I can't understand so many praise of Steam. Today is convenient, yes. But nobody can assure you'll can install your game tomorrow or next month or next year. If Steam close, all your games will be lost. And if the online music service of Microsoft can close and leave all its users royally fu**ed, something like that could happen with Steam.

And you can't lend them to friends or give them away if you want... I'm sorry, but I prefer old-school DVD-Games (without limited installs or calling home before every install, of course). If I buy something, I want to use it as I see fit.

Calling-home DRM is the worse kind and Steam is just that, a calling home DRM with a great PR department.

Funny how you don't hear about Valve complaining about piracy.

Boo F***ing Hoo. Cry my a f***ing river, Hollenshead. Praytell, what obliges hardware companies to be concerned about software piracy? Here's a clue, Mr Hollenshead: it is not their concern. Expecting hardware companies to be concerned about software piracy makes even less sense than expecting condom manufacturers to be concerned about adultery. Even if hardware companies are "happy about piracy" like Hollenshead has accused, so what? Does it make them responsible for piracy?

You know, it always annoys me when content publishers (RIAA, Hollywood, id Software) whines about "hardware companies don't make it harder for pirates". "Boohoo, this particular model of Samsung DVD players doesn't have Region Protection. Waaah, waaaah!!!" I just hope hardware companies are not swayed by this kind sh*t and listen more to their consumers than the likes of RIAA.

It is true that piracy is a salesargument, I'd not buy such relatively expensive fast computers if I had to rely on having only software I could afford (hoping it was any good if there was no trial version) and if I had to only buy games I'd play a whole lot less of them, because let's face it; most aren't worth the asking price.
I do buy software and games though, if it's a good product and the price isn't out there in the stratosphere.

Oh and I agree that such matters are definitely not the concern of hardware makers, although in my opinion they already try too hard, audio codec makers are proud on installing DRM support in their chips for instance and video chips and GPU add macromedia and HDCP crap, there's tons of hardware with such awful stuff in it, which the makers had to develop to run on their hardware at their own cost and seemingly proudly do so...

As a former software pirate he is absoloutely right - a lot of 'oh I'm a good guy!' whiners will complain but it's without any doubt in my mind a serious factor in many PC gamers minds, there's no way I could have afforded half the PC hardware I've had in my days if I had to pay for the games too.

It's such a shame and I feel ashamed to admit it, I'm an emotionless tool and even I feel guilt about it.

That being said, I did buy Sin Episodes you tools :( damn I was sad to see the rest of the episodes cancelled, GRRR.

make a good game price it right and you will make money. Make a moderate game at a moderate/high price and you will not make (very much) money. I used to pirate quite a bit and if the game was good I would buy it... I try and stay legit now and its getting easier with the availability of demos skyrocketing but odds are if someone pirated the game and liked it they wont mind dropping a few of thier hard earned dollars to your company for the software if for nothing else than a token of their appreciation of a "valuable" product.

Those who are going to buy a game will and those who are going to pirate the game will, DRM does not change that.

What DRM has changed is my buying habits.

DRM has done what buggy and unfinished games couldn't do, stopped me from buying games. It does not induce me to pirate a game, but is sure has stopped me from buying a lot of games.

Steam is in my opinion a bad example of DRM that works, is my view that these users are the people who would have paid for the game anyway etc.

Piracy, piracy, piracy.... no matter how often they say it is not what is hurting their business.

Cheers,

Teddy Bär

It's also every car manufacturers fault that people are speeding.

Maybe id should try making less repetitive games before they can bitch about piracy. Again.

What is the evidence? How are hardware manufacturers helping pirates? What is the crime? Are they responsible for fixing piracy?

So... he's blaming hardware manufacturers now for their lack of new ideas to keep PC gamers buying.

Can't wait for HDMI inside the computer to protect us from the content!

"like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games. "

using the net is not a right, its a freedom. that was and still is the point of the net. your free to do what you want with it. whether or not the mpaa or riaa stalk and terrorize your ip and info is another story.

Here's a wild theory:

a) Stop coding lazy ass crap for PCs that needs a 500 dollar video card to run half decently (for the most part, except maybe close to a console's release, consoles have hardware quite inferior to what many PC games require)

b) Gamers have money left over to buy games instead from not needing 2500 dollar PC

c) Profit.

Proof:

- best selling PC games don't have heavy requirements

Conclusion:

- iD might have some of the best programmers, but don't have a lick of common sense.

- hardware vendors don't encourage piracy, software vendors are lazy, hardware vendors profit from stupid software engineers, and piracy *might* be slightly higher as a side effect... as someone else pointed out, piracy isn't exactly unknown on consoles. As yet, the PS3 hasn't been hacked.... guess which console hasn't sold as well as Sony would have hoped? ;) Of course I have no proof of this, but who knows.

Many of us generate our own content. I take photographs, I record myself playing and singing, I write short poetry and prose. I make massive spreadsheets to model data. Family members record digital video. We all generate data that we want to exchange with others and a PC makes this easy. No piracy or infringing need be involved.

That said, the RIAA and MPPA are following a failed paradigm. Someday this will all go away when congress pulls its head out and realizes that nobody can create anything new and useful because their ideas are entangled with patents and copyrights that should not have been granted. Fundamentally, congress needs to realize that nearly all technology is either knowledge of reality or derivative of prior developments. These temporary monopolies need to be narrower in focus and granted for much shorter lengths of time. Thats what has got to happen.

People pirate because they know they won't get in trouble.

