Oh, good to know that someone on this forum has omnipotent powers and the mysterious ability to know and understand the motivation of millions of people around the world.

While you're at it with your amazing statements that would be impossible for us mere mortal men to make, could you deign to let us know the answers to solving world hunger, curing cancer, and the meaning of life? I mean, you're really selling yourself short with these minor declarations here.

If you cared about a game enough to play it new, but only buy it when it is cheaper, you are hurting the industry. Because that game which you bought a few months later might not have gotten the same launch-sales that it would otherwise, which largely affects what kind of support the publishers are willing to give to it (for the more risky games. You know, the ones we actually want).

Again, I cite VTM Bloodlines. Buggy piece of crap at launch, amazing game now. And if even a fraction of the people who bought it over the past years bought it at launch, Troika probably would have gotten pulled out of the toilet (so they could continue circling the drain again).
Nah, I am sadly not omnipotent, although I can see how you could confuse my roguish good looks as being a sign of divine power.

But seriously, go take a look at a comments thread for a torrent, or a torrent forum. You start to see a lot of trends.

Hell, let's use Gamerager here: He has been advocating how he is just trying before he buys and all this other ethical crap. Then he drops down "I only buy the games I pirate and like".

"Like" is a very subjective term. Especially after you have already played the game.

To make a fun analogy: He isn't going to buy the cow if he can get the milk for free.

Or, to make it more fun: He isn't going to marry the girl if he can boink the crap out of her, make recordings, and post them online to turn a profit.

Sales: Not really. If you don't mind waiting for a sale, then you weren't gonna buy it new.
OOH! I can use the MEPC now!

A lot of those people cared enough to buy the game new because they wanted to play NOW. Not a week from "now", but "NOW". So if they had been able to pirate, they wouldn't have purchased it. Or they would have purchased it at a much lower price (leading to lower launch figures, and lower total revenue).

Most games these days either get demos later in the life cycle (a few weeks past release), or are almost purely multiplayer-focused. And even then, the rise of video reviews (I actually do like gametrailers for those, even if they definitely spin) largely negate the need for demos in most cases. Did you need to play a demo of DNF to realize it was a childish (and somewhat uncomfortable) game? Or were the reviews, and video reviews, enough?

So if someone cares enough that they need to play the game "NOW", they should buy the game. Because clearly the marketing and thought behind the game are something that made them want to play it at release. If not, then they can wait. The "try before you buy" is just a way to play the game NOW but pay for it later.

As far as myself: If I want a game at launch, I pay full price (or look for a good sale so that I get it for 40, or even 30, bucks). That is the beauty of growing up and getting a job, you have that luxury. If money is tight that month, I wait (although, if it is a game that really got me hot and bothered, I already put aside the money for it ahead of time). If I don't need it NOW, I wait.

Thus, I provide maximum support for the games that most appeal to me, and overall support for the games that just seem fun. So I will show the industry that I really want more games about wandering around chernobyl with a backpack full of sausage, and that I enjoy, but am not obsessed with, the latest Starcraft.

And we are largely going in circles, so have fun poking the corpse. I'm done.

No we're not going around in circles. You keep stating opinions as facts and I keep pointing that out yet you disregard that and take some of my comments the wrong way to support your point.

Thing is, regardless of your first two paragraphs just now in your latest reply, in both cases both people don't buy new and usually pay the same amount of dollars in a sale. Both times the developer gets less than full price, but due to different reasons. Even so they still get x amount of dollars, which supports the devs less than paying full price in both cases, the only difference being that one pirated and one did not in regards to legality.

Thing is I could not pirate a game, and buy it in a sale for 20 bucks, or pirate and test and then buy later for 20 bucks. As in both cases I will pay what I think the game is worth(even if i've played it or not and based on how much I think it's worth overall quality wise ), so IMO both cases the dev gets money and can make more games. I never pay full price, even on the games I dont demo and just buy, so even if I didn't pirate they'd still not get full price from me in 95% of my buys.

We're not talking about how they arrived at such payments( the sale buyer and the pirate who sale buys) or what they might've paid if they didn't pirate or vice versa if they never pirated games before/......we're talking about the industry getting the same amount of dollars in both cases or close to it, thus if one is hurting developers in paying less than full price both are, or non are. There is no middle ground or exception here.

Also why wait? Is it the fact that I pay less that irks you? Or the fact I play earlier? Is jealousy that good a reason to dislike what I do?

Also as I said I do as I do, and am not trying to prove my case here, just clearing up a misconception you seem to have that all or most pirates never buy games they pirate. I don't care if you approve of what I do, or any of that.......but I do care when people make such bltantly spun propaganda as truth.

