ive got farcry 2 and fallout 3 and heard that it has secuROM and that farcry 2 has limiting DRM!!!!! ive heard it has increased pirating for people who just want to play the flipping game!!!! anti-DRM here i come :ranting2::ranting2::ranting2:
any form of game protection IS DRM - whether it be securom, safedisc or whatever, it is a form of DRM so I wouldn't bother getting quite so het up about it!
Quote from: BlueBall;269601any form of game protection IS DRM - whether it be securom, safedisc or whatever, it is a form of DRM so I wouldn't bother getting quite so het up about it!
sorry BB
One must take into account though, that when it comes to drm there are many forms of protection, of which are some just plain nasty.
Securom is a terrible bit of software that I try to avoid getting on my computer because it impares my rights too much. Who are "they" to say how often i can install a game when I bought it.
That's like a car dealer telling me that I can only use the new car I bought twice a week maximum! It just doesn't make any sense.
Logically, manufacturers are allways going to try and protect their products (which ofcourse they have the full right to do, i just don't agree on some of the methods), so it's up to you to decide if you are so bugged by the protection that you will not buy the game or learn to live with it.
Quote from: TE_owner;269603sorry BB
I didn't mean it like that :) It wasn't a telling off I was just saying it is all over the pace so no point in letting it get to us :)
I'm pro-DRM. But only when it's the valve stuff used with steam. It's simple keeps all your games in check.
There are so many out there which are far too agressive interfering with things that are unrelated to the game.
DRM/copy protection is fair game, the manufactures just wanna protect their property which they have spent a great deal of time and money making.. and not really something to waste to much energy on :)
Atleast they dont ship games with starforce anymore
DRM never stopped any game being pirated. Everything is out there if you really want you're PC games for free. All DRM does is give a publisher a few weeks grace before the pirate versions appear. That may be enough to get their sales up and some profit in the bank, nothing else
The irony is that DRM often causes far more inconvenience to the legitimate customer than to the pirate. Music is fast being stripped of it's DRM as music publishers have finally realised that it stops nothing and even encourages people to get thier music in pirated form rather than legitimately.
As a gamer what I want is to be able to download a game without having to give the publisher a mass of personal information they have no right to and really only want for marketing, not to have sit for several days waiting for the publishers overloaded authentication servers to allow me to actually play the thing, to not have to shove a DVD in the drive every time I want to play it and to be able to still play it when I add some ram or upgrade my graphics card without having to re-validate the game all over again.
The only real way I can get that is to pirate the game. But I don't want to steal it, I want to buy it. :doh:
DRM got so bad that when I bought Bioshock it simply would not authenticate. The customer support was non existant and the only way I got the game to play was to download a second pirate copy and play that. It's insane that to play a game that I had paid for, I had to steal it :blink:
We live in a sad world.
Quote from: Smilodon
QFT.
Totally agree with Smilo here. DRM should not intefer with me and my life or my ability to play a game I own in a convenient fashion. No-CD crack anyone?
TL.
Quote from: smilodon;269621DRM never stopped any game being pirated.
I actually got a game where the DRM is so effective that it still hasnt been cracked.. but then again i never got to play the game with expansions either as its impossible to install :)
Quote from: smilodon;269621As a gamer what I want is to be able to download a game without having to give the publisher a mass of personal information they have no right to and really only want for marketing, not to have sit for several days waiting for the publishers overloaded authentication servers to allow me to actually play the thing, to not have to shove a DVD in the drive every time I want to play it and to be able to still play it when I add some ram or upgrade my graphics card without having to re-validate the game all over again.
My point exactly. Half the time the game comes out pirated before the release date (soon after they go gold). So why make regular users mess around with DVD's and securerom anyway.
Steam seems to be the way of the future. Everything all in one placeworks online or offline, install it as many times as you like. It's still got it's bugs but it's a step in the right direction. Even games which come on disk and are then activated never need the dvd.
Steams only weakness is that you cannot even give the game away after you finish.
Quote from: BlueBall;269635Steams only weakness is that you cannot even give the game away after you finish.
It would be a good feature if you could deactivate a game from your profile and send it to someone else as a gift. Don't see it happening anytime soon though.
Of course for your Steam game to work Steam needs to work in most cases. So we're reliant on Valve to keep our paid for games functional.
