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[radicc]

QUOTE(Textbook @ Aug 24 2006, 08:41 PM)

The best weapon against piracy is making it free in the first place.

Its true!



"We will release a version of our game that looks like it's been hacked at the same time as a pirated version gets out,"

So I'm paying extra for your game so you can pay somebody to release a fake hacked version.
That says to me: "Please pirate my game, because we are flushing your money down the toilet anyway!"

[ILLusions0fGrander]

QUOTE(prof-it @ Aug 24 2006, 03:07 PM)

Does anyone P2P anymore even?

of course, fastest way to get the new free fear multiplayer game...

[The Zep Man]

QUOTE(sgr215 @ Aug 24 2006, 11:03 PM)

They must think we're all idiots.

Only the people who download their games using torrents, actually.

This is almost like a viral campaign. Not many gamers have ever heard of Introversion and it seems to me that they have trouble starting a hype around their latest game called 'DEFCON'. Hell, I would even think that not many people would even consider downloading that game because they have never heard of it.

The people who really want to buy the game will pay money for it once it comes out. The people who really want to download the game without actually buying it will get the game for no money. The people who really don't care about the game will simply continue not caring unless they read this 'news', after which they might join the people who want to buy the game or the people who want to download it for free.

In the end, this 'statement' is a win-win for Introversion, since the people who do not care might get interested in one of their games without paying any money for advertising. For everything and everyone else, life will go on.

[jtom617]

QUOTE(MN-Mod-Man @ Aug 24 2006, 08:03 PM)

    What a joke, spend more money time and resources to attempt to foil pirates...GET REAL, while I don't condone piracy, this NEVER works, ask EMINEM.

number one post of the month..  

[KUNFUCHOPSTICKS]

8===D Introversion

[SScorpio]

QUOTE(twistedsymphony @ Aug 24 2006, 09:16 PM)

A more advanced method might be to have a server act as a seeder for an already released "real" version of the game and simply Seed corrupt data, if they give it some good bandwidth and make it look like they're seeding the whole thing I'm sure all the torrent clients would leach from it like moths to a flame but of course they would be just spinning their wheels because every packet would fail CRC and try again... it wouldn't stop it completely but it would probably slow down the process to a snails crawl. And unless you could determine who exactly was sending you the bung data it'd be hard to stop.

Then again that might only work on public trackers.

It won't even work on public trackers.  Every modern Bittorrent client I know will hash each piece and verify that the piece passes the hash check.  If you receive too many bad pieces from the same user (yes Bittorrent keeps track of people by IP) then that IP will be banned from that torrent and not used.  Also clients like Azerus support a known blacklist which are already filtering out certain IP ranges which are known to be bad.

QUOTE(utorrent.com (client) @ Aug 24 2006, 09:16 PM)

How do I know that someone isn't sending out viruses on BitTorrent?

In short, you don't. You should treat something downloaded with BitTorrent just like any file downloaded from the internet - that is, if you don't trust the source of the file, then you should use caution when opening it. Running a virus scan is usually a good idea. However, BitTorrent does have protection to ensure that someone uploading parts of the file you're downloading (ie. someone who is not the original source of the torrent file) is not uploading malicious data to your computer.

Warning: the following paragraph is relatively technical!
This is done using the torrent file. Not only does this file contain the information needed to find people with parts of the file and start downloading off them (the tracker URL), it also includes hashes of each piece in the torrent (remember how BitTorrent splits each file up into many smaller pieces?). A hash is, put simply, a small amount of data that uniquely represents another piece of data and is calculated using a one-way function - meaning that it is easy to find the hash of a file, but almost impossible to find a piece of data that would generate that hash. So technically someone could be sending you malicious content instead of a piece of the file - but when you receive it, BitTorrent would hash the malicious content, discover that it did not match the real hash, and discard it. (Still want to know more? Read up on cryptographic hash functions or SHA-1, the hashing algorithm used by µTorrent.)

So, while BitTorrent makes sure you get what you asked for when you downloaded the torrent file, it can't guarantee that the torrent file wasn't malicious in the first place - which is where anti-virus software comes into play.

[majik655]

worthless.  

It has been done  many times by  music & movies industry.   the company will realize soon that it is more work for nothing in the long run.    

as said many times also, people who pirate understand tagging and filename structure from the different groups.  

Funny they came out in public stating they have and are going to continue doing it.   Thats real smart of them, now everyone knows about it.  Could have been way more useful without everyone knowing about it.

[LightningStruckMyXbox]

These guys don't have a chance! This is more of an advertisement than a threat. I mean c'mon, if Sony failed with their DRM 'rootkit' protection then how does a company that noone has even heard of expect to thwart piraters!? It's an upsurd idea. It's like trying to stop the use of drugs world-wide or stop the wars, it's not a realistic goal. And if they plan to release so-called 'Hacked' version OF THEIR OWN SOFTWARE, how the hell am I supposed to know what games they even make? I haven't ever hear of Intervision before today. I sure as hell wouldn't buy games form them.

People need to understand that pirating is a natural part of a videogame or any item that can be replicated easily. Hell If the game is good then they might just buy it. Maby a company can spread their fan-base with this 'poor'    class of people. And just for those who don't know, many games on the popular torent sites (Like 90%) don't work online because of the simple fact that the keygens released with them don't work for online. And some games even come with starforce. Now maby the hard-core, rebel, spend 23 hours a day on a computer, pirate will go through the lengthy process of unpluging drives and runing hiding software in the background, but for the average person willing to download illegal software, that is enough to make them actually buy the game.

