Its an age old problem. Build a fence, some one will climb over it. Gaming is no exception. The Companines do have something in common. They have the computers with the game files hooked to the internet. That is THE number on problem. The computer you have the files/code, should not have access to the internet. No access, no hacking. If it gets out then, you know insiders are doing it. I had heard, like the music aspect, that Warz are being tracked down. It just takes time.

You can never completely prevent warez. After all, if one person can program safety mesaures (eg. SafeDisc), another person who know how to program can crack it.

Unfortunately its a sign of the society in general. There are those who believe they should be able to download it - they think they have a right to things. No-one wants to pay.........and little do they seem to care that if no money is made, then there is no incentive to make.

You can see it everywhere, not just games - its part of general acceptance almost. We have a women who accidentally got some money she shouldn't have. We are now taking her to court, because she says its our mistake ergo, we should have to foot the bill.
I am sorry, its £200, and no - we shouldn't (and won't) foot the bill. However, she thinks she has a right to that money, and we should compensate her as well! The time she spent should have been to write a cheque - as a pre-paid envelope is provided....however, she has dragged it out for weeks now.

Sadly, this reflects on society in general these days, and its sickening. High time that they did what they used to do - make the punishment so bad that its not worth the risk to do the crime. They really should chop fingers off with no anaesthetic etc, or put em in Jail for 25 years perhaps. Its extreme, but it may JUST get through peoples selfish and self centered attitudes.

I too am against piracy, but did any of you stop to think that if the large corporate companies in the music, computer and film industries simply lowered their prices a little, piracy may fall? Only the naive among us believe that £39.99 for a computer game, £400 for an art package, £15.99 for a DVD and £12.99 for a CD are fair prices....have you seen the sheer amount of profit these people make? Did you know that if you take the average music album, priced at £12.99, remove the cost of the cd burn, the artwork, the band's percentage and the marketing cost, you are left with a figure that is approximately £8 profit PER CD!??!! In my opinion, piracy is simply fallout from massive corporate greed....but that doesn't mean I agree with it of course.

I know what your saying Grom. Tis true, especially with music CD's that it stems from corporate greed. The game industry has long charged prices between £20-£50 for a product. But they need to pay staff and such for how long it takes to make games and the effort put in to them. The Music and film industry do have staff to pay but most of the money goes to the people staring in them and i make a point of not buying Music CD's. DVD's i will buy simply because a collect them

Good thing we've got gromit here, otherwise I would have had to say that. The thing that you have to remember is that "When you squeeze the nobility, its the peasants who feel the pinch" ie, piracy hurts the people who make games, not the people who make money off games. If a publisher/developer loses money due to piracy it won't be the bosses who take pay cuts (most of the time) rather, they'll lay off the coders etc. That sort of corporate idiocy makes my blood boil.

Welcome to the capatalist world my friend.

There is a part of humanity that i am not proud of.

greed

but it is all according to who is deserving of the money IMHO. I wont fork out 30 AUD for an album i may not like, so i download 1 track the night before and delete it if i dont like it, or buy the album the next day, sorta like a renting system, but its just seeing who i think is deserving of money. i still wont pay for daikatana. ever. but i wont download it either... The reason i do this is because i am not made of moolah. I cant spend willy nilly until i get a job. (which im trying to do ATM) The last thing i got gamewise was Doom3. the next thing i'll get is HL2. I have got no pirated games on my system, but i do use a lot of No-CD patches, prefering the speed of my HDD over CD drives.

=:=
The Shark
-:-
I used to be a guy called Cosmic Viator, jake_langley, Griffin, raz0r_j@ck, jade_falcon, joker2015, starfox... Jared Tyers was in there somewhere too...

It is all about greed. Every step of the way.

Greed motivates all sides, don't you think? The "legitimate" business that wants to stuff as much profit into the price as the market will bear and the "Illegitimate" business that wants to siphon off that profit for their own gains at little or no cost to themselves.

