Bioshock

[Aada]

Pirating is wrong no matter how much you sugar coat it.. if you complete the game before it releases your telling me you will still buy it? naaaaaah

 

[cHodAX]

Pirating is wrong no matter how much you sugar coat it.. if you complete the game before it releases your telling me you will still buy it? naaaaaah

Already pre-ordered this morning, got it coming from Play-asia though. Be damned if I am paying £50 when I can wait a fortnight and get it for £30! As for your point, I completed Gears of War about 3 months before I bought it and the same Project Gotham. Like I said, I am happy to buy good games and support developers who actually give a shit about what they produce. What I won't do is shovel heaps of money at developers like EA who constantly deliver garbage in shiny boxes.

 

[ST^]

Pirating isn't any more wrong than renting or buying used. The publisher and developers are losing out either way.

 

[Saggy]

Pirating isn't any more wrong than renting or buying used. The publisher and developers are losing out either way.

In a fantasy world maybe, not in reality - 1 bought game can lead to millions of copies, millions of used games requires ~millions of bought games ;o Or are you honestly saying that there is only few used games about and millions of people buy those in turns? This Bioshock release has been already downloaded by ~20k users according to trackers I checked - that sucks :S

"Stealing cars isn't any more wrong than renting or buying used. The manufactorers are losing out either way". ;p

 

[ST^]

You're looking at it wrong. All I'm saying is that if you go and buy a used copy of a game, you haven't given anything back to the developers.

Your cars analogy sucks major :/ Cars have a large material cost. Games, once made, just need to be pressed onto a few more discs. If you can't see the difference between physical and digital goods then you really shouldn't be arguing with me on this.

 

[nath]

PIRACY IS NOT FUCKING STEALING.

Jesus christ, it really fucking gets up my nose people who think that, and particularly the adverts that claim stealing some old biddies handbag is the same as downloading a song/movie/game.

First of all, there's the question of if one downloads a song/movie/game would they have purchased it if the piracy route was an option? I know for DAMN sure that nigh on EVERYTHING I pirate wouldn't have been purchased if I couldn't download it.

The other fairly fucking obvious thing is that when you steal something, THE PERSON YOU STOLE IT FROM DOESN'T HAVE IT ANYMORE BECAUSE YOU STOLE IT. Piracy is making a copy, thus taking away POTENTIAL earnings from the publishers. There's always figures about how much piracy costs them based on how many people download the stuff, but it's absurd to assume that everyone who pirates it would have paid for it if they didn't have the option of downloading.

I'm with chodax on this one pretty much - I pay for games when I feel compelled to. Bioshock I'm damn sure gunna pay for, and not because I have to. However, I frequently download pc games to play, not for demo purposes but because I know I'm not gunna buy them but it might be a quick laugh to play for a bit. If I had no way to download them, I wouldn't be buying them anyway.

Piracy is not the end of the world. Piracy did not kill your father and rape your mother.

End rant.

 

[tris-]

Already pre-ordered this morning, got it coming from Play-asia though. Be damned if I am paying £50 when I can wait a fortnight and get it for £30!

its like £32 on shopto and you wont have to wait as long

you big doodoo head.

 

[Opt1]

nath's said it all.

These days, so much garbage is churned out, its impossible to know what's worth owning and what's not - yes, there's reviews, but after a range of bad experiences, I only trust them so far these days.

In the past, I could buy a game and if I didn't like it, I could return it - now I can't and I'll be damned if companies like EA get any more of my money for the **** they produce, claiming the game to be the greatest game of all time. And I'm not going to spend £30+ on a game that can be completed in a week - its a waste of my money.

That "Knock off Nigel" advert irritates the hell out of me too - apparently watching a downloaded movie is equivalent to stealing from your gran/being a rip-off merchant.. when they're charging me £7 to see a film and £3.50 for coke that costs them less than 20p. They're the ones ripping me off tbqfh.

/rant

 

[Saggy]

You're looking at it wrong. All I'm saying is that if you go and buy a used copy of a game, you haven't given anything back to the developers.

Yeah, and like I said that's not the whole story - there isn't enough used games available but pretty much everyone can get illegal copy in their hands.

Your cars analogy sucks major :/ Cars have a large material cost. Games, once made, just need to be pressed onto a few more discs. If you can't see the difference between physical and digital goods then you really shouldn't be arguing with me on this.

Yes, and if you didn't spot the ";p" smiley dont bother to read my posts at all - each and every letter/number/paragraph/whatever in my posts are there for a reason.

