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Piracy in the Video Game Industry
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posted by shwang
on Monday July 11, @01:46AM
from the dept.
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shwang writes "It occurred to me that while both the music and movie industries have taken an active stance on stopping piracy, there has not been any movement to stop piracy in the video game industry. And if there has been any sort of movement to stop video game piracy, it's been fairly toned down in the media. This is very interesting as the video game industry is a $7 billion a year industry being a close third to the film industry's $15 billion a year market and the music industry's $16 billion a year market."
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Piracy in the Video Game Industry
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The Fine Print:
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Monday July 11, @04:28PM (#1693)
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There has always been piracy in the video game
world, and anti-piracy efforts. There is less
piracy in video games, I think, because the
copy-protection has been comparatively more
effective than what RIAA or MPAA have done.
Video games are played either on standard home computers, or on dedicated and very closed console systems (Playstation, Nintendo, Sega, Atari). The home computers have had copy-protection in place since their first releases. Some of the very first computer-based video games were for the Apple-II. They used all sorts of non-standard floppy disk formatting tricks to make it hard to copy a disk.
Compared to the arms race over copy protection in the computer-based games, the consoles have had very little trouble. Their games were usually distributed on hardware cartridges, then on CDs, then on DVD. At the time, few people had the means to duplicate any of those formats. Since the proprietary consoles can tweak the low-level media formats, and embed the tweaks into the very hardware of their device, duplicating games for console players has been a very low-scale activity.
The one great effort at console piracy, modifying one or more chips inside the box ("chipping"), is usually not widespread. It runs the risk of destroying the game console, which is still expensive. It requires hardware skills, often including soldering, that most people don't have. And those who supply the modified chips are a convenient commercial lawsuit magnet.
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Actually, "modding" game consoles is a very common thing these days as some websites online even offer services to sell "modded" game systems for some markup over the cost of a standard system.
Also, it has been increasingly easy to copy games (with the usage of dvd's) and share them over the internet through torrent sites.
Especially with Microsoft's Xbox system (which is pretty much a computer modified to be a gaming system) it is very easy to modify the system and find free copies of games online.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Thursday August 25, @06:20AM (#1699)
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It's a piece of piss to copy games. All you needed is a modded ps2 or xbox then download from torrent sites. Then you can play all your old favourites suc h as the SNES, Megadrive, N64, PS1, even the commodore 64, Spectrum and Amstrad!
It seems that the video game industry has tried every copy protection and way of stopping copying and failed. The only thing they haven't tried is cutting the price.
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Nasty DRM was tried on video games back in the early '80s. They found that it pissed off customers way more than it got them extra sales, so they dropped it. Now copy protection consists of relatively innocuous things (like not allowing multiple copies of a given serial number to play online). In some cases, they even encourage people to share limited versions of the game.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday October 11, @03:23AM (#1703)
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Not entirely. See Starforce, Steam, etc. for examples of some recent methods of copy-protection that greatly infringe on user freedom.
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Friday September 02, @12:09AM (#1700)
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Great thing we get this behind the country and teh video game industry needs to bring out more adult games because all those nintendo and sony gamers are that age now. Found some great adult games here including Playboys http://www.playboy.com new game http://www.sextoysparty.com
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Wednesday November 09, @08:25AM (#1705)
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I think that piracy in video games is sick! If you can't afford to buy the real thing, you shouldn't have it at all. If all you can do is download games off the internet you are no good to anyone, or anything. I feel that the police and law enforcement agencies around the world should have more power over what to do to these pirates
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by
Anonymous Coward
on Tuesday January 03, @10:51AM (#1707)
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How would I report piracy? I know couple of guys who download and distribute video games downloaded from Internet.
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Humanity has the stars in its future, and that future is too important to be
lost under the burden of juvenile folly and ignorant superstition.
- Isaac Asimov
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