On the other hand I can see how upset a game developer/publisher must get when they see years of work ripped off and given away for free and for the bragging rights of the person who cracked their game. And if no one ever bought a PC game then we'd sadly see developers giving up on the PC platform and just selling games for consoles :blink:
Games that have intrusive DRM end up on bit torrent very fast. Spore had a three install limit DRM feature and overnight became the most pirated game ever, half a million dowloads in a week :blink:
I also wonder how many pirate copies of a game are actually lost sales. There are games I know I want to play. All the Total War games for example are must haves for me. So I go and buy them. Pirating them never crosses my mind. But some games are ones I'm not really interested in. For example post appocalypse games like Stalker and Fallout 3 or Squad shooters like the Tom Clancy series do nothing for me. I'd never consider buying them. So if I spend a few hours messing about with a pirate copy and then confirming I don't like it and deleteing it is that piracy? Yes. Does it hurt the developer? No. I'm sure most piracy is nothing more than extended demoing. The actual loss to the game makers from people who would have bought the game and played it but who went for the pirate version is much less than the total number of downloaded copies seen on Bit torrent.
The way to fight piracy is to offer something extra as an insentive and not punish us for not actually using pirated software. A game that can easily be cracked and stolen isn't much of a temptation if the player looses the ability to have 'achievements', mods, free content and other extras. BioWare co-CEO Ray Muzyka, who was originally a supporter of the DRM mess that was Bioshock now says....
"We're doing a lot of post-release downloadable content on all of our PC titles going forward. We think it's a good thing to encourage players to make them want to buy a PC title. That's ultimately the best, most successful path to prevent piracy is to have players that want your games, want to believe in them and think they're high-quality and realise they're going to get a lot of value out of them as platforms for long time afterwards."
Piracy is a bad thing. But punsihing me for it every time I buy a legitimate game seems perverse. Give me a little thankyou for buying it and I'll become a loyal customer.
/smilodon climbes of his hight horse.
I agree with the points made here.
I agree with smile about getting a game to see what its like before you actually buy it, I got my hands on Oblivion ages ago it had no crack protection at all.
Within an hour of playing it I was online buying a legit copy because I was blown away.
Whatever the Devs do the games will be cracked and put on the internet, why waste the money on trying to develop more and more complex security features? maybe they should concentrate on not releasing buggy and unfinished products.
Most of the games now have online features which you can not play if you have a pirate version so that seems to work well.
Quote from: smilodon;269643So if I spend a few hours messing about with a pirate copy and then confirming I don't like it and deleteing it is that piracy? Yes. Does it hurt the developer? No. I'm sure most piracy is nothing more than extended demoing.
I don't know how it works in other countries, but in Norway for instance, many grocery stores have a "100% satisfied guarantee". If there is something you don't like with what you've bought, you bring it back (doesn't matter if it's half eaten) and you get
all your money back. If you for instance see a pile of nice shiny red apples - they might look delicious, but they could very well be totally rotten inside. It should be kind of the same with computer games (and music and films for that matter).
Quote from: smilodon;269643The way to fight piracy is to offer something extra as an insentive and not punish us for not actually using pirated software. A game that can easily be cracked and stolen isn't much of a temptation if the player looses the ability to have 'achievements', mods, free content and other extras. BioWare co-CEO Ray Muzyka, who was originally a supporter of the DRM mess that was Bioshock now says....
As long as the quality of the pirated products are better than what you can legally buy, piracy will win. When downloading a movie from the Internet, you don't have to sit and watch a 30sec "commercial" where the movie company tell you that you are a pirate - that is not an option with a DVD you've bought in a store. When you download a pirated album from the Internet, you can choose loss-less flac formats that you can play on your computer, on your mp3-player, put on a memory stick and bring with you in your car, and you can share it with a friend (yes, that is actually legal - in Norway at least) - that would seldom be an option if you bought and downloaded it from one of the legal web shops.
The industries - at least some of them - seems to be moving in the right way. With music for instance, more and more web shops are starting to remove any form of DRM from the files you buy, and the quality are getting better. You also see services such as Spotify which I have very much faith in. And as Smilo mentioned, several games come with nice extra bonuses which only are available if you have a legally bought copy.
My basic thoughts are thus: it must be reasonable priced, it must have high quality, it must be easily accessible and it must come without limitations.
Quote from: Bob;269711I don't know how it works in other countries, but in Norway for instance, many grocery stores have a "100% satisfied guarantee". If there is something you don't like with what you've bought, you bring it back (doesn't matter if it's half eaten) and you get all your money back. If you for instance see a pile of nice shiny red apples - they might look delicious, but they could very well be totally rotten inside. It should be kind of the same with computer games (and music and films for that matter).