You're looking at it wrong. All I'm saying is that if you go and buy a used copy of a game, you haven't given anything back to the developers.

If you want to put things that simple then my idiotic car analogy works just as well - all I'm saying is that if you go and buy a used car, you haven't given anything back to manufactorer (note: I'm not saying copying games and stealing cars is the same thing, I'm looking things in a point of view of developer/manufactorer and their used products).

 

[Louster]

While piracy isn't theft, it's definitely a "breach of intellectual property" or some other phrase to that effect, and the concept of the protection of intellectual property is a useful one. Without it, there would be no motivation to invest any amount of time developing ideas as there would be no way of ensuring that the results of your investment aren't immediately implemented/used by someone else, who naturally foregoes any of the development costs. We would be stuck in a situation in which people never take chances, as the development costs pose far too much of a risk - which, to a jaded cynic, bears a striking similarity to the vast majority of contemporary games development.

My point being that if you try and justify piracy as morally neutral I don't think you can really complain about a lack of innovation. At best it boils down to an argument about the validity of intellectual property rights.

 

[Aada]

PIRACY IS NOT FUCKING STEALING.

Jesus christ, it really fucking gets up my nose people who think that, and particularly the adverts that claim stealing some old biddies handbag is the same as downloading a song/movie/game.

First of all, there's the question of if one downloads a song/movie/game would they have purchased it if the piracy route was an option? I know for DAMN sure that nigh on EVERYTHING I pirate wouldn't have been purchased if I couldn't download it.

The other fairly fucking obvious thing is that when you steal something, THE PERSON YOU STOLE IT FROM DOESN'T HAVE IT ANYMORE BECAUSE YOU STOLE IT. Piracy is making a copy, thus taking away POTENTIAL earnings from the publishers. There's always figures about how much piracy costs them based on how many people download the stuff, but it's absurd to assume that everyone who pirates it would have paid for it if they didn't have the option of downloading.

I'm with chodax on this one pretty much - I pay for games when I feel compelled to. Bioshock I'm damn sure gunna pay for, and not because I have to. However, I frequently download pc games to play, not for demo purposes but because I know I'm not gunna buy them but it might be a quick laugh to play for a bit. If I had no way to download them, I wouldn't be buying them anyway.

Piracy is not the end of the world. Piracy did not kill your father and rape your mother.

End rant.

Complete bollox.

Your telling me that all these people who do nothing but download pirated copies of games and never buy them aren't stealing/taking money away from people that made the fucking game?

Why do you think publishers are shunning PC game development? because they are sick and tired of it being leaked on the net thus costing them 100s of thousands in profit.

You think these companys make games for free ? you think the devs work for free?

Playing copied games is wrong do NOT try and sugar coat it with the 'il still buy it' because i am pretty sure if an excellent game came out that you dld and couldn't put down and completed it before it was released you would not buy it.

Why would you buy a game you completed?

There are 2 options to help you to decide if a game is worth buying.

1. Play the demo

2. Rent it (the publishers get money from xx amount of games bought by say Blockbusters)

Don't try and say its ok to dl pirate games because it isn't if it was ok games would be free and everyone would download them.

I think people like yourself forget that the Developers work long and hard to create a game and omg shock horror have a family to support? if a publisher is losing money do you think they keep all the devs on? nope they do what every other company does in the world and start cutting jobs.

People that download a copy do not give a rats arse about what it is actually doing to a company and said employees that might lose a job because said company loses money to dl gimps.

Someone said Bioshock has been downloaded 20k times already that number has probably gone up to around 50k by now and the small amount of people that might by the game are out weighed by the twats that won't, i hate to think how much money the publisher has lost before the game even hits the shelfs.

 

[nath]

Your telling me that all these people who do nothing but download pirated copies of games and never buy them aren't stealing/taking money away from people that made the fucking game?

No, I'm saying that at all. I'm simply saying that piracy is not stealing. Because it's not. It's piracy.

I'm also saying it's not as black and white as people make out. As I said, I download games that generally speaking I wouldn't have paid for even if I couldn't download them. In THAT scenario, the publisher has lost NO money whatsoever. This is where it's clearly stupid. If I see a porsche parked in the street, doors unlocked, keys in the ignition and I steal it, the person it belongs to DOESN'T HAVE IT ANYMORE BECAUSE I STOLE IT. If it wasn't available to steal so easily, I wouldn't automatically go out and buy a porsche.

Piracy does hurt games companies, there's countless people out there who say "why should I buy it when I can just download it". Games companies should try to stop piracy when they can (as long as it doesn't adversely affect the paying customer).

