Two views on piracy!

On one hand there's Epic Games position on piracy, which basically boils down to "The PC is the new Amiga".

On the other hand we have Stardocks position on piracy, which basically boils down to "Evolve or Die".

Any thoughts?

I'm leaning towards "Evolve or Die".
If a game doesn't sell hundred of thousands of copies, doesn't necessarily mean it must be mass-pirated..

I hate CD copy protection systems. For instance, I got a CD containing a version of Trackmania with my new graphics card once. I installed it, not realising it had Starforce protection.

At that point, I uninstalled it immediately without even bothering to play the game, then set about figuring out how to rid my PC of Starforce which had clamped itself onto my OS like a limpet. For me, Starforce only succeeded in making me not want the game anywhere near my PC.

Take Spore as another example. You can only install that three times (now five since EA have slightly buckled to public pressure). But even so, if I've paid good money for a game why should I put up with this limitation? If a few major hardware components get swapped out then that's interpreted as being installed on a different PC and your handful of installs potentially gone very quickly, and you're left with a pretty expensive coaster.

I suppose the point I'm trying to make is that anti-piracy systems are a bigger deterrent for legitimate consumers than they are for pirates. That being the case, why bother?

why indeed

console gamess can be and are pirated and not just due to the price of DVD writers, 101 nes games on one rom (now found as those nes in a joypad gizmos on carboot sales)
so jumping to a fixed platform like that citing piracy isnt quite justifiable

what can be seen as justifiable about consoles is that you only have to cater for 2-4 systems 360/ps3 and perhaps wii and the handhelds, all state of the art tanking games that cite piracy for lack of sales have currently such a low user base and by the time we have those kinda rigs as standard theyll be targeting systems with 4 quad core cpu's full on physics and widescreen monitors the size of the average billboard and still wonder why no one is buying their games

the best copy protection is honesty
if you buy a game with no cd protection what so ever, not even a disc in drive for the odd random file check, that you could copy a dozzen times and give out to all your mates, would you?
i wouldnt, id tell them about what a great game it is

but honesty doesnt pay the wages of the people fighting this arms race writing all this copy protection BS that is cracked in the 10th of the time it took to create it

and all the sony owned companies that are heavily invested in anti piracy measures
remember this
sony your parent company manufacture and sell the means to copy your IP
if sony are so anti piracy they should stop selling sony DVD writers and branded DVD roms, it was ok for them when they were just a hardware manufacturer but once they got their fingers in the pies of music and movies they should have stopped selling cassette recorders that let the home listener take their vinyl collection anywhere
but i think they love being hypocritical
if you cant beat em atleast hope they buy YOUR media when they do copy stuff

edit:
i like the old dos methods of the sierra days
in that big cardboard box youd also find a codewheel or some address book and a tonne of gumff, that when used well work as part of the game and not just some at the start access code

eg lesure suit larry whichever had the address book entry
but if you were part way through a game and charly said "youve got to call clarissa urgently" then the only way you could find out clarissas number (aside from internet cheating) would be that little address book and the name clarissa might be dave the next time you play so give it a well stuffed 100 or so numbers and then its that little bit harder (but not much seeing as 100 names/numbers isnt a big txt file)
but if you then had to add in the picture it gets that more complex (but still not enough in todays information, but in the early 80's)

with adventure games these copy protection gizmos should become essential props that could not be easily replicatable and could/should hinder a gamer who doesnt have them (now anyone who bought a game in the day with all these props probably doesnt still have said box of stuff, if it got thrown away thats one thing, if you never had it to begin with thats something else)

Evolve or Die

Similar discussions take place in the world of softsynths and other audio software. My point here is that large sequencer software is so big that it becomes like a word processor: a tool with a thousand functions of which most people only use ten. Hardly a surprise people won't be paying for a thousand options when they know they'll only be using ten. My solution is to split-up a tool into components and simply let the customer decide which components he wants. As for softsynths: just not many are really good. If you have one or maybe two good ones then you have roughly everything covered. And what you don't have is usually not very popular anyway. It's a bit of a runaway bandwagon coders are jumping on: 'making virtual instruments', but there are so many people doing that.. it's not surprising that reaching the market becomes a bit tricky.

