and other crimes?", what other crimes? Maybe pirate videos as well as games? Hiding in the train loo? Whistling on a Tuesday?

The stories you have just read show that piracy has always been around - it's the underground games industry. I'm not going to go on about how games are too expensive, because this has been covered this on the site many times, but in this and other industries, piracy has been feared (remember "Home Taping is Killing Music?") but no-one has ever come up with accurate statistics to show exactly how big an impact piracy makes. Just as home taping didn't kill music in the 80s, we see album sales are higher than ever now, and that's now we have Kazaa, Napster and the like. The figures that are used, to show how piracy deprives the industry of cash, usually assume that everyone with a pirate copy would have bought the original if they had no choice. This is absolutely not the case. The money spent by Elspa (the European Leisure Software Producer Association, or something) on adverts telling us to shop our teachers for £1000 is wasted money. There will always be piracy, whether that's games, films, music or whatever. It happens. Live with it. The pirates are ordinary, normal people who can't justify spending £40 on a new game. They only turn to the professional pirates because the shop bought product cannot be copied.

And why? Simple - because the hackers are much more knowledgeable than the man on the street. The hackers can remove any level of protection on any medium, but the man on the street can't get 'lenslok' to work. Whilst the hackers are breaking through the protection and fixing the occasional bug, the man on the street can't get the game to start because he is looking at the wrong word on page 5, line 4 of the manual. The man on the street has lost his codewheel, his colour chart, or his little plastic lens. The man on the street finds that someone has peeled the serial number sticker off the box whilst it was on the shelf in the store. He's typing "0" instead of "O".

The hackers however, know that they can break into anything eventually. They might not have the key, but they have the lock and, like my locksmith friend they can reverse engineer. This is exactly what happened when some cheap DVD player from the Far East was manufactured with the lock mechanism (Content Scrambling System or CSS) exposed. Before long, someone used that information to create a program called DeCSS, which removes the protection on DVD movies, and always will.

This DVD protection should stop people copying the films. Instead, people still copy films, but the legitimate users find they can't watch movies on their Linux PCs. Also, the de facto standard for copy protection, Macrovision stops anyone who doesn't spend £20 on a special cable from copying the films, but also stops many legitimate users from using big screen projectors as the Macrovision interferes with the picture. Still DVD was invented over five years ago - everyone learns from their mistakes and moves on, right?

Consider the many people who can't play new music CDs because the copy protection stops the computer reading the disks. And are these protected disks still available to download from the internet? Of course they are. The protection only serves to inconvenience the legitimate buyer.

'Guitar Freaks'on Playstation? 'Um Jammer Lammy?' Neither work on a chipped Playstation if you buy them from a shop. A legitimate, shop bought game won't work, but a pirate copy will. What's the sense in that? And how many customers came back to the shop asking "Where can I find the CD Case item in Metal Gear Solid?", only for us to tell them it's copy protection, and they are referring to the actual CD case that the game comes in. That sound silly, but it happened a lot.

But then Metal Gear Solid happened 6 years ago. The industry has matured, developed and learned from its mistakes. Hasn't it?

April 2004. 'Farcry' for the PC gets a stunning review in Edge magazine, and within days the internet forums are filled with people struggling to get the game to run. Apparently, it searches your computer for CD Cloning software, virtual drives, that sort of thing, and if it finds any, the game refuses to run. In this era of high street shops offering 10-day returns policies, genuine customers are buying a game from the shop, coming home, and finding that the only way to play it is to download a hacker group's No-CD patch from the internet. Anyone else think that is a crazy situation? Of course it is!

The games industry needs to stop spending tens of thousands of pounds combating piracy. Using advertising to promote claims that the average gamesplayer is going to be bum raped in jail, shutting down emulation sites - this won't make a difference. All it will serve to do is drive the legitimate customers further underground - closer to the pirates. Piracy always been here and it's not going away, and any attempts to stop it only inconvenience the legitimate purchaser. The hacker doesn't care, in fact they probably enjoy the challenge! The money spent on this ridiculous battle could be used to increase media exposure and get gaming noticed. Get people playing games. Improve sales by making the whole industry mass market. Work to make sure that anyone who pays £30 for 'Farcry' can actually go home and play it. Is that asking too much?

