days of piracy!!!

[whitetop]

from videos to gaming piracy has always been around but what makes all this piracy mean???

as we all know piracy has been a problem and always will from the old reels to to the latest gaming consoles piracy has gotten worse from just making a backup to full on mass production but what makes all piracy bad well think of it this way
say you spend 6million on making a game 3 years of full on work to get just 3-4hours of campaign play for it then you publish it to stores all over the world now there you are having a nice rest and waiting for the figures to roll in to see what profit you made so you can make enough for a new game.results come in and you only made 1-2million back now with this money your meant to pay your programmers,art designers, now say you pay out 1 million  for labor.
now how are you going to make a new game with just one million,now your thinking how did this happen so you go and see why you had no profit you a search for your game on the internet now you see on some sites on how great the game is all is good so you keep searching you find more sites but not what you want to see you click the site and you see the download counter over 200,000 just from one site now you just found out why no profit has came in and from the 6 million you spent on the game 2 million comes in that leaves you a 4 million det on your hands not including the wages you had to pay for the workers.with just the last bit of your money you make a low budget game knowing all well whats going to happen you publish it and wait again for results and you barely make 1/4% of your money back, now you do what you did last time checked on how many downloads your game had and you see about 50,000 ,you go and look on the gaming site to see why these results came back so bad all you see is "this game was ok but could have spent there money doing it better" " game was crap with all that money from the last game you think they would make better games after" but fully aware 70% of the people moaning was ones that had a pirated version of the two games you made now thing of it this way you could try getting a new job but from company's that pay for this and not you but this piracy that's happened to you is happening to them and due to this they are laying of studios and and members now your kinda job less due to the only thing you can do is game games but due to piracy not many company's are employing or many jobs in general are around  your only getting enough money to make ends meet but by the skin of your teeth due to government funding,now new laws come in funding going down and no were to turn no job and not enough money to live on whats the next step the one you don't want but have no choice the streets now you know were its going (steeling crime ect).
this is of a close friend of mine that's had this and this is what in short terms happened to him.

results of piracy

vhs still 20% being pirated
dvd 65% of piracy
gaming has gone to 60% piracy
software up to  70% piracy

these are results stating this year and still on the rise and still company's going the same way that most went in the early 80's.
now people stat your allowed to make one backup of your original stuff  your 50/50 right and wrong not all your stuff is allowed to be backed up only close to 20% of stuff is allowed to be backed up even while owning the real copy due to people not understanding this we end up having a 15 year old kid breaking the very first protection to prevent piracy in the late 80's most people will remember this chap from this one kids evolution of piracy started now stating he was a kid when he did this figures stat that today's piracy is 70% of kids from games and films to music but due to them being under 16 in most places not much have been done about this but news has it this will change very soon when new changes of piracy and privacy law's come from ages of 10 years old will get charged.

but if people think piracy is not bad and is not hurting anyone think of it this way would you like it to happen to you if you put your life savings into one thing and don't get even 40% back with profit.

[crazy-modder]

Nice article whitetop. Im just wondering where you are getting these percentages from. Im not saying your wrong but most statistics are complete bs and come right off the top of peoples heads. Piracy is definitely a crime and does have a "small affect" on game designers. I do agree that it brings their profit down maybe a little bit but your article is pretty much saying that pirates put people on the streets living in a cardboard box..... Sounds a little dramatic to me.  I mean look at the COD series, black ops is one of the most pirated games off all time and it still got the #1 selling game in history. I think as long as a game has good marketing and great reviews then it is going to do great no problem. Like i said though, piracy is not right and most likely does affect the industry, but not much.

[Anonamous]

all they gotta do is make some sort of activation code come with the game to enable online play. There goes at least 50% of those who pirated it lol

[crazy-modder]

I agree with the online code deal. I believe homefront did that? correct me if im wrong. Lol to bad that game is horrible anyways.