There's always the option of having games download essential elements from the internet to be able to work. Similar to how steam games work. Just make it so that when you type in the CD key, the exe is downloaded from the publisher, but can only be downloaded 50 times, to make it virtually unlimited for home users but enough to stop pirates spreading the key around.

that could/would work
providing that is that the files are still around in x years time
thats why i like having a physical product that requires NO online authentication to run
the long winded CD key printed in the manual or via a sticker is annoying as they are sometimes hard to read, is that an I or a 1? did i miss off a digit? it looks like i did.
these valid keys only work for online play, sorry mate but that key is in use at the moment you must be a pirate sod off

now you might be the legitimate user but you logged on after someone used a key gen program that just happened to be your cd key and untill they log off you cant log on and are treated as the guilty party

I mostly only buy games on Steam, because their way is good. The only bad thing I had with them that some games aren't Vista compatible.... Well, with a little patching I got Midnight Club 2, Manhunt, XCom TFTD and Max Pain to working under Vista as well.

Games like Spore I would rather have the illegal version because that one is not limited on how many times I install it. So EA is losing a lot of customers because of this. I'm not paying for limited stuff.

heres how i see it work:

games are published
games get pirated
copy protection is required
copy protection technology progesses, some of us hate it
it is crack then improved again..then cracked then improved again...rinse and repeat.

or

games are published
games not pirated
no copy protection required, some of us love it
companies that do research, creation etc of copy protection not needed and go bust with people out of work.

Basically every action has a reaction. What if there was no crime? would we need people who work in law enforcement anymore?

The world needs both ends of the candle to burn ie positive and negative stuff to happen.

> Games like Spore I would rather have the illegal version because that one is not limited on how many times I install it

I will not entertain 'Spore' at all due to SecureROM bastardisation of my PC. In the exact same way as GFK with Trackmania. The 'demo' version of Starforce I had also installed Startforce protection. Needless to say I uninstalled the demo and wrote an irate email to the TM forums after spending hours trying to get rid of SF


What a refreshing read

Here here

im sure the copy protection writers and crackers will find other jobs to do, its not like its the only skill they have
they are more akin to the cyrpography arms race than cops vs robbers so the second paragraph "what if" fat chance more like

i deleted the line "games not pirated" and modified the other cos even with no copy protection and a price tag of a quid people will still get a copy
the only way some one would buy it was if blank CD's/DVD's still cost the earth (but they dont)
game £1
blank CD £1
which would you go for? the legitimate game with manual and badge of honesty or spend time with a torrent and a blank disc that may or may not copy correctly rendering the cost to potentially double

I am for piracy and against copy protection, drm and all such weird things.

Offer the software to fair conditions and it should work in most cases.

i am against copy protection drm and other things that hinder the consumer

i dont agree with piracy as would you like your hard work done for free?
be that as your next blitz game or what you do for a living

"hi im a builder and ive just built this house with the rest of my crew and seeing as no one wants to pay for music, movies or video games our bosses just decided that no one wants to pay for houses to be built so we did it all for free arnt we nice"

but that doesnt affect the stones, we all know they make their money stacking shelves at tescos inbetween tours and not selling records thats all just a lie

Exactly. Pirates will pirate no matter what you do - removing the SecureROM or whatever copy protection they spend so much time implementing is as simple as downloading a quick nocd/nodvd patch and replacing it over your exe. It's absolutely 0 inconvenience for pirates. Most games are cracked before they're even released.

For most legal consumers, it's a huge pain when you have to call customer service just to extend your install limit when you buy a new computer (which is what I may have to do for Spore when my new computer arrives), and of course all the other annoyances, hassles, and sometimes even damaged hardware caused by the copy protection "trojans".

The ironic thing is with all this effort to protect Spore, for example, it's breaking records as the most pirated game ever. It almost seems as though the more copy protection you put on a game, the more inclined people are to pirate it (it actually makes sense, a little).


Piracy is bad, although unstoppable. There will always be those who crack copy protection, and always those who leech games off the internet because they couldn't be bothered to support the companies making them with a few dollars.

