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Skeletor

Future of Game Piracy

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I was about to play Red Orchestra on Steam a few days ago, but I noticed in the Store page that they were advertising this game called Arma II. Never heard of it, so I checked it out. It looks boring and doesn't look that great...but the game's graphics looked interesting, and the game proudly claimed the feature of the game world being 220 something Kilometers of the real world. I thought, wow, that game is probably going to take up alot of HD space. Sure enough, it was like 10 GB.

We know that with RAGE and the megatextures thing, I think it was mentioned that the game was going to be, what, around the same size? Now, with future games becoming larger, usually around 10+GB, do you think people will become less inclined to download pirated games? Of course many people will still download games but do you think more people will take on a "f**k it, I'll just buy the game" attitude?

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Maybe a bit, but not really, seeing the amount of 4 GB DVDs people are throwing around the Internet. It might make some people resort to older games, though.

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It's more a case of harddrives have become bigger and computers faster, I'm afraid :(

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Are you kidding? I see people torrenting entire collections of Playstation games (700Mb disc image) that add up to several terabytes. If piracy ever ends it won't be for lack of storage. Pirating for convenience doesn't really apply when hard drives have gotten so cheap. I think people doing that skews to a pretty small percentage anyway.

I happen to think most software pirates have some bullshit political or philosophical reasoning behind it. Or they don't give a fuck.

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Bucket said:

Or they don't give a fuck.


Probably this one. I don't see pirating going anywhere in the near future. Hell, not even the far future. Never. Pirates have been around for eternity and will exist forever.

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Wait, what's the argument? That people won't download games because they're big? Why would that stop anyone? If you buy it digitally you're faced with the same download wait, and even if you buy a physical copy you still have to waste the same amount of HD space for the game.

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Yeah, good point. Any reduction in unauthorized downloads due to game size will likely be accompanied by a reduction in sales for the same reasons.

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I've been hesistent about downloading Blu-Ray movies due to size. Downloading game dvds has been a habit of "turn on the download and let it download overnight". 10gb game downloads are going to be a monster.

Also, if you plan on downloading Arma II, you might want to look out for this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE

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BlackFish said:

Downloading game dvds has been a habit of "turn on the download and let it download overnight". 10gb game downloads are going to be a monster.

1 DVD = 4.7Gb = 1 night
10Gb = 2.13 nights

Yeah, such monsters. :(

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Chiming in before this thread turns bad.

So far, size hasn't stopped anyone downloading, even when a single CD worth of data was considered "huge" by HD and dial-up connections standards. If it can be downloaded overnight, as many people pointed out, there will be no hesitation in carrying it out.

10 GB or even bigger games are already commonplace in the last 2-3 years. OTAH, I have no idea how well such large game will "marry" with the premises behind "supportless" digital content distribution: paying and waiting for downloading 20 GB worth of data, without even being able to back up and being framed into activation/DRM schemes doesn't sound very good. They may invent some scheme like downloading a portion of the game at a time or some shit, but physical media > digital distribution any day.

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Pft, 10 GB is nothing. I've got 45 GB of Scrapheap Challenge episodes alone.

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Wouldn't the internet speeds also become faster and faster anyway, so bigger games would just result in that the pirats get higher speed standards? :P

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BlackFish said:

Also, if you plan on downloading Arma II, you might want to look out for this. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FADE

From that very page:

However, within days of ArmA 2's release, a successful crack of the game was uploaded and has yet to see any effects from FADE.

So yeah - if you're a pirate, you have nothing to worry about. However, if you're a legit consumer there's a chance this DRM won't work as intended and it'll brick your copy of the game. Same as it ever was.

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Maes said:

physical media > digital distribution


Unfortunately the quality of physical media seems to be on the decline.

When I was younger and bought a PC game, it used to come in a big cardboard box with a colorful outer cover, adverts for other games, a huge 100+ page manual, and a nice jewel case.

The last PC game I bought was Half-Life 2. The "box" was actually the case for the DVD. That's all there was, no ads or manual or even a jewel case for the disk, and the disk had come loose. I was disappoint(in the game as well).

I haven't bought a console game in a while, but I imagine it has gone the same way. It probably started due to PlayStation games not having any real packaging, just the jewel case. Cartridge era games had nice boxes and manuals.

If the game companies want me to actually buy their products, they might want to try not producing crap.

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The last PC game I bought was Half-Life 2. The "box" was actually the case for the DVD. That's all there was[...]


That's odd- my copy of Half-Lfe 2 came in a case with a manual. :/

Did you buy it recently? I've had my copy for a few years.
I can understand why Valve might not invest as much in packaging their products, considering their adopted method of online distribution.

