You'd pay more to get more protection? Sorry but I really need you to explain that to me. What if the extra protection resulted in you not being able to activate or play your game because of incompatibility or server errors? Wouldn't you be just a bit miffed that you'd paid full-whack for a game you couldn't play?

I did that, with Oblivian

I would be po'ed at purchasing something only to be dictated to about how many times i could install/use it - how about a car that self destructs after a certain number of owners hmm? hehehe, ok probably a bad example as they already have those... hmm, well what do you do with a game when you get tired of it? you either sell it, give it to a friend or throw it in a drawer - the restriction to a set number of activations would mean your options are pretty limited. And that's how i see it

The reason why is it has NEVER happen to me in all my years of buying and playing games. If it did happen, well that would suck and I would be able to leave a bad review as warning to other people who read up on games before buying, it pretty much would become the spam of bad reviews people leave anyway in all games. Plus it would have been 50 dollars and it wouldn't be the end of the world and I just wouldn't trust the company in their other games, but it's too bad that this isn't the case or ever has been for me. Would I still buy Bioshock after reading up about the protection? Maybe.. It's not as bad as everyone is making it out to be, however there are more interesting games I can save up and enjoy better and longer then this game. Orangebox anyone?


Edited by - Question Asker2044 on 8/31/2007 7:25:40 PM

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If a game comes out like Bioshock, HL2, etc I will not buy it and will persuade others not to condone this garbage by buying it until it is in the bargain bin. That will make a statement to these companies who already made a mint.

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You're going to punish Irrational because you don't like the copy protection 2K placed on the game. How cool of you.

You do realise that companies actually have to sell their games before they can make "a mint".

RIP Elixir Studios, RIP Mucky Foot. The list goes on...

Why could games sell for $10-$15 less without copy protection?

I'm a bit confused by this part... do you mean they should sell games that don't have copy protection cheaper? I don't think they'd sell many at all to be honest. It's easy to sit and say "I'd buy it", but in all honesty... so many wouldn't that it'd never make them money.

People's wages have to be paid, packaging and all sorts - games cost lots of money these days - millions to make.

People don't make them for fun, they make them for money. Piracy means they make less, or in the odd case, next to none. So I am not sure how games without copy protection could save that much money - unless you've got a link to whereby it states just how much money it costs to use copy protection per game.

If it costs that much per disk, then I am flabberghasted!

Yes, it cost a mint per disc/DVD to have protection software on it. Moreover, it cost $10 - $15 per disc/DVD so all this bullcrap cost us the buyer the ones who support the company. It's like the gun laws of my country they hurt the honest citizen more then the criminals.

With regards to gun laws, I'm always suspicious of people who get upset when the government restricts the purchase of items purposefully designed to project small pieces of metal into others at supersonic speeds, with understandably unpleasant results.

It was citizens with guns that won the American Revolution. (At first at least, the French helped.)

Americans have the right to rise up and change or destroy a tyrannical or abusive government, but if citizens couldn't possess guns, there would simply be no way we could do that. I'm going to quote from the movie V For Vendetta here, "What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns?" Citizens also have the right to defend themselves, not just from the government but from other citizens. All these anti-gun laws do is take away the civilian's right to defend him or herself. Criminals don't pay attention to laws, that's what makes them criminals. Columbine had anti-gun rules, do you think that stopped those sociopaths? What about at VA Tech? I'm not saying they should let guns in schools, but my point is still valid. Anti-gun laws don't stop criminals from getting guns (in fact, they just make it easier,) and they stop civilians from having the means to defend themselves. A .45 slug to the brain would stop rape in an instant.



Edited by - Killa on 9/1/2007 9:16:44 AM

This has absolutely *nothing* to do with copy protection software!

The analogy with gun laws was only an aside for illustration of a point, that's all. If you want to debate gun controls, or the lack thereof, please make another thread! The gun control argument is too big an issue to be properly debated as part of a thread that is, after all, discussing a very unrelated topic.

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Yes, it cost a mint per disc/DVD to have protection software on it. Moreover, it cost $10 - $15 per disc/DVD so all this bullcrap cost us the buyer the ones who support the company.

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Please provide sources, little difficult to believe something people state as true without any knowledge of how they know this, and furthermore, where they found it out from! Sources required, else I could say "it's free, trust me" and expect people to believe it as well


Edited by - Chips on 9/1/2007 5:15:31 PM

Well Chips why dont you do a little digging yourself it's all out there if you just look for it. If it was free then again the games would be much cheaper then $50-$40.

So in that case it's a fabrication? (have to be prepared for sceptics when no evidence )

Either provide a source to back up the claim, or expect it to be questioned and not believed! I'm suprised no-one asked about my Doom 3 quote I did search, couldn't find it at all... but they do mention more than 50k copies downloaded before release They point out that's a couple of million lost before it's even hit the shelves (if bought, but not intending to buy a game doesn't make piracy legal or justified either!). Whether stronger protection would have helped I do not know, possibly - who knows what the leak actually was, a review copy without any real copy protection? 50k before release could easily translate up a month after release, but still doesn't validate what I say I read

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3527332.stm

One about game piracy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6449421.stm

Ergo, if probed about it - I couldn't back that claim up, people may therefore not believe it. It was there - indeed, i swear i've linked to the article before in another discussion about piracy on this very forum... but searching is yielding nothing on BBC news, and trawling through the search mechanism here is just not worth it However, the second article quotes that piracy costs $4bn per year to US game industry, and up to 90% of games played in Asia are illegal pirated copies.

Of course, what's needed is by where a game has no copy protection (popular game, HL 3 if there were one for example) and see whether sales are as expected... or whether the internet crashes due to the transfers of millions of copies

Now if you can find your source for how much copy protection costs per disk, then I'd be really interested! They certainly don't advertise the cost on their sites, have to ask for a quote.

Edited by - Chips on 9/2/2007 2:56:34 AM

How much it costs per unit really depends on what level of protection is being used and how many units. As games ship in the hundreds of thousands or millions, you can be pretty confident that the unit price even on a combined activation key and web-based validation is going to be quite low; as in pennies. It might well be $10-$15 unit price for a small run, but can you really see corporates with buying power like EA having that cutting into their profit margins?

When I worked for a software house we utilised, at different time, software and hardware based copy protection. Software was cheaper and more convenient (remote activation) but hardware (i.e. a dongle) was a lot simpler and more secure; the dongles were only a fiver even back then. What we charged customers for them was a different matter! We used to charge £400 for a spare dongle because it was, in fact, an extra licence for the software we'd spend nearly 3 yrs developing, although the number of installation units was never going to be more than a few hundred at most.