I used to pirate games when i was young, dumb, and thought i was "sticking it to the man"

Now i buy most of the games i play but have a list of companies that i simpily refuse to buy from since they have screwed me in the past. At the moment it contains THQ, and EA. THQ for the terrible support for games that they intended to milk a fanbase and EA for castrating command and conquer to the pile of crap that they release now, and there stupid DRM devices.

Now for companies that i respect aka valve, stardock, to name a few, i will always buy the game and have since gone and bought games i have previesly downloaded because i felt that i wanted the franchise to continue.

Now most of my downloads involve games that you can't find anymore anywhere else, or have paid for years ago but can't find 1 of the 5 cd's nessesary to install the damn thing, other wise known as Baldurs Gate 2 TOB sydrome.

You will never solve piracy but you can limit it simpily by incorerating multiplayer into core game features. Games like Cod:WaW and RA3(DIAF EA), and DOTA, are a step in this direction, since it is much easier to convince people to register and signup online if they pretty much have to play online anyway, and if you offer a free and easy way for them to connect thier friends they will think your doing them a favour . People who pvp will always buy the game since its almost mandatory, but you have to find a way for people who normally play single player to get excited about multiplayer and thus buy the product. If you look at a company like Blizzard that has such a huge online following it doesn't nearly effect them as much if a few people download their product.

Thats my 2 cents anyway anyone is free to disagree with me.

I know I may be straying off topic but, some of that falls on the parents. The parents could pay for the thing online for the child. I did that for my first machine I built, gave my mom 2300 and baught all my parts online. There are cards now that take directly out of checking account and can be set to deny transaction if funds aren't there, preventing overdraft. If a teen is making enough money on his own to buy a game wouldn't it be time to start teaching them a little responsibility of using a card now, so when they hit 18 and get a credit card they aren't filing for bankruptcy next year?

BACK ON TOPIC

I do agree that online authentication would be the way to go. However this only effects online games. There are a lot of single player games with awsome online muliplayer ability. However it would be rather aggravating to go out buy say Crysis 2, and be all pumped up to kick some alien butt, get home and not be able to play, because some idiot cableguy cut the wrong line somewhere and you now have to wait a week before you can play it, or your modem went bad and they have to mail you another one.

In the farther future when most every home has internet (a suprising many still don't) and when internet hardly ever goes down E-V-E-R, then I would say yes definately online authentication for everything would be the way to go. But right now there are many people who don't always have a stable ISP, I know of a few thanks to where I used to work but I cannot disclose what ISPs those were, but they had weekly outtages.  Also a lot of the singleplayer games that require you to be online still have the needed data in the game on the disc, so they can still be cracked to not need online authentication.

Online singplayer?

The online authentication would be much more effective on singplayer games if the entire game sat on a server, but even then someone at the company might let some of that server data go and poof you have piracy back again. Even if they didn't, you would need a huge amount of bandwidth for a hi-def game on the consumer end, and the software provider would be spending way more money than they would lose to piracy to setup the system required to support that. Think of huge numbers of servers, then paying the monthly cost for the huge amount of bandwidth required to run that system. (Not to mention the cost of building the nuclear powerplant next door to run it all), or at least the power bill. Then paying for a building with an adequite cooling system to run all of that. The costs would far exceed the benefits.

World of Warcraft is a little different because they charge a monthly rate to play their game and the entire game installs onto your system, the server just need to keep track of where you are in the world and do accasional updates (which is why private servers are possible and proves a previous point).

However do you want to pay a monthly fee to play a singeplayer game? The number of customers you would lose because of that, plus paying for the infrastructure to support a singplayer game that plays over the internet that has to stream all the textures, data and entities would be far to costly.

How steam does things is about ideal as you get, you buy at store but you still need to have an online connection to play, but it would be better if you had like a 20 or 10 day activation window to play the game offline so if you baught the game and your modem is fried you don't have to wait to play. Or maybe have a phone activation system, and only make critical updates that fix huge bugs downloadable, but the gameplay and updates like 1.1 for Sins you need to be online and authenticated. However this should be done through the game, cause honestly, if all game publishers have their own authentication program , you would have a docking program for every publisher. Imagine starting your PC and

A EA downloader window pops up

A Impulse dock pops up

A THQ updater pops up

Steam pops up

Relic updater pops up

Gas powered Games updater pops up

Atari Games updater pops up

(Getting the point yet?)

