Does Piracy Hinder Consoles ?

[Jsr_101918]

If the company couldn't put enough security in the consol, it's their bad.

[DimensionT]

Hey, look at the Sega CD. It had no copy protection, and it still bombed, lol.

[MaxSMoke]

I'm sure somebody's mentioned in this thread, but I'm going to mention it again any ways;

THE DREAMCAST WAS NOT KILLED BY PIRACY!!!!!

The Dreamcast died because of ALOT of factors, like poor 3rd party support, a limited game library, nonexistent online play, high cost, and a general "We Hate Sega" attitude from gamers. I owned the Dreamcast, I bought hordes of software for it. I thought it was great, but then again I've owned almost every lemon Sega turned out before they threw in the towel and gave up on hardware sales.

On the other hand, from what I've heard from others, the original Playstation had *ALOT* of piracy. Something about the disks being easy to copy or something. And the Playstation sold like GANGBUSTERS! It had awesome 3rd party support, mostly because it was easy to develop software for and and limited production costs because of the standard CD format. The Dreamcast used a special "CD-G" disks which only Sega could make. Of course the console didn't need them, but Sega required them for "legitimate" software releases, which drove up costs.

Overall, considering *ALL* of the hurdles, I don't think the Dreamcast did that badly in the market. But Piracy was not one of those hurdles. Well a small handful of computer savvy people made have bootlegged every DC game ever made, this piracy never reached the main stream. Heck, I never even heard of it's existence until nearly a year after I moved on to a PS2.

The software "Piracy", as the software companies like to call it, it's nothing more then a white tiger dreamed up to justify the terrible treatment of customers. It has, and most likely will always remain, the domain of a few technologically savvy people out there clever enough to figure out how to do it. And well these people might stock pile huge collections, these collections cost the software companies *NOTHING*. There's no loss in a copy. Get a CLUE!

In fact, someday these collections might actually help to save certain software from oblivion. Nobody's archiving old, unpopular games. The ROM carts and CD disks decay after time. Someday, old "pirate" collections might be the only preserved copies of some of these games.

And if you think that sucking up to Sony like this is going to legitimize Homebrew, you're dreaming.

[XDelusion]

According to Sega, Piracy is not a threat.

Me? I don't really care, we live in a world of controlled famine and starvation, a world were 15% hold the wealth and power, and the rest of us mindless argue over how best to suck up to our corporate masters who keep us down.
So as far as I see it, make sure mouths are fed before worrying about this kind of stuff.

Just a thought.

[jassin000]

Piracy didn't kill Dreamcast! The size of DC ISO's alone (1GB or greater in a time when dialup modems were common) kept them out of the hands of many would be pirates. If anything, rental services like Blockbuster should fear piracy most. I wouldn't buy a lackluster game title, but I would rent it. In the eyes of a video game company, how is renting a game, returning it, and never buying it any different then downloading it?

[Emeriastone]

Yes. Piracy hinders consoles.

[jojotjuh]

Yes piracy kills software sales and we do not condone it in anyway at all but for hardware sales does it actually help sales.

nintendo should release their own flashcarts...

this way, they still will get paid for atleast hardware.
then also, release a romserver for a little money for subscription.

because others have already available burnable cd it would be outta the question, thats why i only name nintendo.

[nonarKitten]

Piracy seems to exist at a certain level no matter what - there will always be a certain percentage of people who think piracy is valid due to extortionistic practicies of some software publishers (e.g., Microsoft). I believe that piracy can be accurately measured to be proportional to the popularity of either the software and/or hardware, the ease-of-piracy (e.g., Windows 2000 vs XP/SP2), and the cost-of-goods.

Now, what killed the Dreamcast wasn't piracy, though Sega would probably use that as a scapegoat. What did kill Sega was the Saturn fiasco and other issues around the time the Saturn was release. After the MegaCD, and 32X being huge bombs, people were skeptical of the Saturn. Plus, the biggest sports company, EA, had abandonded Sega a while ago, so they were sorely lacking in big titles. Sega lost a lot of 'face' durring this period. The Saturn was so hard to develop for, only AM2 could afford to put enough effot into making games as good as VF2 - everyone else gave up and jumped ship to the easier to program PSX (not to mention all the Sony incentives at the time).

