Just as a Note, I agree wholeheartedly that copy protection ONLY hurts the legit users, pirates have never been stopped by it. In fact, one of the bigger ones was XP (and now Vista) which has been broken and hacked in a matter of hours of it's release. Wow, yeah, that really stopped them pirates good, for a whole less then 24 hours.
I love games which don't require you to have the CD in or do a CD check, such as UT 2004, which interestingly enough...STILL MADE MONEY...
Hmm, yet a game that is outstanding as well, called Darkstar One gets a bad rep because of why??? The copy protection makes it hard to run on people's computers...so a DIRECT thing between bad sales...and copy protection...
Yet idiots STILL use copy protection...thinking it will help sell more games...idiots.
Same goes for movies.
This is the attitude I love! Because it was broken by someone and they made that information available it is pointless... Well hell... no reason to use passwords on machines anymore. Obviously they can be broken so why use them??? Oh wait... you mean that 98% of the populous has no clue how to "Crack" the DRM by themselves and at 90% or more will never bother to go find a tool to do it?
Do you REALLY think companies would continue copy protection if it really only cost them money? Do you honestly believe corporations are that stupid? Really? Especially ones that are often run by the guys that have literally grown up in an age where copy protection was always circumvented? Huh... I wonder if maybe, just maybe, somewhere someone actually ran the numbers and found a correlation between piracy and ease of copyright infringement.
For instance what is the easiest copyright material to steal in the digital age? Yup you guessed it... CD music. Now here is a fun test for you all... Please go find me the Mp3 of The Chicago Symphony Orchestra's 1971 recording of Symphony Fantastique by Hector Berlioz. Now if you want the 1973 it will take about 15 seconds. Why? It is on CD. Any idiot can rip MP3 from a CD. However the '71 is by far superior... and more over it is only available on Vinyl! Yup you need a record player to hear it. So it has no better copy protection than the '73 recording, however it is a hell of a lot more work to make an MP3 from a record than it is from a cd. End result... path of least resistance wins!
I am willing to bet dollars to donuts that software companies (as well as media types) "ran the math" and found that some form of copy protection (Despite the fact it is already broken by some) does indeed lead to less piracy by "the masses". Make something easy to steal and you make more thieves! Napster was proof... any idiot was able to make their CD collection available online to others, and any idiot did! It was easy... there were no "real" victims, and people's morals went out the window. Now it is almost considered a birth right to get other peoples ripped music for free.
So while they may have stopped the "hardcore" pirates for a few hours they stop a whole lot of "casual" pirates forever. Because many of them will just pay the cash if they think it is worth it. More over many of the hardcore pirates spent more time (at a measly $10 an hour) than if they just forked over the money (and at least 1 of them had to fork over the money as well as someone had to have the media in the first place) for the game.
This is why I think the MMO revolution is so profitable... Piracy is not really a problem for blizzard in World of Warcraft... that is the bonus of hosting servers. It makes verification of product very easy. You mention UT2004... It so happens our CGIM department uses that game to teach a level design class. It also happens that the MAJOR draw of the game is multiplayer online that requires an individualized Key... They don't care if you copy the game to 100 machines in order to play your buddy on the internet you needed a Key and so did he. They still got their money. So I think we will see more and more movement to online games that require online authorization. Why? Piracy makes it more desirable for the software development companies. That in the end is the ultimate irony of media and software theft. In the end the only people that it screws are the customers... not because of "bulky" Copy protection, but because every stolen game makes it less likely for people to write more of them. Very few people write games for free... the more money made by game companies... the more good games you will get. Pretty simple really.
So you bring up ONE title that suffered from bad Copy protection. For it I can list hundreds that benefited from good copy protection. So those "idiots" are probably not in the business because they are idiots... I am sure when you own and run your own game company you can tell me how wrong I am... however, I suspect if that were your lot in life you would be listening to the "idiots" that were telling you how to protect your investment... the same way they are.
GE-Raven
- Idiot.
I don't know a SINGLE title that has profited from Copy Protection, but I can name some big ones that lost money. For example, NWN was a big seller, but it didn't sell as many as it could. The copy protection did terrible things for it's worth, and though Bioware finally convinced Atari of the stupidity of it all, they didn't manage to get it removed until patch 1.23 and by then much damage had been done. Or then there's the Pool of Radiance fiasco, in which the installation and uninstallation program hadn't been checked for bugginess because the Copy Protection was slapped on after the final product was sent, and if you know anything about POR and what happened afterwards, you know that had a most definate hit on sales. They finally got the patch out for it...but...
