Nvidia VP: No Justification for PC Piracy

For one thing, most of the money never reaches the people who made the game; it's caught by the publisher and distributor casting a net between the creator and the player, where it only encourages the milking of the franchise in a series of sequels, usually either forced upon the original developer against their wishes or handed directly to an inexperienced studio who promise to do it fast and dirty.

For another, the general problem with capitalism; you charge the poor the same amount as the rich and consider the sales equal. To some I know, a £40 purchase for Xbox means eating noodles and cereal for two weeks, to others it's just another way to spend their uncomfortable excess, rather than spending it on alcohol.
There's a vast difference in the true value of the product, and the meaning of the purchase between these two parties, but that isn't reflected in price or sales statistics.

Another? We're given no demonstration of most games anymore, and find it increasingly difficult to find honest reviewers. Your copy protection penalises us for trying to lend our games to friends for those purpose, or to borrow them ourselves. Piracy, regardless of legality, allows us that demonstration, and while not supremely common many pirate players go on to purchase the game once they've tried it illegally.

Price in general! We're charged more for less, games are getting shorter, often not exceeding a linear 10 hour run, most of which is repetition of earlier content with a new skin and sound effects, and less and less often do we see a decent manual, good offline or online support, or even a fully functional game until three patches post release.

Less rights: It seems after the mod boom of Half-Life, providing an SDK has gone out of fashion. We can no longer modify the game, we have less rights to do so, and with increasingly harsh and problematic copy protection we find we do not even own our games, we're barely even renting them from the publisher.

And hell, if I'm going for story I have to buy the game wearing a blindfold because most of the plot will be written on the back of the case in between the 'shopped screenshots, IF I managed to dodge the ten thousand gameplay videos released in the past three months that showed me every character, creature, feature and twist in the game.

I could continue.

.. Oddly, I don't pirate, I just don't actually buy many games, I mostly borrow them from richer, generous friends only to find they certainly were not worth purchasing in the first place. In my limited experience I'm just too lazy to wrestle with cracks for hours after downloading a virus-laden torrent. If it was worth that effort, it might actually be worth buying, for me =)

People who pirate your game were never your target audience anyway. If you dont want to take this into account then you deserve to fail as a company and developer.

They can cry all they want, piracy ain't going anywhere (may it'll go to consoles and then console devs can start crying XD).

Anyways steam > all, to hell with that 10 day check crap.

So why does middle class game dude who can afford to buy games are pirate them.

Well, what is easier:

A)

1. ask your girlfriend if it's ok to buy a game
2. (get roped into agreeing to run errands at walmart because you're going into town)
3. get in your car
4. drive to walmart, buy tampons, dish washer detergent, air fresheners
5. drive to the game shop
6. buy the game
7. drive home
8. play the game

B)

1. sit in your chair and click on a link and download
2. play the game


Hmm well I'm lazy and just want to play my games, so lets see, I pick B. Now historically to follow through with B I'd have to pirate the game. But wait, what's this thing called Steam? It can satisfy B but doing it legitimately. Hmm. And wait, it offers something neither the pirated or the store bought copy can; auto updates. Hmm...well well this is getting interesting. It addresses the fact i'm lazy, provides a legitimate way of acquiring games, AND provides a better experience at the same time. Fantastic.

Steam is a service that competes with piracy where it matters rather then trying to prevent it.

The problem is that PC games are expensive to play. For consoles a kid could pay $5 to rent the game, play it for a few days, beat it and move on. That $5 is totally justified. For PC its either buy the game for $60 or pirate it. I remember a store in my city that used to rent PC games years ago, and it was awesome. Of course it shut down because there was no way it could sustain itself.

I don't see how this is controversial at all. If you download a game you didn't pay for, you are stealing it. You are a thief. You are just as bad as the ghetto rat who steals a carton of cigarrettes. It's something you don't need to live, and you want it, and you're willing to become a thief to own it.

Actually, software pirates are worse than ghetto rats, because they aren't going to get caught in the act and rolled off to the police station. They're cowards to boot.

Again, all this math is not hard. You will always have preteen scriptkiddies who steal games they don't even care to play, just to build a collection to distro.

Then you have people like me, who hate nothing more than purchasing a game and finding out it's utter shite. A game I'm on the fence about buying I may try out to see if I like it. If I do, I buy it. Happened for NWN2 and I bought it, happened for several console ports that I detest, and I simply deleted them.