[whitetop]

crazy my personages came from my mate the one that ive put this up for he mite be out of the business now but still knows and talks to the people. the ones on the web are not even close to the real stuff.

not all end up on the street most end up getting new jobs most don't most live with family after this stuff happens but once that have no one end up that bad.

the code stuff is old and by means of old is reason they are rarely used they tried on some low budget games to test it and they was lucky on low budget as loads of people had pirated codes

[crazy-modder]

O i didnt know that. Well maybe the best way to beat piracy is charging a monthly charge for online play with games. Like they do for wow. I know that would be absolutely horrible but i think that would beat the piracy. I know it would also make the honest people that buy games not want to play games online lol. Its just gonna be extremely hard to fight piracy, i think its always gonna be around.

[jrfhoutx]

Being the number 1 selling game in history doesn't necessarily mean it was profitable let alone recouped the expense of making it. Using the number one selling game as an example is also not a very good comparison considering most games don't sell those kind of numbers but still take a great deal of money to make...

Roll through the credits of a game sometime, count all those people and then multiply it by $30,000 (as a low figure of average salary of each person involved in developing that game. Btw that means at an average retail price of $50 per unit you have to sell 600 copies to pay that one $30k salary)... That's justthe amount your spending in staff costs... Then consider marketing and unit production costs... Then look at the number of units that game sold and the number of times that game has been downloaded from one site... Then tell me there's no impact on the industry... That's bull:censored:...




edit:
now take for example COD:BO. treyarch, which is is a subsidiary of Activision, has 250 employees. Now, assuming each of those 250 people only makes $30k a year (and we know that many of them make more than that, but we'll stick with $30k as a low end number to encompass even the lowest man on the totem pole) that means that just to pay the salaries of the treyarch employees the game needs to make a minimum of $7.5 million (and that doesn't even include paying out to employee benefits programs, 401Ks, etc.). now add to that the unknown cost of the equipment the company needs to pay for, as well as operating expenses (power, water, bandwidth, and rent on the facility they operate in). Now don't forget licensing fees that need to be paid to the console manufacturers. and don't forget that they need to pay for servers and bandwidth for at least the PC gamers. on top of that marketing costs, packaging costs and media costs. and on top of that the games profits have to pay for a portion of activisions employee and operating expenses (since Activision is the parent company and they have 4000 employees), and don't forget activision's parent company activision blizzard  will want a cut to pay their 5000 employees, and so will vivendi activision blizzards parent company (with 3400 employees), as well as the employee and operating expenses for the other publisher SE (who has 3300+ employees) and the DS developer n-Space (40 employees)...

Activision had a revenue of $2.9b in 2008, and currently owns 13 different game studios including treyarch... (btw revenue is NOT the same as profit...) that $2.9b has to first cover all expenses by Activision and all 13 of their studios before they can count a dime of profit...

I'll stop there, but you can see the snowball effect of operating costs vs revenue vs profit needed to maintain the companies. There are far more companies and people involved than people want to look at and each company want's it's cut of the profit. . Just for numbers fun, Black ops sold 7million units it's first week... and there have been over 4.5 million confirmed pirated copies downloaded (as of 12-26-10) that's a $250 million loss... to say that there is very little effect due to piracy is ludicrous... and regardless of whether or not every one of those pirated copies would have been a sale if pirated copies were not available, every single pirated copy is a lost sale in the eyes of the companies, because even if the customer wouldn't have actually bought the game, the potential was there (and if that were your product being pirated you'd probably see it that way too.)

[crazy-modder]

lol ....you go way in to depth on how businesses work. I am well aware of how a business works since both my parents are business owners. I never said that piracy does not affect the gaming industry....i said it affects it very little. This will be my last comment on this topic......

[DuctTapedGoat]

Piracy is bad - but, they ARE the ones catering to a demographic that dabble in certain 'wares'.

Actual lost profit would be on a smaller scale, like if I went onto a building worksite and took all of the hardware and materials. If I just gave it away to people, that's not so bad. But, if I take their stuff and resell it, or worse yet - take their stuff and build something with it, I'm not just taking a free gift and passing it on. Then, I'm actually stealing business.

