Anybody that knows me, knows that I'm not against game piracy. Most of the games I own are burned, with the exception of a rare few. I legally own Half-Life, and Neverwinter Nights. I was a legal player of Asheron's Call for over three years. I legally owned Everquest and Ultima Online for that matter. What do all of these games have in common? I had a reason to buy them.
After reading this article on RPGamer, I started thinking... Game piracy is inevitable. As long as people have blank media to put the game on, and it works afterwards, people are going to pirate games.
What game companies need to do is find ways to make the consumer NEED to purchase the game, in order to get full enjoyment out of it. For example, it's nearly impossible to play a pirated Neverwinter Nights online, unless you somehow get ahold of a legal CD key that hasn't been used yet to create an account. More companies need to make their games have online capabilities, and require a valid and unique CD-key in order to play online. Too many games are using CD-keys just for installing the game. Just grab a keygen, and bam, you have the full version of the game.
Neverwinter Nights, on the other hand, requires you to create an account (for free) using your own CD key to be able to play online. Most of the enjoyment from that game comes from online play, just like most games. Half-Life is also kind of doing this, with their pirated cd-key blocking and stuff. It forces people to go out and legally buy the game to be able to play it online.
It's annoying as fuck for the people trying to pirate the game, but it's an effective strategy and it's only fair.
So what am I saying basically? Game companies need to try harder in making the game worth purchasing. Imagine if Vice City PC had an online mode, and the only way you could play it was to purchase the game. I honestly think the game would sell like crazy, everybody wants to play GTA online. When it's only single player, what's really the point of buying the game, when you can just copy it? Or what about Morrowind. If you could play that game online, and people had to buy the game in order to do so, it would have done much, much better than it did. But Bethesda is stupid, and they swore that they would never make an online Morrowind. So I'm just going to keep downloading their software for free, I'm not missing out on anything.
You're not going to stop software piracy by putting up statistics on how much money the game companies are losing. The only way to stop it is either to make a reason to buy the games, or to stop making games completely. I think the game companies should lean more toward the former than the latter.
Posted by at June 2, 2003 10:23 AM