If a game has a demo... a real playable demo... then I would never bother with a torrent, and that happens a lot too.

Because of piracy, nVidia has been able ride the high wave of overpriced "enthusiast hardware" for years now. The same goes for other manufacturers in this niche consumer space; Asus, Gigabyte, OCZ etc. who will excruciatingly find themselves in the same predicament as nvidia. Asus is pushing out motherboards that go over €300 and even it's mid-range P45 products yield in €200. Shit like this won't save PC gaming.

08 still has some great AAA+ titles in store for us, and I for one will be updating my 8800 GTX to feed my LP3065. If 09 sees the end of dumbed down corssplatform games and half-arsed PC ports, I'd say it'll be a blessing. DoW 2 and Clear Sky, and perhaps ArmA2(?) (save the MMO scene) will probably be the last great exclusives for our platform. PC gaming as we nostalgics like to reminisce it is gone, and will never come back. Blockbusters will always cater the lowest common denominator, and the core audience will find themselves sufficed with their 360's and PS3's and whatever will follow. Altho I do find my self enjoying CoD4 online on weekly basis, I can live without it. And I'm not planning to get a console, at least for now.

I'm sure that smaller devs like Stardock will still keep crafting their games for the niche market, and cover the development cost with the sails figures those titles can cut. But they certainly won't require a 1K SP monsterchips or what ever it is nVidia has in store for us next. Unless the future MMOG's can lure the current WoW gen to get higher-end hardware (a bit of a stretch) the big green may soon find it self as a 3rd party contractor for next gen consoles, and what ever integrated solutions the future desktop market will hold. High-end graphics in terms of what we have today may very well be gone... but I can still take a spin on BattleZone, BGII or HoI and enjoy my life without pay-per-use DLC and what ever crap the future may hold...

/troll

arrrr... I am a pirate, wear an eyepatch, have a peg leg, and have a parrot named polly...

nvidia needs to stop playa hatin...

I dig booty?

Seems like every form of copy protection has been beaten eventually... how are they going to stop pirates?
--
On another note in some cases I don't have much sympathy for the missing millions of dollars that are being lost due to piracy. But I wouldn't want to see everyone go out of business because it was easier to steal stuff than buy it, that's not fair...
--
What about all the copies that they DID sell... there are alot of us who still buy games even though we could have everything for free. I mean look at GTA IV - who cares if another 20 million copies are pirated, they already made 500 million bucks or more... 500 million isn't enough? thats more than the GNP of some small countries... smells like greed

PC games hardly have any good games besides Valve, Blizzard, and Firaxis games.
Other games are probably not good enough to be on people's buy list and piracy just lets them try it.

It kinda saddens me when I read some of the responses that I see here. I'm a huge fan of PC gaming and I want it to thrive and I also don't want to get handed console ports for my games. I'll freely admit that I've pirated games in the past when I was a teen, but in the long run, it comes down to personal ethics. What bothers me most about some of the responses is how people are like, "Yeah, so I'm lazy, I want shit for free, and it's all about taking things as they pass my way." You're proud that you're doing it. And regardless of your justification, those of us who are reasonable can all attest that it is hurting the industry somewhat.

You like the game, you support the the people who produce it. The publisher, the developer, and everyone else involved. If it's crap enough that I don't want to even pay for it at full price, I wait until it goes down or I dont even bother with it at all. I work my ass off to make money so why would I also expect someone to not get paid for their hard work. If you can afford a gaming PC, but you can't even pay for a lousy $50 to $30 PC game? What would constitute a AAA title that you'd actually shell out the cash? There are plenty of us who are middle class, have bills and responsiblities and people to support and still manage to be able to get a couple of games a month.

Crysis would have sold twice as much if it ran on twice as many systems. But then who would you sell your cards to?

we're going to see more of an approach that says that PC games aren't products—they're a service

And that is the entire problem with PC gaming in it's current state (and to a lesser extent consoles but it is coming there soon), games bought at a ridiculous retail price (for entertainment standards) should not ever be sold as a service. This includes any game where the creators do not intend to update it's content on any real reasonable schedule; and by that I mean like monthly.

The entire service model has zero consumer interest in mind and, quite frankly, is driven by greed.

Consumers know this, they aren't stupid. As much as this publishers wished they were, their not.