I personally see a huge difference in stealing business and stealing profit.


Lets say I had a VGC21 - the latest and greatest game console. Every game I get, I make a backup - just so the lifespan of my disc is at it's max.

Then one day, I'm robbed. Someone took my VGC21 games! But, I still have my backups - should I in good faith destroy them? Or, knowing that I did pay good money for the game, should I keep my backups?


This all is just me playing devil's advocate - but they are important things to consider.





Myself personally, I have always and will always have this stance.

Software comes down to programmed 0s and 1s. For someone to say that they are the owners of the intellectual right to 0s and 1s placed in a certain particular order and that nobody can take their 0s and 1s because they paid money to research those 0s and 1s, develop those 0s and 1s, own those 0s and 1s, and now make money for selling those 0s and 1s is just asinine.

They shouldn't have more investment insurance than stockholders in a company.

In the game industry, it should be operated hippie commune style. Buy the tools to work the wood, and you can have the wood for free. Steal someone's tools and you'll get kicked out of the commune, but prevent someone with tools from getting wood - and you've got a fight on your hands.

[jrfhoutx]

First I'm going to stop using the word piracy and I'm going to call it what it is, theft.

crazy, if you know how businesses work then you know that large scale product theft does affect a business and that it affects a business more than 'very little'... if it didn't then places like best buy would have no interest in having a 'Loss Prevention' division, and none of these software or movie companies would be complaining about the theft.

ok guys, when it ends up being your intellectual property that you wanna get paid for I'll be the first one in line with millions of my friends behind me to steal your product from you... see how your tune about impact changes then...

you're basically saying that in a capitalist society (because whether you like it or not that's what we are) a company that has invested their time and money into a product does not have the right to protect their investment from theft and has no right to expect for there to be any return on their investment because their product should be free... That's ridiculous, it's bull:censored:, and you know it.

In the game industry, it should be operated hippie commune style. Buy the tools to work the wood, and you can have the wood for free. Steal someone's tools and you'll get kicked out of the commune, but prevent someone with tools from getting wood - and you've got a fight on your hands.

Just for the record, being an ex-hippie, that's not how a hippie commune works... you still 'pay' for the wood, you just pay for it in free labor. You're trading services for goods. if you want some wood to work into a cabinet, you 'pay' the person who felled the tree by building them a kitchen table with some of that wood, that's not free wood. nothing in this world is free and even hippies don't give away for free, many may be a little naive but they're not stupid and they're not that naive, even they believe you should see a return for your work, even if it's only returned in services.

[geraldrubalcava]

as a developer myself. i agree with you 98.8888% of the time, No its not theft, its piracy, the right word.

just like calling ciber-criminals hacker. not the same.

but i disagree with one thing. if the work of a developer always shows on the final product, some games, movies , software are not worth the time or money.

when i make a piece of software i admit that i should not be paid for this. but some developer think that just because its a popular series it deserves every cent.
and its also when companies like actvition contract treyarch, they should know the quality of there work and how much they need to invest in them.

who here has bought a movie or game or even on a movie theater were its just and cant even finish it of how awfull it is?

P.s. if they went into a activation code of games it will ruin businesses like game stop (due to the one activation encryption any company will implement), and this is against some of the UK laws. therefore it would be difficult to implement this encryption. plus no encryption is safe from hackers. just like how the ps3 was getting activation codes. It did not work and will not.

[DuctTapedGoat]

if they went into a activation code of games it will ruin businesses like game stop (due to the one activation encryption any company will implement)

That which would save developers would destroy the culture, then what are the devs going to do?

It's already been done to date - PSP Go.


It could be worse - just wait until they require a monthly fee for offline games.


When I see trailers for a good game, I want the game. I rent the game, test the game, get a feel for the game. I don't then go out and steal it (Either with a gun at a store, or with the internets). If it's a good game, I buy it.

