There are several reasons why PC gaming continues in spite of being so easy to pirate games ...

Most of the gamers who are the most dedicated to online gaming play their games on the PC. It has been this way for a very long time, and it has been difficult for a long time to steal a PC game and still play it online on official servers.

PC games have been far better at generating alternative revenue streams. The MMO subscription has become the largest single stream of income, but expansion packs and mods have been providing developers with additional money for quite a long time (and several of the largest PC developers also licence their engines or tools to other developers which increases their revenues).

There is far less overhead for PC developers ... For quite a while (small to large) PC developers have been able to sell their games as direct downloads on their websites (or through inexpensive services) which drastically cuts overhead; if you don't have to pay for a physical copy to be manufactured, there is only a small (or no) retailer cut, and there are no platform licencing fees a publisher/developer can take home 90% or more of the sale price of a game.

A lot of PC games (like the Civilization games or the Sid Myers games) have stayed fairly close to their roots and they have not seen the massive rise in development costs that plague certain genres.

In my opinion, one of the most important reason piracy hasn't killed the PC market is that most (big budget) PC games are ported to a console which (dramatically) increases their game sales.

To put out an example of how this all works together lets look at Valve ... Valve creates the Source Engine and Steam which are heavily used by other developers and create massive revenues after the fact, they see very low overhead from selling their games and mods through steam and are still able to sell these games for the same price as retail, they create and sell a variety of expansions and mods for their most popular series Half-Life and they have ported this game to many consoles for excellent sales. At the same time Steam helps limit piracy from "uneducated" consumers, and also prevents people from stealing a game if they want to play it online ...

Well it has been hacked.

And then there are the people like me who just don't care. Although I don't think I'd ever buy a pirated game.. if I'm going to pay money it might as well be an official copy with that new fresh game/manual smell.

 It really has definately not been hacked, I assure you!

The stuff you read from PS3hax is pure bullshit. We're at the point now where some person has stolen some code to run a Java application that could be run in the VM machine of a Bluray movie disc specification.

This has NO access to the GPU, NO access to the CPU directly.

Its a VM, man this is not hacked....!

To run this "homebrew" you need to load it from a AVCHD folder on a memory stick, what does this tell you?

If I were to rip a DVD that contained an easter egg game and play it on my 360, would that be hacked also?

There has been no proof of a hack made public, everything that has been released so far is either fake, or a complete and utter embarresment, that just shows the lack of understanding of what "hacking" is. These so called "hackers" need some serious mental help.

The only code that has been run with full access to the system is on a development PS3, this can run UNSIGHNED CODE from scratch - this is not hackiong and CANNOT be applied to a retail PS3. Period!

Not at all...no help..not even a tiny bit...some sites will tell you that this is "the first steps towards homebrew".

It isn't, it is nothing, just like the BD-J pong, oh and now I see BD-J snake that has been released!

I decided to do some investigations on this myself ...

From what I have seen they have been able to accomplish quite a few things with the PS3 (including booting PS2 backups), and they have accomplished many of the things required to get a back-up running, but there is no published way to play backups at the moment. As a guess, I would expect a working hack on the PS3 by the end of 2008 ...

Some of you guys must not understand what a hack is. It most certainly has been hacked. Even just running something via the Java is still a hack. If you don't agree, you're not a hacker.

To put it in basic terms, hacking is simply getting a component to do something it was not intended to do by the manufacturer.


Some of you are suggesting something must be executable or playable or it must access certain internal components to be considered a hack. That's incorrect. All that refers to is how deep the hack goes.

i shall now put kergeten in my "must destroy list" - reason evil pirate!!

if PS3 was hacked, I would of had one by now but since it is not hacked, It is not possible. It sucks when you got people on the 360 who can just rip the games off without paying $59.99 retail for it and I do? what the heck? Life is just unfair.

 So the games would have to be made aware of this restriction, which btw only works on HDMi so what to do with people who play with a VGA connection or God forbid on an SD TV, does Sony want to exclude all those customers from one day to the next?

Something tells me you didnt quite think your response trough.

Kind of dissapointing for a man who for years was the EIC of the Official Playstation Magazine over here.

Now why dont you go load up some more pirated games on your DS?

Oh BTW, email me I have stuff to ask and lost yer phone number :)

Fishie +10.   And Sven damned you are one of those persons who is always complaining about pirating of games and you do it yourself....Damned....you dissapoint me.