Piracy

#1 Bertellsman (sp?) has told Napster that they have to come up with a legal buisness model for the new plan to incorporate movies and games.

I doubt they'd let anything illegal happen unless they want to face another set of long, legal battles.

#2 I wouldn't exactly call this piracy, this is a breach of the NDA, and is pretty damn lame.

As for file sharing, it's been around, it'll always be around and it's just something the industry will have to deal with. CD Keys have taken a chunk out of game piratinng, however I think that it's going to always be an issue.

#3 We all know physical copy protection just does not work (for very long). There is a movement in the industry towards CD Key and on-line validation. Right now there are a handful of products using this technique, mostly multiplayer shooters, but as the percentage of home computers connected to the internet grows you will see more and more mass market titles using these techniques.

#4 Tribes II uses the approach mentioned by Rick. You need an online account to play (and a CD key to create an single online account). You can distribute the program around all you want, but without an account you can't play online. Only a one player at a time can play on a account, so handing out your account # doesn't do you much good.

#5 Games distribution and distribution of porn on Napster has been going on for ages. All you have to do is name a ZIP file to .mp3 or a JPG to .mp3

You set up a site and tell the user to search for specific titles. You do however get the randomness of servers and the slowness, but its happening now.

#6 Hmm...what about piracy of single-player only games (or at least games with a primary focus on single-player)? CD-key or not, once they've got the rip or ISO, they can play the whole thing. You can't force people to register a cd-key/serial online, mainly because not everyone IS online.

#7 Maybe they are not all on-line, but in the future, you may have to be on-line to play a game. If piracy is so rampant that you cannot get return on your investment, you can't make games.

Jeff

#8 How far in the future are we talking though? It's not a requirement that *everyone* has to have broadband, just the game-buying majority. Even assuming that, we're talking 5 years minimum.
I personally think that it's a model destined to fail. There's already a hefty backlash against the enforced registration model that Microsoft are introducing with Windows and Office XP. Apart from anything else, people *will* find a way round it. If you're playing a single-player game, what's going to prevent the player from spoofing the authentication server? I don't think that piracy is something that we can stop, and we just have to live with it to a certain extent.

#9 I've lived with it too long, I guess. Having made some of the most pirated games in history with The Incredible Machine and Tribes, I have decided that I'm no longer going to just give games away. Maybe this isn't the entire answer, but simply sending out CD's that get copied won't pay the bills.

We are kind of in the same situation as the music industry, but we have been dealing with it for much longer. People want to play games and listen to music. Others want to create it and get paid. It will work out, we just don't quite know how.

Jeff GG

#10 Don't get me wrong Jeff, I'm in no way *advocating* piracy. It's just not going to disappear. About the only reassuring thing is that most of the pirates probably weren't going to buy it anyway. Cd-keys and serial numbers have pretty much secured the online games, but there's no reliable method of securing a locally-played game against piracy. It sucks, and I hate the thought of something that I've spent ages working on being made available on some lame warez site. I only wish there was more that could be done to stop it.

#11 It drives me nuts that Tribes 1 was pirated so much. It is such a great game. I feel bad that you guys worked so hard on it and then it gets pirated all over the place. I love that game so much; I still go and examine the box when I'm at the store. It is the only game that stays on my hard drive. Ok that is enough ass kissing :). Hopefully there will be a solution soon. BTW do you guys get Tribes 2 royalties even though your not with Dynamix anymore?

#12 I wish I could see a copy in a store. In the UK, I don't believe that Tribes was actually released (primarily due to our crappy metered internet access). It took the game admin at our ISP weeks to find a copy to put a server up.

#13 We all settled any royalty distribution we would have had with Tribes 2 before we left Dynamix.

I'm not too discouraged by piracy. It is a fact of life. Kind of like planting a garden, i.e. one seed for the birds, one for the worms, and hopefully, one for me:) In some ways you can look at piracy as a form of advertisement or marketing. Maybe something like getting enough pirates to play your game that they want to buy into the on-line service. Or maybe, the price is just so low, that even pirates feel compelled to pay.

This is not unlike the shareware model, but with a little more back-end sophistication.

Jeff Tunnell GG

#14 Im just realised that Marble Blaster (the boxed version bof Marble Blast publ. by eGames) was cracked by Razor1911 and spreaded widely via highspeed ftp's.

Im really suprised that they (or a similar group) didnt cracked the full ecommerce versions earlier.

Thats means to me, that really before or meanwhile the CD making progress theft someone the beta-master, and the crackers really dont want to invest into an electronically distributed game. (ie. to get the full version, and crack after)

Then what is the words of wisdom?
Leave the crackers to work (you cant do others anyway..) and build into the game something, ie. advertisements, direct connections to your products website, etc.. that comes back something from the widely illegal spreading, or basically skip the boxed market just becouse in the ecommerce-piracy is much lower than in the boxmarket ?

#15 One small suggestion would be for the makers of such fine tools as Maya , 3dsMax , Photoshop etc.... lower the damn prices or make upgrades alot cheaper for people that buy them to make games etc... and pay advertising or some sort of royalty to the companies using them.People make games with these tools and promote them selflessly to the young and older gaming masses, meanwhile lossing out on valuable income due to piracy . Hell chargew softdrink companies or whatever to advertise in games , how many of us use these sugar laden drinks from heaven to get past the 24hr hour gaming or modelling.

anyways just a suggestion from someone who needs sleep

Cheers

#16

Quote:
Tribes II uses the approach mentioned by Rick. You need an online account to play (and a CD key to create an single online account). You can distribute the program around all you want, but without an account you can't play online. Only a one player at a time can play on a account, so handing out your account # doesn't do you much good.

Tim, this is how the ignition key works right?

#17 Ignition has been covered in a few other threads.... Quick summery: Ignition works a lot like XP's copy protection system.

#18 Lol, and how does that work? dont know how I missed those threads... I'm reading these forums all the time :P, I'll do a search

#19 "Ignition works a lot like XP's copy protection system."

True. Still the problem remains that cracked versions of Windows XP (without the authorization, which is rather annoying, by the way) were availiable on eDonkey networks even before WindowsXP was publicly released. That's just an example. Ignition can be defeated by crackers :-/

#20 Well, as long as it stops the casual gamer I'm happy