Or we can continue to steer genuine customers to the underground, force them to seek out patches on the internet, and wonder why they never come back.

[Fleagle]

Well, at least you're an honest cunt.

Er, thanks. I think.

Did you? And does it actually matter if the game has a bug if you love it? Really, you're just scraping the barrel with this one. If you love the game, it's worth the money, even if it crashes when you press fifteen keys at once whilst playing the ukelele into the microphone.

Very true except you know that I'm not referring to simple bugs and glitches but major problems with the software that renders it useless or at the very least virtually unplayable.

I've seen people here saying that they've had no problems with their pc games and that's great but it hasn't been the case with me. Off the top of my head I can remember buying Outcast, some Ultima game, Battlefield 1942, Ghost Recon and Hidden & Dangerous 1+2 and I've had major problems with all of them. Maybe I'm just unlucky but it still doesn't change the fact that I'm pissed off about it and unwilling to accept that sort ofthing anymore.

I'm not saying you're a liar. I believe you. I'm just saying that because you've got tons of legal stuff doesn't make it ok that you have pirated stuff as well. They don't cancel each other out.

Yeah, that's a fair enough point and I wouldn't argue with it. I was just pointing out the fact that it's a little strange that I've bought so may legal dvd's when I could've downloaded the lot of them.

Why do you want the ones that aren't good? I can appreciate that in this case it makes not a jot of a difference, but why?

I think cat faeces are not good. So I don't get them. Why get a bad game? Why waste your time

Simply because many games that aren't that good still might have some redeeming features about them and possibly even turn out to be actually rather good. By nicking them I can see for myself without any kind of expense.

Edit: that amazing post above mine has just reminded me of my problems with that game Ace and it's crappy lenslok gizmo along with the fact that my legal copy of About a boy won't run on my Xbox. Cunts and their security.

[Gabe]

To take my earlier comments one step further, I think it's a cultural symptom of the 'I want everything now culture'.  I don't think yarring a game is that far removed from buying something on credit (apart from the inevitable house reposession) - people just have no patience any more.  Whatever happened to if you can't afford it, you can't have it?  Once that mentality is gone, nobody has respect for copyright, IP, etc.  And the mentality of course is that if just one person is doing it, it's not going to have any impact on overall sales (hence the lack of guilt), but what happens when it goes mainstream as it now clearly has?

Since I have worked in the industry, I have gone from being largely ambivalent, to caring quite a lot.  Piracy has a huge impact on sales, whatever people say or however they justify it.  That's why we don't sell games in China.  In another 5 years, maybe we won't be able to sell games in the west either without some form of copy protection that actually is effective even if it pisses off genuine customers.

When people talk about getting yarred versions of GTA, the Warriors, or any other T2/R* product, and ask on here about how to get it working etc (while throwing in all sorts of platitudes about how they will buy it if they like it), it makes me really fed up.  Lost sales hit my back pocket literally, and those of everyone else in the company.  I'm sure everyone else in the mainstream games/movie/music industries have similar feelings.

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I haven't read the rest of the thread yet, so apologies if this has been already mentioned, but I read an article ages ago that linked this type of mentality (and that of road rage) to fast food outlets. The theory being that the appearance of being able to get a product quickly transcended to other areas of life, where people would then start to expect everything now.

Gives folk another reason to hate the shit that is McDonalds, I guess.

[Jack]

My legal copy of About a boy won't run on my Xbox. Cunts and their security.

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That's probably a very good thing.

[BeeJay]

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?

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yes and yes. They know what they are doing is wrong and don't try and justify it.

[BeeJay]

I haven't read the rest of the thread yet, so apologies if this has been already mentioned, but I read an article ages ago that linked this type of mentality (and that of road rage) to fast food outlets. The theory being that the appearance of being able to get a product quickly transcended to other areas of life, where people would then start to expect everything now.

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It's true of modern culture without a doubt. Everyone expects everything now. No-one expects to have to work for anything. Patience is not the best attribute of modern culture.

Both of those pieces above are well written and do really put the point across well. My opinion is that two wrongs don't make a right.

If company x screw you over then don't buy their stuff again. Simple as that.

Just because some guy cuts you up on the motorway, don't go after him and cut him up aswell. Honestly, just let him go.