This will never be totally stopped by forceful (copy protection, DRM, etc.) means - I believe the only way is to simply focus on giving your customers the best product you can, and ignore the pirates. Maybe a little message saying "This is not a free product" to deter honest accidental piracy.

game developers should be given a card that they show to the police after they are caught shoplifting anything from a box of cornflakes to a brand new ferrarri

"sorry guv, didnt know you were a game developer, we'll just take that ammount out of what the world owes you for the last game you made"

if you work in a shop and advocate piracy dont bother stopping shoplifters
ok virtual vs physical theft has been done to death in these threads but just dont sti there and be a hypocrite, you might never buy the game so they dont loose out on a sale where as physical looses out on a bought and paid for product, it would just be the hypocrasy id find offencive

If I like a game I'll buy it. Wish publishers and developers would quite whinging and just make games people want to play.

Saw that EA and Activision dropped about 10% on the stock market. Wondering if the current crisis might end up being good for the industry. Might mean that emphasis falls less on graphics and more better balanced interesting games that cost less get developed.

Interesting discussion. I can't really answer your original question though, FlameDuck, because I am not really familiar with what "The PC is the new Amiga" and "Evolve or Die" really means.

One thing I have noticed is that most developers don't realize how incredibly open and accessible their code is, especially when you write in a higher level language. Writing protective mechanisms in higher level code does nothing to protect you from hackers getting into the low-level code that's output from the compiler.

It's kind of like you develop in this bubble of false security, thinking that there is nothing outside of the bubble, only to find that your entire bubble is like the `matrix` running inside a larger computer - and more to the point, that when viewed from outside of the matrix you can see all of its workings like a wide open engine - and you can modify it. No matter what your program does, it is nothing more than a bunch of binary digits, and hackers can manipulate everything at the binary level.

It is (not speaking from experience) SO easy for anyone to look at your binary program and see how it is functioning, monitor it, look at where it stores its values in given situations, find out where it was written from in the code, modify the binary opcodes etc to alter the value or the address, and hey presto hacked code. Most computer languages are NOT designed to be secure from hacking, at all, and this is probably the simplest and easiest technical procedure in the hacker's repertoir.

So then it would more or less stand to reason that your code cannot protect itself from the inside out. It can do nothing to stop something poking at it from the `outside`. There has to be something outside of it to protect it - something it is dependent upon beyond the scope of the language itself, and I think that is where most protection schemes draw their inspiration - downloading a key, checking an online password, registering, having to use a hardware dongle, requiring a codewheel or tifficult-to-photocopy manual, etc. It has to be dependent on something which is secure, exclusive, big enough and expensive enough, hard to access and hard to fake. Like, if you don't have a 5 tonne rock sitting in your back yard the software won't work.

But as we know there are ways around pretty much all of these things. There is no such thing as `perfect protection all of the time`. You can get what seems like near-perfect protection some of the time, it can put off all but the most dedicated hackers, but you can't win. At some point you've gotta decide that you're going to be satisfied with and `okay with` people pirating your hard work. So then it's just a question so where you draw the line, how much is too much. And then maybe you'll wonder if it's worth being upset about ANY amount of piracy, which is the bigger question.

There is virtually no way to copy protect an isolated program (a single player game, for example), because by the nature of computer programs they can be modified to "think" they are valid, when they're not. For example, even if your single player game connects to a server to verify your unique CD key hasn't been pirated, all it takes is a quick change of your EXE and now your game will always think it's validated by the server.

Like ImaginaryHuman said, the only way so far that's successfully deterred piracy is multiplayer validation where the server - an external copy protection check - will kick you out if your codes are not valid. This way no matter how much you modify the code on your end, the server will refuse your multiplayer connection if you don't provide the correct access codes. The only way to bypass this would be to hack the server.

In other words, people are free to do whatever they want with their own PCs, because they have full control over the code that executes on them. The only way to forcefully stop the player from illegally playing a game is to deny them a connection to some online service.

This means pirates can be blocked from dynamic multiplayer and online content, but they cannot be blocked from content on their own computer, or static online content that can be copied locally (such as validation data).

I don't believe in using copy protection. In my opinion it's just a challenge to hackers and one they will win at that.

Why don't they publish on usb memory sticks instead?

I suspect that getting rich off mass producing .03c slices of plastic makes you fat, lazy and possibly a little too greedy.

