Adventure Gamers - Forums

Oscar - 23 October 2012 08:17 AM

Dale - 22 October 2012 11:21 AM

dave_minall - 22 October 2012 10:03 AM

I’m going to continue to pirate games made by large organisations, unless they make an effort to give me more for my £40 (by the way of OSTs, design bibles etc) then that won’t stop.

Maybe I need to remind you that we have a zero tolerance policy on pirating, so I would suggest you stop this line of discussion.

Oh come on, seriously? The rules say “no soliciting or promoting warez” and he isn’t. We’re just discussing piracy and he’s just being honest.

Speaking of which, a bit of honesty would be healthy - I’m 100% sure that not a single person here has ever borrowed or copied a game off a friend I’ve borrowed dozens of games from my local library without paying a cent, along with books, CDs and movies. Ban me if you have to for saying that.

Thank you sir - if I was posting links to warez then I would completely understand, I know not to do that, I’m just providing an insight as to why I pirate!

Oscar - 23 October 2012 08:17 AM

Dale - 22 October 2012 11:21 AM

dave_minall - 22 October 2012 10:03 AM

I’m going to continue to pirate games made by large organisations, unless they make an effort to give me more for my £40 (by the way of OSTs, design bibles etc) then that won’t stop.

Maybe I need to remind you that we have a zero tolerance policy on pirating, so I would suggest you stop this line of discussion.

Oh come on, seriously? The rules say “no soliciting or promoting warez” and he isn’t. We’re just discussing piracy and he’s just being honest.

Speaking of which, a bit of honesty would be healthy - I’m 100% sure that not a single person here has ever borrowed or copied a game off a friend I’ve borrowed dozens of games from my local library without paying a cent, along with books, CDs and movies. Ban me if you have to for saying that.

yeah we all love honestly,

anyways please lets stop explaining and reasoning an irrelevant issue to the thread as i guess it is about how to protect these games,.. but not a confession room

i used to pirate as a youngster too,afterwards i decided i want to get into game development professionally so i vowed at least not to pirate adventure games.and since then i’ve bought about 30 games in 3 years,,half of which were from sales and price drops, as i’m going for a collection(though it’s time for some hiatus until things are stabler ).the problem is that most AAA games are too pricey.and even if there are goodies and feelies or whatever it still doesn’t change the fact that they are pricey.even without them the work done and the costs alone to produce such a game along with their quality are enough to justify a high price.but the price is higher than most people can manage,hence the piracy.also ags have been using price drops a lot lately which makes things better.it makes the game sellable for longer.AAA games need a lot of time before there is a price drop.AGs have lower prices from the get go so they are more accessible than AAA games.personally i don’t know many people who pirate AGs.there are some obviously but i don’t see it so often.

getting to play for a couple of days(as if it isn’t enough to finish some of the games out there,it took me 2 days to finish Max Payne 3,which I bought btw ) isn’t going to make a difference.you can rent the game in the local dvd club legally and play as much as you like.might take 5 days to finish but you still get to pay less.on the other hand on both cases you might end up paying 1/5 or nothing and end up saving money if the game wasn’t worth it.

and the Max Payne 3 example proves my previous post’s point,it was pricey but i thought it was worth it because it had all those great features and i bought it but it only took me two days to finish the Single Player and it wasn’t on Easy.Of course it has replayability because the levels are that good but i can only say that for me.

i actually don’t believe piracy is the biggest problem for adventure games.i think it’s the fact that people don’t know that much about adventure games,especially when there are consoles and online gaming which sets the bar on things for most people.let’s face it most want action and good graphics.and yes i know that there are adventure games(at least classified as adventure) that have made it reasonably in consoles but it still doesn’t change the fact that the majority of people is after the next AAA game.
you see people buying games as presents.they don’t buy adventure games.they’ll buy a halo or an assassins creed.it might not be the only factor but it is a major one.how many of you have played an adventure game as kids and fell in love with them?the whacky ones…a monkey island or a day of the tentacle or cooler one as a grim fandago,or a mystery one as broken sword.kids are one of the biggest market/demographic in gaming.it’s as they say….you have to plant the seed early on .

Confessions of a redeemed pirate ahoy.

I used to pirate everything. Just everything. I live in a country where physical copies video games are very hard to come by. If it’s not the newest big studio shoot ‘em up, it’s not in stores. Torrent sites and earlier equivalents were around loooong before the industry learned the internet even existed. Buying a game off amazon became a possibility later, but the shipping costs often exceeded the price of the actual game. If it hadn’t been for piracy, I would never have been exposed to adventure games, or any “niche” genre at all. I simply wouldn’t have known they existed, let alone had a chance to actually play them.

Nowadays we have Steam, legal downloads, the works, and I can get any game I want in my country without having to pirate them. So I don’t. I’ve even gone back and tried my very best to buy a legal copy of all the games I did pirate in the past. Money is still tight, but I can do that now.

It’s still worth mentioning that even today not everyone has the luxury of going to a store (online or around the corner) and buying what they want even if they do have the funds to do so. It’s 2012 and when I visited the US I was still amazed at how easy they had made it to purchase all sorts of entertainment, online and on physical hardware.

The thing that really changed things for me was adventure games. It’s easy to ignore the legality of what you’re doing when you’re doing it to EA. Because screw EA. EA blew up my computer, and that’s not even hyperbole. (I still don’t pirate their games these days, I just don’t play them.) But adventure games and the people who make them are different and we all now that. I started reading those heartfelt pleas from indie developers and promptly developed a social conscience.

But that’s what did it for me. Living in a country where you simply couldn’t buy hard copies of games you wanted was the biggest factor when I started. And it’s so very easy to just keep doing it. People are creatures of habit after all.

Piracy is wrong y’all. I hope we all agree on that. But there’s reasons people do it that go beyond “I want free stuff”.

Me, if I’ve legally bought a game that just WILL NOT WORK while the cracked version does, then yes, I will absolutely get the pirated but working version of the game I paid for. Same with DRM. If your DRM is screwing with my machine, I will get a DRM-free version by any means necessary. If I paid for the game, I consider it my right to play the game, done deal.

As for what to do about it, if there was an answer to that, I’m sure some people would have found it by now. Me, I’d like to know more about why people do it. It’s surprisingly hard to find any info on, and what little studies and surveys there are are mostly done in the US, which is going to screw with the numbers. Because from what I’ve seen, it goes further than dumb mindless greed and willful ignorance. You’ve got those, sure, in great numbers, but you’ve also got your activist pirates, your pirates who don’t have the option to buy legally, your crackers and hackers who do it for the sport of it… All kinds of people, and it seems unfair and more than a little hasty to assume they’re all greedy assholes and write them off as “the enemy”.