I get ID'ed at bars all the time. Does that mean I can't drink the beer I paid for? Only if I'm underage or don't have an ID.

Do you get ID'd when you open your six pack at home that you were already ID'd to puchase in the first place?

Are you retarded or something?

Good ideas, but please try not to glorify piracy by saying its cool to be a "carnivore". If you only buy games without DRM because that's what you want, then you are doing exactly the right thing. That is as long as you aren't stealing the other ones.

Well, if they didn't exist, they wouldn't be needed. They aren't really necessary. Herbivores would find some other way to control their populations. Carnivores started as parasites of autotrophic species, and then the two co-evolved. The reason carnivores exist is that they can. They may serve a purpose now. But, originally, they were pirates.

On the other hand, I don't see our favorite pirates as ever contributing to the software ecology. They are more like the influenza of games. There's no mutualism or even commensalism there, and there will almost certainly never be.

Pirates will never destroy a company while there is still a legitimate demand for the service it provides.

Err... you know, I spend a LOT of time developing a high quality mod/addon for the Sins of a Solar Empire. And I mean, high-quality, on par with what you get with the vanilla version (or at least I so aim). And you know what, I sort of doubt there is a couple of million dollars waiting for me out there as a reward for my effort.

I do it for free. Because I love the game, I love to spend my creative energy that way and to top it all, other people get to have fun with what I make in the end.
That you have to spend top dollar on quality is simply not true. What companies spend money on is actually fluff.

You can make a shallow and boring game which looks great, and you can also make a deep and fun game which was made practically without a budget. The fluff, the superb voice acting, crisp visuals, great sound effects, that costs money. Its a bit sad, but you can make a lot more money as a graphic artist than as a writer, because *everyone* wants their games to look good, while the storytelling takes a back seat.

So when we take all this into account, your claim that pirates decrease the quality of games we see simply does not stand. You can make a great game in your garage. Sure, it won't look like Crysis, but it doesn't have to. Quality means more than just expensive special effects. It means depth, it means creativity, and you know what?
People who have the urge to express themselves creatively do not care too much about making millions of dolars. Big publishing companies do. But they do not make games.

I'd say it is actually the big publishers who have the longer track record of destroying the quality of games, than pirates.

Well, I think I ought to say my piece...

1. The EULA of most programs states that it is OK to modify the game that you own at your own risk; ergo no-cd/DVDs are perfectly legitimate in my book, as long as you bought/own a legit copy.

2. I think that it's pretty friggin' ridiculous that a PC gamer is supposed to spend even more money to get more licenses if they want to play games over a LAN connection when you're dealing with manufacturers such as EA. Many manufacturers aren't too strict along these lines, and I thank them. However, if I was playing it on console, it would have split-screen or other such multiplayer capability a lot of the time, ergo I believe keygens are acceptable as well.

3. Some companies' DRM is a bit ridiculous as well. I have, on many cases, wanted to make a backup of my games, because I have younger siblings who have broken 2 of my games thus far. However, I am just forced to pray that my discs aren't thrown onto the floor and stepped on/run over, etc. because often the CD copy protection is too stringent and I cannot create a reliable image on my PC due to my recent hard drive failures. I would like to be able to copy the discs for legitimate reasons, so I think programs like Alcohol or Daemontools are just fine.

4. On game borrowing: if it was a console game, the developers wouldn't care if you and your friends set up a sort of gaming commune and shared the games around; yet another reason why keygens should be legal or they shouldn't force you to install the software onto only 1 or 2 machines.

That said, I do think that sites dedicated to downloading full versions of games that you do not own is pushing it. If you want a game, support the developers that put effort into making it, k? If you enjoyed the game, let them know!

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of you make fun of me for this, but I'm just stating how things should be. People should police themselves, but they won't in the foreseeable future...

For free, no. Although I could argue that many professional teams start out either as modding teams or volunteer teams, both of which work for free initially. Some years back, when I was just starting out with the graphics, I had the opportunity to witness a formation of one such team. Guys making a fantasy RTS game, programmers, sound and graphic artists, writers, all pitching in with their skills and free time to work on their dream.
Many don't make it, but some do - and later on we read about big publishers buying them out and stiffling all that creative energy in the name of the allmighty dollar with "smart" business strategies such as rushing the product out before it is finished because Christmas is coming.

