Read more...

You guys should check this one out

Good article.

The age old piracy argument is getting stale if you ask me. Obviously if the game is of high quality and priced accordingly people are going to buy it but at the same time if the game is crap and charges premium price for it and nobody buys it the publishers or studio automatically pulls the "blame piracy" card.

How about those devs just fess up and admit their game was buttslop and nobody wanted to play it and the people who pirated the game was going to pirate it anyways.

If you really look between PC games and the console games you will notice that the 360 and Wii are heavily pirated as well but nobody cares to point that out at all and just automatically blames the PC side of ruining the industry.

Also piracy aside, how about studios taking gambles on new and different IP's instead of making another Battlefield of Duty: Modern Killzone clone and breath some fresh air into the industry.

Just my 2 cents. Still a good read on the article.

I agree

I do think that pirating on the PC is easier than on a console, but the core issue is that piracy isn't really the problem in the first place. I also know a lot more people are willing to pirate a game that they thing sucks.

Oh without a doubt its easier on the PC since all the tools are pretty much click and go but it is getting easier for the consoles especially the 360. Obviously not Dreamcast easy haha but for someone with a little technical know how it's pretty straight forward.

I'm very guilty of "renting" games that suck I used to do it all the time when I was going to school and living in Michigan and didn't have much money to spend.

drpain wrote:
With the invention of "free weekends" on steam where they can allow you to download and play a game for a limited amount of time, why not allow us to rent a game for a week for $5, if we like it, they give us the $5 back towards the full retail purchase of the game, if we don't wanna buy it, they keep the $5 and disable it from our steam account? It would allow the people who wanna try a game to do it without being forced into piracy!?!?!?!?
If only the companies thought this way, instead of just giving hackers new projects. The only way to prevent you from playing a game it to require internet authentication, but i'm not sure why we couldn't unplug the WWW at a LAN and create our own to fool STEAM into thinking we had bought all the games? It's obviously a huge task, but so is reverse engineering a game to create key generators and the such to offer it on a pirated site...
Just sayin', it's going to happen, at least try to profit a little from it as the maker steam!

Yeah, something like that could work. I think OnLive does something like that were you can rent the game or atleast play it for like an hour or 2 but it's been awhile since I have fooled around with OnLive.

I'm sure we all remember back in the 90's and early 00's we had the shareware and demos out that would let us play a level or a single multiplayer level as long as we wanted.

Don't know why that went away especially on the PC since the consoles get demos for the games.

Twodavez wrote:
99% of games on Steam sell for $5 during the sales anyway. The only ones that don't are the big multiplayer titles. Any other game you could just play through once for $5 and be done with under your system, none of them would ever sell at full price while new. This would be horrible, not only as a business decision for Steam but also for the developers as well. I mean, unless you want them all to go bankrupt. Let them keep making the money off their shiny new games and sell them later for cheap, no need to change anything.

drpain wrote:
Steam has demos for nearly every game as it is. I wasn't aware it ever "went away".