Infinity Ward Amazed by Rampant PC Piracy
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Yeah, pirating blows. It's really turning developers off, and I can't blame them. Try to protect your game, and people bitch that they're treated like thieves. Don't protect your game and it's stolen to all hell. People make up these weird excuses to validate the behavior that make no sense.
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Bioshock's protection (and other games') went a bit too far. e.g. If you had used certain completely legitimate diagnostics tools like Microsoft's Process Monitor, which is just an enhanced Task Manager really, since booting then you'd have to reboot before the copy protection would let you play. Not just exit the tool but reboot (since it leaves a driver running).
They also had the thing here it counted the number of installs/uninstalls you did, although I think the fuss over that was a bit over the top. I'm not aware of it causing any real problems and the "6 installs without any uninstalls" limit seemed enough, assuming they eventually patched away the limit. (Nobody wants their old games to stop working because they didn't uninstall them properly over the years, e.g. due to PC rebuilds, and nobody wants to have to uninstall each and every program/game before being allowed to reinstall Windows, assuming the machine is in a state to even let them.)
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So...just because it worked for you? A lot of people were burned by it. I also don't agree with being that limited on installs, it wasn't an acceptable solution. It's also real irritating when they don't label this stuff on the box because you feel like they are doing something underhanded.
Steam to me is the middleground. It's not unhackable, but it's safer than a disc check and not nearly as painful as other methods. -
Inconvenience. The entire concept of pc gaming was to be able to install games onto the hd and be done with it. No hunting down a cd when changing games.
If you are going to copy protect your software, you might as well also save me some hd space and stream the data. Hell at least then there would be some type of convenience tied to copy protection. Right now it's nothing more than a pain in the ass that is broken the first week the game is released, if not the week before.
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I would like to expand on your statement, "Try to protect your game, and people bitch that they're treated like thieves. Don't protect your game and it's stolen to all hell."
There's nothing untrue there. However, it is incomplete, and should read:
Try to protect your game, and people bitch that they're treated like thieves, and the game is stolen to all hell. Don't protect your game and it's stolen to all hell.
The 'stolen to all hell' bit is a common denominator. It happens whether they use copy-protection or not. BioShock's copy protection was obtrusive enough to cause a commotion, but it didn't accomplish anything - I still had a cracked copy of the game downloaded before my pre-order was delivered.
So, long story short, copy protection isn't a useful deterrent to piracy. Quite contrary, piracy these days is easier than being legit. I've been using cracks for my legitimately owned games (with very few exceptions) since 2004, when I bought the Collector's Edition of Half-Life 2 and was unable to play it due to SecuROM protection.
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