Game Piracy

[Tami]

Sometimes it's not the news that matters, but the reaction to the
news. When two almost identical stories broke this week about Halo 2
and Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, both revealing that the games in
question have been leaked onto the Internet several days (or in Halo
2's case, almost a month) before launch, the news itself was
worrying enough, but the reaction of consumers on forums around the
Net was even more so. "This isn't news," sites which reported the
news were told. "Every game gets pirated before release, so this is
nothing special."

For the creators of the games in question, of course, it's something
pretty special. Halo 2 and GTA San Andreas will be among the biggest
game launches in history, and their talented creators have laboured
for several years under intense pressure to follow up on previous
successes, only to see their games being freely distributed to
pirates weeks before loyal, paying fans can get their hands on them.
For the publishers, it's something special too - their biggest hopes
for Christmas will be on sale on market stalls before they're on
sale in videogame stores. And for consumers waiting for the games,
it's a slap in the face, as pirates gleefully discuss details of the
long-awaited games in chat rooms and forums weeks before the honest
consumer gets to see the title.

There's a grain of truth in what's being said all the same, though,
becuase it's true that almost every game is pirated before its
release - whether it's a couple of days before, a week before, or a
month before, the first distribution channel a game usually appears
on is a pirate one. It's a sad fact that this has become the status
quo, so much so that gamers are no longer even remotely surprised by
the appearance of leaked copies of headline games - a damning
indictment of the industry's security procedures in handling
valuable gold code, if ever there was one.

While we don't doubt that Halo 2 and GTA San Andreas will go on to
sell incredibly well despite the leaks, equally there's no doubt in
our mind that this sort of piracy is damaging - especially to less
high profile games which may be on the borderline of commercial
success in the first place. Online piracy itself is damaging, but
probably doesn't result in that many lost sales; the fact that
pirates take downloaded versions of games, stick them onto DVDs and
sell them on market stalls is the altogether more worrying aspect
which really starts to hit the bottom lines of publishers and
developers.

The question of how we can counteract this problem, as an industry,
is a convoluted one which requires a great deal more research and
investigation than is currently taking place. Much of the industry
pays lip service to the notion of curbing software piracy, while not
really taking any educated measures themselves - relying instead on
the actions of bodies such as ELSPA and the police to make the
difference. Existing software protection systems simply don't work,
and while there's some hope that technology from firms such as
Trymedia and Softwrap will deliver at least a partial solution for
the PC platform, publishers have been remarkably slow to adopt such
schemes. Platform holders, meanwhile, focus on the menace of chipped
consoles - while continuing to cling to the ridiculous notion of
region locking, which at worst provides a potential get-out clause
for chipping, and at best is an insulting way to treat their
consumers.

As two of its biggest prospects for the busy holiday season
circulate freely on the Internet and gradually make their way into
car boot sales and market stalls, perhaps this should be the sign
that the industry needs to sit up and start taking piracy more
seriously. This is not a problem which can be solved by one
publisher in isolation; best practice security and technology
methods must be established which can protect the output of the
industry as a whole, rather than having individual publishers
striking technology deals for outdated disk protection systems and
watching as their valuable games go missing from duplication plants
and localisation agencies.

There won't be a universal panacea, and piracy isn't going to go
away - but working with the platform holders, embracing digital
distribution paradigms and co-operating to develop industry
standards for code security and proven copy protection technology
could go a long way towards lessening the impact of this kind of
mess on Christmas line-ups to come.

Source: Gamasutra Developer News

[Jim]

Leaking games will probably put someone in jail, and if not atleast fired. Guess it didn't do them any good <img src=\'http://www.killanet.net/forum3/public/s ... >/blum.gif\' class=\'bbc_emoticon\' alt=\':P\' />