id: Piracy 'hidden benefit' for PC manufacturers

he has a point also for every £30 not spent on a game thats a £30 better GPU

so they are gaining there also

Well you can understand the train of thought for some. I'll buy a top end PC over a console because I can get the software free. Don't agree with it, but I can understand.

This is stupid. What does he suppose hardware manufacturers do against piracy? Also, aside from piracy, there is a lot of great content on the internet that actually is free. Free content and freedom to use the PC what you damn well want to use it for was, is, and will always be the single biggest pro for buying a PC.

Wait.. He doesn't want us to pay for his games, just steal them so long as we buy better hardware?

Score.

I'm not entirely sure I follow his train of logic. Buying a PC doesn't turn you into a rampant pirate overnight (my mum is living proof of that :)), and I don't see how hardware manufacturers would benefit from piracy anyway?

I'm confused.

Originally Posted by Flibblebot
I'm not entirely sure I follow his train of logic. Buying a PC doesn't turn you into a rampant pirate overnight (my mum is living proof of that :)), and I don't see how hardware manufacturers would benefit from piracy anyway?

I'm confused.

Here in the world of "We release a lot of crap and nobody bought it...therefore piracy is to blame", you must first leave your common sense, logic and reason at the door. You must START with the assumptions that:

1) Piracy is what's hurting YOUR sales,
2) The hardware market isn't falling down and dying because everyone only plays Bejeweled.

Now that you have your base assumptions, it's clear that people aren't buying your game because they're pirating it. Bad customers. Worse, they can then use that money to plonk down on new, fancy hardware the doesn't put the effort in to DRM your software for you. Bad hardware manufactures.

They're in league, the hardware and the consumer...they're all bent to screw YOU...it's a conspiracy. (Why on earth he says that and in the next breath says "it's not like I think it's some conspiracy," just that everyone thinks that way and acts on it!)

Seriously, I think he might benefit from some psychotherapy, because this sounds a lot like paranoid delusions.

I'm so sorry Mr. Game Developer Man, you were one out of a million game developers who made a crappy game that noone bought - hence you, in your awesome narcissistic grand delusions assume that everyone went ahead and pirated it instead. Guess what, there are hundreds of games released every year and even the most fervent mainstream enthusiasts probably buy less than 10. Good luck as the needle in the hay stack, just shut up about the pirate strawman argument.. The last id game on my radar was Doom 3. Not a good game. I didn't buy it. Now get off the stage and make good PC games. Last I heard you guys were busy making console games and throwing us some port scraps - not a good recipe, unless of course you're just waiting for an excuse to blame pirates again.

I'm sure everyone who buys an Xbox 360 does it so they can pay someone to mod it and get free games too. Roll.

What he's saying is that if you could magically and accurately forecast future sales of hardware in a world where piracy was rampant, and then magically forecast future sales of hardware where piracy was impossible, the latter would have less hardware sales.

Sorta like the PSP, it sells like hotcakes but proportionately less software.

@ Dego: Maybe he should pirate more games and movies to have the money to pay for his hardware getting repaired.

On topic:

Yea, right, Mr. Hollenshead! Ehrm... wait... no, wrong it is! Anyways, thanks for making me laugh. :)

He just wants to point the finger at someone, next he'll be crying like a baby.

If game makers did something like Steam, where you get a free account and you have to purchase the game then there would be no problems.

A few years back i hated the idea of steam, i didn't like the idea of having to have internet access to play games, i still hate battle field 2 and the fact that weapons and maps sizes are only unlocked via online multiplayer but thats another story of why to hate EA.

Originally Posted by Burnout21
He just wants to point the finger at someone, next he'll be crying like a baby.

If game makers did something like Steam, where you get a free account and you have to purchase the game then there would be no problems.

A few years back i hated the idea of steam, i didn't like the idea of having to have internet access to play games, i still hate battle field 2 and the fact that weapons and maps sizes are only unlocked via online multiplayer but thats another story of why to hate EA.

Do something like Steam? Why not just bloody use Steam, one distribution stream to rule them all :) I would also like to see them reducing their fees so Valve can offer the 3rd party titles at a more reasonable rate, why the hell would I buy a digital distribution game for more than the physical version?

