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AnthonyW86 on 27 January 2010
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ChichiriMuyo said:
AnthonyW86 said:
ChichiriMuyo said:

As has already been said, no one has proven there is a negative impact from piracy and the reason they haven't is because they can't.  If they could, they would.  Statistical data on piracy would be everywhere, the math would be testable, and the results would be reproducable.  The fact is, though, that piracy has a statistically insignificant impact on their business.  Most people who pirate would love it if they could afford to buy legitimate copies, they don't because they can't. 

Do take note, that they are also using this system to stop used sales.  What they are doing is fighting tooth and nail to show some kind of improved profit margin.  They do not care if you buy their game legitimately or not, they care if they get the money for it.  They hate used sales just as much as piracy and this is a mover to fight used sales just as much as it is to fight piracy. 

If they get their way they actually won't have any impact on pirates, since the game can be hacked to avoid the security altogether, but it will have a severe impact on people who buy games second-hand.  What they are really doing is squeezing the middle market, which will only have the effect of making used buyers in to new buyers or pirates.  This is not something that deserves praise.

Hell, the fact that people actually think this move is about piracy is laughable.  They can't kill piracy, they know it, and you'd have to be completely naive to think this will slow the pirates down even one bit.  This is about the used market, and you're going to miss it when it is gone.  Trust me.

Like i said you should have checked the bittorrent numbers that were released recently. For example: The game Prototype was downloaded more times than it was sold on PS3 and X360 COMBINED. And that's just Bittorrent, and only downloads since it could have been copied multiple times after.

So don't go saying it doesn't impact the bussiness because it does.

And i hounestly won't miss the used game market one second, since iv'e resold only a handfew of games in my entire life, and those i did were for like $10 to friends. And to be honest, nobody complaints if they pay like $10 to watch a movie of 2 hours in the theater, why complain when paying $40(PC average new price) for 10-20 of game entertainment?

 

On-topic: Ass said above, you probably need to online to access your savegame and maybe to save your game aswell. And again in future optimations games could be programmed to get parts of the game code online.

I've seen them, but they are simply meaningless.  Prototype could have been downloaded a billion times and that doesn't mean piracy had any impact on sales whatsoever.  The number of downloads doesn't have any correlation to the number of legitimate sales potentially lost. We can sit here all day pouring over Gamestop's numbers too, but at the end of the day we can't just say they sold X used games so the devs sold X (or Y) less copies than they could have.  That's simply not how it works.  Just look at MW2, which had more piracy than Prototype's legit sales and pirated sales combined.  Did that massive piracy stop it from being one of the biggest entertainment launches in history?  NOT AT ALL.  That's because success or failure has nothing to do with the avilability of pirated data.  If a company is going to be a success, they'll do so within the realities of the market, not by fighting it.

Piracy, as has been said all too many times, is by and large something done by people who would happily buy legitimate products if they could afford to.  They don't because they can't.  China and Brazil are places where piracy is really rampant, and the cost of a game in those countries is easily twice what it'd cost in the US despite people making only a 10th of what an American makes.  They can't afford it, so they don't buy it.  That's also the leading reason why the PC is the target of the vast majority of piracy - consoles are luxury goods and pirates typically can't afford luxuries (PCs are utility goods).  Any argument about how much harder it is to pirate on a non-PS3 console is coming from someone that has never actually involved themselves with piracy.  It's easy as hell, you just need to be able to afford the hardware in the first place and most pirates can't.

Also, given the fact that pirates can and have worked around the dial-in restriction before by setting up fake authentification servers, what is stopping anyone from settign up a fake save data server on their own PC once a pirate cracks Ubisoft's system?  Absolutely nothing, which is how much impact this will have on piracy.

If you really think that those millions of downloads don't impact overall sales thenn i don't think i can make my point clearly anyway(i just hope you don't have a job witch involves economics).

As for the unaffordable part, that really isn't a valit point. If i can't afford something, it doesn't mean i should just get it without paying no does it? I used to save up my $10 allowense to buy 1 great game every half year, and man did i enjoy those games. And if people can't afford any luxuries and can barely get around, i don't think playing videogames is a priority for them either(and again not being able to afford something doesn't mean you should be able to get it without paying).

But i've shared my opinion(thats what forums are for) and really have nothing more to add here. I really hope this knew approach works and puts and end to piracy. Because i love PC gaming and they way hardware keeps improving every year.

And if it works, than maybe we will finally get alot of really good PC developed games again. Maybe just maybe will can get back to the glory days of Half-Life, Unreal etc. were PC games weren't just console ports for the most part...