PC piracy has always been a hot-button topic. Most recently, it was Crytek CEO Cevat Yurli who said his game Crysis had a 20-1 ratio of pirated versus purchased copies. For Yurli, the answer to the issue of piracy is to abandon PC exclusivity altogether. BioWare believes they have a different answer. That answer would be to actively engage the consumer in the game and provide content to continue to serve the consumer.
Multiplayer recently had a talk with BioWare co-CEO Ray Muzyka about the rampancy of PC piracy and how to avoid it if at all possible. To this, Muzyka stated:
We think it’s a good thing to encourage players to make them want to buy a PC title. That’s ultimately the best, most successful path to prevent piracy is to have players that want your games, want to believe in them and think they’re high-quality and realize they’re going to get a lot of value out of them as platforms for long time afterwards.
Unfortunately, this may not be as rosy as it all seems.
Mass Effect had some hiccups with the copy protection, as it went from
bad to
still bad when EA postulated quite loudly to consumers about what exactly to do with the title. Also, content costs money just like games do. While I would love to sit back and say that this would fix the issue, I wonder what exactly DLC or quality is going to do to fix this matter. Muzyka’s comments are a welcome addition to the dialogue, but I’m afraid it will fall on deaf ears.
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Contest:
1:44 PM on 07.08.2008
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I usually DL PC games and try them out, then if I like it I go out and buy it and if it sucks I delete it.
So, I pirated the game I'd bought, then played the pirated copy until my real copy arrived, backed up the save file, reinstalled the legitimate copy and went back to playing. I have absolutely no regrets.
Yeah, I don't like buying crappy games!
I mentioned on a previous topic that you get to test drive a vehicle before you buy it so why not a video game?
All of my PC games have been purchased and if I do want to try a game beofre I buy I do DL it and if like the game I will buy it.
I despise the fact that some people/companies that want DLC for entire games as really I <3 my tangible video game cartridges and collections.
@FrogWholsFinal
I've only gotten about an hour past the "alien" stuff and I gave up, I might pick it up again sometime.
If you make a game that's a tech demo people are going to pirate it "just to see how it runs." Next time try making a game that people will want to own rather than a $50 tech demo/stress test.
why reinstall the game? You already bought it, it's no different. And now you have to put the CD in when you feel like playing. Unless there's some patch that adds features, there's no reason.
Case in point: I was getting all nostalgic about Diablo 2 the other day so I reinstalled it and loaned out my disks to a few friends that somehow missed out on the game the first time around. With the latest patches, you don't need disks in the drive to play. You just can't have two games with the same CD-key logged into Battle.net at once. With single player mode acting as a "demo" of the multiplayer experience, two of my freinds of them went out and spent $30 each on an 8 year old game so we could play together.
User management via multiplayer server control with persistant stats/gear/etc isn't a perfect answer (pirate-only private servers and all that jazz, aforementioned 1-player only experiences) but it's good for deterring piracy without making life hard for people who legitimately purchased a copy.
However, demos can be completely impractical if not properly built into a development schedule.
Even the people that do eventually buy it, most likely wont pick it up unless there is a significant price cut.
20-to-1 ratio of crysis legit to crysis pirated? Ever consider where those pirated copies were obtained? Places like China, Eastern Europe and Vietnam, where Crysis just isn't sold in any meaningful numbers.
Obviously SOME sales are lost to piracy, but even implementation of 100% perfect DRM will only result in a token increase in sales, because the vast majority of people who've pirated the game wouldn't have been able to buy it in the first place.
If your game 'protection' is so fucking retarded people wo buy the game are worse off than people who pirate it, that would be where quality comes in. Part of quality is not being a moron and making your paying customers jump through hoops just to play the game they paid for.
DLC isn't new, the likes of EA and MS leaving things out of games to extort money at a later date is.
Oh and Cevat Yurli is a goddamn fucking retard if he thought that spouting a 20-1 ratio would do anything other than make him look like a dick. So 20+ million people pirated Crysis/ Suuuuuuure...
But Iam a pirate, I pirate games because not all of those games are worth 50 dollars, some of them I just play them a little and then delete them because they are a waste of space in the hdd.
I would have bought crysis if the game was on digital distribution, but it was not so maybe they forgot that a whole continent exists. Thats my problem with companies that dont go digital distribution, they blame people who wouldnt be playing their games anyway if they were not for pirating, they dont send copies to this side of the world anyway, so they dont loose money with us if they dont put the content on digital distribution.
So.
Customer Support.
Yeah.
I'm not buying any fucking games.
(It applies to pc games too, they're also 60 bucks right? Plus, my pc can't handle anything new, so if i download anything it will be old...ish)
Instead of worrying about the status of deafness of ears upon which this comment may fall...why not look at the industry? Besides The Sims, PC games which sell well and continue to sell for months and years after their release ALL OFFER ONLINE CONTENT.