Sure if only 2 or 3 startup your machine won't slow down too much, but if you have a ton of those running for all the games you got, a few megs here and there adds up really fast, then on top of that they are all sucking up bandwidth to keep up to date and if its like EAs downloader which has to reinstall itself every month cause of freaking updates you got a serious problem.Then throw in windows update, I am sorry but something somewhere is going to start conflicting and boom your PC has got a problem.

So it would be better to run the authentication and update system in the game, is this more coding? yes, it is, unfortunately for the publisher. If you could just make a simple shell that could launch into the actual game or do updates and ran in the background for authentication only while the game was being played, that would be better.

(Starts panting) anyways I think I am done...lol.

However with the "thin client" system resources can be more intelligently allocated.

There are a great deal of benefits in having your OS managed centrally which is why schools for one love it.  Many corporates also do this in one of several forms.  Even companies that use laptops for their employee PC still try to standardise their users' systems with "COE" builds.  You get a problem with your PC and you're not likely to see a tech spend more than 10 minutes trying to resolve it.  If there is nothing obvious that they can fix you'll get a rebuild of your COE and be back up and running in an hour.  In the mass market, consumers will want this same level of capability.  You must remeber that people posting in forums like these inevitably are already self sufficient with their IT needs and usually don't recognise how painful owning and operating a home PC is for the majority of consumers.

Centralised OS will mean many cool things for end users not least of which will be utter removal of their personal requirement to run and maintain anti virus & firewall systems.  Firewalls will be built in to the hardware although there's little need for them since there's nothing there for hackers to grab.  The company you're connected to will be trusted to operate the best level of protection of your system from external threats and everyone will be happier for it.  Die hard computerists will still run PC's and still be able to do it all themselves but there will be so little need to do so. 

This may be true if you are one of the lucky few, but game development is also a tremendous risk. MOST games don't make a profit. Yes, I said most. Its easy to throw around figures and 'hate the man', but the realities of development are far from perfect realitive to other industries requiring equivilent skillsets. Fortunately there are a lot of very passionate people making games that are keeping PC gaming alive for everyone to enjoy, despite the risks and theft that stare them back in the face everyday.    

That what DEMOS are for. Why would anyone buy a game if they already played the full version?

When I was young, I bought many things through my parents as well.

Children-friendly credit cards may be technically possible, but I have never heard of it and people <18 simply don't have credit cards. At least not on this side of the Atlantic.  They do usually have bank accounts and debit cards. Perfectly nice, but not suitable for buying in webshops. This is simply the situation.

However, the moral of the story is not so much the example, it is that, IMO, it is underestimated by many game publishers how much money not being a pirate can cost people. It's a concern if you are looking at increasing sales instead of fighting piracy.

BioShock. The demo was good. But that was it. Demos are not a good indication of whether or not the game is fun to play.

Without getting into the argument too much (for several reasons, mostly because I tend to get banned for "advocating piracy", wheter or not I'm actually doing it; yeah, David, fuck you too) I just want to say that demos are RUBBISH at showcasing a game. I haven't seen a decent demo since time immemorial, especially considering that most games tend to showcase all their features cramped into a very tiny space at the beginning, just to afterwards kinda float out.

It reminds me of the prologue/tutorial of Jade Empire, and how it's explained to you that it's not about good or evil, but varying philosophies of the Open Palm and the Closed Fist - just to later in the game boil it down to kick-the-puppy dichotomy. Demos are utterly worthless.

This is what Impulse Reactor is being designed to do. Developer simply includes ImpulseReactor.dll and voila. They get access to cloud multiplayer, cloud space, authentification and a ton of other features. No "start up" programs needed.

But oh yea, I think I could write a game that largely eliminated piracy as long as it required the player to play on-line.

Imagine a GalCiv in which all the AI players were AI bots on-line. How you going to crack that? Not bloody likely. But requiring people to be on-line all the time to play games isn't something that I want to get into at this point. I like playing games on the plane or in places where I don't have net connections. 

As someone who has cracked his share of games over the years, I can say with some confidence that it wouldn't be that hard to largely eliminate piracy as long as you made the game on-line only to play.  But that is a huge requirement.

This is also true of nearly every other industry on earth.  Most of them go under in the first several years if not sooner.

You are effectively a niche game designer, so is Frogboy.  I'm pretty sure both of you are smart enough to know that you could lose your shirts if you spend ten million dollars designing a game like Sins or Galciv, the audience just flat isn't wide enough for that kind of investment unless it's a sure bet based on a preexisting base from a predecessor.  If, instead of being at least marginally intelligent and grasping your situation, you did spend ten million dollars and the game grossed less than that, your bankroller would lose his shirt and you'd lose your job yes?  Regardless of whether piracy is a factor, it's the failure to recognize the reality that is your sales potential that leads to losses.  Mistakes put people out of business all over the place.

