Introversion's Approach to Piracy

'Nice' to see developers resorting to spamming tactics. If you acknowledge that you can't stop pirating, why bother with such tactics? The people who want the game legally will still end up paying for it anyhow. This strikes me as nothing more than a childish retort. Don't drop to level of the competition.

Operation Flashpoint still has one of the best piracy protection systems I've ever seen.

We have come a long way since: "Enter the 13th word of the 2nd paragraph on page 48 of the manual. "

It would be much better to hide couple viruses inside the package and then release it to warez doods. That would teach them.

noting that many of them detract from the experiences of legitimate gamers

Like the copy protection that wouldn't let me play my legitimately purchased copy of Chaos Theory.

Best 50 dollars I ever spent.

This is a great move if they can manage to make the demo easily unlockable. In darwinia demo on steam you could just hit a button after the demo level and it would start downloading the rest of the game and you were able to continue to play it just a few moments later.

I believe that much of todays piracy is just convenience. It actually takes less time to download a game then to make free time for visiting a store. Often i download games to get started while I have a pre-order placed with amazon at the same time just because I don't have to wait this way.

In fact a good 30% of the games on my shelf here are unopened for this reason and the other ones are mainly just opend for cdkeys. I never use CD's because I can't stand the noise.

This is of course nothing new. Steve Jobs famously declared convenience as one of the biggest drives to piracy in the music industry about 5 years ago shortly before introduction of iTunes. He was spot on. A big demographic of prior pirates migrated to iTunes because its the only thing quicker then firing up kazaa.

Wouldn't really work. Do they think people are stupid? Why would someone download a torrent that would obviously be redflagged as a demo/fake.

everyone offering / sharing the renamed demo for download is pretending to commit a criminal offence?
Introversion becomes a criminal organization?

I said it before, but here it goes again.

I've been playing the hell out of Defcon and confidently say it's the best game I've played all year. Introversion is a hell of a studio and by taking an innovative approach to development, I can see great things in its future.

You ladies all better buy the game so we can play.

I agree with the sentiment that Introversion are one of the best studios out there.

It kinda seems like the game industry is turning into Hollywood or the music business as far as creativity, quality, new ideas, etc goes.

Can't wait for Defcon.

--
".. I'd piss on a sparkplug if I thought it'd do any good!"

I really like this demo thing and also, the positive approach and trying to think of come up with a way to "take advantage of" the currently rampant piracy system, instead of usual whining about it.

How about price? I'm more than happy to pay $10 for Uplink.

Hmm, damn. That's pretty clever really.

I wonder if the statement it self is enough to deter people from downloading or being more cautious.

Doesn't releasing it on steam pretty much take care of piracy? There has got to be a decent way to use steam to practicly eliminate it, or am I wrong.

Actually with Darwinia they did it even better (imo) - they made such a cool game, that i ordered it without even giving one thought of looking into any p2p network if its possibly available.

Gamers like paying for good games, because they know how to value the creativity and implementation of a good developer.

That's a really intuitive way to deal with the situation. Well done.

that's pretty neat. what's even neater is that it's not some random junk the size of the installation file but actually the demo. well done indeed.

Yes thank you. Keep things simple. Dont punish the people that actually paid for it. What a concept!

Reminds me of the old napster days when people would intentionally retitle MP3s. Earpiercingnoise.mp3 renamed to any random top 40 song.

Haha, that's pretty cool.