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.