Peeved Developer Gets His Responses

[Rob Williams]

From our front-page news:

This past Monday, I linked to an Ars Technica article that discussed Cliff Harris, an agitated game developer who's tired of his games being pirated, and rightfully so. He raised the question to the pirates themselves, "Why do you pirate games?" Seems like a straight-forward question, but did he get straight-forward answers back?

It depends on how you view things. Some hardcore freedom enthusiasts believe everything should be free, while others believe games are simply too expensive. Both of these are foolish for the most part, given how much money people waste on other things without a second thought (how about those $5 coffees or GAS?!). 'Going to the shops is annoying' was another, which is another poor excuse, since even the laziest person can easily order the game online.

The most popular complaint is one I can actually agree with... DRM. I've mentioned my own thoughts many times before, but the overall idea for me is that if you pay for something, you shouldn't have to put up with copy protection, on anything. I'm tired of seeing warning labels on my $30 Blu-ray movies, I hate having to find a no-CD crack for my $50 games, and don't get me started on music DRM.

Developers (well, publishers more so) need to get a clue and reward the paying customers, given the fact that no matter the protection put in place, crackers will defeat it. It sometimes even happens before the game's release, so who's kidding who here?

Starship Tycoon - One of Positech's many titles

In many cases DRM ensures that pirates get the superior version of the game, while people who purchased the boxed game have to put up with annoying piracy counter-measures. This issue became even more surreal last month when Ubisoft used an actual crack from the piracy scene to "fix" an issue customers were having with Rainbow Six Vegas 2. The truth is that as long as DRM hurts gamers while pirates enjoy more stable releases, there will always be an incentive to steal.

Source: Ars Technica

[b1lk1]

I am extremely against pirating games, but it really pisses me off to be forced to use no-cd cracks for my games because Starforce doesn't play with Vista 64 and EA Games downloaded games don't work after 3-4 months.

[Krazy K]

Windows doesn't need the install CD in the drive to load so why to I need to leave the game CD accessible, I mean in a place where I can easily scratch it, so that it will load the game?

[Merlin]

Originally Posted by Krazy K

Windows doesn't need the install CD in the drive to load so why to I need to leave the game CD accessible, I mean in a place where I can easily scratch it, so that it will load the game?

You can mount the cd into a virtual drive, maybe using Dameon Tools
So pack that CD somewhere safe and play away

Merlin

[Rob Williams]

I've just resorted to locating no-CD cracks and never have to worry about the disc. On odd occasion, I'll burn the game itself to a backup, but that doesn't always work because the game knows better. The companies simply want you to scratch the original disc enough so you'll have to replace it, it seems.

[Kougar]

I had some bad experiences with virtual drives, although admittedly it was a rather long time ago now. I don't even remember what program it was but it completely mucked up my real CD-ROM drivers so that the OS didn't recognize the real optical drive.

I've not run into that issue as of late, but it left a lingering negative view of mounting virtual drives with me.

Particularly the DRM... Now that I have a GPU that lets me play Crysis on Very High @ 1920x1200 I've been playing it... but I certainly do NOT enjoy having to insert the disc every time I play. OR that the disc requires the drive to spool for about half a minute to a minute before it can even read the disc! EA's idea of copy protection was to make their Crysis discs extremely hard to read and if I was prone to violence I'd like to meet the guy that thought that idea up. Who in their right mind would design a disc that is hard to read, like that is even going to stop a single person from pirating it.

Edit: I had completely forgotten, but after posting this I recalled my experiences with Prey. I forget what copy-protection it used to verify the disc is genuine but it's similar to the one in Crysis that requires the disc be inserted so it can verfiy it's authenticity. Anyway, I hopped onto the SATA DVD burner bandwagon early and also bought Prey second hand, so it was pretty old already.

Just like Windows XP pre-SP1, I came to find out Prey didn't work at all with my SATA optical drive. I had to contact their support, download their tool to scan the optical drive and generate a hardware profile, then send it back to them before they could send me a modified exe file that would let me launch the game without it failing the disc check process. It would only successfully launch 1 out of 10 attempts, but the disc itself was fine.