Games are interactive art. As such, they intrinsically should escape pricing, deadlines, rushing, target audiences and all those things which "guide" their creativity when creativity clearly should be kept wild and free.
Unfortunately, the bigwigs at the publishing companies do not see it that way. They only see numbers and bottom lines.

As for Mass Effect... don't always believe what the game PR tells you. They tend to be like the ancient greek historians - always multiplying the figures by a factor of 10, or in the case of Mass Effect, 100. I took time playing through and unless those novels have 2 pages each, I sort of missed on the whole 90 000 pages of written or spoken text (average novel is about 300 pages).
You've seen it many times if you are a gamer.

Hundreds of units! (actually, only about fifty in all)
Many new foes! (five in total)
...and so on.

If you want to see a game which does have several novels (still not 300) worth of dialogue, and general text in it, check out Albion. I never finished it, because it was so long. Had a blast playing it though.

Bottom line: money can buy you "technical" stuff. Great engine, great tools (licences for professional development tools tend to provoke a groan in anyone who is on a limited budget), big teams of professionals.
But money can't buy you ideas. Nor talent. Creativity is also outside of its paying power. And these things stand at the core of a great game.

I don't care about the fluff. I care about the art that are games. And *that* pirates will never destroy, just like copycats can never destroy an artist's need to express themselves. People will always make games because people like to play games. End of story.

You could say the same for some businesses and governments as well. Some people even say the same about entire countries. Personally, I'm indifferent to piracy. Is it good? No. But I've got enough experience with software and media to understand where it comes from. The whole concept of copyright is based on morality. Creativity by people for people. Large businesses are not moral. It is just not a concept that is familiar to them. Small businesses allows the morality of the owner(s) and workforce to shine through in it policies. Big businesses don't allow this by nature and many important decisionmakers in big business have questionable morality themselves.


Disapprove. When I grew up (15-20 years ago), piracy was a large problem as well. It was also the only solution for most people. No internet, modems were rare and dogslow and only a handful of stores in the cities. Getting a game wasn't easy, except on school. You could find any game there, and usually when someone got their hands on the latest, everyone knew it within a few days. And the quality in terms of gameplay in that time was better than most games now. Even the graphics and music were great, if you take the limitations of that time into account.


AFAIK, games do not have to be cheap per sé, but they have provide value-for-money. That is one of the things most mainstream software fails to do, but smaller outfits like Stardock seem to get right. Value-for-money, communication and support, not treating customers as criminals or idiots; those are usually signs of a healthy relationship between a business and its customers.

You evidently have no understanding of the concept of rationality.
It is perfectly rational for someone to pay money for an inferior product than one they could get for free from a pirate (by inferior product, I'm referring to DRM and other copy protection measures on the non-pirated version). Why is it rational? Because of the costs associated to them of obtaining+using a pirated version. For example the time+effort cost in locating the pirate version, downloading it, etc.; The negative utility they may well suffer from doing something they know to be illegal; the risk they (believe that they) are undertaking that the pirate version may contain other undesirable elemnts, e.g. give them a virus or something.

The individual is acting irrationaly if and only if they believe using the pirate version of the game would provide them with more utility than the legal version, and yet they get the legal version instead of the pirate version.

@Slydrivel

go back to 4chan and troll there, your attitude about piracy is that of some non existent guru. People pirate anything and everything. Internet piracy is just a new forum of it. It's always existed and always will. If companies understand that fact and just roll their shit out without DRM then if they make a quality product people will buy it.

ps I pirate all the time and I could care less that all of you like to pretend you pay for everything you have. I'm sure you iTunes every song you've ever listened to.

Anti-piracy people get off that high horse.

And Pirates stop feeding the trolls like Slydrivel

The biggest factor in a games development is talent. A budget makes the game pretty. It does not determine the fun. Can anyone think of a big budget game more fun than super mario or goldeneye or starcraft. For me, if a game's graphics are too pretty I know it will be much lauded as amazing, but most likely be amusing at best, and not brilliant or even fun.

Make games worthy of being bought(like sins{which is still too pretty}) and ill buy it.