Let's say it cost, ultimately, $20/game if 500,000 games are sold, inclusive of game creation and final packaging. distribution and advertising. If they sell 1,000,000, lets say that it still costs them $15/game (because of the packaging and distribution costs increasing). On a $50 sales price, the legitimate side of the business might make something like $30/game to $35/game depending on the production run and sales. The illegitimate side can ignore the creation costs, also crank out crappy packaging with shoddier distribution (i.e. no returns, sales "as is," no refund for defects, etc., etc., etc.). They can price themselves at $15 to $20/disc if that high and make out like bandits anyway with, of course the benefits of free advertising provided by the legitimate side of the business. All this, again for greed.

And, as far as the game playing public is concerned, when he/she elects to pay the lower "stolen goods" price. Is that not also greed?

it isnt just games is it? how many of us are using hookey operating systems on the basis that we can't afford to pay MS prices? I'm in the fortunate position that I don't have tp pay for most software and get what i do pay for at a fraction of the retail cost, one of the perks of my career.

and it aint just software. a lot of oem hardware is "grey" ie imported from unofficial sources in other countries, or downright faked. q often its RMA stock deliberatley mixed in with new so that there's an excuse to give to Trading Standards and the authorities. but as many unscrupulous distributors and retailers do this to get a competitive edge, i don't see many people complaining when they see processor for £25 less than an honest retailer is selling. as long as the public are prepared to buy grey stock, someone will supply it.

just remember if it looks too good to be true, it probably isn't true. buy grey and see what happens if you need to take it back.

Edited by - Tawakalna on 10/22/2004 12:49:53 PM

Over the summer, i dropped into Evolution Studios for a job at their QA department, i didnt get it but a mate on my course did. Evolution studios do the World Rally Championship games which are pretty popular with racing fans. Anyway, when the game was nigh on finished, they were sitting around all day waiting for the last bit of code to be churned out for final testing, if it was ok, it went gold.
It went gold. they still had to keep coming in for some reason and apparantly there were gold disks lying all over the place. Spindles of burned disks that were to be mailed out to magazines to be reviewed laying on desks who's coders had long since packed up for the month and gone on a long deserved holiday. If any of them had been that way inclined, WRC '04 would be on warez too, in fact it probably is.

Games houses have little security, a commited individual could get his hands on Halo 2 no worries, they need to take it by hand to each review office and never let it leave their sight. That cant happen. At some point, the game is going to be left alone with some guy who holds loyalty to themselves only and wants a free copy of game x theyve heard is quiet good.

Its a sad side of gaming but its true with most software.

If that's an example of what is usual, I guess we have to give more credibiity to the HL2 source code theft

well that, if sources are to be believed, was a hack job due to insecure networking. Guy got in through a trojan or something sent via email. But yeah, companies cant watch every issue of their game from office to store.
Once the gold disk is at the manufacturers, there's nothing stopping an employee from taking a test copy and pocketing it instead of binning it.

Without breaking my pledge, I can say here and now, that it is indeed greed, but, this is in all humans alike, no-one is different from that, from there, we come into area's of: "What one does not know, one does not give a crap about" in other words, poor people that have never had any money at all, won't miss it at all, they seem to think its just that, money, and that is in my book a good thought. Only problem is, ones with greed, also are the ones with ambition, so it will always be so that moneygrubbers that want to turn every penny into a sixpence if necessary at the top, and those who will have little at the bottom, greed is a powerfull emotional drive, going way back, the drive of self- preservation, a poor bastard given a million will turn into that same moneygrubbin bastard he loathes if given enough time, because more money = more to spend on things important = more to the egoistic self, he wants to preserve it, he can buy enough food to last a lifetime, and still won't spend a single cent on someone who would need it, ie the man he used to be, this will never change, think about it, if given about 20 million in any currency, would you spend most of it to a charity and leave yourself on an equal basis??

as long as this goes on, Warez will always be around the corner, lurking on the corporations next move, next thing theyll come up with are ludicrous anti warez measures, which the common consumer will be the one paying the price for, because high road or low road, Made by man is cracked by man, for one motive alone: Money.

PS: My Stabd on Warez, if any should ever doubt, is against, definately against, im not saying I haven't owned it, because I have, but for just those reasons I am against.

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Edited by - Locutus on 10/22/2004 6:59:00 PM