Not really, the topic is still idiocy.

I don't even play trivia games and I know vastly more than needed to just guess that trees outnumber people by a factorial.  The estimated tree count as of 2007 was ~8 trillion.  Get over it.

Ok, the second part of this is just crap.  If I piss on a copy of the local regs, no one gives a shit.  If they do give a shit, it's their own fucking problem for being anal.  Law, civil law in particular, is not some sacred thing.  In most cases, it's a pile of crap written by idiots.  This country was founded because of stupid laws pissing people off.

The first part is the summation of my argument.  Just replace do with don't.  For all you know, someone died today because of something you did or didn't do.  Maybe you smiled at a pretty girl, got her distracted, and she was hit by a bus later.  Fact is relevant, wishful thinking is irrelevant.  You can't prove that internet piracy harms developers.  You can't even prove that it costs them profits.  All you can do is prove that people who didn't buy the game are still getting to play anyway.  Until that changes, the copyright argument is a bunch of whiners trying to force something on the rest of society with no regard for the unintended side effects.

The music industry boomed when Napster was letting people "steal" their music on a massive scale.  The logic is simple, it's as close to scientific fact as psychology gets.  A person is more likely to purchase something when they have had some level of interaction with it before hand.  This is why demo's exist, why songs are played across the airwaves, why samples are given away for new products in stores, why people bother to advertise in the first place.  It's not an either or scenario and you're going to have to get over that minor detail if you ever want to be even marginally intelligent in your arguments.

So what gives you the right to write in english?  I think you should have to come up with your own language, since the fact that it's been around for centuries and achieved saturation long ago is irrelevant.

You think in this little box that says "someone owns this because they say so" and completely ignore reality. The only reason someone owns Elvis' music is because that someone and a few other someones bribed a bunch of congressmen with the money they were making off of their copyright holdings they had nothing to do with creating in the first place.  Copyright is arbitrary.

Could is not would.  Could is could.

I could go buy a lottery ticket tomorrow, hit the jackpot, become a millionaire overnight, and buy a thousand games by Christmas.  I could start shitting gold bricks instead, that's probably more likely.  Would you guess that the odds are perhaps against either situation?  My Christmas budget is looking to be about $400 to spread around my relatives, I can probably afford to make another purchase this year for myself without adding difficulty to my shopping task.  Even if I go scrooge and send them coal instead, at max I'd buy around 10 games.

Reality is that I will make no more game purchases this year.  It's not a maybe, it doesn't hinge on the availability of the products, there's nothing significantly attractive enough to make me tighten my budgetary constraints.  If, tomorrow, I get a thousand games off the internet, who have I harmed?  No lost sales, not even potential lost sales.  Someone in return for nothing, with niether intent nor ability to procure it by other means regardless of the alternative.  The worst case scenario for the game developer in such a case is that none of the games I take interest me enough to go out and buy them.

[quote]As if something forces you to buy their products...and if you cannot resist pirating it instead you should rather go to some therapy since you are obviously addicted.[quote]

Congratulations, you just wiped out copyright enforcement.  Targetted discrimination against a mental illness violates anti-discrimination laws!

Logic and fact do not support the claim that piracy is harming the industry, shoving a stick up my ass does however.  I've already blacklisted two game companies for giving me shit, and I'll buy Sony music when hell freezes over.

Exactly, piracy has potential for harm.  As does every activity one does.  You could kill yourself sitting up in the morning, break a clot loose and give yourself a heart attack.  Going jogging to avoid the heart attack could burst a defective blood vessel in your brain.  You could kill a whole bunch of people by driving a car and having an accident through no fault of your own.  Will you get up and go about your life tomorrow morning?  Potentially, thousands of people will be depressed by this paragraph and end their own lives in despair!

Potential is what kids have before they go through public school.  Prove it.

You mean the item that I manufacture and distribute myself yet magically belongs to someone else because they bought an expiring copyright and bribed people to change the laws for them later?  Yeah, it sucks, but you're not as dumb as bodyless so you might figure this out eventually.