The only way you can stop someone from pirating your software (or anything else) is to not make it available to them in the first place, in any way shape or form. Only through total withholding of sharing can you create a `separation` between you and the `user` to have total control. And when you *have* total control, you are holding onto your product so tightly that you're not sharing it at all. So either you control it and nobody gets to use it, or you don't control it and everything can use it (and however they like). Giving and retaining are mutually exclusive, except in insane illusions.

In illusions you can have both control and freedom at the same time - you give the *illusion* that you are providing something of real value, while very much retaining as much control as possible. You convince the user that they are actually receiving something, but in all the fine print and in the delivery and in the foundation of the whole software system itself you make sure that if you want to pull the plug, their software will grind to a halt. What this means is that the user never really owns anything, and even though you hand over money to obtain access to what seems to be something useful, that access is very strictly controlled and can be withdrawn in an instant.

To do this you have to not really give the user any freedoms, or in other words, you have to take all of their freedoms away. Ultimately that leads to the user being an entirely passive client, barely able to breathe without your say so,. Then, all of the actual `product` remains in the hands of the developers - you just get it dangled in front of your face close enough to see it but not to touch it. You get to interact with the illusion that you own something, but with no ownership at all.

A prime example of how to do this, is to create an internet-based `operating system` where all software and data lives on the server and where the user has a very very limited locked-down client which can do little more than `view` and minimally interact with/cooperate with it. You give the user a very thin client and then you control everything else. And of course, you can choose to revoke access privileges (freedoms) at a moments notice - you become a policer and an enforcer of your law. And because all your data and software lives on their server they can completely control all piracy efforts, applying Digital Rights Managment at the level of the operating system itself - and applying it to *everything*.

Only when you have never really given anything to the user in the first place can you *remain* in control and able to keep everything secure. That is why when you buy these super-protected games you are barely buying anything at all, all your rights are revoked and you barely even have permission to look at it. They still own it. All you bought was what you thought was some tiny small measure of freedom to access, in limited ways, and under tight controls, and as soon as you step outside of their controls you lose your freedom. This is all based on a doctrine of not truly giving anything, of pretending to give but entirely withholding and retaining as much of what you pretended to give, such that you're practically giving nothing at all.

If you buy something, and supposedly you truly own it, then you should be able to *whatever the heck* you want with it, and those whom you purchased it from should have absolutely no say in that - they should have no say in your *freedom*. But that isn't good for business. What happens when you truly get full unrestricted unlimited eternal access to something? You stop being a potential future customer. Yep, to the insane ego of business, you are only important so long as you are handing over money, and you can't be doing that if you are satisfied, and you won't do it if you already have full control of what you purchased.

So instead, they retain the product, they keep reigns on it, control it, stop you from using it, in fact they actively want you to be to some degree disappointed, so that you will keep coughing up money for `more`. Dangling carrots. More money for little morsels of satisfaction, and what better way to do that than to implement a long-term payment scheme where you must subscribe and keep paying over and over again. After all, the more money the better. If people could force everyone to be dependent on their product and to then force them to pay whatever the like on an ongoing basis, they'd get very rich and you'd become very poor (think Gas/Petroleum prices).

Who do we know who is trying to move towards such a vision of control and security, with an internet-based operating system? Microsoft, and probably others. This is going to be the future. This may sound slightly paranoid, but if we follow this path, society is going to start turning more and more toward a totally locked down policed prison, where if you jump through the hoops correctly you get scraps of satisfaction, otherwise you get locked out and shut down. It is nothing more than the total en-slavery of our freedom. Ok, so let's hope it doesn't get that bad.

So if you want to make your software secure and you want to protect it, know that your efforts to protect it through denied access is actually an effort to deny access to the user, and trying to deny their access is trying to imprison them. Locking down your app is locking down the user. Do you want that?

One thing to consider, though, is that if you don't do that, if you don't try to imprison in order to retain control, you're basically giving an open invitation - some people will treat you with respect, some will take from you viciously. That isn't exactly a wonderful alternative. But these are the only options - either you shut your app down and shut out the user, or you open your app up to abuse. Either way, both of them are forms of abuse. So are you going to abuse yourself by limiting your freedom, or are you going to abuse yourself by being too open? This is really a hopeless situation, and it is typical of this insane world that we live in. The only thing you can really do for peace of mind is to transcend behavior and just do something. If you're going to add protections, just do it, if you're not, just don't, but don't make yourself mad about it, and don't lose sleep over the result.

