Yes, that's exactly my point... but seeing as you already got that, here's credit due.
Mark Rein On The Pervasiveness of UT3 Piracy
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Yes, that's exactly my point... but seeing as you already got that, here's credit due.
You hit the nail on the head. For one, 40 million rejections doesn't equal 40 million pirated copies (multiple attempts, false positives, etc). And yes, for largely online games like UT3, denying pirated games from playing online is a large step in thwarting piracy.
I was talking with some friends just the other day about this. Games like Crysis suffer somewhat because they have nonexistent (or in the case of Crysis, broken) multiplayer gameplay. It's draconian and, perhaps for the companies more importantly, damn near impossible to stop the breaking of local, on-the-person's-PC copying protection. However, it's comparably trivial to enforce legitimate copies when authenticating to a central online server browser or system. And if the game is good enough, people will easily want to get on that system.
As the counter-example to Crysis, for considering how relatively under-hyped and niche ET:QW is, it has done fairly well, and has a very healthy player base so that a person intrigued by the game can pick up the game now and not have to worry that there's no one to play with (a la S.T.A.L.K.E.R.). It has potentially longterm popularity, and a style of popularity which ensures that there will be purchases despite piracy; in fact, potentially due to piracy, there's even a torrent for the Linux version around I believe and I honestly think that will directly contribute to new players buying the game, since they'll be able to try out the entire game on their platform of choice. It isn't the kind of game that's everyone's cup of tea, but I've seen many people try it out and much to their own surprise go "wow, I HAVE to play this online". Add in the very comprehensive stats pages and you have a game where any pirated version is basically an extended demo.
Personally I could pirate xbox360 games, but I don't. Primarily not for altruistic reasons, rather because I truly enjoy the functionality of Live (I don't enjoy the functionality of my xbox360 breaking, or the functionality of customer support denying me the warranty, but that's neither here nor there). The solution to piracy is not making it technically impossible to do it (there's only so far you can go before any further steps directly inconvenience paying customers and yet are likely broken anyways) but to have a system where people want the whole system. Once UT3 comes out for Linux (I'm a believer!) I will most certainly buy it, because despite the problems it does have I'm certain that it will be a joy to play online.
Of course, this does seem to throw single-player games to the wolves, I'll admit. But a complete lack of online functionality does seem a bit artificial these days, and dear god if the pressures of the marketplace force companies to finally start adding Co-Op to more games then I think we all win. I can't be the only person who still makes and plays Unreal co-op with friends on a regular basis, and it's largely because such a brilliant and customizable co-op game hasn't come out since. Co-op makes everything better. Hell, Halo 2 is playable, even fun, with co-op.
Okay, I'm starting to ramble, so I'll wrap this up. In a nutshell, 40 million == meaningless number in relation to figuring out piracy, online-heavy non-broken games defeat piracy anyways (most pirates in those cases are those who haven't played the game yet, or would never buy the game for full price anyways), and the world needs more co-op (can game piracy promote co-op? our report at 11, and the results may surprise you).
I thought it to be quite accurate in summing up his remarks. If I were going to write an ostentatious headline I'd have said something like "Mark Rein Decries 40 Million UT3 Pirates"
I'd honestly and sincerely be interested to know what kind of a title you think would most accurately describe the conversation?
see answer below...
Or a solution off the top of my head however. Each official CD key, ones generated by Epic/Midway whomever, are kept on a central server. The CD key is then linked to an account (like steam) or perhaps your Gamespy account. The game then verifies that A. the cd key you are using is valid. Meaning that it wasn't created by some random generator. Then B. ensure it is used with the correct account, Gamespy or whomever.
Now that I actually read what I was thinking in my head, what I described is basically, Steam. Seems to me that Steam/Valve has it figured out better then most game studio's.
IMO, Epic and many other game studios have done pretty much nothing to prevent piracy. It gets very little development time and it's thought about pretty much last (this is just a guess based on my observations). There have been no new techniques attempted to prevent piracy by Epic that I'm aware of. They are still using methodologies from the late 90's. Pass out a cd key and hope for the best. Guess what, that DOESN'T work. How can you say Epic or most other game studio's are taking piracy seriously when they haven't done anything visible to prevent it. Unless I'm missing something. At least an effort was made for BioShock albeit it was not executed very well. But you can clearly see THEY took piracy seriously with their product. I can't say the same for other Epic or other companies/products. They only say they are taking it seriously when they find out how many people have tried to pirate their software and how much money is being lost.