There is PLENTY of classic retro games. Many of these games are still under copyright, but these haxors take the classic sprites and use them in levels that weren't endorsed by the creators of said franchise! Oh the horror of ethical hacking. Would you consider that piracy? A homebrew game that uses copyrighted characters/environments? Or is that where the line in the sand is drawn today?


Anyways, don't get mad at me for playing devils advocate, but you can't have your cake and eat it too. People write programs that allow you to have a hacked console and still get onto the services offered, and that's not right. Either you're in support of free 0s and 1s, or you're in support of the devs. Too many people are so wishy washy on this subject for fear of offending anybody.

[geraldrubalcava]

exacly! you rent the game first. while some games are just expected to be good and you have to buy the game.

when you rent the game u rent it then you pass it, if youlike it you will buy it.
just like movies too. i rent a movie, or see it at a friends house, if i like it i will buy the blueray. if not no.
same thing, sometimes i go to torrents and try to see movies, see the reviews and then purchase.


i have a huge collection of movies and over 450 movies in both dvd and blueray. so my system of watch it first then buy works for me.

for others who are not honest then they are the corrupts, but as companies hire developers then are greedy and dont even let you play the story for a bit, or just give you a trailer and make people buy upon that 1:30 sec of a video.

and yes as a developer myself i still think that quality work should be paid. :censored:ty work should not. it works in the real world and it should work in the digital world.(as a personal experience with a coworker) the company hired him and he just did :censored:ty work, my work was adequate, at the end of the day he was wasting there time and money, so he got fired. and trust me. when your a dev you know what quality work is. and if i was a company i will not pay 150 a hour to a :censored:en lazy ass who pulled off the code in 30 min. so



no ther is no only against or for piracy, there is a better section to discribe it, Quality.

[jrfhoutx]

Taking a product without paying for it is theft. regardless of the re-appropriation of the term piracy it is not a proper term for what is happening in the entertainment and software industries (it isn't even really appropriate for 'pirate radio,' though that is closer because you are at least hijacking a radio frequency). Piracy is 'to hijack in order to hold for ransom.'  When you 'pirate' software you are not hijacking anything nor are you holding it for ransom. You're stealing it. period.

Whether the software, game or whatever is sub-par is not the issue, the issue is that as a finished product people deserve to be paid for their product. does someone who makes a crap game deserve to be paid as much as someone who makes a great game? Not in my opinion, but they still deserve to be paid. as you say, it's all about quality, and price should be determined by quality. but just because it's a crappy game doesn't mean it should be free, this is after all a capitalist society and nothing is free. if you do work you should be paid for your work and your pay should be based on the quality of your work.

there is a difference between being released from a contract part way through production and having that contract be given to someone else and creating a finished product. if you get released mid way through you either don't get paid the full amount or you don't get paid (depending on the terms). if you finish the product you get paid the full amount. in that situation unless there is a stipulation in the contract that lays out terms of quality then its not an issue and being a 'lazy ass' and pumping out a poor quality product doesn't make a difference in terms of the contract. is it a moral issue and a reflection of work ethic? absolutely.

quality is a bull:censored: excuse made by 'pirates'. there are plenty of legitimate ways to take advantage of the 'try before you buy' approach. Rentals being the most prevalent and cheapest. services like gamefly are a ridiculously inexpensive way to take advantage of it. try before you buy is a lame excuse for 'pirating' games made by those who don't really buy the games after they try them. if you want to try games before you buy them then get a rental subscription to a service like gamefly at $16 a month for 1 game at a time with a 3 day turnaround and 1 day of gameplay per game you're looking at 8-10 games a month that's $2 a game (with a full day of play it's hard not to know if you like a game or not, most of us can tell in the first few minutes of play if we're not going to like the game).

Personally I think true demos need to come back, and I'm glad that XBL is bringing them back but I think that every game should have a demo, that removes the try before you buy argument and gives you a free trial.




btw, all games made after 1978 are still under copyright (I know of very few that were made prior to that, and this is why manufacturers like Nintendo dislike emulators and ROMs so much). US copyright law protects a work for anywhere from 70 to 125 years... Per the US Copyright Office:

How long does a copyright last?