[edit] Just saw this news about cloud computing: http://blogs.computerworld.com/rms_hates_cloud_computing_says_you_should_too [/edit]

That is why freeware is so easy to make :)

You don't have to worry because what do you care if they copy your game if it is free in the first place

If you have `nothing to lose` then there is no reason to hold back your application, or the use of it, for any reason other than the limits of your creativity and design/development skills.

The problem is that a) you have something to lose if you depend on your application to pay bills, and b) it's difficult to retain the same degree of freedom in the application itself when trying to implement control or protection.

There is one other element to this, though. If you can create software so useful and brilliant and great that it really `speaks to` what the user wants and needs, and you happen to have sold it to someone who has a sense of values that include seeing your software as deserving of payment, then they will pay you, and they'll be a loyal and appreciative customer. You'll have an open relationship based on sharing and gratitude, listening and understanding, support and cooperation. But to get this to work you have to make a great product plus get it into the hands of a great person. This is the only way it can seem to `work`. All other intentions of destruction or exclusive possession or pirating cannot be dealt with productively, because there has to be mutual cooperation and agreement - a shared sense of order. The only thing to make this be a viable market is if enough people have enough of those agreeable values, to make a big enough group to make it worth your while making the software. At no point in human history in the past 2000 years or more have enough people had enough of the values to support a civilized enough society to come up with the technologies and structures to make it possible for your little game to get the recognition it deserves. It all hangs in a very fragile balance.

ImaginaryHuman: Did anyone ever tell you your posts are sometimes too long? :). Your posts are definitely interesting, but I don't know if it's just me, but I often just don't have the time to thoroughly read your 1,000+ word essays so I can post a quick response :)

Regarding your idea that the only way to control a persons use of software is to not give them the software in the first place, I disagree slightly. You could, for example, provide a web service where all the game and game code is running on your server, and only the screen video feed is provided to the player, which responds to their controls remotely.

Obviously, this wouldn't work with current network capabilities, and I think it would be a stupid and extremely inconvenient and potentially abusable "protection" method, but it demonstrates that there are ways of maintaining remote control over the user does, contrary to what you said.

Wow, Mikkel, I came across that Stardock article just last night and thought it was bang on the money. I even saved it to my favourites, which is very rare indeed.

When a company becomes very large, they seek to participate in systems which require a high startup cost, and thus ensuring a low level of competition. It is for this reason that Epic likes console development, and uses every opportunity to try to disparage companies that develop for the PC. They want the barriers to entering the market to be high, so they can dominate it.

Of course, Mr Epic guy, because savvy users had no clue how to copy stuff 'back in the day' without BitTorrent <rolls eyes>

John, thanks for the opinion, yes I know I write at length, some people are okay with it some aren't. That's their issue ;-) I'm only really writing to myself (we're all One).

Also I am not sure therefore if you actually read the whole of what I wrote because I basically said the same thing you said in your response - that the only way to do it is to show the user an image of the software but don't actually give it to them - so yes a video feed would be an example of that, and little different than an online operating system with a closed client model.

Ah, ok. I just skimmed over your post so yeah I missed that, sorry :)

I can't help thinking that Epic were somewhat unprepared for the increasing popularity of budget laptops and ended up targeting a diminishing market -- those with a decent-ish machine but who weren't so nerdishly, antisocially 3leet that they just torrented everything. They're not in a bad position, really -- all their prior customers (who switched to cheap notebooks) have Xbox360s so their market has only moved, and they're still a multi-platform engine developer who can, when all is said and done, generate guaranteed cash from licensing.

Stardock are the poster boys for how you treat your customers, though. Every success to 'em.

So did we decide on what is the best form of protection? After all, if you're going to try to do it you might as well do it effectively. What do y'all think is the most effective approach that we could actually implement?

I agree with Stardock: I think the most effective approach to copyright is to not treat all your users as potential enemies - above all make absolutely sure there is no inconvenience whatsoever to paying customers. Ignore the pirates, because adding heavy copy protection only challenges them to pay more attention to cracking your game.

Here, here. It's a crying shame they havn't released any games I actually like so I can give them some money.

The Galactic Civilization games are awesome.

They're all 'awesome', I just don't like them.

sending in the heavies?

