I Hate Software Piracy
 

*sigh*

I hate software piracy almost as much as having Bush reelected.

I love it, I hate Kerry, but I also don't love Bush. Does this mean Piracy is related to the US presendential elections? :crazy:

you Sr. are a fool:crazy:

The worst thing about priacy is the effect it has on future production. Sooner or later developers are going to ask why they should spend so long developing a game for someone to rip them off. Software pirates are getting all the benefits without doing any of the work. :(

If a game is worth playing then it's worth shelling out your hard-earned cash to both thank those making it for their hard work and to encourage them to make more. A gaming company without income is a gaming company that won't produce anything else. You might make a quick saving downloading pirate software now but you'll end up paying in the long run when there's nobody left to pruduce the games you love.

i sometimes think that they should stop making games for the PC and do nothing but console games. pirating games is much harder and happens less frequently on consoles. this theory of mine wouldn't really work unfortunately.

Please don't say that. I just spent about 2000 bucks upgrading my PC. Plus the PC platform started gaming like we know it today. It's not fair for us who pay for our games to be denied our favorite platform, just coz of a bunch of pirates. :(

i know what you mean, i upgrade my PC every year, it gets realy expensive and i to would like to sit back and play a ngame with out the worry of piracy

That's a myth. Unfortunately the "©0|\|$01€ 1337\/\/@®€z11!" community is extremely busy, and pretty much any console game for both PS2 and XBox is available on the internet (and quite easily, unfortunately) before or at the official release. It's not uncommon for people to have chipped Xbox's with 160GB HDs containing virtually every game (on hd), and especially in the console warez scene money is being made from the sale of these games worldwide.

If they stop making games for the pc, the "$©€n3" will be all the more busy with console releases ;)

Are you a console fanboy?

No way about stopping making PC games! If they do that, we won't have deep games that we can mod the life out of -- like NWN series, Elder Scrolls series, HL series, Doom series, and any other game w/ a SDK.


GTA:SA and Halo 2 was pirated.

I don't have to say much more. If anything, pirating on the console is becoming more common.

i am in no way a console fan boy, i would just want to see pirates stop. people are more likely to pirate a PC game rather a console game because a PC game requires no modification. you can download an already cracked PC game you cant do that to a console game.

Pirates won't stop.

I'm sick of piracy b/c it is driving me crazy to see SafeDisc3 and other crap-tastic piracy protection programs cause problems b/c people have Nero, Roxio, or whatever program installed and the game won't run (Sims 2, PK, etc) b/c there's a conflict!

Just b/c someone has a DVD/CD Burning Program don't mean they are going to make a copy of the game!

You'll hate piracy even more when you read this article:

http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/...RSS,RSS,00.asp

"Presumed Guilty: Paying for Piracy in Advance

Should prices for blank media and recording products include a royalty fee to copyright holders for presumed losses to piracy?"

You know from a different angle, I hate what the software companies are doing to fight piracy (especially Micro$oft). I bought a dell about 3 years ago and it came with Windows XP (which is part of the cost). I bought another computer recently without an OS coz I thought I already had an OS. But they said that the other OS can only work on a DELL computer, and I need to buy a new one. So I have to buy 2 copies of Windows coz I have 2 computers. Now windows costs 200 bucks (got it for 100 on ebay). How fair is that? It's like saying I have 2 DVD players so I need to buy two dvds of the same movie to watch them on those seperate players. You see what I'm trying to say. Companies like MS are greedy and sometimes I really feel they deserve what they get.

Yes you can. If your console has a modchip installed, you can download and burn the games to disc and play them just as easily as PC games. And they don't even need cracks as far as I know.

Who need modchips, these days? ;) Xboxes can even be software modded (to feature what can best be described as an OS), and keep in mind this procedure is about the cost of one game, so you can bet your ass that half of all xboxs are in fact modified. If you have a HD installed you can just download a game (*ANY* game, sadly) and upload it to your xbox (from your pc) and play, so I'm guessing most of these people don't even bother with burning DVDs, they prefer to have their entire games collection on their xbox (a friend of mine even has an N64 emulator and virtually any n64 game on his hd). Damn lazy pirates! :P

Back in the days of the old C64 I heard of an odd form of copy protection. I don't know if it would be viable now (or really existed then) but I'll suggest it anyway.

Supposedly part of the production process deliberately trashed certain tracks on the disk. When the game started it attempted a read on one of those tracks and, if it could (even if it was just empty) it would refuse to run the game. The principle was, even with a perfect copy of the disks, those tracks would just be empty space on the copy.

Anyone techy enough to know if that would be feasible and how hard it would be for a pirate to copy if it was?

In what way are Microsoft greedy? Just because they are successful, doesn't suddenly make them wrong to charge money for a product that they have developed and which you are choosing to use. And is $200 really that much for a product that you will be using almost all the time? If they were charging $1000, I'd be far more concerned, but believe me when I say that I've spent more money than that on a computer program that I use far less often.

Piracy is piracy, and for both games and operating systems it is both illegal and wrong (though in the debate on abandonware the latter idea is less clear-cut).

Sorry to get hot under the collar about this ;).

There are (or has been) similar protection methods on PC games also. I have no idea how hard it is to brake a protection of that kind, but it seems that there's always a way.

I could be wrong, but I believe that Sony's SecureROM was based on this principle.

Well first of all you really don't have much of a choice when it comes to an OS. Windows is the only viable OS to use to play games. Linux is far from close to be a platform to play games. But you got me wrong. I'm not complaining about the fact that 200$ is a lot or not (though I personally think it is. 200$ is a lot of money to spend on anything). What I'm complaining about is the fact that you cannot use an OS that comes with DELL on any other computer although you have already payed for it. So I'm ending up paying not 200 but 400 dollars just coz I have 2 computers. I believe, and please give me your opinion about this, that when I buy a piece of software, I should be able to use it on ALL My computers.

Okay let me reword my question for you, and anyone can give their opinion about this. Is it piracy, for ONE person to use the same software on multiple of his computers? Coz that same logic does not apply to DVD's nor to music CD's (I can go buy a music CD to listen to on my home stereo and car CD player). Opinions?