Some times, games are not available in some countries. So, if i am from one of those countries and i want to play a game, am I affecting to the dev if i pirate their creation? I do not think so, anyway, they will not get anymoney from the place i live.

Some other companies deserve to be pirate, why? Because they create games to make money and not to please the customers.

CDPR do games to make money, of course, but look how they listen us and try to make their game always thinking in the users. What another company do that? EA? Ubisoft?

Piracy is evil when crime organizations produce fake products, like cheap game CD's, DVD's and console disks in some Chinese pressing plant then sell for 1/10th of the original product price in the streets, outlets and shopping centres all over the world for stupid dumbass people who think they are "saving" money by buying stuff cheap when they are in fact financing crime which will use the money to drug and weapons deals too.

Downloading files over the internet with no profit intent, when we may be in a difficult financial situation without the money to spend, or to try a product before purchasing it or not, deleting the files then because it sucks, or to play a leak and decide whether to buy it or not when released (I too play Deux Ex:HR leak and will definitely buy it when released) is actually much better to the original producers than the first case. They may even get some new customers that would never buy their products otherwise.

Downloading tv shows after their exhibited in their origin country when your country only offers the shittiest and most expensive cable tv system in the planet which will only show that episode in some two years from now is not only not evil. It is angelically divine!

When it comes to Gabe's point I totally agr... agr.... agre... damn it, it's too hard to say. Too bad he doesn't walk the walk when it comes to "service" (see: bad service by way of tormenting fans over the HL series).

It's important to remember that people have always stolen games, and that the industry clearly stopped making money from that point on. Now they can barely afford to spend 20 million dollars on a mediocre shooter! What have we done to these poor people?

Games are one-time purchases that you can only buy on faith, so I support piracy as a means of quality control. Without it, marketing dictates how well a game sells and by the time you learn that the game is awful, it's too late to undo that purchase. They've already got your money and you've voted with your wallet for more products like the one you bought, regardless your opinion of it. With piracy, however, games have to actually be good to make money because the fans already know what they're purchasing apart from the hype, and you can know what you're voting with your wallet for more of. Piracy is really only a problem for those companies who want to market the hell out of something mediocre and sell a billion copies.

Nice vids.

I really dislike the word piracy to refer to file sharing or downloading with no profit involved. Pirates are the guys who rob ships on Somalia's coast. Or produce forgery and make money out of it. Have you ever seen a Bolex or Rulova watch for sale? They really look like a Rolex or a Bulova, only they're made with real cheap parts and prolly stop working after 15 minutes! hehe

Files downloading causes no loss to the industry and that's proved by Harvard Economics school. When stuff is good it will sell regardless of the poor souls who have no other way to get the files or those who try them out first. How much Starcraft 2, a PC only game, sold on the first week?

DRM cracker groups do a big favor to lots of DRM game owners. I love playing my legit AC2 copy without giving a fart about Ubisoft copy protection that would prevent me to play offline!

People just like free stuff, and will come up with ways to justify it or look at is as the lesser evil because some counterfeits sold on the street may or may not be linked to organized crime. Either way, the people who slaved away to make it lose just as much if it never turns into a sale because somebody would rather have it for free (yeah yeah, free advertisement to a non-buyer's market - occasionally to those who'll still get it anyway, but why when you already have a working version of it.)

If there was less zero-day piracy, I could see it in a better light than the cracker groups just trying to outdo each other and then move on to the next game to crack. Is there even much of any impressive demoscene left in cracktros?

From that youtube vid, selling books is another thing, since professional translations and non-OCR'd versions are nice. E-book readers haven't supplanted pulp and paper yet. You can still go into a bookstore and browse the pages all you like, or borrow it from your local library branch.

Then we have video games. Fewer representative game demos (if any) and unbought reviews makes buying a game like navigating a mine field. They'd rather hype their stuff with pre-order DLC and hats (!!!). So many big-budget games/console ports nowadays that I can't stand playing for long. It doesn't help tying games to Steam or some other online account, exclusive DLC, and other ways of making it hard to buy a second hand PC game as well. For Steam, I mostly just look for the summer and Christmas sales now.

Services that let you "borrow" from a library of games for a fixed fee a month would be interesting (a games "netflix"), but it'd be better if they had a way of guaranteeing you could keep the game in your account permanently and wouldn't be taken off the service with no notice. I'm not a fan of yet another DRM service or any DRM at all, but something like Metaboli but owning it without their DRM, or some way for your purchase to get validated on all the other online sellers so you're not afraid of losing all your games there if they go out of business, get bought out, or you unwittingly accept a stolen gift and lose thousands worth of purchases.