Louster, you're right, it's not morally neutral, not always. More often than not it is costing the companies money and they're well within their rights to try and stop it. In the meanwhile, when there are games freely available to download - games that I have no intention of buying but fancy a bash none the less - I will. I'm sure as fuck not gunna lose any sleep over it and given that I don't use P2P I'm not making the situation worse by making it easier for others to get hold of pirated software.

 

[Saggy]

I'm also saying it's not as black and white as people make out. As I said, I download games that generally speaking I wouldn't have paid for even if I couldn't download them. In THAT scenario, the publisher has lost NO money whatsoever. This is where it's clearly stupid. If I see a porsche parked in the street, doors unlocked, keys in the ignition and I steal it, the person it belongs to DOESN'T HAVE IT ANYMORE BECAUSE I STOLE IT. If it wasn't available to steal so easily, I wouldn't automatically go out and buy a porsche.

In that Porsche scenario you are not hurting manufactorer either, more likely the opposite - that person might buy another one By using CD-key generator there is a chance that you happen to use one that hasn't been sold yet - once it get sold you are hurting that customer in a way or another (unable to play at all or wasting precious time on scanning the proof that he has actually bought it). Like you said, its not as black and white as people make out.

 

[nath]

In that Porsche scenario you are not hurting manufactorer either

Well I could adjust the analogy to say I stole it from a showroom/factory.

 

[Saggy]

Well I could adjust the analogy to say I stole it from a showroom/factory.

Naturally, kinda meant it with the "" smiley.

Back to the topic: this game is fucking brilliant Oo Felt off the chair playing and continued playing like it hadn't happened - when that scene was over I was like "wtf just happened" and laughed my ass off

My posts are spoiler-free btw but not going to post anything about this game until release date anyway - kinda ashamed I D/L'd it :S

 

[ST^]

It's just one big grey area. I'd say most piracy (this goes for mp3s, movies and games) occurs when people wouldn't have paid for the real product anyway. Maybe they just don't like the product enough, or maybe they can't afford it. In this case, nobody loses anything.

On the other hand, piracy does hurt the industry to by varying degrees. Anyone seen PSP software sales? I'll give you a tip - they're not low because of a lack of good games or a lack of PSP owners.

 

[Louster]

I think anyone who's interested enough in a game to download it and give it a bash probably would be willing to buy the game given a price below a certain threshold, in which case the argument kind of falls over, as games are always reduced in price eventually. Can you say that you definitely wouldn't buy a game that you've downloaded if it was available for, say, £5? If you have the machine to run it (and by implication some disposable income), the vague interest required to download it, and some sense of morality, I'd be surprised if the answer was 'no', and at that point the original argument becomes 'I wouldn't buy it now' rather than 'ever'.

Anyhow, while I'm not one to go on retarded crusades against piracy, I'm personally extremely uncomfortable downloading new games - and only ever very rarely do - for pretty much the reasons I've outlined, and the only real 'grey area' that I acknowledge is that of games that are no longer available legally, or otherwise extremely difficult to obtain. In that case, where developers/publishers are just sitting on the rights for years and years after with no real intention of ever re-releasing, I think that it does actually become much closer to a grey, "morally neutral" area.

Also, if I'm bored enough that I'm looking to download stuff, I'll play around with independent shareware shit (which is typically AWESOME) or demos, and am perfectly happy with that. In the case of Bioshock, since I own neither an xbox360 nor a computer that would be able to run it acceptably, I'll be forced to wait years to play it in any case, so I'm not really bothered.

 

[ST^]

When will you get brand new games for a fiver? Prices are always reduced but they'll disappear from shelves before they start selling for that little.

 

[Louster]

My point was that game prices are reduced over time, and often the 'succesful' ones are rereleased, for example, at huge discounts. (Like how you can buy Rollercoaster Tycoon 2 + 3 and all the expansion packs for £18 from play.com now, which to me is very tempting.) So if it's an inevitability (and it surely is) that you will eventually be able to buy whatever new game that you're downloading for some pittance in the future, the argument, like I said, becomes more about immediacy than "not buying it at all".

 

[nath]

Can you say that you definitely wouldn't buy a game that you've downloaded if it was available for, say, £5?

That's true to a certain extent. Colin McRae Dirt for example, downloaded that for pc, played it a bit, it was a bit of a laugh but it's not something I'd ever consider buying. If I saw it for 5 quid, I'd still not consider it a worthy purchase. However, given the utter lack of effort to download it I did. I've played it a few times, and will continue to do so every now and then. If it had impenetrable copy protection and wasn't available to download, I'd simply not bother.