Consumers go to the store and do the math in their heads, they can pay 60 dollars for a game that will last them 15 hours but first they'll have to plead and beg the publisher to not only allow them to install it on a computer but they also have to conform to retarded limitations set forth by the publisher; and it's getting worse, not better, thanks to some totally shortsighted greedy fucking people who want to see gamers pay more, more often, for less content, and totally control the consumer like a puppet in the process.

OR they could buy 4 movies, 6 cds, 2-3 board games, countless books, and limitless other physical products that not only allow them the freedom to do what they want with it (within reason) but can be traded, sold, or otherwise redeemed for some return on investment; even if that return is simply the product can still be used in 10 years down the road when such and such a company is out of business or is choosing not to support it anymore.

One day, when you can turn on a TV like device and choose a game out of 50-100 games, on demand, where the content is constantly changing, then you can you sell me a service - at a monthly rate. Until then, wake up to reality, people will pay good money for good products if you give them the ability to use them on their own terms (again, within reason); but if you absolutely must insist on a service like structure the price has got to go down.

Well I go to John Carmack's concerts so....oh wait, I don't because he doesn't have them....

i know people that have bought new video cards just to run their pirated video games. what say you now, nvidia?

"I just don't know how anyone could consider that a cool thing to do."

Yeah, it's also not cool to punish the people who buy your games with draconian DRM and call home schemes.

Cue up heavyweapon guy......

They could give a ratsass about pc piracy, they just won't have as many customers of their gpu's running out who think they need every revision of the same chip.
Typical pc life you'll replace a video card what? 2-3 times as a average user?
Console your locked in with what the company puts in there for that version.

Gee which would have a greater impact on the bottom line? One lump contract with X amount of units where,negotiated at a lower price than your competition, or a consumer based market where you can pump out the chips for a constant revenue stream?
Just like the military remember your carrying the gear from the lowest bid contractor.

Whatever. This isn't going anywhere good. Here are the facts:

1) Piracy is a problem; a big one. It indicates that people don't think they are getting good value. The gaming market has failed to stratify itself to target the different demographics. Teen gamers just don't have the same budget for gaming as 30-something professionals. One price point will miss a sale on one side, or miss out on profit on the other. Fix the pricing system.

2) Adding DRM never stopped piracy. Period. It doesn't work. It doesn't even work with WoW. Spore will still be pirated, and tons of paying customers will get a crappy DRM system they hate, and they are the ones supporting the developers.

Listen, I'm going to make this as simple as I can: as long as the game developers make the gaming experience WORSE for paying customers than the pirating customers, piracy will continue.

Some ideas:
Provide digital downloads that authenticate once (like steam, direct2drive, Blizzard store, etc.) and offer the downloads at a discount - bring in the younger crowd, allow impulse buys, provide good value. Keep selling in brick and mortar, but target the older gamers and parents, let them pay a premium in-store (as they are now). Eventually, move to a mostly digital model, stop paying to get published and stocked. The future of financing the business isn't raising prices and DRM, it is by lowering the barrier to entry (at least on the cost front), trimming off retail fat, and increasing sales. The market is there and you're losing it to consoles because playing on a console is easier, not because it is better. Oh, and for god's sake, learn that games are viable on Mac and Linux.

Piracy doesn't require justification. Piracy doesn't have justifications beyond the fact that IT IS NOT the potential market it's cracked up to be.

Only about 2% of newly released games generate enough hype for some people to actually go buy them instead of waiting a few more days for a crack/release. We're talking major releases that won't flop either way, and even then you have to consider exactly what percentage of pirates has the means/need enough to buy retail. Personally I trust no statistic or figure bandied about every few months regarding the millions upon millions of dollars of losses, for I've yet to see a number compiled with usage statistics kindly borrowed from trackers and the like.

Piracy can be blamed for a variety of reasons you cannot possibly expect to squeeze money out of without some dedication. You have a probably significant portion of the population pirating games just because it's easy and convenient, but in truth you don't know how many, or how often they do it. How much they actually liked the game, if they even got 10 mins into it. And then you have people who sees them as demos (a good torrent of the full game will download faster and with less traffic corruption than a 1.5gig demo sent through ftp). Then you have people who don't actually have means (the cheap, the reasonably poor, the ones living in unfair exchange rate countries, the ones with oppresive custom taxes or regulations, or whatever combination you can think of), those who can't even buy them due to a lack of retail stores in their area/province/country. Those who doubt about performance, those who actually buy the ones they like, those who are salvaging discs scratched beyond repair, those looking for discontinued products.. the list goes on.

