StarForce - The Other Side of CP Story - Thoughts ??

[Hertston]

ORIGINAL: Kizardvexius

"In my experience of writing games, it's not pirates ripping us off of our hard earned money, it's been publishers."
"So I hope you can excuse me if I don't lose sleep at night that some 15 year old might have downloaded my game while some executive at a company (or former company) is sailing on their boat paid for by my hard work. "

Hehe... I suspect there have been a few nods of agreement with that from those here involved in the industry [:D]


I will play devils advocate a little bit on the first post, although I do generally agree with it's sentiments

Now an industry figure for games (and this is a conservative figure) is that 70 out of every 100 games played (70%) is a pirate copy. Only 30% of people who play games play the legal version of any game. (This kind of puts most of you in the minority I think) I know from my work with various games companies that this is a solid stat.

Solid or not, there are, as they say, lies, damned lies and statistics. What that one conveniently misses is any account of how many of those playing the pirated game would actually ever have bought it ?. In a very few cases (say Doom 3), the answer is without doubt "a great many". In most cases though, the answer is very few. There are millions of kids (of all ages) out there who have huge "libraries" of downloaded games software, music, and movies. Most is forgotten immediately after downloading, and only a tiny fraction would ever have been purchased if the piracy option was not available. Piracy is bad news for publishers - but nowhere near as bad as those figures suggest.

Have you been to EB or Game etc lately? Noticed anything? The PC games section is getting smaller and smaller. One of the prime reasons for this is that console games are a much much safer bet for games companies in terms of piracy.

I think a far bigger factor is profit margin - console games are, and always have been more expensive than their PC counterparts, with no associated increase in production and distribution costs. Just as important is the ownership numbers - numbers of console users have been increasing far more rapidly than gaming PC (which these days can be a very different animal from a "family PC") users.

[Lucifuge]

Personally I wont ever buy any game that uses Starforce, too many past problems with it. On top of that way I look at it is if I buy a dvd or tv it doesnt come with a real life person to stand in my house to make sure I dont do something bad with those devices nor should the pc games that I PURCHASE. Im probably in minority with this and most people probably think whats the big deal, to me it is I dont like when software installs stuff on my system especially when this specific one doesnt seem to like my computer for some reason.

I dont buy a game to mess with and fiddle with to try and get its copy protection to allow me to run something I just bought, I dont have patiences or desire for that. Oh and for anyone who has followed Starforce there is an amazingly simple way to bypass it (that is pretty laughable that it works) which I had to use for a game I actually purchased...how lame is that that I had to resort to those 'evil' pirates to run something I bought because the software company was of no help.

[dinsdale]

ORIGINAL: Hertston
Solid or not, there are, as they say, lies, damned lies and statistics. What that one conveniently misses is any account of how many of those playing the pirated game would actually ever have bought it ?. In a very few cases (say Doom 3), the answer is without doubt "a great many". In most cases though, the answer is very few. There are millions of kids (of all ages) out there who have huge "libraries" of downloaded games software, music, and movies. Most is forgotten immediately after downloading, and only a tiny fraction would ever have been purchased if the piracy option was not available. Piracy is bad news for publishers - but nowhere near as bad as those figures suggest.

:thup: I agree completely. Software is the only industry where not only do they guess the pirated figures, but they also assume that every one of those mythical copies is a lost sale.

Back in the day, there used to be a newsgroup where people would post pirate copies of software they could never use, would never use, but wanted to have. Larger sized application, the greater the kudos from others. It always struck me as bizzare: people wanting to choke their harddrives with Fortran development suites or the latest Borland product. I'd say a lot of that is still going on: people download Doom, play for 5 minutes then move on.

Of course I might be wrong, but then I have as much chance of being accurate as the bull beign spewed from the CP industry. 70 out of 100 ROFL, did someone pick the number out of a hat [:'(]

I think a far bigger factor is profit margin - console games are, and always have been more expensive than their PC counterparts, with no associated increase in production and distribution costs.

Great point. No one seems to notice that with PCs, the scope of games keeps increasing. More complex, more graphics/art etc, but selling for the same price. A console is a fixed piece of hardware with a limited expectation of complexity, it's fixed dev costs are very appealing to publishers.

I would also add that PC games are becomming such a problem that people are buying consoles. *anecdotal evidence alert: * a friend of mine just bought an X-Box, he's a wargame guy from the earliest days of PC games, but he's done what he always swore he wouldn't. Instead of waiting for the next game which doesn't work, he's playing games which go into the CD and work immediately. Now I can't see myself ever doing the same, but the number of calls I get from friends who ask me to fix their PC after some disaster has struck convinces me that PC games are going to be niche products soon. Maybe it will be better that way. It was wargames and adventures which pioneered PC gaming in the 80's, maybe companies won't keep blaming pirates when all the pirates have switched to the next generation of consoles to play on.