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If you ask me, the (*partial) solution to piracy is not makeing more and more draconian anti piracy measures, thease allways just end up punishing the legetimate users, whereas the pirates, thouse lucky bastards, get to download a cracked version that has none of thouse annoyances, its practically promoting piracy!
Instead you need to make it easier to buy the game than it is to pirate it, and you need to reward people for buying, make sure buying means people get cool things they want.
Steam really seems to have most of this covered actually, its easy and hassle free, and dev's could certainly release extra goodies as steam updates.
* Partial because some piracy is not motivated by sloth or greed, but by poverty, there's a good reason why piracy is popular in Russia and other poor countries.
Instead you need to make it easier to buy the game than it is to pirate it, and you need to reward people for buying, make sure buying means people get cool things they want.
Steam really seems to have most of this covered actually, its easy and hassle free, and dev's could certainly release extra goodies as steam updates.
* Partial because some piracy is not motivated by sloth or greed, but by poverty, there's a good reason why piracy is popular in Russia and other poor countries.
The dev teams need to put their own considerations to piracy, and not rely on third party antipiracy technology, though. Remember starforce? It was (supposedly) one of the more effective copy protections, but the stealth drivers it installed on people's computers literally caused their optical drives to fail. Try too hard (or without careful thought) to prevent piracy and you'll alienate LEGITIMATE gamers alongside the pirates.
It's a fine balance that's hard to achive, reducing piracy without burdening the honest consumer.
It's a fine balance that's hard to achive, reducing piracy without burdening the honest consumer.
An email address for a name? Who told you that? You use an email address to log into GS, yes, but the name can be anything you wish, including things like: Gamespy sucks! if you wish.
..........
If everyone does move over to steam, would there be a possibility for someone to buy the game over Steam, then for some reason lose his access to the internet, maybe he can't afford to keep paying for it, then have a HDD crash or get a different machine or for some reason no longer have the game installed anymore (perhaps to make room for something else) and as a result no longer have any access to the game he paid for, since he can't re-download it from Steam? (Presuming that downloading an entire game over a 56k is an absurd idea.)
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It would be nice if steam gave you an option to get the disc for added price if that is indeed the issue.
Apparently they made an error on their price listings for COD4 here listing the US price so everyone thought it was a bargain and then got a rude awakening when the bill came through at double what they paid
Apparently they made an error on their price listings for COD4 here listing the US price so everyone thought it was a bargain and then got a rude awakening when the bill came through at double what they paid
That seems very far fetched on piracy, just for fun I looked for copies of UT3 on ***** there are two copies on demonoid totaling 199 dls. Whats funny is that the demo trackers on ***** tracked 17000 dls. ***** had more but still was rather low number on pirating since ***** doent post dls ill base on seeder/leacher count ~790.
Lets compare to cod4, On ****there are 11 trackers totaling 5895 dls. TPB, just one tracker for that has more people than all the ut3 ones combined at 681 seeders and 946 leachers. The quick total i get is ~4356 active seeders/leachers.
One UT2004 tracker on ***** shows 53078 dls and has more seeders and leachers now than the UT3 torrents.
Overall UT3 doesn't even look like a successful pirated game either.
Do you honestly think that everyone who torrented it since November will stay online seeding so you could count them now?
As far as i know Steam is pirated too (because of the offline feature i assume?)
This can easily be countered with "unlockables", UT3 already have this and CoD4 used it extremely well.
If youre offline or uses a warezed copy you wont get the new character, weapon or map.
Pirates will never get the "unlockables" and those that play offline because they have a slow connection can leave the game online during the night or whatever.
One thing thats important though is that a feature like this MUST be easy to use and attractive to the customer.
PC gaming needs to get into the grey zone between Steam and MMO:s imho.
This can easily be countered with "unlockables", UT3 already have this and CoD4 used it extremely well.
If youre offline or uses a warezed copy you wont get the new character, weapon or map.
Pirates will never get the "unlockables" and those that play offline because they have a slow connection can leave the game online during the night or whatever.
