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PCGA on Piracy's Benefits

[Feb 13, 2009, 02:05 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The PC Gaming Alliance Interview on Big Download talks with Randy Stude of Intel and the PCGA about their new membership options, and progress of their various committees looking at various aspects of PC gaming. His answer to a question about the approach Valve and Stardock take to DRM and piracy yields an answer with an unusual point-of-view from someone in his position:

If you ask both of the publishers that you mentioned here about the rate of piracy for their games you may find that one has rampant piracy and the other has almost none. The PC Gaming Industry's history is littered with examples of startups (including Stardock and Valve) that actually benefitted from wide spread piracy to grow a market for their future titles. Don't get me wrong, I am not advocating piracy... However, how would Quake, Doom, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, or Half-Life have been able to grow widespread brand recognition without a widespread network of gamers openly sharing these games. These titles (and many more) defined the industry. Personally, my first experience with a first person shooter was with Doom (back in the day) and I did not pay for it. Id Software turned the corner and has a very successful business built on the back of the early free/open source exchange of their games...

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22.

Re: PCGA on Piracy's Benefits

Feb 13, 2009, 07:41

wallace321

can someone please explain why CD-keys don't do a damn thing? When it comes time to patch a game, why can't they blacklist KNOWN popular pirate keys or WHITELIST the ones known to be legit and distributed? That would at least restrict access to multiplayer which is 80% of the game for some people. Think about this cliffski, if you saw hundred dollar bills in the street, would you start picking them up? Everybody else is! It's crazy! 100 dollar bills all over! Yaaaay!! And then the bank scolds the people for picking them up, not the idiot armored car driver who drives down the street with the back door open day after day. So the bank's answer is to hire Blackwater escort vehicles who then shoot anybody who gets close to the car whether they were trying to steal from them or not, with the door wide open still spitting money all over. I don't care if that analogy is picked apart, it sounds very accurate to me and it was fun to think about because I really have no sympathy for idiot publishers who want to stop piracy by punishing people who bought the game.

Subject

Comment [quote="wallace321"Feb 13, 2009, 07:41]can someone please explain why CD-keys don't do a damn thing? When it comes time to patch a game, why can't they blacklist KNOWN popular pirate keys or WHITELIST the ones known to be legit and distributed? That would at least restrict access to multiplayer which is 80% of the game for some people. Think about this cliffski, if you saw hundred dollar bills in the street, would you start picking them up? Everybody else is! It's crazy! 100 dollar bills all over! Yaaaay!! And then the bank scolds the people for picking them up, not the idiot armored car driver who drives down the street with the back door open day after day. So the bank's answer is to hire Blackwater escort vehicles who then shoot anybody who gets close to the car whether they were trying to steal from them or not, with the door wide open still spitting money all over. I don't care if that analogy is picked apart, it sounds very accurate to me and it was fun to think about because I really have no sympathy for idiot publishers who want to stop piracy by punishing people who bought the game. [/quote]

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