Or maybe they deserve a straight jacket?

A matter of scale.  $20 for a 40 year old movie, that, by original intent, should be public domain available for anyone to reproduce and costs cents to recreate, is an obscenity.  With the original intent, we'd have remastered versions of Star Wars that don't have stupid horse shit like Han Solo waiting for the bounty hunter to shoot first.  Competing remastered versions, the remastered copy would be copyrighted after all.

The potential effect of piracy is always being dragged about despite the evidence that says otherwise, yet the potential effect of copyright laws are irrelevant and have no bearing.  Is that about right?

Oddly enough, that's exactly the case, I boycott companies that piss me off.  Weird huh?

That last sentence of yours is just perfect.  Think about it a while, you should be able to figure it out.

I think what he meant was the converse: pirating is as good a protest as a boycott. It's not, but that's that your statement implied.

phychoak's argument is not that piracy doesn't cost a (relative) few sales, it's that piracy increases sales (by the preview factor) more than the sales it costs. Hell, he may even be right - I haven't seen numbers I trust one way or the other. I'm not even sure it's possible to get reasonably definite numbers on that - like in quantum mechanics, observing the event can influence the outcome.

He does discount the value of the bargin bin, though. Just because a person's not willing to pay full retail for a new release doesn't mean they won't pick it up 6 months later at discount - and it's still a lost sale.

Well, quite a thread we have here.

Unfourtanetly I think piracy will always be one step ahead of DRM  in the long run.  Not throwing numbers here, just putting my 22 years of gaming as an example.

Today's games have been hurt by piracy and DRM, yet I dare say DRM does more harm than good.  I kept hearing about how great Bioshock is for instance the other day, and I saw on the back of the box for the PC version about how it requires an Internet connection to activate.  I promptly put the box back and passed.  I don't trust online activation games since the Mass Effect fiasco (Where you had to activate your legitimate copy every 10 days).  Same thing with Dead Space.  I saw the Internet requirement and promptly bought it for PS3, then at least I don't have to deal with the joke that is DRM.  Some of you may say different about the DRM or how it's changed, I don't care, that's not the point.

The point is that when DRM gets too intrusive, it no longer bears interest to the developer, because it makes me, the legit customer, not buy it out of the simple notion that I just don't want to deal with the prostate exam that is DRM these days.  I don't like the idea of someone probing my computer to check and make sure I'm not a criminal.  I have enough anal exams for my computer that are called 'Viruses' and 'Trojans,' I don't need a legitimate coporation that makes millions of dollars a year examining me to make sure I did pay in upwards of 50+ dollars.  That's to me invasion of privacy and a sign that the company distrusts its own customers, I don't care how you word it.

The thing that pisses me off most about DRM is split into two main points.  One, companies like EA could completely DRM-free their software and still make more money off of them than most developers do.  Two, especially this, companies that spend all that time, energy, money, and profits could be using all that power to patching and updating the game before release.  "We have 43 known bugs for X game.  Should we fix it?  No, we have to make sure that the DRM is implemented so that the pirates don't steal our software, even though it gets cracked in a few days time anyway!"  Why put all that effort into a project that can and will be cracked in a short time?  I know you want to protect your software but come on, eventually you're going to hash it so that only a government organization can unlock it, and where will your sales be then?  People will retaliate and just not buy the game.  The simple fact is that I sympathize with companies like Ironclad and Stardock, because their game gets stolen, who's doesn't, but they're in the business in where they're screwed either way; there's just no easy way out of the situation.

Lol of course everyone who repeated to not agree with you is ignorant.

No i didnt. But the US arent the only nation with copyright law either.

I dont like that they are blaming piracy for every commercial failure. But obviously lost sales by piracy exist according to what ypu have written.

I never said that every pirated copy is a lost sale. But only a few lost sales are enough to prove that piracy does *some* damage. Try to dispove that.

Does that mean that i hardly make any absurd statements?

