To sum up:

-Copy protection should be legal user friendly.
-You know you''ll be pirated, so you''d better deal with it.

Somebody said that some pirates couldn''t afford games and so that it''s not lost money for devs, but that personn didn''t go any further.
The truth is that pirated software are not as ''lost'' money as you think, if the game is good, the player will remember the firm name, and maybe buy the next game of that firm, even if he don''t, he may talk about that game to his friends who might bought it, so basically piracy is not all that bad.
Don''t get me wrong, I don''t encourage nor excuse it, you should not pirate stuff.

Another point for europeans people, many countries apply taxs to CDR because of (prepare yourself) MUSIC piracy. No money is given to the software devs, but the music industry get money because of the piracy that might result from those CDR selling.
I think it''s a bigger problem than piracy in itself.
This is really a bad thing since a government decided to pay SOME and NOT ALL people who CAN be pirated.
Also the consumer pays THOSE people, even if they use the CDR for perfect legal use, so basically they are accused or piracy and recognised guilty, and must pay for their ''fault''.

So why do the music industry get money while software devs (way more pirated than those peoples) don''t get anything ?
I think this is a much more important battle to fight atm.

-* So many things to do, so little time to spend. *-

quote:
My program is my property, which is only made available to you at a price - just like my money is only made available to you in return for services rendered. "Individual property" is created by application of "work" to common property, which makes intangible products property as well (and thus the term and area of IP). Therefore, piracy is akin to theft and causes the developer loss.

But what have actually LOST?
Your example with your money is very different, if you give me $100 you cant use them afterwards, now can you? If you give me a copy of a game you can still use it afterwards.
Now if i distribute this program to anyone who might actually have bought it otherwise, i am definetly causing a loss for you.
The same goes for me selling your program because that implies that you couldt have sold it to the same people.
But if i just make a copy for myself and have no means of buying it otherwise or just wouldnt, well then you have not really lost anything but your pride
Note that im in no way saying piracy isnt harmful, im just saying its very hard to judge exactly how big a loss it causes(in that you cant just take the retail price and multiply it by the number of pirated copies to get your lost profit), which is unlike regular theft.

I'd like to thank the last few posters for actually adding to the topic rather than fuelling a flamewar. I am not interested in discussing whether software piracy is acceptable or not, I am interested in how the industry should respond to it.

Eric: That may work for online purchases, but I don't see how you could adapt this to off the shelf purchases. There are also fairly serious implications: if a legitimate user's computer is hacked, would the hacker be able to get his private info?

Ingenu: What you say about the tax on CDR's is interesting. Also, there are some fairly weird inconsistencies between the music industry and the gaming industry. I also read somewhere that while Napster was in its prime, music sales overall were up - since it's decline, they have slumped back somewhat. Not sure about the truth of this, but if this is true it does have some interesting implications. Another industry which makes an interesting comparison is the home video industry - The Simpsons Season 1 DVD was a best seller despite the fact that they are shown on TV for free all the time. Granted, the game industry is significantly different to both the music and movie industry, but it is still food for thought.

My own view is that software piracy is more of a symptom than a problem of its own. Quite frankly, I rarely buy full priced games any more, the simple reason being I don't feel like I am getting value for money. The last full priced game I bought was Civ III, and I had this game for nearly three months before sufficient patches were released to make it playable. The alternatives? 1) Steal the game, you still get the bugs but at least you didn't pay for them or 2) wait till it comes out on budget and buy the fully patched version at a third of the cost. I prefer option 2, but not everyone is that patient.

I understand that games are expensive to make. A game costing £2million to develop needs to sell at least 50,000 at £40 just to break even. I can't help thinking that the game would sell substantially more than 100,000 at £20 though. Take a look at the sales for Serious Sam for example, as mentioned at the beginning of this article. Serious Sam is an excellent example of what I said in the original post: The best copy protection of all is a quality game at a sensible price.




[edited by - Sandman on March 27, 2002 7:37:19 AM]

I''d like to make the point of how much do the developers, the actual people not the company, get paid. I mean do they get paid as they create the game with a regular wage, or do they get paid afterwards? Where do all the royalties from these games got to, huh? If the games sells a hundred-thousand units, does the boss come round to the development team and say "well that was a great game, here''s your bonus for it." Or do they get regular bonus'' like everyone else.

Piracy of any form will hurt the company in time, but if they get the product right and include some decent, but un-invasive protection then people will buy the legit copy.

On the matter of the Internet, we in the computer industry created this monster. WE developed it and made it grow, we have only ourselves to blame. The Internet is a great idea, with massive potential (realised and unrealised). BUT as with all things it can and is corrupted by people. How much great stuff is out there, like this site? now think of how much useless crap is also out there?


"Making it up! Why should I be making it up. Lifes bad enough as it is without wanting to invent more of it."

I would like to say that in my contry almost no one bys anything...

I got my Visual Studio 6 copy from a teacher when I was 15 years old... I admit that I had many ilegal copies of games, programs, OSs...

Later on, I went to university and started to learn real programming, and I realized the work that a comercial game can be... dam... teams with 20+ workers, years of development... my opinion on piracy changed.

By now, at home I work with cygwin and DevC++, and I try to stay away from piracy, using freeware tools. When I need a pay-for-use program, I use the ones available at my school.

Games are very expensive, yes. But I do not want to by them all!!! I can afford a game from time to time witch I choose very well...

(I have dificulty expressing myself in english, so sorry for any mistakes.)

____________________
Pedro Santos «» Project Y «» GameDevPT

A lot of people are saying that they don''t buy full-priced games, because they don''t think they''re getting their money''s worth.

If you don''t think you''re getting your money''s worth then don''t buy the game OR download it. Is it really that hard?

If no games come out that you like, then developer will just have to make better games to improve their sales.