Like Napster before it, torrent site The Pirate Bay--notorious for its use as a hub for online piracy--has been acquired by a legitimate company, and its traffic will now be leveraged to sell legitimate content.

Internet cafe company Global Gaming Factory paid $7.8 million for the site. The company will "introduce models which entail that content providers and copyright owners get paid for content that is downloaded via the site," according to CEO Hans Pandeya.

Following a highly publicized court battle in Sweden, the owners of The Pirate Bay were sentenced to one year in prison and fines of $905,000 each in April.

According to the Pirate Bay blog, profits from the sale will "go into a foundation that is going to help with projects about freedom of speech, freedom of information and the openess of the nets."

"We've been working on this project for many years," wrote the owners. "It's time to invite more people into the project, in a way that is secure and safe for everybody. We need that, or the site will die."

Following through on word that StarCraft II won't support LAN play due to "planned technology to be incorporated into Battle.net," developer Blizzard has provided Joystiq with a further explanation of the controversial decision and the planned technology:

We don't currently plan to support LAN play with StarCraft II, as we are building Battle.net to be the ideal destination for multiplayer gaming with StarCraft II and future Blizzard Entertainment games. While this was a difficult decision for us, we felt that moving away from LAN play and... Read more

The pre-release leak of The Sims 3 essentially served as a "demo program" for Electronic Arts to test its focus on "disc-enabled" services like community and downloadable content, CEO John Riccitiello recently postulated to IndustryGamers.

After jokingly referring to the leak as a "secret marketing campaign," Riccitiello noted that "Sims 3 has a massive amount of content, and a lot of it is downloaded once you register with EA." For example, registered users get an extra city as a free download.

"For the pirate consumer, they don't get the second town, they don't get all the extra content, and they don't get the community. [The piracy] was only concentrated on Poland and China, but I think of it as not being that different than a demo," the CEO added.

Use of free downloadable content as a piracy and used sales deterrent is a growing trend amongst the development community, which has been extremely... Read more

In a new interview with Gamaustra, Sony's Peter Dille called the problem of rampant PSP piracy "sickening," and said that Sony now believes a large amount of software sales are lost to illegal sharing.

"I'm convinced and we're convinced that piracy has taken out a big chunk of our software sales on PSP," said Dille.

Stating that third-party developers were "just about ready to jump off the cliff and pull support for the platform" around 18 months ago, Dille explained that Sony has been "evangelizing" the platform since, in an attempt to pull in more original PSP projects outside of PlayStation 2 ports.

But with millions of piracy-capable PSPs still on the market, Dille admits that the "toothpaste is out of the tube."

"[Piracy is] not good for us, but it's not good for the development community," he said. "We can look at data from BitTorrent sites from the day Resistance: Retribution goes on sale and see how many copies are being downloaded illegally, and it's frankly sickening. We are spending a lot of time talking about how we can deal with that problem."

Update: Stardock has asked the press to clarify that the below figures don't represent overall sales, but simply the breakdown of pirate-to-legitimate users at peak hours.

Original: While around 140K people tried to play Gas Powered Games' Demigod (PC) online Wednesday, only 12% or so were legitimate buyers, claims publisher Stardock.

"We ended up with 140,000 connected users, of which about 12% were actually legitimate customers," reads a status update from Stardock CEO Brad Wardell. An earlier message had put the percentage of pirated users at about 85%.

While pirates are unable to partake in multiplayer, the initial version of Demigod pinged a server for updates when the game started. That was changed in yesterday's patch.

"We spent a lot of time today trying to isolate out the warez users from the legitimate users," Wardell wrote, noting "it would require a lot of surgery to actually break them and even if we did, there'd be no friendly 'ha ha pirate' message which... Read more

Microsoft today announced new features coming soon to the Games for Windows Live service, including an anti-piracy solution and in-game marketplace.

Few details were revealed of the server-side, "zero-day" anti-piracy solution. However, Microsoft did note that Games for Windows Live will now require authentication for online play.

In-game marketplace capability has also been added, allowing developers to sell content through their own store fronts through customized APIs. Games for Windows Live will now save users' settings in the cloud, allowing access to the settings regardless of the PC used.

"This update and other features currently in development represent a tipping point in the evolution of Games for Windows Live as a leading online PC gaming network," said general manager of Games for Windows Live Ron Pessner. "In the coming months, we will continue to deliver on our promise to provide gamers and publishers with the industry's best connected gaming experiences through the Live service."

