Crysis 2

    Quote from e-freak

    Piracy is like environmental pollution or global warming. You do it - it's fine. Everyone does it - still no immediate effect. Everyone keeps doing it - wait a few years - you successfully destroyed most of the system. And then it takes ages until it recovers. And no one wants to be the one blamed for it.We educated society to act on immediate responses and short attention spans. Most of these kids don't understand they were the ones killing Mirrors Edge, they are the ones destroying all the progress in the market and they will be the ones suffering from a lack of new games.

    QFT

    As long as you don't directly see your impact on things, you don't feel like you have any impact at all

    I honestly don't see piracy as that big a deal, in the big picture. It's one of many things that could impact things, for example used sales, unfortunate release dates overshadowing smaller games, pricing, regions, advertising strategy, publisher support, fads and trends. In particular I see used games as a much bigger deal, because to the average gamer it FEELS legit. After all, you're walking into a nice, clean business, spread across the country, and paying money for a product. It's legal, it's popular, and it doesn't give one single penny to the original creator of that product. Those people who are willing to pay money for games, and are being sidetracked into paying a reseller instead of paying the people who made the game, seems to me a much bigger issue, and something that actually can be effected, than pirates, who are not willing to, or frequently able to, pay for the things they consume, many of whom bask in the perceived 'rebel' culture of downloading what you want without payment or restriction.

    The used game market is indeed an issue and one that's being attacked with things like one-time non-essential but highly desirable DLC codes and stuff. Quite a reasonable way of approaching the problem IMO.

    Piracy is always going to be a problem and I can't honestly see any real solution to it, beyond providing excellent incentives to buy. This seems to be the approach publishers are shifting towards rather than crazy DRM. Steam for example makes buying, updating, and networking games so quick and easy I almost enjoy doing so.

    However I do feel more strongly against pirates rather than used game buyers because most of the latter don't understand the implications, whereas pirates almost always do. There's absolutely no excuse for piracy if you're past school. While I can kind of sympathise with the 'I'm a student' argument, there's absolutely nothing stopping any student from getting a job and doing an honest day's work to pay for their games.

    I buy so many PC games because I can get them from steam where there isn't really any DRM. Would buy a lot more films if I could get digital HD versions drm free. Some people actually buy games and then download a pirate version because its gotten so bad.

    I like piracy a lot, it's great.

    It gives everyone with an internet connection access to most games, books, movies and music out there. It effectively multiplies your purchasing power by a thousandfold. Until steam and gog it was also the only way to track down unknown and/or old games, and is still the most reliable. Piracy also allows you to circumvent censorship. This also go's for movies, books and music.

    It dramatically lowers the barrier to acquiring a consoles or a gaming pc, as otherwise you spend a couple of hundred bucks on hardware and then you have to pay 60,- or 70,- for a game you never played trough, and even then you could afford maybe 3 or 4 games a year. So that's hundreds of bucks spend on hardware so you can play 3 or 4 games on it.

    With piracy that becomes, almost every game released, plus you never ever have to buy a game you never played trough, you can make sure that every fucking cent you spent go's to good developers instead of bad ones. This makes it much easier for many people especially younger ones to own and play games.

    It also gives consumers the power, don't like the DRM or whatever aspect, used have to take it up in the ass or just not play the game, now I can enjoy the game while not getting it up the ass. I don't know why, the just don't buy it then argument is brought so much, since it's fucking stupid, really this like one of the biggest boons about piracy.

    And I suspect it's also the biggest reason why piracy is hated, since it does give the consumer so much power, and the more power they have, the less you can fuck with them, and the nicer you have to be, so fix the bugs, explain business decisions etc. Without pirating most consumers would take it up the ass, publishers know this, they know organizing consumers is a hundred times harder then it is for a big company.

    I also haven't seen any convincing losses because of pirating. Seeing a lot of people pirate a game doesn't tell me weather or not pirating replaced a legal buy or pirating exposed them to a game they went ahead and bought. I'm also not seeing heavily pirated system be negatively affected by it, Many multiplat games sell less on the PS3 then 360, even accounting for the fact there are more 360,'s out there. Although the PS3 version might be inferior. The NDS is way more easy to pirate for then PSP, yet again software sales are good. And as far as the PSP, the piracy and emu scene is the only thing keeping it alive.

    The main thing that I would say is killing gaming is the fact that the middles class is disappearing, gaming is getting more expensive while peoples incomes are shrinking.

    To sum it up, hundreds of millions of people around the globe should give up something which brings them so much benefit, for the sake of industry that is still healthy and growing and doing it's best to make sure gaming gets more expensive, and more annoying.

    Quote from Gloglebag

    I also haven't seen any convincing losses because of pirating. Seeing a lot of people pirate a game doesn't tell me weather or not pirating replaced a legal buy or pirating exposed them to a game they went ahead and bought. I'm also not seeing heavily pirated system be negatively affected by it

    You never will, because there's no accurate way of measuring such things. One can only speculate.

    However, it doesn't take much speculation to ascertain that if a large proportion of people who want to play a game simply download it for free rather than pay for it, that's going to have an impact on sales performance. If enough people do it, it has a large impact on sales performance. In an industry as volatile as the games industry, this is what contributes towards studios almost constantly being closed, people being made redundant, high-quality games never receiving sequels, the PC being treated as an afterthought, etc.

    Bury your head in the sand and deny piracy has anything to do with all this if you like. But just remember that it's publishers who decide what games get developed and for what platforms, and if they think piracy is a large problem then this is going to have an impact on the kind of games you get to play.

    Regardless of what you think I'm pretty much certain piracy has a large detrimental effect on at least the PC platform, which I've watched go from being great to being a fuckin' joke. I'm aware it's not the only reason, but it's definitely one of them.