The term of copyright for a particular work depends on several factors, including whether it has been published, and, if so, the date of first publication. As a general rule, for works created after January 1, 1978, copyright protection lasts for the life of the author plus an additional 70 years. For an anonymous work, a pseudonymous work, or a work made for hire, the copyright endures for a term of 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation, whichever expires first. For works first published prior to 1978, the term will vary depending on several factors.

[DuctTapedGoat]

Well, even the game system is copyrighted, so writing games for a system which you don't have is against copyright laws.

I'm just saying, to be against "piracy" or "virtual theft" you would have to be against taking apart NONopensource code and REprogramming it to suit your needs. i.e. CFW. Homebrew.

Is downloading video games and other copyrighted stuffs illegal? No! It's not.

Is uploading said stuffs illegal? Yes. It is.


So, if you're against "piracy", you'd be against CFW, against garage programmers who rewrite code, against torrents, against P2P filesharing, against home made games, against developing video games with unauthorized SDKs, against emulators, against modified roms, etc JUST on the principle that people should be paid for their works.






I don't get why people would even frequent a place that all about modifying your system to do whatever you want, yet get on a high horse thinking they're better than anyone else because they don't steal video games they can be angry at pirates. It's all in violation of copyright laws, so get out of your towers and enjoy the world of...


ETHICAL HACKING (where regardless, you have to defend people who do the dirty work so you can reap the rewards)

[hyper999]

Legal definition of Piracy

The act of violence or depredation on the high seas; also, the theft of Intellectual Property, especially in electronic media.

http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/piracy

[geraldrubalcava]

a men brother! jrfhoutx said that hack then he was a hacker, but i call shinanigans.

a real hacker would be like DuctTapedGoat wrote.

how i got my first job was to get companies code (not gonna say the name due to legal reasons) which they mentioned was secure with 256 AES encryption, and i cracked it.
then i sent it to then with a job request. that is hacking, and even if i used there code there is always a gray area were its ok for some and not for others.

demos do need a comeback but they have to be more longer, why? because if companies know its a :censored:ty game they will probably include the good part then after that let you buy it. i have never pirated a game in my life exept for roms whitch i own the actual :censored:ing cartage game! and i would just like to play it with my computer.


how strange if jrfhoutx if such against piracy and hackers, why is a admin here in ACIDMODS!... uhhh idk

[Mogler]

how strange if jrfhoutx if such against piracy and hackers, why is a admin here in ACIDMODS!... uhhh idk

Acidmods isnt a hacking and piracy site, its for modding and other things.

[geraldrubalcava]

but when modding we avoid our warranty. i  think this forum not just includes hardware hack but also a large software wise.

[Mogler]

I guess its considered a type of hacking but its not the same. and i think what hes trying to get at is he is agenst hacking in attempt to mess with someone else stuff other than your own.

[hyper999]

a men brother! jrfhoutx said that hack then he was a hacker, but i call shinanigans.

a real hacker would be like DuctTapedGoat wrote.

how i got my first job was to get companies code (not gonna say the name due to legal reasons) which they mentioned was secure with 256 AES encryption, and i cracked it.
then i sent it to then with a job request. that is hacking, and even if i used there code there is always a gray area were its ok for some and not for others.

demos do need a comeback but they have to be more longer, why? because if companies know its a :censored:ty game they will probably include the good part then after that let you buy it. i have never pirated a game in my life exept for roms whitch i own the actual :censored:ing cartage game! and i would just like to play it with my computer.


how strange if jrfhoutx if such against piracy and hackers, why is a admin here in ACIDMODS!... uhhh idk

It isn't at all strange that as an admin is against piracy

It would be strange if he as an admin of this site enouraged piracy or illegal hacking, because its his job to enforce the rules here, and if you read the forum rules you will find this;

12 - No discussion of committing illegal activities of any kind. This includes but is not limited to: Drug use, stealing(wifi included), physical harm, warranty fraud, and piracy.  Everyone must at least pretend to be law-abiding member of society when posting in this forum, even if that is not the case.  In extreme cases acidmods.com can and will notify the long arm of the law with relative information posted here

[802Chives]

voiding your warranty is not illegal.   pirating software is illegal.  hacking it is not. AM does not condone anything that is illegal.  There are grey areas that exist that AM is guilty of being a part of.. however that grey area is called freedom, and little by little your freedom to modify or improve something that you purchased is being tested.