Okay. The PC is the new Amiga, is the approach that Epic is taking, and blaming rampant piracy for the perceived failure of the platform. If you'll remember in the last days of the Amiga, games released fell into largely three categories. Poorly ported PC games, Interactive Spreadsheets and shareware/indie games. For some reason certain publishers thought the reason games like "Full Contact" and "FIFA '95" (not sure about the year) were commercial failures on the Amiga was due to piracy. As opposed to one being so laughably poor it couldn't even stand against IK+ on the C64 and the other being so crash prone it was practically impossible to play it for more than about 20 minutes at a time, not to mention the game was jerky and generally unplayable, even when it didn't crash.

The Evolve or Die paradigm recognizes that the software market in general, and video games in particular is a moving target, and in order to remain focused and hit said target, you need to continually adapt your strategy. Basically it means that if your game isn't selling, you're doing it wrong! The Sims, World Of Warcraft and Bejeweled have proven well beyond any reasonable doubt, that the PC game market is very lucrative, provided you provide an experience the (paying) PC game market enjoys.

Not to waste any money on protection at all. While it might protect against the technologically challenged copying the game to a few friends, provided none of these friends even know anyone who hasn't heard of BitTorrent, but anyone who wants it so bad they're willing to steal to save a few bucks, they're going to get it no matter what you do.

Thanks for the explanation Mr Duck *quack*. I would agree mainly with the evolve or die concept, then.

Hmm I do believe the Amiga was a different kettle of fish to -some- extent. I mean LucasGames ditched the Miggy after Monkey Island II due to poor sales and that was in no way a bad port.

On the other hand, support of the machine from publishers was still going in one form or another until the Miggy stopped being produced, so it's hard to know for sure. I want to believe the Miggy was killed via hardware mismanagement. The PC will be around for a long time to come so it will be a much more solid platform to test these theories out on.

Regardless of the quality of the game, I imagine the disk-swapping (and therefore the experience to some extent) was horrendous.

Hmmmm....

I think that the standard 'Username' and 'Serial Number' combo is the best copy proctection system in the world.

Simply put, it reminds the user that they really ought to pay for this (i.e. it's not free), but doesn't inconvenience them in any way.

So what if it's crackable in five minutes! So what if there are keygens out there! If someone has the will to go looking for keygens or cracks, then they will be able to get them for whatever system you use.

It's a shame when a honest developer who prices fairly and works hard, doesn't get paid for their hard work, but there isn't much that can be done about software theft as computers stand. Even the O/S isn't safe!

Good cartoon thanks. I don't get the Elton John bit though unless it's implying that the consumers are the injured party after listening to that song...

If by "support" you mean Vulcan Software, Team 17 and ClickBOOM, then yes. If you mean EA, Ubisoft, Infogrames, Activision, Interplay or any other actual publisher, then no.

The exact same thing is happening now, except for one small detail. Popcap, BFG and Stardock have much more market penetration and business savvy. And of course they actually sell good games worth playing.

Nice cartoon. It's interesting actually that, as shown in the second segment of that cartoon, for a while there was an atmosphere of sharing and trading openly before it became bigger business. Then all of a sudden it became more about money.

You'll notice that as the cartoon progresses there is a growing rift of separation between those who want to make sure they receive maximum money and those who were otherwise sharing freely.

You'll also notice that it is *because of* the hoarding activities by those wishing to make money, that the rest of the crowd suddenly `becomes` pirates. Instead of being about sharing it turned into a division of interests, and it is only because of the wish to make money that those who were otherwise openly sharing suddenly take on a negative aura. Those who were originally sharing have now been segragated off into a sub-group and labelled as pirates, while the rest are segragated into the money makers, and they are in direct opposition.

It's not that the people really changed at all, it's moreso that there is now an opposing force - the money machine - which tries to separate itself from the world of `not receiving money`, which causes those who are `left out` of the money machine to be seen as criminals. Who really are the criminals?

What happened is there was an increasing polarization of software access - you can't have the people wanting to make money without forcing other people to `become pirates`, just as you can't have an effort to make software `secure` without forcing others to rise up against this imposed separation. They are both a part of the same dynamic - they go hand in hand. You can't have one without the other.