    Quote from Thrik

    However I do feel more strongly against pirates rather than used game buyers because most of the latter don't understand the implications, whereas pirates almost always do. There's absolutely no excuse for piracy if you're past school. While I can kind of sympathise with the 'I'm a student' argument, there's absolutely nothing stopping any student from getting a job and doing an honest day's work to pay for their games.

    While I completely understand feeling stronger about piracy, I wouldn't agree that "pirates almost always understand the implications". From what I've seen most game pirates have a view much like music pirates do, of the industry being a big monolothic, abusive, faceless entity, that should be spurned. A lot of gamers don't really see a difference between, say, Ice Pick Lodge and Activision. It's morally convenient for them to consider them equally, as "The Man", much as music pirates don't look past the RIAA to see individual artists, studios, engineers, labels etc. and justify their downloading that way. Even in that article by Jim Sterling, raging so hard against PC gamers (he really doesn't portray that group as separate in any way from pirates), justifies excusing pirating music over games because "musicians earn all their money from concerts".

    Also, getting a job can actually be pretty difficult. I've been unemployed now except small time stuff for two years. My area's shedding jobs left and right. A local company exploding a few months ago (literally: It was a natural gas distributor and all their tanks exploded, and leaving the building nothing but a big crater) didn't help.

    I understand that those who worked on this game might be mad, but to be honest this looks more like a marketing stunt than a real leak, there are many signs that suggest this was intentional.

    The biggest one is that people who usually leak media do it for money. They work in some place that has early access to the media, and they sell it to a top release group, who then try to profit somehow from it (this can involve blackmailing the creator, selling physical copies on flee markets, re-selling it to private trackers, etc). It's really rare for a leak to show up on the web without passing trough these "official" channels.

    In this case the leak didn't came from any well known release groups, the proof being that there are many small groups claiming that they own the leak, and a dozen of repacks (some of them with malware in them, so if you download the game be careful).

    Another issue is that the original source of this news seems to be the EA web site. Usually with real leaks, the news show first on web sites connected with the release groups, since in theory the more they publicize the leak the more they will profit from it, and the company that owns the leaked media tries to do damage control instead of publicizing it even more. Since the news showed up on EAs web site,it seems like it was all made by EA in order to try to get more sales (let's be honest here, there wasn't that much media coverage of the game before the leak), and the latest news show that they got what they wanted, pre-orders sky-rocketed since the game leaked.

    The timing is also weird since leaks usually happen closer to the release date, when physical copies of the media start being made and are out of the control of the creator, so they are easier to steal. The other option would be someone hacking into Cryteks servers but It's hard to believe that someone would do that steal a unfinished copy of the game, more than a month before the official release to get nothing in return. Hackers don't usually work for free, not on this scale (I'm guess that after what happened with Crytek before they have a fairly secure infrastructure). And if that was the case i expected EA/Crytek to do what Valve did, go after the hacker and get him arrested, which hasn't happened in this case yet (or at least it was not reported yet).

    Sorry this happened to you guys, especially on what looks to be a huge blockbuster hit. Hopefully the damage will be minimal so the next project won't be negatively impacted by it.

    Echoing the thoughts of most of the others in this thread, I'll be satiating any pre-release appetite with officially published previews and wait for the real thing to arrive on store shelves.

    And a new gameplay trailer has been released!

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    Quote from Zyndrome

    And a new gameplay trailer has been released!

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    This is a really good trailer. Wonder why it's 360 footage though? Now would be the perfect time to release some PC footage.

    Also REALLY GLAD to see weapon customization is back! YAY.

    Quote from Thrik

    Have you forgotten how Crytek themselves were burned with Crysis 1, which was widely reported to have been one of the most pirated games ever with a ratio of something like 15 illegal downloads per sale? If those people had bought it instead Crysis 1 would have been a much more profitable game, which is only good for us gamers because it means more similarly awesome games.

    Thrik man, you're forgetting that not everyone who would pirate a game would actually buy it if they had to spend money on it. there's a gap in the market between those who could become customers, but pirate instead, and those who wouldn't become customers if there was no pirating.

    Quote from Skjalg

    I used to pirate loads of games when I was a broke student, and back then I had loads of time to play games and absolutely no cash at all to purchase them with. Now its the opposite; I have almost no spare time but loads of cash. I usually purchase games, then dont even end up finishing them.

    Back then I only saved up and purchased games I knew I needed a key to play online with. (HL/Source/BF/SC/WoW/Hon etc). Now the only games I pirate are games I've bought but cant find the installer for anymore (usually old games like settlers 2 or tycoon deluxe) or games that I have bought, but because the norwegian mail is slow as fuck I didnt get it on the release date. (sometimes i get so hyped up I cant wait to play ). Thankfully Steam and b.net usually helps here. I think the last game I pirated (right after I bought it) because I couldnt wait was bioshock.. And I didnt finish that one either :S

    I traded in my xbox for a ps3 because I didnt have time to play anything on it. I purchased uncharted 2, Brotherhood and some other games. I havent finished any of them...

    I need more time. Where can I buy time?

    reminds me of this idea i had about sleep farms. imagine if you could sleep for a living and earn money, and then there'd be these sleep farms where you'd sleep all day. in the super markets, you'd be able to buy bottled sleep which would give you 8 more hours a day. that would be so awesome.

    also, just to make a triple post, i think used game sales as a whole hurt the industry more than piracy does. but then, used games mostly hurts console titles.

    Quote from Sentura

    also, just to make a triple post, i think used game sales as a whole hurt the industry more than piracy does. but then, used games mostly hurts console titles.

    Just how big do you think the PC platform is for games compared to consoles?

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