Posts Tagged ‘piracy’
Eidos includes glitch in Batman: Arkham Asylum to thwart pirates
Now here’s an idea developers are sure to adopt — It seems that a user by the name of Chesirec_the_cat recently posted on the Batman: Arkham Asylum PC forums, expressing his concern that he could not use Batman’s glide at a part of the game thus leading to his continous death.
Well, it forum moderator Keir replied letting this user know that Eidos put the glitch into the game intentionally so those who pirated the game could not play through the entire thing. He then went on to say, “It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”
So, EA are you listening? This seems like the best alternative to DRM as it’s been proven no one likes that, right?
via maxconsole
Italy and Spain make up 30% of game piracy
The ESA (Entertainment Software Association) has long been fighting the piracy of video games and are getting increasingly concerned by its rate of growth. In fact, the association estimates in the month of December 2008th over 6.5 million gamers were illegally downloaded.
While the whole world is to be blamed, the ESA focused in on two countries, Italy and Spain, and have said that they make up for 17.1% of and 15.1% of the world’s video game piracy, respectively.
Despite waging a seemingly endless war, the ESA says they will continue to fight piracy.
Read (ESA)
Ubisoft to go head-to-head with piracy this year
Piracy has been an issue for a long time. Even before Napster was made mainstream people were recording songs off the radio and selling bootleg copies. Well, the game industry is no different and one company in particular has been hurtin’ especially bad; Ubisoft.
It seems that the publisher is so fed up with piracy that they have plans to combat the issue with their own firepower. Yves Guillemot, head of Ubisoft, speaks of the piracy problem:
“Altogether on console, the piracy is low. On the PC the piracy is quite a lot. We are working on a tool that would allow us to decrease that on the PC starting next year and probably one game this year.”
So what do they have cookin’ over at Ubisoft? Let’s hope they aren’t getting ideas from EA as we saw how well that was recieved with Spore.
Square Enix sues French retailer for piracy
Square Enix has always been known to holds its own in court, especially on the grounds of software piracy. Unfortunately for a french retailer by the name of la société SAKURA, has come into their targets.
According to Kotaku, the French retailer has a retail store in Paris along with an online presence that sells all sorts of Japanese gaming material. Well, something fishy must have been going on as Square Enix says they “denounces SAKURA for the commercialization of products counterfeiting Square Enix’s FINAL FANTASY and FULLMETAL ALCHEMIST trademarks and copyrights to the FINAL FANTASY series”.
Common la société SAKURA, how long did you think it would take Square Enix to catch you?
The Sims 3 Proves Piracy Is No Threat To Sales
Before the era of P2P file sharing if you wanted to get a game for free you had a few options. First if you had a buddy with the right knowhow he could send a disc your way with the game and a crack program on it. If none of your friends were quite that delinquently minded you only had one choice: to hunt through ‘warez’ sites which were generally just spawning grounds for popups, viruses and porn advertisements.
Peer to peer downloading programs changed that and Bittorrent has been one of the most popular downloading programs in years. Though the first protests came from the music industry thanks to Napster, the video games industry has gotten in on the act, with many companies complaining that developing for PCs has become nearly impossible due to rampant piracy. Those who do often institute draconian DRM measures, frustrating players and anarchists everywhere.
The Sims 3 was leaked and downloaded over 180,000 times from May 18th to May 21st, yet the DRM-free game has sold over 1.4 million copies in its first week, making it one of the most successful launches in EA’s history. EA has been one of the main proponents of the argument that piracy is killing the PC gaming industry, but their arguments seem to have been invalidated by this.
My guess is that the theory behind piracy goes like this: you’ve got a small subsection of the market who will pirate a game no matter what. Then you’ve got people who are willing to pay full price for a robust, well-crafted experience, but don’t want to pay full price for something that they think might be cool yet is only netting five or six out of ten on the reviews. In the end even if the panic-mongers at EA are right and piracy is a huge problem, the industry will simply evolve into an online focus where verification is built into games and money will be made by subscription fees or optional VIP packages in free games.
Sony: PSP Piracy is “Sickening”
The PSP has been stuck with the bane of piracy ever since its firmware was hacked to run homebrew software, which includes pirated games. How does Sony feel about it? In an interview with Gamasutra, Sony’s Peter Dille called the problem “sickening” and noted that the company loses a large amount of software sales due to illegal sharing.
"I’m convinced and we’re convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," said Dille.
The problem got so bad that third-party developers were “just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform” around 18 months ago. But Sony turned that around: Dille explained that the company has been “evangelizing” the platform since, touting it as an original platform and not a place to dump PS2 ports.
“[Piracy is] not good for us, but it’s not good for the development community,” he said. “We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it’s frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem.”
