Thread: New levels of retardedness

Originally Posted by brewbuck

A lot of companies make it so hard to actually pay them for their software, even if you are perfectly willing to do so, that it's easier to just pirate it. It's their own fault.

Uh, no. It's the pirates' fault. The industry's extreme
copy protection is a direct response to all the piracy.
It's frustrating as hell; it sucks, but put the blame on
the pirates for forcing the industry to do this.

Or just abandon PC gaming and focus on consoles
which more and more PC developers are starting to
do because they get screwed over by pirates.

Originally Posted by ethic

Or just abandon PC gaming and focus on consoles
which more and more PC developers are starting to
do because they get screwed over by pirates.

I hate consoles. I couldn't imagine to have an expensive device with lots of powerful stuff in it which only allows me to play games. It's an overkill. I would never buy a rock. I only need useful machines.

Originally Posted by mike_g

Lol, consoles don't stop piracy. Especially since they no longer rely on system specific cartridges.

And even when they do...

I'm still amazed at how fast PSP was cracked.

Originally Posted by abachler

While few companies ever went broke making console games, PC games are where the real money is. By and large PC gamers buy more games per user per anum than console gamers. I buy around 20-30 games a year myself.

Huh? Is that why they're moving away from PC games?
More on more embrace consoles, and more leave the PC in dust.
The PC market is hard to develop for because all computers are different. That means buggy software since companies cannot spend eternal money on ironing out the bugs.
Plus the PC is not a fixed platform, so the developers has to ensure it works on a minimum specs and a recommended/maximum specs, which again, means more time, more complexity. Not to mention they have to develop for both ATI and nVidia.
And because computers are so expensive, people cannot afford to upgrade all the time, which makes all the new games crawl or not work at all, which is another issue.

All in all, this is killing the PC market. In fact, some companies have banded together to save it from shriveling up. No, it won't shrivel up completely due to games like Oblivion and its healthy community, but other games are an entirely different manner.

Originally Posted by brewbuck

The pirates are doing what is natural. Data can be copied, and they copy it freely. What is unnatural is expecting to be able to limit the spread of information in an environment which is fundamentally set up to allow the spread of information.

This is really what is at the heart of the problem. As I said before any in-place security measures intended to prevent the cracking of a software are always be either insufficient or patchy, no matter what some noobs in this thread may advertise.

The open architecture of today's computers is not lenient on any attempts to protect any kind of business related rights. This however never stopped anyone from making money. On the contrary, some companies emerged and become colossus in the industry pushed by crackers and payed by legit consumers.

Most of the money that is made doesn't even come from direct sales. As a company grows it becomes less and less affected by crackers. And when it is small, the more crackers interested in their products the more exposure they must/will have. Many shareware developers I talked too throughout the years have very interesting things to say about the cracking of their products when you ask them privately.

I'm not advertising crackers are an healthy addition to the industry. However, in the presence of a problem that is simply not going to go away, one better try to make the most of it. Or at least understand the phenomena for what it is.

Get yourself a No-CD/DVD crack, mate In this case, I think we can actually recommend it so that you can play the game you bought legally.
Sometimes I tend to use such to get rid of copy right crap such as SecuROM.

Originally Posted by Elysia

Get yourself a No-CD/DVD crack, mate In this case, I think we can actually recommend it so that you can play the game you bought legally.
Sometimes I tend to use such to get rid of copy right crap such as SecuROM.

Such software can get your flagged by anticheat software. This is not a recommended procedure for online games, even if you legally have purchased them and have issues.

@OP: UBI sucks. Don't buy their games.

Another solution is sometimes to do a 1:1 copy of your DVD or just a copy and enable emulation with Deamon Tools for example. Though I haven't really needed to do this myself, so I can't vote for how well it works. Copy protection plays nice with my DVD drive...