[QUOTE="dukedren"]

Another thing is, I believe most pirates wouldn't buy the game anyway if they couldn't pirate it. If I don't have those 60$ to buy a game, I don't have them. That's it. I might pirate the game, and the developers won't get the money,

belboz

You are the second person making that point. And you are wrong. If a people is unwilling/unable to spend $50-60 to buy a game, all they have to do is wait a year or so and the prices is now $30. If they wait a little longer, they will find it in the bargain bins for $10. It really is that simple.

Not wanting to wait a year to play the latest and greatest, is not a valid moral excuse for pirating. But let's stretch that a little. I would guess that people who pirate the game at launch, don't even later pay for the game by buying the discounted edition, and therefore still don't pay the developers.

Might be true where you live, but not here. The only games that are sold at discount prices (even after a year or two) are games I wouldn't even pirate, not now, not when they were released. CoD2 still sells at 50$ for example, I checked a couple of weeks ago. I still believe my point stands. If I couldn't pirate the games I did pirate, I wouldn't buy them anyway. not now, not in a year, not never. A game that is truly worth buying in my opinion (Spore I'm going to buy as soon as possible for example), I will buy at launch. But most are not.

And

"So your saying that people only pirate the bad games and buy the good ones? Your saying that if a thief really enjoys a item they will go and buy it instead of stealing it? You honestly think that these people arent the same people who steal from their own families? A thief is a thief. A low denominator of our species like a cockroach that will both take in the darkness the trash and the good stuff."

Yeah, of course, a person who downloads video games is a madman and a danger to society and should be executed on spot. Believe it or not, a game truly worth buying is a game pirates will buy.

I don't know if anyone said this but I'd thought I'd point this out. Torrent sites do not host copyrighted material. They host torrents which LINK to material that may or MAY NOT be illegal. That is why they cannot be taken down. The sites do not know what content is linked through that torrent. They are merely a database for them. EXACTLY like Google. They just make it a little bit easier by compiling everything together. So there is nothing illegal being done by them.

Anyway, on the subject of piracy. I think Stardock is going the right direction. They don't require a disc in the drive to play, but to get updates you need to register with their site, which is impossible if you downloaded an illegal version. Of course this will only work if you make a good game. So maybe it will be incentive for companies to make better products. That or they will release their product intentionally broke so you have to download a patch (or 2 or 3 or 4....) to make the game work properly. Thereby nullifying the pirates. Until they learn how to crack it, that is.

howlrunner13

Meh, those updates Stardock released were cracked too. On the other hand IMO they're approach is way better than draconian copy protection (Which doesn't work anyway :P).

[QUOTE="tm0054"]

How about this:

You get a different activation code for every level of the game. When you move on to the next level, the previous level is wiped from the hard drive so that only one level of the game is in your hard drive (downloading the new level on the fly) at any point (and the initial download would only put a single level in your hard drive). When you move to the next level, or return to the previous level you have to enter a 255 character key. Also, each level would require files stored on the game dev's web site that would never actually be saved in your local hard drive so you would of course have to be online to play it.

The point is - there is a fine line between protecting a game and irritating your legit users. Personally I prefer to always pay for my games. The devs deserve compensation for their work, and you never know what other junk may be in a pirated game. Who knows what you might put on your system. I agree that $60 is way too much for most video games but luckily that is rarely ever the price tag for a PC game. You can get tons of great games for 10-30 dollars.

gamerguy845

sorry, but that suggestion is really bad due to the fact that people (like me) would be outraged of putting CD keys in every hour just to play a game. And the fact we can't even have the data

Your sarcasm meter is broken.

Another thing is, I believe most pirates wouldn't buy the game anyway if they couldn't pirate it. If I don't have those 60$ to buy a game, I don't have them. That's it. I might pirate the game, and the developers won't get the money, but I might not pirate it and the developers won't get the money either.

And to whoever said Steam is uncrackable? Well, wrong.

[QUOTE="GodLovesDead"][QUOTE="Philmon"]

My suggestion would be to create a "Black Ops" team that would flood the torrents with copies of the games with a time delayed virus hidden within it. It needs to be a nasty virus though, one that would destroy the CPU/GPU by turning off the fan and overloading the CPU/GPU (need to get around the motherboard safety somehow).

Philmon

Of course I have a justifiable reason to complain.

That's incredibly illegal. Not to mention cruel.

Hence the creation of the "Black Ops" team, and hey if you are going to steal software worth thousands of dollars (because lets face it, we are not talking only about one or two games here) then you have no justifiable reason to complain if they fry your computer.

Of course I have a reason to complain. Have you ever stolen anything? Anything at all? bet you have. If you stole a bit of candy from a store and some black ops guy jumped out and shot your foot, how would you feel about it?

My suggestion would be to create a "Black Ops" team that would flood the torrents with copies of the games with a time delayed virus hidden within it. It needs to be a nasty virus though, one that would destroy the CPU/GPU by turning off the fan and overloading the CPU/GPU (need to get around the motherboard safety somehow).

Philmon

Yeah, of course, kill my 200$ motherboard, and 100$ CPU for downloading a game. Fortunately this kind of things is illegal. If it wasn't EA would already be doing that. :P

TheBigBadGRIM:

"2) The only other way to reduce piracy is for demos to be available for 100% of all PC games. Currently there are NOT enough PC demos so gamers can't make a decision whether to buy the game or not. Fearing they will regret wasting $50 and regret purchasing the game, they will decide to download the full game illegally to both satisfy their wallets and their craving for the game. Now don't think this will greatly reduce PC gaming piracy. This will reduce it by a noticable amount but not as much as Solution 1."

That won't work, unless demos actually get better. They need to be either longer, or multiplayer, or just show the game better. As it stands today, demos are pieces of crap. The last good demo I played is dungeon siege 2. It gave a solid one hour of gameplay, which is enough time to judge the game, and enjoy it. Demos that last 10 minutes, or just give you the first stage of a game (which is mostly tutorial usually) just don't cut it. Of course giving a hour of gameplay is a problem when the full game is 5-8 hours, which leads to my previous post about short games.

The idea about an online renting service is good, but it must be completely secure, uncrackable, well made and shouldn't be too much of a hassle to work with. I have never used steam, so I can't really tell how good it is, but based on many rants I've seen here and on other boards it has problems.

Of course, to make any sense such service should be dirt cheap, and maybe offer a discount if you actually buy the game after you rent it.

The two ways to kill piracy are to actually make things worth buying -- like schu said, or cutting the price dramatically. Any copy protection till this day failed horribly with protecting the game, and the one that did actually help (Starforce) created too much other problems.

"hell, even if games costed 5$ ppl wold still rather have them for free..."

Wrong. I'll confess that I don't buy most games I play (Hell, I pretty much don't play video games anymore), but at 5$ a game, at 10$ a game, or at 20$ a game I'd happily pay for it. At 60$? Only something truly extraordinary.