Contrary to popular beliefs the overwhelming majority of Admin, moderators, and members on this site do not pirate software.  Some of us know how to and that comes along with being up to date with modding.  Many of our members are children and some of them are pirates,  it comes along with being a child, it is in a childs nature to get something that normally they wouldnt be able to.  I suspect that a mojority of pirates are children without the means to purchase the game/music and that is why the piracy numbers are complete garbage to me.  because the child that downloaded 100 games wouldnt be able to purchase 100 games.

I have said it before and I will again, piracy hurts the industry... but dont tell me that piracy is the knife in the back of software developers... its called modern economics, market sectors boom and fail all the time.  Quality is not a BS excuse made up by pirates, quality is what is thinning out the herd.  Look at all the crapware the has been shoveled out over the past five years for all the consoles that ends up in the tubs at walmart for $5 a piece... these are the same people coming up with these numbers and whining that the didnt sell because %50 of people playing downloaded it... thats the BS

4.5 million confirmed illegal copies?  how did they come up with that a crystal ball?  no one can quatify these numbers, but I can tell you that whoever pays someone to try, gets the numbers that they want to try to prove a point.   If an independent study was conducted I can garuntee that these statistics would be many magnitudes larger then the truth.

piracy is bad, but its not like someone stealing your life savings, its more like someone sneaking into your movie theater.

[jrfhoutx]

I say quality is a bs excuse made by pirates because it's not a legitimate excuse to steal software. It's an excuse these people give to try to justify the illegal activity they engage in. Just because something is of poor quality doesn't make the poor quality a reason to justify it's theft. In that regard it's a bs excuse to try to justify the activity. Poor quality products should be and eventually are priced in a manner that reflects that quality, but regardless it's a product that you still needto pay for.

Yes the numbers are skewed to reflect what companies want them to reflect but in the absence of legitimate numbers that's what you have to work with, and that's what I did.

[DuctTapedGoat]

It's not against DMCA to download video games etc - only to upload them to other people. So it's not piracy. Earlier "call it what it is"was brought up, so what would it be? Robin Hood style, stealing from the rich to give to the poor. "Retail Software Theft"? Robin Hood would have been a founding father of hacking! Not a pirate.

So, if you're talking about the "grey area of freedom", it's bigger than you think.


I'm not against piracy!

I'm PRO ethical hacking, which means I will defend people who pirate video games, operating systems, music, movies, software and anyone who writes open source code to benefit those around them, asking nothing in return.

What actual piracy would be is this.

I steal your software. I burn it. I sell it for money.
I bootleg your movie. I burn it. I sell it for money.
I rent a game. I burn it and mod a console to play it and sell both for a higher price to make cash.

That takes money from where money should be. The DMCA is spelled out in black and white, which DOES leave a HUGE grey area out there.

Answer this to yourself.

1) Do you support softmods on consoles?
2) Do you support garage written homebrew?
3) Do you support stealing software development kits from game companies?
4) Are you against violators of the copyright laws despite doing any of these things?
5) Are you against those who violate DMCA despite doing any of these things?
6) Have you ever burnt off an audio cd to give to a friend?
7) Have you ever made a mix tape?
8) Do you take your custom modified console onto live game servers?
9) Do you hard mod because it wasn't good enough to begin with?

You support ethical hackers and/or ethical hacking if you answered yes to one of these.

[Sammy]

Im with ductapedgoat well said.