So, in a nut shell, what killed Sega was some very bad market moves (32x and MegaCD, along with the Nomad and GameGear I suppose), loosing developers as fast as they could (due in large to rather draconian royalty schemes, and the absurd difficulties in making the Saturn perform like it should), and then, releasing ahead of the PS2. Not piracy - that was just an effect of what I said above.

In someways, I think piracy can help software companies (under certain circumstances). It can increase market and mind share substantially (which is why most software companies push demo's out, or offer one-month-free to get you hooked). Microsoft is probably the most heavily pirated company in existence (Adobe might be up there too), and I can't se that it hurt them one bit.

Let's take another big example, probably well before anyone here remembers - the Amiga. It was, percentage-wise, probably more heavily pirated than either the Dreamcast or Windows combined. I worked in an Amiga store, and boxed games would collect dust for months - but I saw everyone I knew playing games like Lemmings... there were often cracks to get games of disc before games were even on market.

Did it kill the Amiga? Hell no - The corrupt owners killed Amiga. Commodore (like Sega) was having financial problems long before it's final demise - and developers were jumping ship to the more flexible IBM platforms for games, and to the Mac for professional DTP stuff (though they eventually switched to the IBM world too). In 1990 Amiga pwnd the multimedia world - by 1995 you'd be laughed at if you even mentioned them.

In fact, I would say that piracy DOES kill companies, if-and-only-if they invest huge amounts of resources attempting to combat it - energy that's always and inevitably wasted. If you successfully stop piracy completely (i.e., Xbox360 might have), you will loose that percentage of people who would never buy it knowing they couldn't (e.g., half of China). And if you don't succeed, well then, you've just wasted an incredible amount of resources for nothing, haven't you.

What they need to learn is that they only need to have enough copy-protection to act as a deterrent for casual bootlegging, and ignore the so-called "professional" piracy.

[nonarKitten]

On the subject of homebrew software, Sony was once much warmer to the whole idea than they are now with the Net Yaroze. Now the big question is, would you pay $700 for a totally open PSP that included a little CD with software?

[Virtualtaco]

When talking about the dreamcast you have to realize key differences in why piracy killed it.

-It came out after CD-burning was FAR more widespread
-You didn't need to chip it.

Most people who buy a video game system do not own a soldering iron, do not want to pop open their 200-300 dollar purchase. The vast majority of game systems are not chipped... or no companies would be making money. Since you didn't need to open up the DC and CDburners were just becoming a regular PC accessory when DC came out, your going to have a ton more piracy.

I don't care what DRM comes one future consoles, media formats, whatever. They will always be cracked just as they have been in the past. If you can make it someone can break it, simple as that. PS3 will probably have games loaded onto the hard drive over LAN, and if Blu-Ray is DRM'ed you'll probably copy the games with your ps3... considering it can obviously bypass the DRM.

Now, to the "theft" issue, basically it's about intent. If you know you were going to go buy or rent the game you just downloaded, that's stealing. If you were never going to buy them in the first place... then nothing really happened... because they wouldn't have had your money in the first place. This is vauge and you can't prove it one way or another, but ethicly that's the only criteria you can go on. It's not like every game has a demo so you can't test out every game before you buy it.

You can't use the argument "you aren't taking anything off the shelf" because they aren't selling the media they are selling what's on the media.

Now if you buy a system and only use it for homebrew, the company looses money. If you buy a few games though they make money.

There have to be special circumstances for piracy to kill a system, or else PSone would have failed completely. The Xbox would have gone the way of DC except for it's trump card of Live, which keeps over half of their gamers legit. Xbox still has a softmod but you have to buy a couple games... which is kind of ironic actually...

-Taco