How about this for thought, The Elder Scrolls: IV, had no sort of copywrite protection, no DRM, and even no cd-key, only a cd checker which you can easily get by, sold copies in the millions? If the game is worth buying, people will buy it. Make crappy games with drm, people will be more then happy to pirate it.

This sounds like a perfectly reasonable statement to me.

One of the biggest advantages of "openness" is that piracy is easier.

Here we go again. Id at its usual statements. They have nothing else better to do than to talk trash again. Here is an idea??. Stop making crappy games. Second??. I find this funny as valve has not said a word about piracy.

With that said I hope one day to see Id get bought out by Microsoft LOL. They need to get assimilated. The gaming industry are becoming too greedy. Case you haven't noticed but piracy is not unique just pc's. Everything else also get pirated. The goal is to make games that are worth buying. Even console games are crap. Again ID needs to get bought out and then everyone will be happy =)

I think Jesus would have no problems with a person getting a game for free if they were poor and couldn't afford it. I also don't think he would have a problem if a poor person also connected to a neighbors wireless as long as they don't abuse it. I'm not religious, but yeah, but the little I know, Jesus would probably encourage it. I think he would also have a problem with the elites of the church living in gold, with the poor around the world fueling their life style.

I have a different opinion on piracy.
I say that software makers drive people to piracy through severely inconveniencing the honest players with draconian drm.

Steam is probably the absolute best drm system, as it doesn't inconvenience the customer.
Which is why steam gets more sales than other drm systems.

Bioshock is probably one of the best examples of crappy DRM.
The game won't install or run if you are using microsoft's process explorer, it installs some sort of hidden rootkit, even with this drm it still has a cd check, and limited your installations of the game.
The 1.1 patch took around 30 minutes or more, probably because of a slow activation server or something.
It was one of the worst drm systems I ever had to deal with.

I pretty much downloaded the crack as soon as it was available.

I won't buy any games that use the same drm as bioshock now, so spore and mass effect are 2 sales that the game companies aren't going to get from me.

Consolitis and bloatware is another reason for poor sales, pc gamers aren't interested in 75% of the games, because they're horrible games. *cough* crysis *cough*
When I bought Bioshock, I was hoping for something like system shock2, but I got a FPS.
Not that it was a bad FPS, but it certainly wasn't what I expected it to be.

Also, you have to take into account people who stay with an old game and don't play anything else.
Consoles make you rebuy your games, and they don't have much replay value, whereas on the pc you have people still playing CS1, TF1, quake3, ut2004, starcraft and diablo2.

Isn't this the same argument some point (for and against) nuclear energy?

As a shareware game developer, I don't support the idea of piracy, but it happens. That's the whole beauty of the PC---it's a general purpose computer. You can do cool things with it, or you can be a prick---it's totally up to you. It's nice to have that freedom, and I don't think PC hardware should be restricted in any ways. Hardware DRM would fly in the face of the idea of general purpose computing.

When we release a game or application, the full version doesn't have any DRM, and we try to keep the price reasonable for the content you're getting. In fact, I love it if people share the game with family members, because you can't buy better advertising than that. As a result, we have lots of happy customers and extremely low rates of piracy. If you release a crappy, expensive game and then fortify it with titanic levels of DRM, you are pretty much asking people to pirate the beejesus out of it.

Piracy has always been the cost of doing business on an open medium and platform like the internet and PCs.

Piracy is not the biggest reason why PC gaming has been on the decline and developers/publishers are shifting to consoles.

It is a factor, but there are far larger elements at play. (changing demographics, budget and focus on eye candy going out of control, beta-quality programming with being released then later on gets patches if the game is a fiscal success. etc.)

Yet, piracy is treated by the gaming industry like the biggest scapegoat ever.

It is ironic, that piracy is part of the reason why some applications and games became so successful. The product in question was good and easy enough to pirate that it effectively killed the competition.

I find it ironic that a company that was started by people passing around copies of their shareware and later the full game would complain about piracy. Piracy built them into a profitable company because, while plenty of copies were pirated, plenty of copies were bought as well.

This is sort of like when Microsoft turned a blind eye to Office being pirated. They would condemn it one minute, but at the same time, they did nothing about it. So Office becomes the defacto standard, beating out other competitors by force of piracy. Then when it's the standard, MS started trying to trip up pirates.

I do feel software companies should be paid for their work. But there will always be pirates and their will always be honest people. Id should know this better than anyone.

ugh, I can't even be bothered to pirate an ID/Raven game for the past 5+ years, let alone buy it.

Just sounds like more Crytekexcuseism (it's my new word!)

Do these guys ever think about what they're saying in an interview before they open their mouth and realize it sounds reaaally dumb?

What a crock. How can he make a blanket statement about PC users' intent? Did he do a survey, or is he rationalizing based upon his own unique experience?

Sure, people pirate games on the PC platform. It makes sense that it's easy, but it's not unique to PC's at all. I remember back in the days of the NES there were loads of pirated cartridges available, and you can still pirate console games.

Pirates will pirate anywhere, from any industry. This idea that there's some special condition in the PC world that makes it especially attractive is just Todd's way of shrugging off his own responsibility to protect his games.

I was at a LAN party once where RAVEN software developers stopped in as a guest appearance and they found out someone had a copied version of whatever FPS game was popular at the time. They were thrilled and told everyone to get it from him so we could all play death match with them. The person who got the most killed won an autographed copy of the game.

It's a basic tenet of economics that one way to make you're product more attractive, is to make the complementary products cheaper (or free). cf. Joel Spolsky.