Estimates are always going to have issues concerning accuracy. There is no doubt about that.

I will say this. I don't care if the estimates of damage concerning piracy are exaggerated. To pirate a product is to steal and stealing is against the law. It is no different than walking into a store and robbing it.

As for accusations of greed against the music industry or any other form of entertainment industry, such accusations are the most hypocritical that I have ever heard. These people who make such accusations call others greedy for demanding compensation for their contribution to a piece of work yet these accusers refuse to pay anything even if they have the money for it. Now that is true greed and true hypocrisy right there. People have the right to demand and collect compensation for their work whether they be musical artists, publishers, plumbers, or cooks.

If someone can't afford to purchase a certain music, film, or software due to money issues, that person should do what I do and that is to work towards purchasing it instead of committing theft and then calling others the "bad guy."

It's not stealing by definition....one is the theft of a physical good while one is making an illegal copy while not depriving the IP holder or a store of a copy to sell.

Both illegal but no it's not theft by definition.

Also by greed they are greedy in many cases as some big publishers gouge the consumer for shitty work while also nickel/diming them for DLC packs & selling games for more money than is even fair in some countries....among other things like paying some of their workers peanuts while they are forced to work under tight deadlines which often lead to shitty products.

I know I said I would drop the thread, but someone pointed me to that:

Yes, there are morons who feel that everything should be free. These are the people who have never put any effort into making anything.


But there is a lot of greed involved. Labels in the music industry and many publishers do take a large percentage of funds from the artists/devs/writers. I recall hearing that, at least in the early oughties, most musicians made nothing from albums, and only profited from concerts.

But at the same time, digital distribution has really helped with this. Yeah, Steam probably skims a good bit off the top. But it is probably still a lot less than Best Buy (not to mention the distributor and the people who manufacture the boxes). So there is a larger percentage going back to the publisher, and a marginally larger amount going back to the developer.

So yeah, I would say a lot of pirates are greedy bastards (and I would argue that a lot of anti-DRM people forget that the devs have incentive to want their work protected, to at least some degree), but there is also a strong argument for supporting indie games over those from major publishers.

NOW I am done.

I just have to rise to this one, sorry.

Naturally they want their work protected. The problem is that their work isn't protected, no matter what they do. Most forms of DRM do exactly nothing to protect games from piracy. The few that have been temporarily effective have been so draconian towards the paying customers that sales have to have suffered, because people would actually rather wait for a proper pirated version than putting up with the game's DRM. (Before you say anything, this is speculation on my part).

In the end, DRM hurts paying customers, not pirates.

Now, if all games had their DRM patched out completely 2 months after release, when the DRM has been cracked anyway, and the only sales figures the industry cares about have been registered, I could live with it. It would have to be patched out in such a way that, given the patch and the retail disc, you could install the game on any machine with no internet connection. Then, I wouldn't mind. But not all games get this treatment, and there is often no way of knowing in advance whether this will be the case or not.

When DRM can prevent a paying customer from playing the game he paid for, while the pirate next door is playing the same game for free with no problems, the DRM has no justification.

It may only be speculation but it's re-enforced by the sales figures. Any single player game that has been shackled with extreme DRM has utterly tanked. Spore, Command & Conquer 4, Assasins Creed II, Splinter Cell Conviction, Silent Hunter V, Gears of War and Prince of Persia: Forgotten Sands have all quickly wound up in the bargain bin.

Mass Effect PC sold pretty well, right? That was the first real taste of Activation-Model Securom (I think Bioshock had it too? And Spore. But which one came first? I only recall MEPC being hard for people to crack, whereas the latter two had 0-days)

Half-Life 2. There was a time when the world feared Steam.

Starcraft 2. A lot of people still don't like the Battle.net DRM

And I think Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory sold fairly well too, but don't quote me on that one. That baby had Starforce.

So two that sold like hotcakes, and one that probably sold fairly well, and one that deserved to sell well.

Maybe it is a better idea to consider the merit of the underlying game, rather than assume PC gamers are capable of not buying something for ideological reasons. I believe Modern Warfare 2 should have taught us that...
And I partially agree. It is all about a balancing act. It is a matter of quality of game VS inconvenience of DRM. SImple as that. That is why many Ubi games tanked while Half-Life 2 and Starcraft 2 are probably some of the best selling games in history.

And people keep citing Spore: DO we actually have sales figures on that? And I am pretty sure that had more to do with it being "too hardcore for the casual gamers, and too casual for the hardcore gamers"

And as far as the DRM itself: it is effectiveness at curbing 0-day piracy (because that is all anyone really cares about, which is why TW2 had its DRM removed after a week or so) VS the impact on the users (which, while annoying, is nowhere near as bad as many of us like to pretend). Why? For the very reasons we have discussed in this thread. Launch figures are the ones that are used to show how well a game did. Launch revenues are used to pay people. Everything after that is just icing on the cake.


