Duke4 & CDKeys etc.

I don't mind CD keys. It's crap like SafeDisk that pisses me off. I always make backups and use those, and keep the original on my bookshelf. Good think I got a PlexWriter so I can make backups of that shit.

Swedes are all dainty queers

#71 my point was that doom sold over 2.5 million copies and had no copy right protection. the fact that everyone had a floppy disk with almost every pc purchased could have copied this game easily! you cant say because cd burners are cheaper everyone will copy your game. if the game is good people will pay for it. If it is not, well then hey put a cd key on it! : )

Or maybe this will make it a little bit clearer for you. It is illegal to take someones intellectual property without paying for it. It is called stealing.

Hell, if you follow your logic far enough, it would be legal for someone to copy your email. After all, it isn\'t real mail that you can hold in your hand. It is just information. So if I happen to \"intercept\" your personal email while it is in transit over the internet, it is ok.

Because we now live in a service/information economy, as opposed to an industrial economy, we have started to adapt laws such as stealing and such to apply to information. If someone spends one million dollars to develop something, and says to everyone \"hey, you want this you pay\", if you aquire that without paying you are stealing. No more, no less.

I understand, mr pinhead@home, that you are not justfying warezing. But you have to realize, in an information based economy, the most important asset you have is ideas. Not materials. Think about it. Patents don\'t cover material objects. They protect ideas from being stolen. That is what pirating is. It is taking and benifitting from someones idea without paying for it.

Maybe you are just not getting your idea across properly. Early in this thread it was stated that stealing a car is worse then warezing because someone could actually physically be hurt when you steal a car. That would be akin to saying that killing someone is worse then wounding them. That is true. But it is also true that violently attacking someone, whether they are only wounded or killed, is wrong. Period. And just as it is wrong to use violence on a person, stealing in any form is wrong too.

Is that clear?

BTW...I hope that things don\'t head towards a big brother type of piracy protection. I\'m afraid that it is heading that way though. The writing is on the wall already, and I could imagine Microsoft doing that sort of thing at the drop of a hat if we (and the DOJ) let them.

Pinhead:

It\'s true, I do have problems understanding idiots like you, especially when they don\'t use proper capitalization. Just a little FYI for you.

If you had bothered to read anything I said, you would have seen that I already made the point that a pirated game does not necessarily equal a sale lost. I guess it would be to much to expect from someone like you to actually read an entire thread? Or does reading all of these big words hurt your poor little brain too much? Lemme guess....your ritalin prescription ran out and your attention span is very short right now. The lack of ritalin would also explain your inability to do two things at once....like holding a shift key down while typing a letter.

Anyways...in case you didn\'t know...the major expense in making a car is actually the development that went into it. For instance...GM regularly spends 800+ million dollars US developing a car. That\'s before a car actually goes into production. So if you do the math, you will see that making cars and making software actually have alot in common when it comes to the money spent on development vs. the money spent on actual physical material that goes into the cars.

I do happen to understand that, obviously better then you can. If I sounded violent, well....let\'s not call it violent. Let\'s just say I\'m the Dear Abby for idiots. I was just giving an idiot some helpful advice.

I swear, give a guy a cable modem and his intelligence drops in direct proportion to his bandwidth. If you doubt me, go look at Usenet.

\"Hit games used to sell many more copies than they do nowadays, and a good part of the dramatic drop must be due to the proliferation of CD-ROM burners.\"

Or maybe it\'s due to the fact that we gamer\'s are sick of the flood of mediocre games (predominately FPS\'s). When Doom/II and others were released, they were THE games to have out of a handful of available releases. Now every jackass software house and twice as many publishers are pumping out formulaic shit using licensed engines.

And you wonder why every \"big\" title isn\'t getting the same piece of the pie as it used to...

Charlie W.

Hell, if I could warez a car, I\'ll tell you right now I would have no prob with it. How else am I gonna get a Ferrari?

I think you just convinced me that warezing is ok ;)

Pinhead,

I feel so awful being called a bitch by someone who has such a towering intellect such as yourself. Your command of english is truly breathtaking.

And how could I argue that warezing isn\'t anything like stealing anything that you can hold in your hand. And hear I thought all these cd-roms were actually real. I bow to your pure logic.

Here\'s a little clue for you prick: there is more then the cost of cd\'s to consider when determining the rightful price of a game. Games can cost well over a million dollars to create, and that doesn\'t include the cost of packaging, advertising, etc. By your logic, if they were to charge say 10 dollars per game, and they had a hit on their hands (another clue for you...most games don\'t sell over 100,000 copies) they still wouldn\'t break even.

If they want to make extra money for profit, and to spend on RandD, that\'s just tough shit for them I guess, or at least you seem to think so.

Pinhead, I\'ve seen your type before, you little fuckstain. Why don\'t you do the world a favor and go suck off a shotgun? NOW.

Thanks.

#184

Stealing cars may not be like warezing, but they are both stealing.

Mind if I call you pinhead instead of Anon@cr499356-a.nmkt1.on.wave.home.com? It\'s much easier to spell, and seems to fit you pretty well.