Some publishers/developers really need to sort out their priorities, stop blaming piracy for their woes and start doing something about it - be it improving the content, offering digital copies at a _reduced_ price or making the game virtually impossible to fully enjoy without the added benefit of legality (though personally I would have some content available for the pirates to give them a taste of the 'full' experience)...

I agree that Steam and the like are great concepts and I love the idea. The problem with digital distribution of software/media is that you don't actually have a physical copy of it. Nor do you own it, though I s'pose technically, based on the RIAA/MPAA mandates, none of us actually own the music/films we buy on physical media anywaze... @rseholes...

Well, ok, you do have a physical copy on your hdd, but not a dvd/cd of the material. So if you lose your hdd, which is a very common and not wholly-unrealistic scenario, you'd need to go an re-download the material at your own expense, be it either time or cost or both. And as films/games/music increase in quality (I mean physical not quality of content! <grin>) so do their physical sizes which means more downloading time/bandwidth.

And as our (UK & I suspect a great deal of the US) entire bband infrastructure is sh1t compared to the likes of Japan and Sweden who have 100mbit+ download speeds, re-acquiring your HD films and legit versions of high-end games via digitial distribution would be a nightmare.

This really lacks context. Why did he bring this up? It's certainly true but why bother talking about it. Accusing hardware devs of secretly not caring about piracy doesn't really do much good for you as a software dev.

Originally Posted by Xtrafresh
Free content and freedom to use the PC what you damn well want to use it for was, is, and will always be the single biggest pro for buying a PC.

Exactly, well said.

I'm getting bored of re-reading Eurogamer's news, a few days later on Bit-Tech..

Originally Posted by yakyb
he has a point also for every £30 not spent on a game thats a £30 better GPU

Disregarding the article (which I haven't read) and gaming, this has been one of the base three reasons for piracy* since computers were invented.

I spend on silicon, not software

(*

• The entire industry is one giant rip off/ X$ are evil, etc.
• I've no intention of buying it so it's not a lost sale

)

People don't use PCs because they can get the games for free, a high end gaming PC could easily cost more than a console and a decent libary of games. The only real way that you can say that piracy hurts the gaming industry is if the games require a decent rig, the rest of the industry is mostly crap and sequalware.

if he was making this argument against ISP's I could understand, but don't see it really applying to hardware companies

Originally Posted by liratheal
Wait.. He doesn't want us to pay for his games, just steal them so long as we buy better hardware?

Score.

You're really looking for justification, aren't you :p And no, that's not even close to what he said.

I think there's some validity to Hollenshead/id's point, but I think there's also a decent amount of baseless whining and looking for someone to blame mixed in.

umm... I think its pretty obvious that hardware manufacturers benefit from piracy, just like how they benefit from legitimate sales. As long as the software is there, people will want to buy the hardware, otherwise its kinda pointless. It just seems like though that certain developers have a harder time with piracy than others, even if the all make excellent games. Crytek got hit hard by piracy, but Valve doesn't seem care, and Ironclad Games have pretty much just said "go ahead and pirate it, but we know you'll want to buy it later". Then again, I bought the entire HL2 series, and Sins of a Solar Empire, so there's something to be said about just shutting up about piracy and letting your product sell itself.

one word: butthurt
somehow, he doesn't think its possible that they are just staying out of the whole piracy thing cause its not their place to begin with. seriously, what do hardware manufacturers have to gain by bitching about piracy?
it seems the ID cast have gone up the walls a bit (too much dope methinks :P ). either that, or that other ID nutter has realized noone listens to him any more and is getting his cronies to do the talking for him instead.
CONSPIRACIES ALL AROUND!

Next thing you know, he will try to say the oil companies are making a profit as well from it because if you get free software, you will have more money to buy gas. Hell, lets throw the food stores into the mix too...

Steam isn't that great, it would be if they accepted cards like Switch/Maestro. Why should you need a visa electron or credit card to buy a game?

