Graeme Devine has another new .plan update with word that the new and final Quake3 playable demo will be available some time today. He also talks a bit about piracy and the impact it has on id Software games. Thanks loony for the summary.

The demo has gone final and will be available through Sandpiper in a few hours.

I've gotten a lot of feedback from people regarding the use of authentication servers. Yes, John Carmack has a nice car from his hard work, but unfortunately software piracy has become such a serious issue that we need to use schemes such as CD keys to protect our future sales. Games cost large sums of money to make and market, and if you want to have software developers continue to develop games then piracy, understanding it, and addressing it, needs to be part of the development process...

Is piracy of id products the only way the community has prospered, grown and sustained itself all these years? It’s true a certain number of you will always pirate a game and never make the purchase. But a whole bunch of you are raving, fanatical loyal id fans with money in one hand and EB on speed dial in the other to see if Q3A is in stock. If you help the community by helping to stamp out piracy, then I think you’ll see that the community will be just fine and who knows, software prices might fall, Doom 2000 might come out, or the Y2K bug may not burn us all.

So yes. Use a SOCKS server (we will authenticate multiple CD Keys off a single IP), open up those ports on your firewall (you can resolve master.quake3arena.com and just use that IP address), but please don’t belie our intentions. We’ll work extremely hard, 24 hours a day, to make everything in Q3A work flawlessly for you, but we’ll also work on another game with the money we get from sales of Q3A, and by the time it’s done we may be able to release on DVD-ROM and piracy will be a non-issue. But alas, I fear, if it’s there, it will be copied.

These are my views, although I think id also frowns at piracy.