guardian.co.uk — Why do people pirate and share video games? Despite great efforts to develop technologies to foil them, and the occasional legal challenge, it seems nobody had ever asked the pirates themselves why they were doing it
Sep 12, 2008 View in Crawl 4
jggubeSep 12, 2008
"The worst cases are where the person copying and posting your game on the internet insists other pirates 'thank them for their work'."I never really saw it like that, from a game developer's perspective.
slurbaSep 14, 2008
assh**e.
raadaSep 14, 2008
When I was like 12 yo in '85, people would pirate games because we could not afford to buy all games and after having tried hundreds of games you quickly notice that only a handful is actually worth paying money for (even less today). Many games are "copy-cats" of other games with worse quality. Who wants to pay for that? I bought the best games and had copied of the rest which I never used...The other reason was to "show off" that you could break the games protection and show it to your friends. Also, a coolness factor was to have a game early, before anyone else. The faster the better.Later when copy protection got out of hand, people got tired of that you have to have a CD in the CD player, constantly switching the CD for every game, enter long clumsy, secret serial codes and at the same time standing on one leg, just to get the stupid game to even start. If you use a pirated game, you just start it and it works... The only ones suffering from Copy protection is the people who buy the game.
ethos101Sep 14, 2008
That's true. I just don't wanna pay $20 for a s**t ass game.
Closed AccountSep 15, 2008
One big issue I have with games is arbitrary region coding. Games for the non-us global market are marked up much more than ones for the US market. With the exchange rate the way it is, why does it cost more for the same game in Brittan or Australia than in the U.S. Region coding kills the free market system which these corperations rely on.. It's the same with movies. If they sell a movie or game in china through legally authorized distribution channels, then I should be able to order from a retailer in that country and play it where ever I live. Used games from the US should be able to be resold in other english speaking countries with NO BARRIERS. Barriers encourage piracy. Region coding (to charge more arbitrarily by nation), Restrictive DRM, Forced Online authorization (which could fail and make games unplayable), backup prevention, unknown level of playability due to high system requirements, lack of free/easily accessable demos, are all Barriers which encourage piracy.
mrrbSep 15, 2008
The reason you can't return it is *because of piracy*.
weegee101Sep 15, 2008
I also remember the days when PCG was a book. One argument I always hear PCG these days push as to why its thinner is "well it used to be all ads". I scoff at that remark because the ratio of ads hasn't changed all that much... Plus, these days PCG just doesn't have anything worth reading anymore.And CGW were the people who did that big demo CD with the free games, including Zork, Betrayal at Krondor, and some others. Those were the days.
waterclosetSep 17, 2008
That's kind of the point, crackers aren't doing what they do for money, they do it for the sense of getting something done. No one paid you for your slam, you did it for the warm fuzzy feeling you get for []D\/\/[][]1n6 some nub on digg. Job well done good sir, job well done.