Anyway, you do not need "cyberbullying" laws for insults to be illegal. Such laws exists and dont depend on the medium by which the insult was made.

Just because you cannot afford what you stole does not make the stealing legal.

It still means the same: if you want to protest you can aswell boycott it legally without pirating it illegally. And if you want the industry to respect the law you should better do that yourself.

If you used your brain you you should be able to prove it. But no, you just insult again which looks like that you jsut made the statement because you tried to make an argument and there is nothing beheind it.

"There is risk in every single insignificant action taken" including not getting out of the bed. But what risk is in not pirating a game? Maybe getting bored but risking lost lsales of others instead means egoism.

And before we continue to make more quotetastic posts try to prove that no copyright system would be better than any current one. Else you will certainly come to the conclusion that outlawing piracy is still the better option than making the gaming industry dependent purely on the honest of the consumers or on steam like DRM systems. And that supporting the copyright law actually has benefits.

Circular reasoning, it's illegal thus it's bad, it's bad, thus it's illegal.  If you can't use your brain even to watch Star Wars and work through that absurd hatchet job of a butchered scene, you're truly beyond hope.  Lucas himself, the fucking idiot, has even stated that he wanted to "soften" his character.  That way the original trilogy fits better with the retarded emo crap 1-3 movies.

My parting shot.  Billions are spent on advertising every year, internet piracy is free of charge.  Pretend you won, I'm done bothering.

Dark, that's a substantially different case.  Commercial piracy in a country where copyright doesn't exist is an entirely different animal.

Btw restricting duplicating legal software is very easy, you just have to build in some hardware checks, like in consoles, again. But the point is - hardware makers are not interested in that kind of thing. Less software, less hardware sold, less profit for them. Thats a very simple equation. Why do you think Steve Jobs is for DRM-free music. cause he sells ipods! More music more ipods sold. Actual pirates have nothing to do with that again.

sorry for doublepost.

The thing is, if a new way to stop pirates is invented, a new way to circumvent that protection will be created by the pirates. SecuROM was suppose to end all piracy, instead pirates just take out the SecuROM. Every format used today(DVD, Blu Ray, HD DVD) was all advertised as uncrackable. Well that didn't last very long, did it? Calling something uncrackable is like putting a million dollar bounty on cracking it. All of a sudden all the hackers try to see who can crack it first.

The sad thing is, Pirates will always get what they want, no matter what. Developers are just gonna have to learn to live with it and do what Stardock did; If you can prove you bought the game, you get extra bonuses(patches)

Thats totally not true. There are many working and not cracked protections fully operational as of today. Look at satellite receivers card protections. Look at consoles. Yes they can be cracked, and some of them are, but the amount of piracy is minimal cause its hard to do. The only thing which is needed for PC games is hardware makers playing along. But they are not interested, it causes less profit. Simple as cake.

For me, it's all about the preview factor.  If a game has a demo available, I'll download it to try it out.  If not, I'll find a "free" copy and try it out.  If the game is good (IMHO), then I ALWAYS buy a copy.  I want to support the things I feel are worthwhile, but please give me a demo.  If the game sucks, then I don't feel bad about the copy, and toss it in the digital trash.

My bottom line thinking, is that great games will attract gamers and their money!

This deals mainly in morality, where it is impossible to make any arguement or statement without contradictimg yourself.

I am no robin hood. On occasion, I steal, lie and cheat for no purpose noble. The arguments put forth by pirates in this thread are embarrassing. the problem with the theft of a creative work is that you are not stealing a physical product, but rather the potential for an experience. a computer game and a song are not far removed. if you hear the song on the radio, or play the game at your friends house, the expierience is limited and subsidized. the radio and your friend have both payed money to have access to the expierience. if you borrow a cd (music or game, take your pick) from said friend, you are in theory deparving them of the expireience of it's use.

