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Thread: piracy on pc games

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    Senior Member mcmiller's Avatar
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    piracy on pc games

    found this on bbc yesterday id soft saying they've had enough of piracy on pcs and are goin to move across to other lucrative platforms, consoles.
    http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6449421.stm

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    Seething Cauldron of Hatred TheAnimus's Avatar
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    Mabye its because the last truely decent quake was 2?

    q3 has multiplayer game play thats good.

    From then on, doom... oh god the latest doom. Thats not worth my time, let alone £10!
    throw new ArgumentException (String, String, Exception)

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    WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! MadduckUK's Avatar
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    not going to bother writing it out so ill steal someone elses comment:

    It is warranted to point out that net piracy is not necessarily a lost sale, as individuals that download a cracked PC game may not be those that would buy it. This leads to vastly biased statistics that do not take these factors into account, or rather do take these factors into account when they shouldn't. Those who oppose piracy need to be more informed within their writing when it comes to differences between theft and piracy, as they are subtly but very importantly different.
    Colin, Exeter England
    Quote Originally Posted by Ephesians
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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    *shrugs*

    I think the cost of developing/supporting all the different PC specs is probably higher than that lost to piracy.

    Otherwise just make games free to download and get revenue through advertising - that would eliminate loses due to piracy.

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    Lovely chap dangel's Avatar
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    To be fair, they didn't actually say they'd had enough or that they're abandoning the PC!
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    Has all the piri-piri! GeorgeTuk's Avatar
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    I think its also the insane amount of combinations of hardware spread in the market too. Makes it much harder to code for as different people have different specs.

    If you look at pure time that it took to port the Xbox360 to PC of Test Drive Unlimited. Not saying its the only thing or the whole team but it takes time.

    Plus the market for PC games is slowly declining I believe (though would be happy to be proved wrong) as the layman is put off by the technicalities of it and by the rabid fanboy players who are less than kind to new players.

    Piracy though is a percieved direct loss of money so its easier to give that as a reason!

    Stealth Geek - And Proud!

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    Banhammer in peace PeterB kalniel's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by GeorgeTuk View Post
    Plus the market for PC games is slowly declining I believe (though would be happy to be proved wrong)
    I think the PC games market is still the largest out there.. but it's for casual games, not hardcore ones. The percentage of PC owners that actually have a decent descrete graphics card is really small. MS could have fixed this with Vista.. but they copped out.

    Oblivion, for all it's PC style gaming, has done far better on the young X360 market than it has on the mature PC market.

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    Lovely chap dangel's Avatar
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    I think the PC as a gaming platform has been 'supposed' to be dying for a decade now.. It never does tho.
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    Tools are the subtlest of traps redsky009's Avatar
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    I doubt it will die out for a while yet - consoles are becoming more and more like PCs as time goes on (internet, hard drives etc) so there is obviously still something about the pc.

    And there is almost nothing you can do on a console that you can't do on a PC - except be sure a game will work on your system.

    People like the ability to change games (e.g. mods), which unfortunately leads some people to piracy.

    Most people I know pirated games because they couldn't really afford them (students etc) but have now started buying games now that they have jobs and decent PCs.

    They might never have taken an interest in PC games if it wasn't for those early years of borrowing/swapping games (downloading wasn't an option back then). My roomate at uni 'borrowed' Half-Life from one of his friends, and I played it a few times and loved it so much I bought the special edition jobbie with Blue Shift and Opposing force and have bought HL2 and EP1 since then, and I will buy EP2 when it comes out...

    That said, there are still people who can afford it but never buy any games and pirate everything: those people are rubbish leechers.

  10. #10
    Theoretical Element Spud1's Avatar
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    This has been happening for a while in a subtle way.

    A number of developers have been making games targeting them at consoles first, PCs second over the past few years. By this I mean that when a game is designed, it is looked at from the perspective of the Xbox360 or Xbox, as opposed to the PC.

    This is clearly apparent in the UI of many games, the default texture resolutions supplied and usually in the size of individual maps (not levels, but areas inside a level you have to load to go between).

    Some reasonably recent(past few years) examples include DeusEx 2, Thief 3, Halo and Oblivion.

    All big names, and all could have been 100x better (at least) if they had been designed with the PC in mind. Lets look ona case by case basis.

    Halo - announced for the PC many many years ago. Had some great looking shots and videos...and then one day an announcement is made that its going to be on the Xbox first. Fair enough, no biggie. Then the PC version arrives - low quality textures, average map sizes and your bog standard UI that works surprisingly well on a gamepad...

    DeusEx2 - highly anticipated sequal to a great game, turned out to be pants. Once again we see the same trend, Low quality textures, A HUD/UI clearly designed for consoles (It would have benefited immensely from a UI closer to its parent game, or one more decentralised to take advantage of a keyboard), tiny maps (loading every 5 mins) and greatly simplified gameplay (wheres my upgrades and XP dammit!)

    I could dissect the other two on my list but you get my point.

    Developers have been moving towards consoles for years - and I don't blame them for it (even if I hate them for it ), its a more guarenteed market where piracy, although it still exists in a big way, is a tiny problem compared to the PC market..and its growing bigger every year.

    I don't think we will see the death of PC gaming so to speak, but I do think that the number of quality games that we get (outside of RTS and MMORPG genres) will continue to decrease as a direct result of consoles and PC game piracy

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    Капраз dkmech's Avatar
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    It may become easier to make games for pcs in future once we all have verymanycore cpus and less emphasis is put on the variety of the graphics cards. We may end up with having more ports in the meantime, but while people insist on buying pcs (and they won't stop doing that ever because you can't actually do work on the consoles) there will be games for them.
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    Comfortably Numb directhex's Avatar
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    multithreaded development is harder, not easier

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    Will work for beer... nichomach's Avatar
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    One of the disappointing aspects of the trend to develop for console first and then do a (usually poor) port to the PC - and yes, "Deus Ex 2-Indescribably Weak" was a prime example of precisely why this approach is a very bad thing ("You've moved 30 feet - LEVEL LOAD!") - is that the complexity of writing games should have been reduced on the hardware front; that was one of the prime reasons for developing DirectX - to provide a single API so that the games could be hardware-agnostic, surely?

    edit: That CCL ad by the quick reply box - do you think someone should tell them to add "unless it's one with only an ExpressCard slot. Of course we'll need to know whether it's ExpressCard 54 or only 34, and..."
    Last edited by nichomach; 20-03-2007 at 02:50 PM.

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    Капраз dkmech's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by directhex View Post
    multithreaded development is harder, not easier
    But it will be easier in terms of systems specs being more similar if more emphasis is put back onto cpu.
    Tough on mirrors, tough on the causes of mirrors.

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    WEEEEEEEEEEEEE! MadduckUK's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by nichomach View Post
    that was one of the prime reasons for developing DirectX - to provide a single API so that the games could be hardware-agnostic, surely?
    absolutely. the hardware has to work with directx rather than the games needing to work with the hardware.

    and of course one game engine can be used to make many different games. with the quake ones being the best example.

    the real reason that games are going to consoles first? subsidies from the console manufacturers
    Quote Originally Posted by Ephesians
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    Vodka

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    Will work for beer... nichomach's Avatar
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    To which the best response would be subsidies from PC hardware makers, especially GPU makers....who also make the GPUs for consoles...ah. Not really going to work, that one, is it?

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