In this scenario the act of my downloading a game is almost in a vacuum. It hasn't affected anyone - I'm not getting my stuff from p2p so I'm not making more available to others and there's no lost revenue on the part of the publishers.

 

[Saggy]

That's true to a certain extent. Colin McRae Dirt for example, downloaded that for pc, played it a bit, it was a bit of a laugh but it's not something I'd ever consider buying. If I saw it for 5 quid, I'd still not consider it a worthy purchase. However, given the utter lack of effort to download it I did. I've played it a few times, and will continue to do so every now and then. If it had impenetrable copy protection and wasn't available to download, I'd simply not bother.

Given that Dirt needs quite beast machine would you even buy such an computer if copying games would be impossible? CPU power is always needed but gaming graphics-cards aren't. ~£1000 (from which >£250 for gfx-card) rig means for me that I've to buy ~20 games before upgrading to make it worth it.

 

[nath]

Well, my previous pc's motherboard fell to pieces, seemed to make more sense to get a new one and I like to go for the best as I don't upgrade very often. Actually, that's one of the reasons I downloaded dirt - to see what a really decent looking game runs like on my machine.

 

[Saggy]

Well, my previous pc's motherboard fell to pieces, seemed to make more sense to get a new one and I like to go for the best as I don't upgrade very often. Actually, that's one of the reasons I downloaded dirt - to see what a really decent looking game runs like on my machine.

8800GTX costed a small fortune back then so I'll ask again - would have you bought such an beast machine if downloading games would be impossible? You bought if for gaming by the looks of it, how many games are you going to buy for it to make it worth the price?

 

[nath]

I didn't buy IT for gaming, I just spent roughly 200 quid more on a graphics card than I would have if I didn't play games. I haven't thought about how many games I'm gunna buy. I like games and I like having the option to buy them when something good comes out. Unfortunately the pc games market has been slow recently, however a few spring to mind. Bioshock (looks absolutely amazing), Crysis and HL ep 2.

 

[Saggy]

I didn't buy IT for gaming, I just spent roughly 200 quid more on a graphics card than I would have if I didn't play games. I haven't thought about how many games I'm gunna buy. I like games and I like having the option to buy them when something good comes out. Unfortunately the pc games market has been slow recently, however a few spring to mind. Bioshock (looks absolutely amazing), Crysis and HL ep 2.

Direct question for the 3rd time - would have you bought such an beast machine if downloading games would be impossible? And which gfx-card would have you bought and for what purpose (=for which programs) if it wasn't for gaming btw?

 

[nath]

Like I said, I'd have got the same PC bar the graphics card. The graphics card I would have got would probably be an entry level ati/nvidia for like 70 quid.

 

[Saggy]

Like I said, I'd have got the same PC bar the graphics card. The graphics card I would have got would probably be an entry level ati/nvidia for like 70 quid.

Ok, so downloading pc games frequently to play for a quick laugh was worth almost the price of 8800GTX and if downloading games would be impossible you would only play old'ish games. Explains why people like Louster can't afford such an machine

Oh, I'm not blaming you or anything, it just seems to be the trend - "save up" for the beast machine by downloading the games for free. Wont take long when games start to require new hardware (bundled with ~5 game coupons) twice a year - hard to make profit by selling software so they might force us to buy hardware...



... and in a couple of weeks their system gets hacked and everything is back to normal

 

[nath]

Ok, so downloading pc games frequently to play for a quick laugh was worth almost the price of 8800GTX and if downloading games would be impossible you would only play old'ish games. Explains why people like Louster can't afford such an machine

Oops. seems I misread your question. I read it as would I still buy the same thing if I didn't play games (I was focussing my attention on pizza :\). Anyway, If I couldn't download games, yes I still would have got it as the games I download are not reason enough to buy the fancy card. The fancy card was bought with games like Crysis and HL2 ep2, amongst others (that I can't remember). All of the games that I thought of when deciding on a powerful graphics card I'll be buying. The stuff I download is just because I'm bored and have nothing better to do and, as I said earlier in the thread, wouldn't buy even if I couldn't download them.

Hey, I ain't no saint - there's the odd game here and there that I probably would have bought if I hadn't downloaded but it really doesn't happen very often.

 

[Saggy]

Oops. seems I misread your question.

Correction - you ignored the question twice and misread it once

Anyway, maybe we should get back to topic

 

[nath]

Alright alright, no need to get sand in your vagina.