It's not that way here. You'll find it VERY hard to return a PC game for a refund in the UK.
Anyway a perfect example of piracy leading to a sale. I played a pirated copy of Assasin's Creed a while back, loved it. But it wasn't on steam (I make it a point to get all my games through steam...saves installing them each format I just reinstall Steam into the same directory and I'm away, getting more use out of my games etc), anyway, 50% off offer today reminded me I should get it, and they have a sale.
Now I can't remember the last game I pirated that I've not since bought. Probably Oblivion (still not on steam...I'd buy that if they added it - I've got Fallout 3 but it is a poor substitute), which I borrowed my brothers copy rather than buying myself, if it had DRM I guess it would have been well within the activation limit...I still want to buy it though)
Quote from: T-Bag;269734Anyway a perfect example of piracy leading to a sale. I played a pirated copy of Assasin's Creed a while back, loved it. But it wasn't on steam (I make it a point to get all my games through steam...saves installing them each format I just reinstall Steam into the same directory and I'm away, getting more use out of my games etc), anyway, 50% off offer today reminded me I should get it, and they have a sale.
Just playing Devil's advocate here, and I personally don't really have a problem with what you've done, but a games publisher would say that you've had all the benefits of the game, and then only bought it several months / over a year later when the price is slashed to half of the RRP. If you're a small developer with a need for quick cash-flow after you release the title you've slaved over for years, then if people adopted the approach above then we're going to see less interesting little software houses turning out quality / niche product, and more gargantuan software houses like EA who can ride roughshod over consumer opinions and slap DRM onto anything they want (always wanted to play Dead Space but never did because of EA DRM).
Personally I can't stand DRM where a simple CD key should suffice as a deterrent without being obtrusive, and I can't see me buying a non-Valve game over Steam again after my copy of Bioshock simply refuses to work. Never been a fan of pirated games though on principle, so I rely on a site like Metacritic to give me a wide range of opinions before investing my cash.
Quote from: T-Bag;269734.......I played a pirated copy of Assasin's Creed a while back, loved it. But it wasn't on steam (I make it a point to get all my games through steam...saves installing them each format I just reinstall Steam into the same directory and I'm away, getting more use out of my games etc), anyway, 50% off offer today reminded me I should get it, and they have a sale.
Sounds like you're retrospectively trying to justify yourself pirating the software if you ask me.
You were only 'reminded' by a 50% discount off eh.... does that mean you wouldn't have bought it if it wasn't 50% off??
Also, saying you'll only buy games through steam is a pretty weak excuse tbh.
Nothing personal mate, just sounds slightly nonsensical
Quote from: Penfold;270760Sounds like you're retrospectively trying to justify yourself pirating the software if you ask me.
Perhaps a bit badly worded by T-Bag (not meaning to explain what he meant - casue I don't know - it's just how I read it), but I think it points more in the direction that the industry (be it gaming, music or movies) has to make new and better ways to legally buy their products. And if they manage so, people will actually do this.
Basically, I think it is all about availability and quality. And Steam is one example going in that direction.
I would have bought it full price. I found out about it being on steam through the sale and bought it the same day. I can't promise I'd have bought it the second I'd seen it however.
As for only buying games through steam I own many many games which I haven't played in years. Some are old games which are fiddly to setup, others are multi-disk games that are effort to install, most have got several patches to apply and a no-cd patch/crack to put on so I can play without the disk in my drive.
I format my computer atleast twice a year. I get fed up of it gradually slowing down or crashing, etc etc and it generally only takes a couple of hours to format and put the programs I use on there.
Games on the other hand take far longer. Say 10mins a game. I have 8 games in my favorites list. That's 1 hour 20mins. Or I can reinstall my steam into the same folder before (on a different hard drive to the one I've just formatted) and it takes a fraction of the time. The games are already up to date, all my settings saved etc etc.
To buy games on any other system for me is wasting my money. I know in 6 months I'll format and unless the game is REALLY good I won't put it on again. It'll sit on my shelf.
As for publishers who need a quick cash flow at release etc, I'm sure I must be one of their biggest fans. Recently on Steam I pre-ordered the following:
- Left 4 Dead
- Farcry 2
- GTA 4
- Fallout 3
- Crysis Warhead
(I know I'm stretching "Recently" a little - but these are all games I bought when they first came out, often paying far more - upto £38 - than they cost in the shops -£25 - to have them on Steam)