I have a question. Regular Joe F\'n Shmoe has no clue on how to pirate stuff except to download. They do not know how to crack/hack and package this stuff.

Why the hell doesn\'t the game industry go after the big guys?

Why has Razor1911 and there peers been around for what 15-20 years? Fight this like the drug wars, and clean it out from the top. And before we start shitting all over the customers for downloading all this stuff. How\'s about a everyone come clean, and explain to me how it is that 9 out of 10 times, these games are warezed even before they hit the shelves? In some cases even before gold? Who\'s leaking this stuff? Is it the developers? Why is it that this has not changed in nearly two decades? I would have thought that before we pissed on everyone who was willing to actually buy the game, you guys (as in the game industry), would roll some heads for the leaks. Or is it intentional?


I find it to be pretty amazing that these groups can get software into every 15 yearolds hands seemingly on the planet, but no one seems willing to take them down?


I\'d like to hear from an industry insider as to why this is?


Charlie? Any thought\'s on any of this?


My .02

(Yes, obviously, I know enough about this, that I can\'t claim to be clean, but these guys have been warzing since I had an atari 800 for christ sake. FWIW, I\'m clean these days at least 98%)

Charlie W.

BTW, I think that \"Yummy, online forums where everybody is king and knows everything.\" would be a pretty good line for the next Duke game. Of course, it needs to be said just before Duke goes postal in a crowded room.

LOL #178

Charlie W,

First off, too make things a bit clearer for you (and for others that are following this thread), the \"you guys in the software industry\" was meant as a general statement. It was not meant to point a finger at you guys at Duke Nukem Land. Consider the middle finger pointed more towards the pointy headed publishers that force coders to go public with alpha or beta quality products. I expect with all of the time you guys are taking with this game, it should be as bug free as you can make it. ;)

The reason I brought up my college experience is simple: It happenned before there was even a world wide web. At that time, the good old 286 was king. Nobody warezed games back then, because nobody had computers. My point is personal experience is not a good basis for a datum point, because one never knows if your experience is typical. I will freely admit that my experience is nothing like what it is now. Maybe you can admit that your experience may be less then typical as well.

And yes, Usenet allows thousands of copies to propigate from one pirate. But since less then 10 percent of the people on the net even know how to get to usenet, and that most of the binary traffic on usenet is porn and mp3\'s, I don\'t think that this is the major way piracy occurs. I thought it was stated earlier that the number one source of piracy was someone giving (by hand) a copy to friend or family member. This is not to say that piracy doesn\'t cause you guys to loose money. I\'m sure it does.

I would suggest that the majority of losses from piracy does not occur from gaming losses. Hell, we all know China is a pirates heaven. The majority of software pirated there is office and productivity software, along with OS piracy. This is neither here nor there however. The 40-50% figures I see bandied around are for all software btw. (The figures I am using come from the National Software Association)

It may seem like I\'m trying to hammer home a point that doesn\'t need to be made in regards to poor quality games, but for some reason I doubt it. You at 3Drealms might be committed to making good products, but trust me, companies like you, id, and (in the case of UT but NOT Unreal) Epic are the exception rather then the rule. All we hear from the software industry is \"we are being sodomized by pirates\". I never hear anything about \"we are loosing money cause we rush products out the door to make lotsa money\".

Hell, for all I care you could make some sort of anti-piracy measure that automatically erases any wared copy. But at the same time, I would hope the software industry would actually start acting responsibly towards their customers as well as their investors.

Just to make this super clear: I have no arguement with your anti-piracy stance, and any difference I seem to have would be cosmetic as opposed to structural. I am not saying that you at Nukem Land make shitty products. But many, if not the majority of games are bug ridden, and it is getting worse. I buy ALOT of games. I have more then can comfortably fit on just one hard drive that have been purchased just this year. And most (roughly about 90%) of them have had a show stopping bug. They freeze up windows, or quit to the desktop often, or have buggy sound, or crappy graphic support, etc. If the industry doesn\'t wake up, there will be bigger financial problems for them to deal with than pirates.

How do copy protection schemes fuck with legit users? Do you really believe the BS about stolen keys? There are 7,958,661,109,946,400,884,391,936 possible Quake3 keys.. what is the chance somebody is going to guess ANY legitimate key? What is the chance it\'ll be yours?

Cd keys are practically transparent and are a great step in cutting down on piracy.

This is much preferable to ye ol\' code wheels an word checks of old. The only reason those went away was because cracks became too widespread for their effectiveness to equal the bs the customers went through.

What really cracks me up about this whole thing is that this is the modern warezers first taste of real copy protection. Kids today are used to at least one of their friends having a cd burner, and then either chipping in to buy 1 copy of a game, or downloading it. The negative response (almost entirely from wazerers) has been tremendous. It\'s like a constant deluge of whining. It tastes great.

The bottom line is that the consumer (not the pirate) should not have a worse experience due to these copy protection schemes, and shouldn\'t have to fork over their right to privacy so that the greedy bean counters can try to make back some imaginary money.

I shouldnt have to lock my doors when I go to bed, or keep my car locked when Im not driving it.

Sadly, thats not the way the real world works.