ESA Applauds Bittorrent Site Creators Jailtime
There was always a small issue with piracy; people selling copied VHS tapes out of the trunk or their car or selling bootleg casettes, but the electronic age took this minor industry annoyance and gave it fangs, claws, poisonous stingers, camouflage and an armored exoskeleton. After Napster made the average internet user aware of their ability to get stuff for free online, piracy has been an issue for every entertainment industry.
The sharing method of the day is Bittorrent, which allows users to download files from other users. Many websites have launched that offer easily searched indexes of everything from eBooks to leaked films. As you might expect the industry is doing what they can to go after these people and recently Swedish courts punished the founders/owners of a popular site called Pirate Bay with a year in jail.
The ESA is applauding the Swedish courts for doing so: “piracy is the single greatest threat to the development and release of innovative and creative entertainment software”. While piracy is probably a big issue for some companies I think many would agree with me that the biggest threats to innovation is the lack of innovation and creativity that all but the best game developers show.
MapleStory admins displeased with home-run servers
It’s no surprise that for every RPG out there, there is going to be a slew of users who decide to run their own private servers. MapleStory is no different, but not if AsiaSoft (one of the game’s distributors) has anything to do with it.
A 16-year old named Sean Lee who runs a private server is apparently one of the reasons for the crackdown, who says he’ll cease operations if he’s given a warning.
It looks like that warning may come sooner than he may have hoped as they plan on going straight to the servers’ ISPs
‘We are currently working with developers to take action against the service providers of private servers,’ said Mr Ng Kok Khwang, marketing director of AsiaSoft Online
Read (Kotaku)
Spore #1 Most Pirated Title
While many were complaining about the rather harsh DRM methods implemented to keep people from pirating Spore, somewhere near two million people were doing just that. According to download data collected from peer-to-peer downloading program BitTorrent, Spore was downloaded over 1,700,000 times this year.
Sadly for Maxis not only do the number of pirated downloads approach the total number of copies sold (over two million), The Sims 2 is second on the list, Unfortunately many surmise that the vast amount of Spore piracy is due to the DRM they instituted on the extremely anticipated game.
While many question the future of PC gaming given the extremely high rates of piracy for these and other games, the continued success of World of Warcraft and other MMOs shows that the future of PC gaming is likely in that genre, given that the constant online access includes whatever DRM measures are necessary.
Fake Nintendo handhelds make the rounds
Looking to buy a loved one a Nintendo handheld this holiday season? Well you better make sure it’s actually a Nintendo handheld and not a cheap knockoff like those that were seized by British officials.
It seems that a shipment of Nintendo DS imitators that were purchased from Asia, at an alarmingly discounted price, were intercepted by the good ol’ Brits. But what’s the big deal, the youngins won’t know the difference right?
Wrong, the power supplies that were shipping with these fake consoles were found to be potentially hazardous. So buyers, Mike Rawlinson, managing director of Nintendo’s fraud investigation company, reminds you that if a deal looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Read (Yahoo! Tech)
Spore Hits Shelves, Internet, DS
That’s right people, after being in development forever Spore has finally been released to the public worldwide, legally, that is.
This comes after news that an illegal version of the game had been leaked after it’s release date had been broken in Australia.
Don’t worry though, you can now head to your favorite store, be it virtual or not, and pick up the regular version of Spore for the usual $49.99 or the special Galactic Edition for a less modest $79.99. However, PC gamers won’t get all the lovin as Spore Creatures for the Nintendo DS has also hit shelves, for how much? $29.99.
What are you doing? Go buy obtain the game!
(Note: Digitalbattle does not support piracy.)
Developer: PC Piracy is Overblown
Piracy has been blamed for just about everything: bad reviews, poor sales to even shifts in business models. Crytek has been the most vocal, blaming piracy to be the cause of lower-than-expected sales of Crysis.
However, Penumbra game writer Tom Jubert disagrees, saying that piracy can no longer be employed as he “catch-all excuse”.
To back up his argument, Jubert cites figures from GameShadow Metrics, saying that the Crysis piracy factor is 1:5 instead of Crytek CEO claiming that for every one licensed copy of Crysis there were twenty pirated copies. He also notes that there is a 3:7 ratio in the UK.
“Of course, that’s not to say that Yerli is wrong,” concedes Jubert, “[it's] only that 1:15 is a potentially misleading statistic.” He also notes that it is difficult to measure the actual number of high-end gaming PCs in use, so claims like “consoles sell more” are equally unfounded.
id: Piracy is a "Hidden Benefit"
Epic and Crytek may not be happy about widespread piracy of computer games, but id Software sees piracy as a benefit for consumers. Studio CEO Todd Hollenshead has accused PC makers of viewing piracy as a “hidden benefit” for consumers.
“I think they are [secretly happy about PC piracy],” he said. “The size of the [PC game] pirate market actually is larger than the legitimate-goods market in many cases.”
“I think that there’s been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content–even if you’re supposed to pay for it on PCs–is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games.”
id Software is currently working on Quake Live and Rage, the latter coming out on PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.