Don't get me wrong, I dislike UbiDRM (and laughed at how easy it was for the Scene groups to use the Ubi content servers).
My only point was that many of the vehemently anti-DRM people really forget that behind those faceless games are people who worked their asses off for years of their lives and would really prefer not to see a Reloaded Release on top of Pirate Bay.
You can be anti-DRM (I actually am, believe it or not). Just understand that there are good reasons behind it, even if you have to spin it as "It is like a security blanket that falsely makes the idiots believe that monsters won't eat them"

Hamster wheels.

It's not really spin though, is it? In most cases, the only ones who are inconvenienced are the paying customers. I'm under the clear impression that both developers and publishers are well aware of this, but the ones who have trouble understanding it are the shareholders. They are the reason for most DRM schemes.

Do publishers and developers want to protect their games? Of course they do. Is that a "good reason" for implementing a solution that does nothing to protect their games and does a lot to inconvenience their paying customers? No, not really.

When they come up with a system that is completely transparent to the user and can only possibly affect pirates, then they'll have a "good reason" for implementing it.

Honestly, how often is even the paying customer inconvenienced? Judging by the popularity of used games (for consoles), I doubt most PC gamers ever really reached the 3 or 4 activation limit (and pretty much everything after the first wave automatically de-authed if you uninstalled).

As far as Steam and other always-on DRMs: Yeah, they are annoying. But judging by the popularity of digital distribution, most gamers have broadband and don't mind being online 24/7.

If anything, I would think most of the "draconian" DRMs are, sadly, less inconvenient than the disc-checks of old. God I hated swapping discs...

You yourself say "When they come up with a system that is completely transparent to the user and can only possibly affect pirates, ". Honestly, most users probably know nothing about DRM, so it is transparent to them. My justification for that bit of "omnipotence": People still regularly have no idea what they are talking about DRM-wise (seriously, check most DRM-rant threads on sites with more variety in the ideologies of users) and many are surprised at the activation limits.
And if you are insisting it be an absolute thing ("if even one person is ever inconvenienced, it is evil!":
1. Stop thinking in absolutes
2. No matter what you do, someone will get angry. Even if the DRM consists of a single check that just verifies that the user has a keyboard (because, honor system, if they had a key they would enter it), someone will use that as an excuse to complain (and probably pirate it). How DARE those bastards require me to have a keyboard!

As far as "developers and publishers are well aware of this": With a few notable (and hilarious) exceptions, most developers and publishers that actually post online are PR people (even if it is only a matter of them temporarily pretending they are). And they are not going to say "Hey guys, I know you hate DRM, but we like some degree of it". You've been around here long enough to know how so many people are vehemently anti-DRM and insist on it being "100% DRM-Free"
Point of reference: Stardock and Impulse. Wardell kept saying how much he hates DRM and how important the users are to him. And Stardock implemented GOO. Sure GOO is really one of the least inconvenient DRMs out there, but it is still a DRM. It still requires pirates to have some knowledge of how to grab a crack (which is really WAY beyond most gamers, if tech support is any indication...)


Seriously though, didn't want to get into one of these (I have had some decent discussions here, but there are way too many users who think they will get brownie points and that CD Projekt will sweep them off their feet and take them to the ball if they express a sheer and utter hatred of "DRM". If anything, it is those of us with cute avatars who are getting taken to the ball!), I just couldn't resist trying to at least get people to the stage of "Well, I for one think DRM is completely useless and evil and rapes children. But I can at least understand why someone who worked really hard on someone would lock the door, even if they have an unlocked window nearby."

Now I am really really done (Unless I get pointed at another interesting post)

Whether a product is "shitty" or not is all a matter of opinion by the consumer. I know there is plenty of "shitty" music (especially in the pop and rap genres) and "shitty" game DLC but I just respond by not purchasing and not using such works. That doesn't stop such shitty songs from getting played over the intercom system at work but that's beyond my control sadly.

Taking a piece of fruit that tastes horrible with refusal to pay is no less of a crime than taking a piece of delicious, ripe fruit with refusal to pay. The same goes for works of entertainment. There are some people in management in the entertainment industry who have done less than noble things in effort to get things done ASAP but that doesn't justify giving them excuses to doing what they do by pirating.

Besides, if you think a piece of work is shitty, why would want to experience it in the first place? It's not always the crappy work that gets pirated but also the good stuff as well. People have pirated entire games, songs, and films including games that were fun (this is also a matter of opinion), songs from awesome artists like Metallica, and films that were enjoyable to watch.