There's a difference between Copy Protection, and account creation, which is what you seem to be confused about. Account Protection is what creates an account on line to play, which is what you do need in most instances for an MMO, however Blizzard's just about done away with ANY CD/Game CD protections for the actual game, to the point of offering it for free. An MMO or MMORPG is now shown to actually prosper a great deal more WITHOUT those to deal with, it's not the game that they are worried about, it's the accounts, because in an MMORPG it's the acounts that make money, not the actual game. Someone could have a game and never play, but even if they never play as long as they have 20 accounts, they make money, so that entire BS about MMO's using CD protections is not actually entirely accurate. The more successful ones learned early on that a free game that drew people in to make accounts made a whole lot more money than a game with copy protection. IN fact, the more that copied, the better, and hell, they beat them to the punch. Everquest learned that hell, you don't even need to have people download the game, most who do would only try it out for a week or so, if even that to see if they liked it or not. Why not offer it for free, for a 14 day to month long FREE trial...beating out anything the pirates might do with that. Then it was the account that mattered, and if they could keep that person's account going, and charge them...THAT was where the money came from. The ones that came after, who are successful have learned the same lessons...if you note, WoW is offered for free, and has free trials with it. If you don't mind playing in chunks and have ways to verify the creation of different accounts, you could play literally almost forever on free WoW games, but you still have to be able to make an account, as the account is what matters.
The difference between and account and copy protection, copy protection prevents one from copying the game so others can get free copies. Your attempt at an example for MMOs is so far off the mark as to be not funny, as MMO's typically explicitly cater to those who want to get free copies now days. In many ways MMOs are the exact opposite of what copy protection is. The accounts on the other hand, since that is real money for them, and is tied most times to your real money...aka a credit card...is more protected just like your bank account numbers and credit card numbers would be. Not only does it make them money, but they could be sued badly if they released information like that to the public or made it easy access.
Musicwise, I found it interesting concerning Metallica's change of heart. At first they were blazing the way in the fight against music, and then...their sales fell somewhat. People claimed, or some Metallica publicists claimed it was due to Metallica making different and new types of Music. What I find interesting is that their latest album after all this suddenly had free links to music, and other items...and NO protections whatsoever...though the album WASN't all that great anyways I must admit.
You think Sony hasn't suffered...and then you have Celine Dion. Fabulous singer. Used to have number one hits in the US all the time...hey...not just the US...but the world. Her last albums...well...I Know I DIDN'T buy it (and yes, I had bought albums before), in fact someone tried giving me a copy and I refused because I didn't know which albums had copy protection on them anymore...and CD copy protections from her company had been known to cause problems. Hell, I'll even d/l the songs maybe off youtube (interesting some of what's on there by the way), but no way I'm buying her CD...and I think others have done the same.
60% of my friends however DO burn their CDs to their ipods. I don't know a single one that's been stopped by CD protection if they really want to burn it. It takes all of about 10 minutes to go search something up on the internet that a pirate's already created to make it possible to get past just about any CD protection out there. So contrary to your idea of it taking hours...it takes SOME hours, the rest simply take minutes to use thier work.
The ONLY industry I know of where CD protection/DVD protections have actually done what needed to be done was Microsoft, and part of that was due to their online authorization...aka...creating an account to go along with the CD protection. IN fact the account creation was MUCH more successful at preventing replication than the actual CD/DVD protections. I actually disagree with how they do it, but for the US, it has been more preventative of the usual form of piracy which currently pervades the music world.
Now don't get me wrong, I am strongly against piracy overall...but I'm even more strongly against CD protections for one reason...I as a legit user have ONLY been hurt by them...and it pisses me off. Enough so that I understand why a LOT of my friends have gone to getting the pirated goods, not because it's cheap (though it is, but there is always the risk of bugs and trojans), but because it's a hell of alot easier to run a game on the computer without the CD protections than it is with. If copy protection is bad enough on a game that it reaches the news, and reaches me before I get the game, that is in and of itself reason not to get a game. And I'm not the only one who thinks that way...however I am one of the few that won't actually get the game if that happens (others will simply go looking on the internet for a cracked version).
I DO however, crack the exe's, which the industry calls piracy, to run my games without CDs. I'm not against that, though they call that piracy too. However, I'm the one that the industry loves (my type of consumer, for if I like a game, I'll buy several copies to play MP, and yes, I'll crack them all, but I have them all as well...and they love people who buy multiple copies)...so if they want to stop my sells because they want to stop ALL of what they consider piracy, well their's a point where trying to label something as piracy when it isn't, is absurd.
PS: Sorry for the long post.
Topic: Blu-Ray AND HD-DVD DRM broken (Read 3863 times)