One thing thats important though is that a feature like this MUST be easy to use and attractive to the customer.
PC gaming needs to get into the grey zone between Steam and MMO:s imho.
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CoD4's things are stored client-side. A simple reg hack will put you at level 55 with all the goodies unlocked.
Well, to be totally honest, seeing how Mark wasn't even quoted in the article and was not part of the accompanying interview, I hardly see how the thread should have been dubbed as it is. I find it odd that the author did not provide a quote from Mark, yet, he (the author) goes on to suggest that Epic was losing billions due to piracy, all without proof. Even more humorous is Mark claiming he never made the statement. I'll give Mark the benefit of the doubt. That said, where did the author get the information and why did he claim it came from Mark? Sorry, but this is bad journalism. I may not be an eloquent speaker or writer, but at least I would get my facts straight if posting such prose was my job (regardless of pay).
I'm not sure why you took my original comment to heart. I know you BU guys post these stories to get readership going. However, when I saw the thread title, my own heart sunk as I just knew I would end up reading a bunch of UT3/Epic bashing posts in the thread.
Definitely, in fact I played through all of Portal with an . . . uhhh . . . "legitimate copy" before I actually went out and bought it myself.
Isn't that a given around here, though? Or have I missed the two threads about Epic or UT3 that aren't hate? (Besides the "loving UT3 thread.")
My two cents on a numer of points:
1) As much as I dislike Mark Rein, (this has been said before btw) a few people need to remember that he didn't say most of this stuff.
2) I've been kicked from servers on a duplicate login false positive upwards of 10 times.
3) 40 million invalid keys != 40 million pirates, and more importantly 40 million invalid keys != 40 million lost sales - not by a very long way. This is incredibly irresponsible, biased and misleading journalism by TGD.
4) To those who are saying a) piracy means the death of PC gaming or b) that fighting piracy is easy, it doesn't and it's not. If piracy DOES mean the death of PC gaming, then PC gaming is absolutely going to die - there is no, repeat NO, way to stop piracy, ever. My view (like some other people have said) is that the industry needs to accept piracy as an inherent fact of life nowadays due to the nature of intellectual property + teh interwebs, and concentrate on making games better value, easy to buy, etc, and give more incentives to buy the game like continued support and downloadable content. Copy protection just pisses off legit users and will never stop piracy for more than a couple of days after release.
1) As much as I dislike Mark Rein, (this has been said before btw) a few people need to remember that he didn't say most of this stuff.
2) I've been kicked from servers on a duplicate login false positive upwards of 10 times.
3) 40 million invalid keys != 40 million pirates, and more importantly 40 million invalid keys != 40 million lost sales - not by a very long way. This is incredibly irresponsible, biased and misleading journalism by TGD.
4) To those who are saying a) piracy means the death of PC gaming or b) that fighting piracy is easy, it doesn't and it's not. If piracy DOES mean the death of PC gaming, then PC gaming is absolutely going to die - there is no, repeat NO, way to stop piracy, ever. My view (like some other people have said) is that the industry needs to accept piracy as an inherent fact of life nowadays due to the nature of intellectual property + teh interwebs, and concentrate on making games better value, easy to buy, etc, and give more incentives to buy the game like continued support and downloadable content. Copy protection just pisses off legit users and will never stop piracy for more than a couple of days after release.
So the 'best' copy-protection/anti-piracy measure = a good game with a community & developer that make people want to support the game by paying for it.
People can be convinced to pay a lot of money for substandard product as the iPod is one of these examples.
However when the person copying the game doesn't feel like he's doing anything that is inherently wrong there's no way you're going to be able to stop him from doing so regardless of how draconic the 'protection' is.
Why pay for anything if you can get it for free ... especially if it takes zero effort and zero risk ?
People can be convinced to pay a lot of money for substandard product as the iPod is one of these examples.
However when the person copying the game doesn't feel like he's doing anything that is inherently wrong there's no way you're going to be able to stop him from doing so regardless of how draconic the 'protection' is.
Why pay for anything if you can get it for free ... especially if it takes zero effort and zero risk ?
But that's not because Steam was hacked, it was because Portal is single player and people easily figured out how to remove Steam from the game, afaik.
I don't think Steam's "Valve Anti-cheat" has been cracked.