At least without proper demos, reviews, or money-back guarantees for expensive games, I don't know of any other fair way consumers can employ caveat emptor if they can't properly evaluate it before purchase. It's a hassle and apparently rare event to get a refund on Steam or other online services. I mean, if the game's already been out for a while, it's not like you're getting an early copy to give to your cracker buddies. On the other hand, it'd be a way for pirate sites to piggy-back of Steam if all that needed torrenting was the crack... so maybe a refund with some b/w costs factored in at worst. They could at least let you "return" it within a couple hours worth of playing it (or some percentage of the total length). It gets even better when the extra DRM from the publisher is disclosed weeks after the game's been sold and people are complaining of being locked out. Or things like the old GFWL service that had limited installs, which they only disclosed through forum posts and then people from unsupported countries were still SOL.

Having no DRM is only one part of the equation, I think. The other is having a big enough presence and good will so it'd feel like stealing from your buddy if you pirated the game. And the game not being garbage in the first place also helps.

Funny though that GOG wouldn't be able to sell a lot of games DRM free if it weren't for the cracks out there...

Fact is, I can afford my gaming habit. I buy 5-7 games a year tops. Seeing how companies like Ubisoft crackdown on pirates, I'd much rather pay a company like CDPR.

Same here. All Ubi does lately is teach me delayed gratification, so if I actually want to buy their game, I wait for it to go on sale for around $5 on Steam, and even then it doesn't always feel quite so worth it. With everything still needing to run on consoles, it's not as if the graphics from a few years back are significantly worse either.

Hard topic.

Piracy is bad for new developers who are entering the market, or small time developers, or indie developers. Some times leaving those developers crippled financial or ideologically to make future games, their development houses permanently closed.

Citing the above, people who pirate the above games (with the pro tag *test game before you buy*) should be kicked in the ARSE with a boot all the way upfront to the north pole.

Great games like Uplink hacker, and Defcon was heavily pirated (one time there were 20,000 seed for this..20,000 people who were sharing it and not to mention the peers more than thrice that number)...did they buy the game!..99% of them nope (if they did the next game from the dev house would have already been here)..thou the developing house didn't close permanently, it does leave a bit of a scar when good games made from an idea just goes for free when you worked and soiled it with your sweat.

All one gets from Pirating is, prolongating the cycle at which the next game is made by the same devs.

But the same couldn't be said for already established companies (especially publishers), whose main aim is to make money no matter the quality of the game they sell!. Or by charging extra ordinary price for an average/medicore game and then on top of the original buyout charge around 1/4th of the price for every DLC on forth bundling them with EULA clauses which ranges from needing permanent internet connections to play or getting a permanent game ban for mentioning that their game is bad. <----- by moral standards pirate these games, they are shit anyways..

Generally people should be educated about, what they get by buying this game or that...and how buying that bad product encourages the same cycle (people buy 1,000,000 copies of a bad game, publishers only look at financial/count statistics and push to developers to make the same game or similar game...people again buy those copies).

-Edit-

/me is currently playing Quest for Glory II, The Official Remake..occasionally scratching his butt with Dragon Age 2 DVD!!!.

Amm...And how do they explain when you switch your Internet host, or you have to move? Anyway, you switch IP too, and there wasn't any selling action.
signed. Most of all, agreed.

Don't know what you mean. Usually you register your game to an account with a username and a password, so it doesn't matter how you access the internet to log into this account.

well, NM, I thought it tracks you after IP, and not after registering methods only.But hey, you can make multiple registers about one game (I personally have 3 accounts on EA about C&C 3 KW, which were made accidentaly, but exist).

True, you can do that. But the games are designed to give you disadvantages then. For instance: The free DLC codes that came with Mass Effect 2 can only be registered one time for one account. So if you're then logging in using a different account you wont have these DLCs. And if you sell the game and don't sell your account data, too (which you usually cannot do unless you make a new account for every single game) then the buyer misses those DLCs as well.

And here comes our mighty Digital Jack Sparrow,the king of Piracy, and offers and full quality of free downloadable DLCs from all over the net! Even if your second hand provider cannot grant you these "little" privileges! :P

Anyway, for me I couldnt play ME2 through with DLCs because some "serious" problems, and had to download pirated version. lame:D

Wow. I just spend about twenty minutes writing a wall of text that explained why DRM has absolutely nothing to do with the prevention of illegal downloads and twice this stupid window closed on me, deleting the entire thing.

Well, anyways, as I have already said before (on this board as well) DRM is actually all about eradicating the second-hand market for video games. If this is still news to anyone and you want to learn more about this then ask me to retype my rant. Otherwise I’m too pissed off right now to do it again on my own accord.