Some personal thoughts on piracy (warning - long post)

[Mjarr]

They've been pretty successful with the closed architecture systems like the 360. Sure, there are plenty of mod videos on Youtube, but how many of them are just script kiddies that wind up getting banned the week following their leet hax0r skillz?

Far less people are willing to monkey with their consoles. That Frictional has stated a desire to move onto those platforms I think is a smart move provided that the quality is there from release.

Keyword here is 'closed architecthure', it's sort of sad fact that PC is the free market of gaming platforms while consoles are what are so-called planned economies just for the sake of this really weird comparasion. The industry likes to consider the customer as a wild, deadly spider that must be kept in its cage at all costs and while it has certain reason behind it, it also gives bad generalisation about your customers as a whole. Sure it's a freedom vs security (or protection) situation, but how often we've been hearing that PC gaming is dead even though suddenly it's been claimed not dead yet again? The piracy is just one lovely reason to rationalise from industry's point of view to make more money by switching from one platform to another to gain more profit. Yes, that is obviously the meaning of business but it also is interesting sign about how the whole gaming industry is going to the Hollywood routine of things.

Now I am fully aware gaming costs have gone up alot and they are more risky, but what is your typical mediasparkle you'll see these days? 50-60$ AAA title which single player is shorter than premature ejaculation and the multiplayer is mostly just one excuse regarding the single player. Now while there is nothing wrong with mutliplayer, how long is your average multiplayer game lifespan on consoles? It's pretty damm short, and it's totally dominated by the few mainstream titles, everything else is niche. Now looking at PCs there's Starcraft, Counter-Strike, Warcraft and other games which have had longer lifespan on multiplayer as a single game than consoles have. Even Red Orchestra is over 4½ years old now and it still has moderately active playerbase and it's not even that much of a mainstream title. These days most games are short and capitalize on the hyping box office success (so to speak) and have some additional layers on the ice just to give it slightly further lifespan, and once the profit is gained make a new one. Yes, this is business and in the long run it can give you alot of profit, alot of people still are going to buy it but how often you've heard the common complaint about industry being half dead, bored out of its mind or not innovative at all? People used to complain alot about WW2 games in the past even though now so-called' modern' warfare games are taking over and no-one gives a crap, even when yo ucan't tell visually the diffrence between Killzone, MW2, BC2 and MoH if they were lined up together and all of them are relatively speaking shallow.

Keeping that and the so-called free market thingy in mind, PC platform has the problem that it can't be caged as you can cage consoles. It has both good and bad effects but when you consider that some amount of piracy is caused by generally speaking poor service, it requires diffrent approach than just make a shiny title big massive guns, some polish and it'll sell well. For small\indie the piracy can become dangerous issue especially when plethora of PC gamers are cynical bastards who have lost the faith in industry and some which just would pirate a live clone of [insert some well endowed female here, going with the stereotypical nerdicus gamicus joke] if they could, but when Frictional Games posted their blog about one month after Amnesia's success and the notable spike caused by Zero Punctuation episode, it implies about the 'good service' the game gives the customer. An entertainer who is known to bash mainstream titles in interesting ways gives a green light for something unknown even when the adventure gaming genre - what you can call some sort of dinosaur in the market - is a sign of good service. Or look at Minecraft, it's very lovely target for piracy yet it makes tons of money per day. It's a difficult paradox to live with, but focusing too much on pirates is bound to lose customers in the long run, as it inevitably results into weird DRM schemes.

Now before someone goes batshit, on paper I would not have anything against DRM as long as it does not severely limit the basic functionality of the product, but I'm going to give few examples. First I'll use Soldiers : Heroes of WW2, an old RTS-action title that has Starforce protection. Now I've never had problems with starforce until I tried to install it on Windows Vista, because they are incompatible. The options how to get the game running were quite limited: 1. install it on another PC, copy registery and folder and manually mess with registery etc to make it working, 2. re-buy the game from digital distribution (which on the other hand defeats the purpose, as I already bought it and own the boxed copy with manual and discs) or 3. pirate it. Doing #1 would be 'wrong' in its own ways, #2 is silly and #3 makes me a pirate. Now second example is Assasin's Creed 2, and I actually bought the game on PC when it was released as it's one of those rare more mainstream titles (besides AC1) that got my attension and I found pretty decent\good, but I was unable to play it because of its DRM. Now I have perfectly fine broadband but something between the game, my router and ubisoft servers was not really working as expected and I couldn't play it due DRM. Now the tech support was quite useless, asking it on other forums gave me the automatical "zomg u must have pirated it\haxed it!!!" response and even after I tried another router I have around and messing with it for few days, it still refused to function. My only option to play a game I legitly bought was to wait for someone to crack it and apply it, which also is 'wrong' in sort of ethical point of view and also from industry's point of view, but on moral point of view I don't really have that much of a choice.

Going back to the whole console vs pc vs piracy, console games also enjoy notable piracy rate. There is no real doubt about that and even with comments like "well there's less 'noobs' on consoles who don't know anything" it doesn't really hold up. Look at PSP or DS or Wii. On Xbox360 most pirates don't ever connect it to Xbla while running the game and you can easily get away with that, it's simple yet inconvenient fact for many. Consoles have greater media value and most developers rarely have free hands, there's usually a publisher or so making most of the demands. Indie developers rarely have that issue, but usually indie games rely on diffrent things to gain profit rather than just the blockbuster box office sales. Now this results into one funny thing: usually when consoles have an exclusive title, PC crowd rarely gives a turd about it. Now when PC exclusive comes out that has more media coverage than the few niche websites the console crowd is producing more decibels than old fashion battleship broadside.

Now quite frankly while it's easy to fall to the pro-industry viewpoint about PCs, some of the pro-piracy arguments are also as absurdly retarded, but if there is one thing where the latter is more truthful is about how the platform is being treated. If you recall that odd free market example and that caged spider, on PC certain things are what you can call self evident 'rights' (not in literal sense, mind you) and taking them away is not exactly a good idea. Now sure these 'rights' are potential for exploits or even abuse, but that is a sad fact over many other things. On closed circuits it's easy to simply keep things as they are or even enforced more limitations because there is no other choice, but on PC's... things are diffrent. Service quality is one thing, and if you are being offered by something that barely qualifies as 'tolerable' on E.G. multiplayer department, it's quite obvious that people are not really going to stand up for it.

While I have to admit Nospheratu for having balls to admit such thing, you should really bear the consequences of your words as on the internet going like that is bound to cause explosions for diffrent reasons and eventually evolve into a mini nuke explosion in terms of fallout. But could someone explain why a piracy discussion ultimately boils down to the PC vs console war of "Which ones are the duds of the master race" ?