Hard times: PC game piracy in US estimated at 75-80%

[JKKDARK]

video games have nothing to do with movies. Both are different entertainment products.

[R4mbo]

You forgot something important: The companies lose money when they develop the game. And to get the money back and more money to pay the salary to the workers, they need to sell their product.

Its true what you say, BUT, if a game is crap, or I dont feel like its not worth its money, I dont buy it. Its not the fault of backups then, its the fault of the company because they failed at making a good game. But this just fits on me and most others... I'm sure there are people with an ass full of money which prefer backups. But thats the minority I think. There's so many speculation... and maybe impossible to get true facts... so this isnt worth to discuss at all.

[MicroNut]

Piracy is theft plain and simple.
What is there to argue about?

[R4mbo]

Morality. I think that it is in some situations not wrong to use backups. In the case when you dont have the money to buy the originals, or you would never spend money on the original version because its not worth it.

[eatnooM]

I think they should start packaging nice things with PC, hell, all games like you can often find when buying albums. A combination of that and digital distribution, because frankly once I buy a CD/DVD game I normally shove it on my hard disk and leave the CD/DVD in its box so I don't have to cart too many around and worry about wear and tear. And it's somewhat more difficult to get them illegally via, say, Steam as they can patch exploits etc.

Or at least, those are 2 ways I reckon would be effective to encourage pirates who think somewhat like me to buy the games.

[the_eternal_dark]

Personally, the DRM featured in pc games is pretty much a joke. I don't think piracy would be such an issue if companies would move to an easier way to secure their media (a method similar to steam) and go to digital distribution rather than give us a ridiculous maximum install count or "cd needs to be in the drive during play" and so on. Make one distribution medium that is cross platform (ie no system specific lock-in) and please everyone at the same time. The costs for games would be sure to drop because of this, and all you would have to buy at the store from then on would be the manual booklet and the product key for install/use all locked in a simple, theft resistant hard case at the store.

Tell me I'm wrong.....

[LazerTag]

Morality. I think that it is in some situations not wrong to use backups. In the case when you dont have the money to buy the originals, or you would never spend money on the original version because its not worth it.

OK, I don't know where your morals come from, and I'll say right now mine are not all that great either, but arguing whether this is moral or not is a moot point. It is in fact NOT moral to do what your talking about. I mean we could get into a huge dispute about numerous "laws" that stop you from doing stuff that are only laws. I mean steal from someone, kill someone, hurt someone. Those are only written laws stopping you from those things too, but do you do them? I doubt it. Because you know they are wrong.

I mean when you don't have money to buy a movie, magazine, book, whatever you don't just attempt to steal it from a store because of that, do you? Just because you can download something without anyone probably noticing doesn't make it any more legal then taking from the store. If you don't have the money then you simply don't get it. Maybe cancel your Internet connection for a month or so or don't go out with friends or out to eat so much for a while to make the money needed to buy the product.


And, If you think the game is crap anyway, then why bother with it to begin with? Simply choose to not be a statistic in those cases.

[jmendes]

Wow... if piracy numbers are that high in the US, i guess it´s about 95% in my country (where you pay twice the money for a pc game and 3 times for a console game). I do download games myself now and then... I dont like doing it, I dont encourage it, but it´s the only way I can play some diferent games (I cant pay U$120 on every pc game i like). However, I buy the games I really love, even if it´s just 3 a year. What really bothers me is that I see hundreds of people in internet forums that think it´s smart or righteous to pirate games, even though they can easily afford a game a week... Piracy hurts the very game developers you get your games from, so the smart thing is to avoid or keep it to a minimum.

[NyghtcrawleR]

Those numbers are plain absurd. I'm sure there is a ton of piracy but nowhere near that number.

1. You cant play pirated games online for the most part except on pirated servers.
2. People in general have switched more over to consoles, this leads to a great drop in pc sales.
3. 80% come on.....be serious. Not even 80% of gamers probably even run torrent programs on their computers.

[Spotfist]

I have to agree with NyghtcrawleR, COD4 is a complete waste of money to be playing by yourself, it's all about the multiplayer and you surely can't play the game on-line if it's not an original...? it took me a day to finish the game and I played it for weeks on-line!

I think that if games companies (perhaps music and movies too) just stopped trying to block piracy and focused on dropping the price, things wouldn't be as bad as they are, ok so there are acutal people who are professionally pirating games and making loads of money but surely this should be something that the police should be dealing with...? how much money is being poured into DRM? how many extra employees are being hired to cope with customer complaints? I bought CnC for my PC and it didn't work, It complained about my installation of daemon tools so I e-mailed customer complaints and was given a huge list of things to check. I honestly wish I had pirated the game cuz it was soooo infuriating! In the end I had to crack it WTF?!?!

Does anyone remember the half-life / steam problem when it first came out???? what a nightmare!

What about advertising in games/movies? where does all that money go?!?!?! Im sorry but as usual it's all left to us to solve all the problems in the world! No new ideas, the market just stagnates with the same old junk and then we get blamed when it gets worse!?!?!