PC gaming Alliance: "Game piracy is not that bad...&amp

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zioburosky13

Vault Senior Citizen
In a twist of the cosmic world :roll: ,
Game piracy is misunderstood, according to PCGA Pres. Randy Stude

"Let's monetize every one of those pirates, and let's advertise the hell out of them," Stude told Gamasutra.

Fearing that the big cheese had finally snapped, we nearly missed his explanation, wherein he said that such monetization should be "blatant." For instance, he noted, developers could plaster six times the number of in-game ads around unauthenticated versions of a game. The end result: pirates get an "inferior" version of a game, while developers rake in cash from ads.

"Don't throw [pirates] off [of the server], but show an ad every time a new level loads. The [paying customer] gets a billboard, a passive, less-aggressive ad than [pirates] are going to get," Stude added, demonstrably sane.

Wow they are planning to use in-game advertising ias a way to overcome the game piracy problem? :ugly:
 
Depends on how the pirated game is made. If the ads are hardwired into the main data files, then it'd be tricky to get rid of them without mod tools.

If they're not, the ad thing would be hacked out pretty quickly by a fairly clever group.
 
Or the most don't care about placed advertise and with this the developer can get at least a bit money from the evil pirates.
 
Re: PC gaming Alliance: "Game piracy is not that bad...

zioburosky13 said:
"Don't throw [pirates] off [of the server], but show an ad every time a new level loads. The [paying customer] gets a billboard, a passive, less-aggressive ad than [pirates] are going to get," Stude added, demonstrably sane.[/i]
Click to expand...
Am I the only person that is bothered by the part about paying customers still getting ads?
 
Re: PC gaming Alliance: "Game piracy is not that bad...

Sorrow said:
zioburosky13 said:
"Don't throw [pirates] off [of the server], but show an ad every time a new level loads. The [paying customer] gets a billboard, a passive, less-aggressive ad than [pirates] are going to get," Stude added, demonstrably sane.[/i]
Click to expand...
Am I the only person that is bothered by the part about paying customers still getting ads?
Click to expand...

Same here. If that happened only to the pirates, it would be ok, as long as it was not super-mega-annoying. Pirates are people too. Also, in a certain way, devs would profit from piratary, which would be pretty good and beneficial.
 
I agree, I think it should be: poor people get a "billboard" and people who have money and buy games get no ads.
 
he's most likely talking about online games. removing the ads would be like cheating. something that's eventually caught by the anti-cheating tools of the developer (though usually lagging one generation behind).
 
Re: PC gaming Alliance: "Game piracy is not that bad...

Sorrow said:
zioburosky13 said:
"Don't throw [pirates] off [of the server], but show an ad every time a new level loads. The [paying customer] gets a billboard, a passive, less-aggressive ad than [pirates] are going to get," Stude added, demonstrably sane.[/i]
Click to expand...
Am I the only person that is bothered by the part about paying customers still getting ads?
Click to expand...

My first thought also :)
 
But product placement is the only thing that truly separates us from the animals!

Yeah, seriously, I don't see this flying in the near future.

Maybe in the distant future when we all have compliance chips in our brains, then it'd be another story. (Hopefully a story with rebellions and laser fights)
 
Re: PC gaming Alliance: "Game piracy is not that bad...

Sorrow said:
zioburosky13 said:
"Don't throw [pirates] off [of the server], but show an ad every time a new level loads. The [paying customer] gets a billboard, a passive, less-aggressive ad than [pirates] are going to get," Stude added, demonstrably sane.[/i]
Click to expand...
Am I the only person that is bothered by the part about paying customers still getting ads?
Click to expand...
Pirates get billboards, fine, but I agree, it's bs when paying customers get ads. This is actually not a bad way to approach piracy and I'd be supportive of this.
 
This would probably hurt those companies even more. Very few people would pay $50 for games they could legally play for free just because of ads. That is unless advertising is way too intrusive and annoying, in which case torrents of pirated retail copies would appear on the internet just as fast as they do now, and would also be just as popular.

They do have something there though. It doesn't look like there is anything they can come up with that pirates can't get around so maybe it's a good idea to look at it from this perspective. Nobody is going to suddenly grow a conscience so acknowledging that piracy will take place and then thinking of a way to capitalize on it is not such a bad idea. It has to be something other than ads though and there has to be a much better incentive for buyers than less ads.
 
maximaz said:
This would probably hurt those companies even more. Very few people would pay $50 for games they could legally play for free just because of ads.
Click to expand...
I think that the point of ads would be that they would generate constant income for those companies. The main problem that I see with that is that they could discover that making money on ads and distributing games for free is much more profitable than selling games without them.
 
The main problem would, IMHO, be that if companies started posting ads in games they might start influencing the contents of those games. It already happens to a tiny degree in movies, and considering the fact that games get a lot less respect for their integrity, it would be even worse for games.

Allthough I'm not sure games can get any worse, nowadays.
 
it would never work for games.

seriously, think about it, how long did you play oblivion?

how long do most play the average title?

there are really only a few games people play constantly.

while it would help "kill" the dev houses that arent making quality titles.

i see good things and bad things to this being used for main titles.

i liked the way dungeon runners did it. wasnt too invasive, and i liked the way they handled it.
 
What? I don't get it? How do they plan to control the content of a pirated game? It's just a ripped DVD ISO, cracked with new .exe files.

Would you have to "timebomb" the DVD so that if ripped, it would trigger ad textures inside the game?

I get the point with online games, but isn't the pirated version designed so as to not let the server detect that it's an illegal version?


Also, on a sidenote, I don't see how piracy has hurt the gaming industry. It's bigger than ever, and making a lot of money.
 
When they did this to CoH, my first response is that I'm paying for this, why the hell should they get adspace on top of that, thankfully they had the insight to allow people to opt out.


However that's not the general consensus of the MMO population sadly, every third person I talked to about it online said that they didn't mind it...

Go corporate plugging!
 
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