If you wanna make money from your software, you are intending that some people are excluded from your product, so you are simultaneously creating a separate division in the audience, which labels some people as `not allowed` and `wrong if they try to get access without following your rules`, and then lo and behold you now have pirates. You can't keep the money-making machine and get rid of the pirates, the money-making machine CREATES pirates.

The only solution to get rid of pirates is to dissolve the division between those who are allowed access and those who are not - but doing that while still making money would require a whole different paradigm of approach.

You'd have to somehow decouple the submission of money from whether or not a person has access to the product, and that's not a particularly attractive business model - or at least doesn't come with much of a guarantee. Businesses want to `make sure` they are going to get their money, which is what all of their sales mechanisms and legal procedures are set up to do. But those same procedures create the very `enemies` that they would pretend to want to fight against.

Who exactly is responsible for creating pirates, if not those whose create an atmosphere of disallowing freedom? Crime breeds in the absence of freedom and is founded upon it.

So we have to find a way to still make money without disallowing access to a product. I think this is where shareware has something going for it, but it's important how you approach it and how you try to gather your money. It matters whether you force the issue. There is an important difference between gently asking for payment based on agreement about value, versus just demanding it.

In the meantime another "The PC is the new Amige" talking head joins the fray.

I guess also, whatever you use to `unlock` the game/application, has to be something that cannot be tangibly shared with anyone else. If you send a key/serial#/password it can be given to others. Hard to get around people using whatever means they want.

Here's a thought ... what if you code a uniquely compiled version of your app for every user, which accesses your server in some unique way unlike any other version of the app, and everyone has to contact you for a copy which you then send to them, and which then has to access your server to validate itself *constantly*. Any better?

Enlightening read. I definately do NOT think the PC is in a similar position, then. PC software is usually priced very similarly to console software nowadays, so given that companies such as Ninty/Sony/MS etc do not take a cut of the royalties for PC products there is even more money left for the publisher.

@Flamey: Molyneux has been a total twat for quite some time now. He used to be a legend; now his games are ... not legendary. But of course it must be the pirates who caused this...

i was totally disapointed in dungeon keeper 1 & 2, i was hoping to be on the other end of a dungeon crawl like dungeon master and bloodwych, in the end ive got to wipe out the competition and once thats done the dungeon no matter how good is pointless as its level over

startopia on the other hand i still play to this day (although no as often)

mind you the writing was on the wall for bullfrog = innovation in the god genre with the theme serise, i just found them lacking

Hmm, Dungeon Keeper 2 is amongst my fav all time games, Theme Hospital I have played through several times (although does get boring about half way thru) and I happen to be playing Startopia right now. It's not gripping me, but I'm only 7 missions in. It's more interesting than entertaining.

i found it too limiting in parts lacking in others and annoying nigh on everywhere else

i wanted to build my dungeon by adding walls not just dig around, without prior knowledge of the surrounding open areas my nice bits of wall ended up having great big come hither holes, i dont recall a build wall option they were just fortified by imps not built from scratch

the evenings that turned into mornings with startopia in sandbox mode :)
i always played with a top down view too so trees looked just like bushes and when walking my mums dog id look down at flowers that reminded me of trees and wonder what goods id get if i right clicked it now

i like the trading aspect too, i was going to make a mini arona dahl (sp) type proggie just to see if id ever need to use it, but other things got in the way

Startopia? I remember one section of that being so badly balanced that it was practically impossible -- I think they patched it but I could never get it working under XP. All I remember is that you inevitably ended up being harangued by falling info boxes appearing faster than you could click them away. [Looks at box on shelf] ...Naaaaaah.

works fine on xp for me, no patches used just the disc as it came out of the shops (pitty hogs of war dont like xp) my tactic for the harder conquest levels was to build/buy enough gun turrents to fill the floor of the room next to the one i was going to try and capture
if they sent a security scuzzer in it would have a tough time getting past em ;)
pack em up and move em along ready for the next attempt

Hmm, the official 1.01 patch is supposed to make the program more likely to run under XP, however it comes with a video card detection file that if your card is not recognised the game /may/ not run at all. There's unofficial versions of that file that add support for a tonne more video cards. I have a GeForce 9600 which is not recognised by the game in any file but it still runs (on Vista 64 bit)... maybe I'm just lucky...