Restore my faith in PC gaming by actually making challenging games with good online re-playability and pc piracy will as good as disappear (you will always have some of the mentally challenged who just won't pay for anything.)

hes right as in money saved on one thing will be spent on another thing.

lets say you have 10k to spend on a car but buy one for 8k, then you will have 2k to spend on something else, same goes for pirating games, if you have 100 to spend for two games and download them instead you can buy a new lets say harddisk with the "left over" money. So, in a way hardware manufacturers are profitting from piracy, he should stop badmouthing them like that though.

I agree with him. People, like myself, would rather spend all of my available budget on my PC (I want the best, right?). Then I'm stuck with no money and the easiest thing to do other than accumulating more money is to just pirate the game, right? He has a point. Why not just spend that extra $50 on a better GPU/CPU/etc. rather than on a game that you can pirate? Now whether it is the main reason for HW manufacturer's profits, I doubt that, but they are benefiting from piracy because of this reason...

If I attempted to write this reply on my Wii, PS3 or Xbox360, it would likely take me the better half of a day. And not because I have downs.

In the old days when I did actually frequently buy games, ALL THE TIME they wouldn't even run, or would error like mad and crash nonstop. Now, I just bought this unreturnable game that won't run on my PC. Hmm. Good use of my $3/week allowance as an 11 year old. As soon as I discovered piracy it was like finding a box of naughty magazines in the attic, it opened me up to a "bad" world that everyone secretly uses all the time. My money is better spent on other things in life rather than a game I'll play though once and then forget *cough* crysis * cough*

I wonder if all developers are stil complaining about piracy if their game was the nr1 selling game in the industry. I never hear Valve about piracy... makes you wonder doesn't it..

Or is it the fact that the world economy is lower then ever, we have high oil, energy and food prices and people in the US send the keys of their homes to the bank in a envelope because they cant pay for the mortgage. And all banks in the world have problems keeping their heads up because all of this **** going on.

But noooooo that has nothing to do with dropped sales of "entertainment". Its the piracy!

Clearly the only option is to move back to numbered punch cards and cave paintings so that we cant steal each others ****. I use a PC because its hard to do a report on a PS3. And i only DL things id probably never buy anyways so.... to everyone who said that He is just bitching and wants someone ( faceless internet pirates) to blame, Agreed!! Becase a large group of facless people is easer to take the blame for your marketing division failing.

Steam is no solution. I saw (I won't name anyone, and not it's not me) crack Steam only games. So it does nothing.
Steam sucks balls. I want to play a game, I have to download it and install it. I am sure everyone at bit-tech has a 5 Terabyte per nano-second internet access, but I, and others don't. And, to top things over, I have a bandwidth limit (all ISPs here have a bandwidth limit). I want the disk in my hand, where I can easily install/uninstall it any time I want fast without worries. Not be blocked with a 1/6 of a game per month, in the hope that it doesn't get corrupted during the download process.

If Steam disappears...(let's say because of piracy) what happens now? Where are all my games I purchased? I paid the right of usage, and they just leave. You might say it won't occur, but it the situation occurred with Yahoo Music. Who knew that they would ACTUALLY close down?!
Also having a nice HUGE database of credit cards, I think it will be a nice gold mind for hackers, especially if they can hack the system and crap them on the fly.

Also, if I want to play a 10 year old game (like right now Monkey Island, for old time sakes because I find the game to be a classic), will the game still be on that service? Probably not. And how about resell? And the consequences of removing re-sell games. Many don't have the funds to cash out for games and buy used games. And you have stores that profit from this. What will happen to this group? Also, you have those classic games that sell right now, for over 100$ on eBay.

Anyway, this is just brain food.

I think companies should stop on preventing piracy as it's useless. The money gain will catch up for the pirated games, and even be able to sell teh games at lower price, or make them better, to a point to significantly reduce piracy.

It is sad everytime someone says something about piracy, people here get up in arms and say their game was crap or attack the credibility of the person. What is up with that. The best games get pirated more, that is known. Must be a lot of pirates here on bit-tech.

Greetings!

Hollenshead has a point.
Check those multi-page forum threads "PC vs. Console" where someone always comes with the argument that "PC is better because I can get games for free"- refering to commercial ones, not free ones.

And, usually when there are attacks on someone work or personality is because what he is saying makes sense, the attacker just doesnt want to admit it.

He's Dumb as my @ss