to me the grey zone occurs when something like youtube comes along. when someone uploads a song whos only vidoe is a picture of the cover of the album (ex, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBbyITzbKh8), does it fall under the radio category because you cannot distrubute the media, or the CD, because you can listen to it whenever you please? if it is CD, then I have just engaged in an act of mass piracy, and ifit is radio, I just engaged in an act of piracy because I distributed it to you, who would presumeably not have access to this experience. whoops.

that being said, I do delibertly pirate some things, or seek freeware alternatives. I have a pirated copy of Alcohol 120% because it makes me laugh. I have a pirated copy of Vampire THe Masquerades Bloodlines, which I have not seen in a store for over a year. I visit Abandonware sites. For me, piracy is a means to acquire things I would not otherwise be able to find. except for the copy of Alcohol, which I keep for irony's sake. I love how stardock treats its customers, and disprove of Luckmann abusing their hospitality.

The only reason consoles don't get pirated as much is that the games for them all suck, once more and more dev teams run away like lil pussies with their tails between their legs we'll see a substantial increase in piracy.

Here's another look at the Asian market for PC games:

As far as I know, Asian game developers are the only developers in the world to offer MMOPRG software for free.  In fact, a substantial number of Asian games can be played ALSO FOR FREE.  When your system software is free for everyone, it can't be pirated.  Simple and effective.  In fact, you WANT pirates to host your software platform on their servers so you can approach as close to 100% gamer saturation as possible.

So how do you make money?

Well, there's pay-to-play, but that approach is so old school, and still prone to the delivery of widespread cracks and hacks.  The new wave involve games that are completely free to play - no costs.  But you get product placement of sponsored company products in-game.  You also usually will need to pay real money for virtual items - better swords, guns, clothes and such.  You can still play the core experience for free, but the premiums cost, and the companies make money.

In our local LAN shop, WOW is hardly ever played.  It's not considered an entertaining enough venue.

Imagine this: what if, just speculating, Galactic Civilizations 2, DA, and ToA were all made available for free?  Wouldn't that be awesome?

Yes, but how would Brad pay the bills?  He would include a basic package of ship styles in the game reminiscent of Star Trek and Star Wars.  Or perhaps he creates technologies that recall Nokia or Honda products.  Aside from that, he puts up other ship styles for download at $3 apiece.  Sure, fans could make their own styles, but frankly, there aren't that many out there that are any good.  He could sweeten the deal by including custom parts with each sale - suited to each style.

He can sell additional races, tech trees, mods, and scenarios individually, while distributing the exact same content the game already has for free.  Yes, it would entail more work, but this is fundamentall different: it's the add-ons that generate the income, so income generation is continuous so long as the game remains fresh and interesting.  Heck, he can even sell custom robots for the tech screen, custom interface looks and adjustments - those wouldn't take a long time to code and he would still make a ton of money by leeching you dry of a few bucks here and there.  Before you know it, you've spent over a hundred dollars on the game over just a year, but you'd be happy because you have a great game, and you'd customized it so it reflects your tastes and personality - the Starbucks of galatic conquest.

If it comes to it, he can even sell the actual expansions for a small fraction of the price - say, $10 for each expansion.  You want a modified spy system?  Yours for $3.  Worth it, right?  So cheap.  Spankin new weapons with spankin new animation? $3.  Worth it, right?

If Brad's platform game is popular enough with the gaming crowd and he delivers and reports on a large enough fan base, he can now approach Lucas with a proposition: I have market penetration.  I will sell you a campaign-version of Clone Wars, to be hosted on my site, for less advertising dollars than nationwide billboards - and your market will be playing it everyday until your movie debuts!

That's practically an irresistable offer!  You WILL have primetime attention glued to your product advertisement for weeks, and underground publicity like no one's business.  You can even hold tournaments based on the mod to generate even more publicity.

Then Brad can turn around and offer the very same campaign to us for $3 a download, and we'd bite, of course, since it's so cheap.  Money on both ends.

If you've ever heard of a little game called dwarf fortress, then you know the power of free games. 

Toady_one the dev of Dwarf fortress makes so much money off of donations that he was able to quit is day job.