If you've lost my purchase because I played the full version once, you didn't earn it to start with.

Copyright producers are always stating how much they get shafted but rarely see the bright side of the picture.  I'll never knowingly pay for a game I'm going to play through once.  It's just not going to happen.  When I shell out fifty bucks, I'm expecting something to reside on my hard drive a while.  I'll be overjoyed at my purchase if I end up playing it a few hundred hours in total.  I'll be satisfied with my purchase if, at the end of the game, I think I'll want to play it again later.  If, on completing the campaign, I'm done with it, that means I didn't like it.  Games that have followed this course have been the last ones I ever bought from their respective creators.

A common retort is that we've been gifted with x number of hours of entertainment and it's only fifty dollars!  You spend ten bucks for a movie ticket and that's only maybe two hours!  It's a bullshit argument.  I'm paying for a seat, screen, projector, speakers, and shelter along with the trained monkey running the projector.  If I were being loaned a computer to play it on and a room to stay in at the same time, buying a game to only play it once would make perfect sense.  When I buy a DVD, I'm expecting to want to watch that movie more than once.  If I think I'm only going to watch something once, to hell with the twenty bucks.  I can rent it for a buck or two.

The bright side of it is that when you make a good game that appeals to a broad audience within a reasonable budget, you make a fucking fortune.  I can sell doughnuts till hell freezes over and I will never make a ten to one profit margin.    Most of the world looks at the margins on an industry and says hey, ten percent, badass!  Five percent?  Meh, I could live with it I guess.  The games industry points to their overall numbers and says look, ten guys broke even, twenty lost money, one was a total bust and never made it to production, and we only made 20% off the total!  When they get down to five percent like some of them are, the world is coming to an end, everyone is robbing them blind!

Even with all the millions invested in failures, the industry as a whole has remained profitable.  Only IP can get away with such flagrant abuse of capital.  You couldn't make a dime selling tools if half your tools you developed didn't work or sell.  Tools can't be sold with production margins that let you fuck half of them up and still get loaded in the end.

I respect your work, I'm here after all, but dog eat dog economics aren't exclusive to the PC games industry, from what I've seen it's more lucrative than most and held down mainly by having three massive corporations making most of the games.  Massive corporations are almost always run like shit, a billion dollar profit off a game could probably dissappear into bonuses for management at EA.

The following if for psychoak and is only intended for you to see my point of view on what you said not make ya mad.

psychoak I would love for you to come work for me and help me do whatever it is your profession is for a week, then I will pay you.

Then I will fire you and not pay you right before its time for your paycheck, because well I wasn't as satisfied as I could have been with your work.

after all "if your dumb enough to work before you get your pay, 'you didn't earn it to start with' ". Its not like I am going to hire you again, hehehe.

Is this unfair? No, because the previous guy that worked for me didn't do much and ripped me off and most people that work for me make a profit.

I have a question for you...are you one of those people that sit in a bookstore to read a book and then not pay for it? A lot of people buy the book even though they are only going to read it once, but feel the author has deserved the money for writing such a great story. Sure you may read a few books over again sometime later, but a majority will not be re-read. Do we need BULA's now? Maybe you have a friend that wants to read it, alrighty, the author or publisher loses that sale but at least they got the one sale out of it and your friend can read it. Where as if you were to download the book, enjoy the story, then share it with a bunch of other people, the author is losing out on major sales on something that really is meant to provide a good story once.

How about horror games? They scare some people first time through, playing through second time is not worth it, because well you played it and know what will happen. Kinda like a book you play through. Some games are meant that way.

So I hope you work on something for a few weeks, then someone says, well, "why would I pay you, the other guy screwed up the job, and its not like your job line is losing money.And I am not going to use you again anyway cause i didn't think you did a good job."

You would suddenly think this is unfair I imagine.

But this is only my point of view on what your saying, I would love to justify piracy, and stick to those software developers that did a shawdy job, but you are not just hurting the developer or publisher your hurting the poor guys that got rushed to publish the software before it was ready , but wanted to hold of the release to make it better. That way they could keep their job to make a sequal.  Oh well you say "I'll never knowingly pay for a game I'm going to play through once"

Sorry if this is off topic as this is more of a moralty and POV issue than the issue of how to end piracy.

Quantum_Dragon