GamersBeyond Community Blog

It seems that no matter what happens in the games industry and no matter which games become successful bigger companies will blame piracy for their problems. now, I know that no big name exec will stumble upon this site and read my words of wisdom and be turned to a life of making quality titles that appeal to wide audience with the best form of antipiracy available… but it doesn’t hurt for me to explain my theories and possible solutions here to my 5 readers (I happen to be 2 of them so 3 readers).

Before I get going into this I would like to explain the situation. in the news this week there were a few stories about how piracy ruined a certain game and because of which the game in question lost millions, causing future renditions to no longer be elusive to the PC (the most capable of all the gaming systems), in effect lowering the standards of quality to that of a console and then porting it to PCs. The games from this week are Madden, and Crytek based games (crysis). Madden games will no longer be released on PC and future Crysis games will lose PC exclusivity in favor of console releases.

let me start by first saying that not all ports are inherently bad… for example Assassin’s Creed for PC was a good game; though it was obviously made for consoles and the overall experience suffered for it. if more publishers adopt this form of release schedule then in the end PC gamers will be the ones who feel the pain the most. So then what is killing PC gaming? It’s people like EA, people like Crytek, like EPIC, that around every corner say that PC gaming is dead and they are moving to consoles. I disagree whole heartedly that PC gaming is dead, hell it is my passion to inform you, the gamer, that PC gaming is very much alive and strong. I do so by informing you of trends and news in the genre, and by informing you on how to get the best possible experience from your hardware.

Now assume, like I do, that PC gaming is not dead, and instead it is evolving. Some have stated that pc gaming is evolving into a casual market, one that popcap style games will rule, I say this is another falsity and should not be considered the future of gaming on the most powerful systems in the world. I believe it was ID that said that games are made on PCs so there is no reason that they aren’t released on PC. it is a choice of the developer, is it cost effective to release on a system that runs rampant w/ piracy? yes it is, and here is why; piracy is just a statistic, a statistic that is given a monetary value that is completely ludicrous. The most popular system will have the highest piracy, period. For example the easiest consoles to pirate for are the Xbox and the Wii where a simple mod chip can be installed and games can thusly be downloaded, burned, and played with little or no repercussions. The same is currently true for PC, but how will we curb piracy and still have the PC be the most popular system for game producers?

To answer that lets look at the past attempts, some of the first attempts to curb piracy, and I mean first attempts, was to include codes throughout the game that needed to be inserted from the manual to the game. The game would stop and a screen would pop up asking for the 3rd letter in the 5th word on the 2nd paragraph on the 6th page of the manual and wouldn’t continue until the correct string was inputted, a wrong answer would change arrangement to dissuade random tries. Though this style is basically rudimentary and out of date, you could photocopy a manual and send it to a friend’s house with the disk, or if the manual was too big (as often was the case) you could just call your friend and get the code when you needed it.

After that style of protection was phased out we started seeing disk style protection; Physical sectors on the disk that could not be recreated in a standard disk burner. The idea was that during launch of the disk it would look for this physical sector on the disk and would load only when found. This is basically the same style that has been used in most games through the 90’s and today. In fact I challenge you to find a game that doesn’t use disk copy protection as a means to keep their game from being pirated; they are few and far between. The problem with this is that every time your system looks for this protection, it is easy to replicate the signal your computer is looking for, or even take that request out all together; effectively removing any purpose your protection had.

The final newer and least popular way to protect games is by server side authentication; sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Let’s look at why and how it is wrong and how it can be right. For a long time the internet was thought of as a luxury and if a game was required to use the internet to even be playable then a whole huge market would be left unable to play. The times have changed and everybody that would purchase a game either has some form of internet or some way of acquiring it. The problem is that it is still easy to mimic the server response to the game or even cut that part out all together affectively disabling the copy protection feature. But the reason that this can be the best method of protection is simple, socializing and content. Socializing for example would be a whole set of social aspects located on the server and would only be accessible if the user had a user account. These aspects would include leader boards, achievements, lobbies for co-op or multi-play; and then the ability to quick patch with free or subscription based content and updates. Look at where this is successful, WoW for example, is easy hell to pirate, and even easier to connect to an unofficial server and play for free; but is it as fun as the populated servers of blizzard? No, and that is why instead of chasing pirates, blizzard is working on making the online component the best experience it can be.

So do I believe that PC gaming is evolving, damn right I do. But instead of evolving to a lower form of “casual” games, I believe it is evolving the same way the web is by becoming a living breathing social entity where users can live, share, and create the gaming experience that best suits them.