People that would attempt to download newer, bigger games probably have fast connections as well, though some folks are just too impatient to wait for somebody to pirate the software.

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Half-Life 2 GOTY only came with a pamplet thing that told you the controls. If you really want to go bad, the current Unreal Anthology box only gives you two dvds, and tells you to goto a website to download a PDF of the manual.

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Skeletor said:

Now, with future games becoming larger, usually around 10+GB, do you think people will become less inclined to download pirated games?

Haven't you heard that size doesn't matter? :P

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If games get too big for the internet to handle, pirates will just do what they did during the days of dial-up: compressing files and ripping out as much data as they can to keep file sizes down.

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Everything Maes said was spot on.

Storage space is so cheap and network access is getting faster all the time, large transfers and larger storage are a non-issue for large-scale piracy, or even the casual TV show collector who understands BitTorrent.

As long as there is DRM, there will be people around to crack it, and then likely distribute the media as it should always have been. The smarter people who have a clue will jump on the bandwagon, leaving the innocent (and perhaps slightly clueless) honest paying consumer hung out to dry when the DRM service goes offline, or their copy breaks.

Coupling large media with DRM only harms the paying consumers it's intended to protect.

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Scet said:

Unfortunately the quality of physical media seems to be on the decline.

When I was younger and bought a PC game, it used to come in a big cardboard box with a colorful outer cover, adverts for other games, a huge 100+ page manual, and a nice jewel case.

The last PC game I bought was Half-Life 2. The "box" was actually the case for the DVD. That's all there was, no ads or manual or even a jewel case for the disk, and the disk had come loose. I was disappoint(in the game as well).

I haven't bought a console game in a while, but I imagine it has gone the same way. It probably started due to PlayStation games not having any real packaging, just the jewel case. Cartridge era games had nice boxes and manuals.

If the game companies want me to actually buy their products, they might want to try not producing crap.


Remember that packaging of that quality originated in an era when the games themselves were technologically incapable of providing extensive information and an impressive backstory/landscape for the player's deeds, and that sort of thing. Modern games are very self-contained by comparison, and even when playing games bought online I feel absolutely no need or desire for physical supplements.

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Super Jamie said:

Coupling large media with DRM only harms the paying consumers it's intended to protect.

Huh? I thought the purpose of DRM was to protect the copyright holder from it's potentially larcenous customers.

Software pirates will adapt their methods to meet the challenges posed by new protection systems, BlackFish's mention of FADE reminds me of similar protection systems on floppy disk-based games - most of which were defeated by nibble copiers that faithfully reproduced the error sectors when copying disks. The next big challenge I see pirates facing is BIOS-level DRM, probably delivered by one of EFI's mutant offspring.

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GreyGhost said:

Huh? I thought the purpose of DRM was to protect the copyright holder from it's potentially larcenous customers.

Time for an appropriate use of XKCD, methinks:

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BlackFish said:

Half-Life 2 GOTY only came with a pamplet thing that told you the controls. If you really want to go bad, the current Unreal Anthology box only gives you two dvds, and tells you to goto a website to download a PDF of the manual.


That's awful. Whatever happened to good old cardboard boxes? I hate PC game packaging today.

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Krispavera said:

Whatever happened to good old cardboard boxes?

They were extremely wasteful. I was happy when they switched to smaller boxes and digital manuals.

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Indeed. And being the type who never throws anything away, for me they take up huge amounts of storage space.

Just like DVD cases, which are another big waste of space and packaging, for what is basically a suped-up CD.

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I tend to throw boxes away but have kept a few due to nostalgia or a cheesy fan boy impulse.

Creaphis said:
Remember that packaging of that quality originated in an era when the games themselves were technologically incapable of providing extensive information and an impressive backstory/landscape for the player's deeds, and that sort of thing. Modern games are very self-contained by comparison, and even when playing games bought online I feel absolutely no need or desire for physical supplements.

Yeah, that's true. We were also used to buying (table top) games and reading instruction manuals, and already had a room in the cellar where we would store various game boxes. One can still do those things but they used to be more or less a necessity.

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I was kind of sad when they downsized their boxes, but quickly got over it since I always threw those away. The new plastic DVD cases are kind of annoying because they're way bigger than my old CD jewel cases so eat up a lot of shelf space. The fact that they stopped bothering to package manuals with their games pisses me off. I enjoy the games that do keep them in their DVD case-things (like Medieval II and Civ 4). That way they stay with their games and don't get lost in my clutter and the like.

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I used to love the "feelies" included with most games of the 80's and 90's, but unfortunately in order to get these now, you have to pay extra for the "collector's edition" box. And those are limited to the games that I tend to not give a shit over (Halo 3 Legendary Edition? Modern Warfare 2 Prestige Edition? MEH).

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