I admit the potential majority just does it because is fun, convenient and punishment-free, but how many do it? How much? Piracy is this big fuzzy cloud of uncertainty everyone seems eager to describe as a number ranging in the billions of lost revenue. The complexity and anonymity of this cloud makes every quote with an agenda as inconsequential as any number you come up with right now.

I'm sorry, but am I the only one who finds the idea of making pc games into a service completely idiotic?

And the piracy theme continues .... Too much talk not enough action.Come up with a better protection.

If we assume that these comments from NVidia are driven mostly by business sensibility, then that is good evidence that they genuinely believe that piracy is causing the decline of PC Gaming. If they didn't believe that, then they should be expected to embrace consumers pirating games because it leaves more money in the consumers' pockets to buy expensive hardware.

Comments should be disabled for piracy-related news posts.

Come up with a system for computer game rentals and you will have cut piracy in half overnight. As much as people like to disagree, a largle portion of pirates are simply trying the game. Yeah I know that's what demos are for, but they are less and less common, and when they do come out, the game is old news. Want to pirate a game on a console, go to blockbuster pay $5 and pirate it for a week.

All that guy had to say was this, and he wouldn't have to type all of that.

"Piracy is bad M'kay!"

You make a post about piracy, and every jackass on the Shack feels obliged to share their idiotic rationalizations for stealing.

I fully agree with Roy Taylor. :(

So many fucking thieves think there is nothing wrong with pirating games, and it's going to lead to less and less PC games being developed.

whats up with this trend of publishers, developers, and now gpu companies blaming PC users for PC's decline? Its totally retarded. Want to know why PC gaming is declining? Its simple: Xbox360, PS3, wii

What's this? Is nVidia worried about the state of PC gaming? I sure as hell would be if my products were no longer justified because developers aren't making software worth upgrading for.

After buying Master of Orion 3 and Unreal 2, I'll for ever pirate games to see if they are any good.

Did that with Dawn of War... Bought it. Did it with Crysis - bought. Company of Heroes - bought. Battlefield 1942 and Battlefield 2 (bought them both).
Oh, and I pirated lots of games which turned out to be pure donkey poo - didn't buy those.

That interview is hilarious. Of course I agree with the content, but shit lol...

If you ask any PC gamer what they think of John Carmack, they'll say he's a hero. What do they think of Tim Sweeney? He's a hero. Ken Levine? He's a hero. John Romero? He's a hero, to gamers that like hair. I guess. George Broussard? Some sort of lazy hero. Well, if there was a Church of Procrastination he'd be their hero. For sure. Harvey Smith? He's.. huh.. he worked with Warren Spector, that makes him some kind of sidekick hero doesn't it?

Yep its been tossed out before and i'll toss it out again, if i didnt have to spend 600bucks for a new video card every two years i just might have enough extra cash to actually buy the games

So I went over to my buddy's house last night because he purchased an Xbox 360 Elite system and told me he modified it (flashed it) and added some master blaster or whatever add-on that lets him flash the firmware with easy using USB. When I got there, he proudly showed me a collection of his 360 games and about 95% of them were games he burned using some Samsung drive he bought off eBay--apparently all he did was rent games from blockbuster and burn these things and the copies worked on his 360...SWEET! I guess piracy is pretty damn easy on a console so nVidia should just STFU and stop releasing overpriced rehashes of their products, the same goes for whiny PC game devs. If we aren't buying your products, chances are iit's because they suck.

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

I also think that illegal things are bad and uncool.

Front page news?

John Carmack IS a hero. Anyone that disagrees can go to hell and fight cyberdemons.

I have no problem with the idea of authentication, once, to unlock something. I don't like the check every 10 days thing. That is something that is a deal breaker for me. My laptop is literally connected to the net like twice a year if I'm lucky, not to mention the times my desktop isn't connected for one reason or another.

"I just don't know how anyone could consider that a cool thing to do - it's not. It sucks."

Aaagh! He's speaking to us in our own language! He's hip, and cool, and words like that! ... I am compelled... Piracy is uncool... Piracy sucks...