We'll have more details on the updates following a briefing with Microsoft later today.

How does Valve deal with PC piracy? According to Valve director of business development Jason Holtman, it gives them what they want--and makes a lot of money doing it.

"Pirates are underserved customers," said Holtman today during a speech at the Game Business Law summit, according to GameDaily.

"When you think about it that way, you think, 'Oh my gosh, I can do some interesting things and make some interesting money off of it.'"

Holtman used Valve's success in the Russian market as an example of how piracy can be reduced by simply selling the pirates what they want--when they want it.

Explained Holtman: "Russians are reading magazines and watching television--they say 'Man, I want to play that game so bad,' but the publishers respond, 'You can play that game in six months...maybe.' "

After ensuring that its products launch simultaneously in Russia, Holtman said that Valve's piracy rates in the territory "dropped off significantly."

Following in the unfortunate footsteps of World of Goo, developer Beautiful Game Studios' claims that its Championship Manager series of PC soccer simulators is the victim of a 90% piracy rate.

"That's not just a number in the air, we can measure it and we know that there are a huge amount of pirated copies," said Beautiful GM Roy Meredith in an interview with CVG.

World of Goo co-creator Ron Carmel recently stated that his game was suffering from a 90% piracy rate--though Carmel later lowered the estimated figure to a still-staggering 82%.

Despite Meredith's obvious concern regarding piracy, he recognizes that adding DRM copy protection to the upcoming Championship Manager 2009 could create even more problems.

"There's a real issue around DRM... I'd love to defeat pirates, but actually, with all this mess on Spore and Football Manager, which I haven't been able to play this year... I spent about three hours trying to go through this registration process and I really want to play it, but I've got other things to do with my life."

Added Meredith: "There are actually other ways of dealing with piracy too. One is to compete price-wise. We haven't got to pay royalties to Sony or Microsoft, so we can go into territories and price compete."

In the future, PCs will be able to officially play console games with the full blessing and support of major console manufacturers Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo, believes PC Gaming Alliance president Randy Stude.

"I predict that all of the console makers over time will recognize that it's too expensive to develop the proprietary solution and recognize the value of collapsing back on the PC as a ubiquitous platform," he told GamePolitics in a recent interview.

Stude, also the director of Intel's gaming program office, explained that "the guts of every console should tell you that the capability is there for the PC to act as the central point for all the consoles," asking why a PC powerful enough to emulate the PlayStation 4, for example, shouldn't be able to run games specifically developed for that platform.

"[Sony is] certainly not making any money on the hardware," he ... Read more

EA Maxis' Spore was by far the most pirated PC game in 2008, according to a list compiled by Torrent-tracking blog TorrentFreak. The title, surrounded by controversy over its anti-piracy DRM, was illegally downloaded over 1.7 million times.

Electronic Arts took a beating in capturing four of the top five slots, with EA Maxis' The Sims 2 taking the not-so-coveted second place by reaching over 1.1 million downloads. The EA-published Crysis and Command & Conquer 3 came in at fourth and fifth, respectively.

Ubisoft's PC port of Assassin's Creed grabbed a reluctant third place with over a million downloads. The game was leaked to torrent networks over six weeks ahead of its retail release in April. Ubisoft later sued disc replicator Optical Experts Manufacturing (OEM) for $10 million in damages, believing that an OEM employee was responsible for the leak.

The rest of the list follows:

1. Spore / 1,700,000 / Sept. 2008
2. The Sims 2 / 1,150,000 / Sept. 2004
3. Assassins Creed / 1,070,000 / Nov. 2007
4. Crysis / 940,000 / Nov. 2007
5. Command & Conquer 3 / 860,000 / Mar. 2007
6. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare / 830,000 / Nov. 2007
7. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas / 740,000 / Jun. 2005
8. Fallout 3 / 645,000 / Oct. 2008
9. Far Cry 2 / 585,000 / Oct. 2008
10. Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 / 470,000 / Oct. 2008

Illegal downloads of PSP software have slowed across the past two months, Sony Computer Entertainment America hardware manager John Koller has revealed.

Noting that piracy has been "a significant issue" for the platform, Koller told MTV Multiplayer that "it's trending down right now," adding that "we've seen the piracy not be as such prevalent in the last month to two months."