So best said, many will buy it, some will priate it.

Lets look at the numbers
Now Kepp in mind that a high budget game cost roughly 20,000,000 meaning thats is the average cost to make a high budget game.


1)There are roughly 295,734,134 in US alone.

Now lets say that .5% of these people bought the game and the the other 99.5% either don't own a game console or pirated the game.

so lets guestimate that about 1,478,670 ligit copies of this unnamed game were sold

Math time:
1,478,670 copies at $50 a pop = a total of 73,933,500. Now subtract the initial budget and you get a net earnings of $53,933,500

Now you are telling me that that is not enough money for the big companies to live off of!!!!??

2) FACT:   Halo 2 made 125,000,000 dollars in it's first 24 hours on the shelves.

Halo 2 has also sold roughly, according to Xbox.com, 7.4 million units worldwide.
Now I know Halo 2 has been out for a couple years now so lets lower the unit cost to an average of $40.

7,400,000 units x $40 per unit = TOTAL of......... ready for this one........... It's gonna be big................ Fall of your ass big...........

$2,960,000,000

Now I ask you how pirates can REALLY disrupt the money these people are getting. The simple answer is that they can't. The only tangible explanation that I can gather is that the companies who complain about piracy are greedy. Plain and simple.

[liquidjojo]

Hey all, lightining i hafta say i dont agree with your stement. Firs toff piracy is stealing plain and simple. I do believe though that all the people who pirate games have no intention on buying them, so i dont feel that its hurting the gaming industry, ya know wlhat im saying? like some people just wanna see what a game is about, but would have never bought the game, and some epople just cant afford it, but you dont steal a ferarrie just cause u like it and cant afford it do u?. So NO i dont think its hurting big buisness at all, but Yes i think that its wrong, wether the company makes 2 dollars or 2 million, its their money they earned for making a great game, just my .02

[tharien]

QUOTE(Andre Vrignaud @  MS's Director of Technical Strategy for Xbox Live)

Some people attempt to justify piracy by pointing to the perceived high price of their hobby and/or games, but the argument just doesn't hold up. You don't steal a Ferrari that you'd love to drive simply because you can't afford it, right? Same thing.

WTFBBQ!?! Seriously, if I knew some guy that had a Ferrari and could reproduce an exact copy for practically nothing, your bet your ass I would take that shit. That’s a piss poor example of a media "smoke up the ass" trick. Software piracy is as socially and publicly acceptable as it is because it’s an INTANGABLE that can be duplicated, in most cases, without cost or alteration, and without any degridation to the original.

So to you, Mr. Vrignaud, I say "suck it". Though a majority of people are blind enough to agree with this point of view, it's a completly impractical analogy.

As far as how it affects the game companies bottom line; I'm pretty sure you spend more money in a day then I can make in a month, so when you have to skate from paycheck to paycheck because piracy has effected you that much, I’ll be here to teach you how to do it.

[krims0n]

Back in the Kazaa days the companies releasing fakes were at least a nuisance. This isn't even going to hit the radar. Check the comments section.. fake.. check the next one... working... start download. They'll just chase more people off to better things, like Usenet. Even a monkey can download off usenet these days with NZB's and stuff.

[Brouhaha]

QUOTE(tharien @ Aug 24 2006, 09:13 PM)

Seriously, if I knew some guy that had a Ferrari and could reproduce an exact copy for practically nothing, your bet your ass I would take that shit.

 

Back on topic, I'm with the group that thinks this is lame ass advertisement. Arrogant too. I have roughly a monthly 100-130$ budget for gaming. They just made sure they won't get a dime from me...

EDIT: Oh wait! Them making games alone took care of that dilemna!

[blade_boy1]

AHAHAHHAHAH....

HAHAHAHAHHAHAH....

That is all I have to say!

 

[bebrewer1]

I've never used P2P, always been a USENET dude.  Those guys are idiots if they think that their idea will work  

[LightningStruckMyXbox]

QUOTE(Perkele @ Aug 24 2006, 07:40 PM)

1) You assume all profit goes to the company, what about retailers etc?
2) Last time I checked 7,400,000 x $40 = $296,000,000

Thank you for catching my typos. Today I feel like I am just smashing the keyboard with my head hoping for a complete sentence.
I also spelled keep as "Kepp".
I'd change the numbers if I could. Hopefully people will just read the entire topiv and come across your post.

@liquidjojo
You may not have to agree with my statement, but the only reason that I currently play ANY steam games is because of using a less than legal version a few years back. I liked it, I bought it. Thats how it should be. When you buy a Ferrei, you at least get to test drive the car. And when compared to the 'test drive' of a video game demo, a proportional test-drive for a car would be like suddenly ending up on a closed airstrip at 130MPH. You get to feel the fast-paced game, but many features won't be even touched, like the handeling or acceleration.
Just because there is a game demo available, it doesn't mean that the demo will give an appropriate depection of the overall gameplay.

Your stance on piracy as an illegal act is understandable, but with my current budget, (anywhere from $0-$20 a month ) I can't afford to buy a game that blows worse than unreal 2: the awakening   .

PLEASE IGNORE THE TYPOS, I know, I know...