In a followup to my previous post about stealing games, it’s time to talk about the trouble it has become to buy video games. Console games are safe in this regard if you steal a copy of a new video game then your a thief end of story. However once again pc gamers are getting the raw end of the deal. Remember how I said to play classic games sometimes the only option available is the illegal option? Well it’s getting to the point for some to use that as a reason for playing new games. The problem is piracy and the circle of stealing it causes.
Piracy is considered a huge issue for PC gaming, which causes publishers to come with more and more annoying measures of copy protection to keep their games “safe”. This in turn pisses off legitimate customers who refuse to buy it and either don’t play the game at all or go for illegal versions minus the above mentioned copy protection. The publisher sees the low number of sales and high number of pirated copies and decide to create an even worse form and the cycle continues over and over again.
I’ve said this before in this blog and I’ll say it again in case you haven’t figured it out yet… COPY PROTECTION DOESN’T WORK. By the fact that people can play illegal versions of games proves that copy protection doesn’t stop piracy. Most often its purpose is to piss off the legitimate users and send them to pirated sites to get an easier version to play. The big news recently concerning copy protection is that Spore is getting killed with negative ratings on Amazon from users who don’t like the copy protection used. Now while I feel sorry for Maxis, I say they had it coming.
Pc gaming is already hard enough to enjoy with the numerous barriers in place (hardware issues, updating whatever,) for casual gamers. Now publishers want to add copy protection that treats users as potential criminals and turns game purchases into game rentals. The secret to lowering the number of pirates is to remove the reasons for pirating games in the first place. The reasons are in my opinion, CD in drive to play, “leasing” a video game not owning it, installing of other things to my computer, having the game phone home. The common explanation for promoting piracy is that it will give you a hassle free experience while those “losers” have to deal with copy protection. If publishers remove the main reasons for pirating games, they should see an increase in sales. Now I know what a lot of you are thinking now and let me say this about piracy.
No matter what you do, there will always be people who will pirate your game. People, months before your game even came out decided that they don’t want to give you money for your product and feel that they deserve the game no matter what. These people you will never reach, even if you have zero protection on your games or tons of it they will find a way to pirate your title. To be frank the only way your going to get them to stop is to tip off the police and have them arrested for theft. Don’t punish the rest of your consumer base for the minority of crooks, it’s not the legitimate consumers fault and is just the nature of the industry. If you drive away your fan base all your doing is shooting yourself in the foot, and left scratching your head as to why no one is buying your game.
Josh.