No explanation was offered as to the lowered piracy rate, nor as to how Sony calculated said rate. The past two months have been a relatively slow period for the PSP, with roughly 20 games released in the past eight weeks. The system often outsells the PS3 in the U.S., though its games rarely rank among the month's best-selling software.

Koller also commented on the "good vs. evil" battles that piracy inevitably raises.

"There's certainly people that are standing up and fighting for what we consider the good side, the rights of developers and publishers to make money on their IP," he observed. "And then there's certainly the other side that believes that they can take as warranted. It's kind of been nice to see other consumers going and help and fight the battle for us."

2D Boy's World of Goo (PC, Wii) is being pirated at the rate of "about 90%," according to co-creator Ron Carmel.

The statement came from Carmel in the form of a user comment on a RockPaperShotgun story about the game's pending European release. 2D Boy cohort Kyle Gabler explained in another comment that the figure was established by looking at the number of unique Internet addresses connecting to the game's leaderboard server.

In the face of staggering piracy, Carmel is keeping his chin up. "We're getting good sales through WiiWare, Steam, and our website. Not going bankrupt just yet!" wrote the upstart developer to Joystiq.

Carmel wrote that a few players had illegally downloaded the game and then decided to make a purchase, but added that those buyers formed a "very small percentage."

2D Boy won the 2008 Independent Games Festival for World of Goo. The physics-based puzzler has quickly risen to popularity among indie game fans on Nintendo's WiiWare service as well as Valve's Steam.

Randy Stude, the outspoken president of the PC Gaming Alliance, has arrived at some conclusions about game piracy after turning his attention to the issue in October.

"I don't think it's getting worse, as much as it's getting easier," said the consortium head to Ars Technica. He offered file-sharing trail-blazer Napster as an example to show that pirates strike all forms of media and are not unique to the games industry.

While Stude represents a collective of hardware makers and game publishers, he surprisingly took the side of enraged gamers who took to the Internet with complaints about Spore's DRM limitations. "I think gamers wanted to make their voices known; it was the equivalent of the Boston tea party," he remarked.

Stude asserted his understanding that PC gamers are a unique and diverse bunch, and as such don't do well with limitations. "[PC gamers] don't buy one machine, stick it in the corner, hook it up to the TV, and play it forever. We play on multitudes of machines, and we want the same rights an Xbox 360 purchaser has, to... Read more

PC Gaming Alliance president Randy Stude has decided to turn his industry consortium's attention toward piracy after months of DRM controversy and PC release delays getting attributed to gamers getting their fix by way of a digital five-finger discount.

"At some point next year, we expect to be able to quantify the potential impact of piracy on the industry," promised Stude to Gamasutra, echoing detractors in the piracy debate who warn that most piracy-related statistics available today are inaccurate.

Stude was pushed into the issue by his constituency--a collection of hardware makers, PC vendors and game publishers including Microsoft, Dell, Activision, and Epic Games. "There's a far more urgent imperative [game companies] want to see discussion and debate going on around, which is piracy," he said.

The Alliance president reiterated the most frequently mentioned solutions to the piracy problem, such as digital distribution and taking games online, but he also had a novel idea for what to do before the day that markets go entirely digital.

"Let's monetize every one of those pirates, and let's advertise the hell out of them," Stude asserted. "Serving, for example, six times the number of in-game ads on unauthenticated game versions would be a piracy deterrent that also provides revenues to the developer," wrote Gamasutra of Stude's idea.

The Entertainment Software Association today praised Congress and President Bush for signing the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property Act of 2008 (PRO-IP) into United States law.

The ESA is particularly thrilled that PRO-IP will "enhance the ability of U.S. law enforcement to address serious intellectual crimes," such as piracy, by creating a new position in the presidential cabinet for an intellectual property enforcement coordinator.

"Piracy is an enormously profitable undertaking for criminal organizations. Disabling those organizations requires a coordinated and cross-border approach to enforcement, which this legislation clearly promotes," stated ESA CEO Michael Gallagher.

"Effective enforcement of IP laws helps protect this engine of economic growth," he added. "More legitimate game sales mean more game-related jobs up and down the value chain."

But while PRO-IP has been praised by the ESA, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, not everyone is happy with it, including the American Library Association, Public Knowledge and Electronic Frontier Foundation.

"It would've been nice to have something to benefit the public and artists instead of big media companies," Public Knowledge communications director Art Brodsky told CNET, as noticed by Gamasutra.

New screenshots of GRIN's Bionic Commando (PC, PS3, 360) accompany today's Tokyo Game Show festivities, showing off more of the swinging-focused action game.

Bionic Commando is slated to hit by next spring, with the developer telling Kotaku that the console versions should be expected in "very early 2009."

Meanwhile, the PC version may arrive a bit later because of piracy and extra polish.

"The PC is always a slippery slope because of piracy, stuff like sorting out DRM, making sure we don't have too little or too much," explained GRIN employee Ulf Andersson.

"But also because we want to make sure it doesn't feel like a port, so we can add a little extra polish to the PC version," Andersson added.

Following up on yesterday's report that a PC release of Tom Clancy's EndWar is likely, creative director Michael de Plater has now revealed that piracy is to blame for the delayed PC version of the Ubisoft Shanhai-developed voice-controlled RTS game.

"To be honest, if PC wasn't pirated to hell and back, there'd probably be a PC version coming out the same day as the other two," Plater told VG247. The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 editions of EndWar arrive November 7.

"The level of piracy that you get with the PC just cannibalizes the others, because people just steal that version," he elaborated. "Piracy's basically killing PC."

In addition to Ubisoft, publisher Electronic Arts is also known to delay PC versions until after a game hits consoles, though it has not explicitly cited piracy as the cause.

For example, EA Redwood Shores' Dead Space hits PS3 and Xbox 360 on October 14, with the PC version coming the next week. And DICE's Mirror's Edge, once slated to ship simultaneously on consoles and PC, will now hit PS3 and Xbox 360 on November 11 while the PC version is targeted for a vague "winter" release window.

Piracy is said to be public enemy number one in the games industry, if certain game studios are to be believed. It's been declared responsible for bad reviews, poor sales of PC ports of popular console games, and even shifts in business models. However, one strong voice of dissent has emerged.

"Rampant piracy is no longer the catch-all excuse it's often employed as," rebuts Penumbra (PC) game writer Tom Jubert in a blog for Edge.

Cevat Yerli, CEO of Crysis developer Crytek (PC), recently intensified the spotlight on the issue by claiming there were 20 pirated copies of Crysis for every one legitimate player.

The actual ratio, Jubert argues, is no worse than 1:5 in the Western world. To back up this claim, Jubert cites figures from GameShadow Metrics--a online service that automatically patches games and can detect altered .exe files--which show 1 pirated copy of Crysis for every 5 legitimate copies in the US and a 3:7 ratio in the UK.

"Of course, that's not to say that Yerli is wrong," concedes Jubert, "[it's] only that 1:15 is a potentially misleading statistic." He adds that it's difficult to measure the actual number of high-end gaming PCs in use, so claims like "consoles sell factors of 4-5 more" are equally unfounded.

While some argue that piracy can increase game sales by letting players take a "try before you buy" approach, Crytek business manager Harald Seeley isn't one of them.

Based on downloads of the last Crysis patch, he argues, there were "a lot more active [Crysis] players than there were unit sales."

And since those pirates are still playing the game months after release, Seeley reasons that "then they were a sale that didn't happen but probably would have had it not been possible to obtain the game illegally."

Crytek, the studio that created the hardware intensive Far Cry and Crysis games exclusively for PC, has repeatedly stated that the upcoming Crysis Warhead will be its last PC-only game due to the abundant piracy of PC games.

But just because Crytek is no longer developing PC exclusives, that doesn't mean the company will abandon the platform. "We want to continue to provide our... Read more

The Entertainment Software Association--the industry organization assisting game makers in legal and governmental matters and organizes the annual E3 event-- today applauded the recent jail sentences of two American game pirates in a press release.

Kevin Fuchs of West Amherst, NY, and Kifah Maswadi of Oakland, FL, were sentenced to eight and 15 months in prison, respectively, this summer. Fuchs will follow that up with eight months of house arrest and another 16 months of court supervised release. Maswadi also received three years of court supervision, 50 hours of community service, and an order to pay $415,900 in restitution.

"These decisions illustrate, once again, that game piracy will not be tolerated and the extent at which these criminals will be prosecuted. The ESA and its members will continue to support law enforcement's efforts to protect the intellectual property of our industry," said Michael Gallagher, CEO of the ESA. The sentencing follows a recent United Kingdom ruling which established a legal precedent in their courts.

The news comes at a time when piracy has had increasing influence... Read more