Top Ten Pirated Games Of The Year

[The 1 2 P]

Ugh. When will it end: http://www.gamedaily.com/articles/news/spore-pirated-over-17-million-times/?biz=1

Although some people say there will always be pirates(and I pretty much believe it too), theres got to be some sort of short range or long range solution to this. I'm not technically efficent enough to figure it out but somebody should. Any suggestions for these publishers?

EDIT: Here's the list and how much they've been illegally downloaded so far:

Top 10 Downloaded Titles on Torrent Sites:
Spore (1,700,000)
The Sims 2 (1,150,000)
Assassins Creed (1,070,000)
Crysis (940,000)
Command & Conquer 3 (860,000)
Call of Duty 4 (830,000)
GTA San Andreas (740,000)
Fallout 3 (645,000)
Far Cry 2 (585,000)
Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 (470,000)

[Poofta!]

serves EA right.

aside from that, there will always be pirates, there is no solution, the whole thing is pointless. the only problem is that before, only tech savy people pirated and it was a very small percentage, today, any idiot with an internet connection and a 4th grade reading comprehension skill can do it.

my suggestion is save your money and not spend it on DRM for your games, pissing off the masses will backfire, (spore), make it worth people's while so purchase your product or make a good enough game to warrant your support.

[boatofcar]

the only problem is that before, only tech savy people pirated and it was a very small percentage

Completely untrue. Did you ever own a C64? An 8 bit computer of any sort? Everyone pirated games in those days.

[otaku]

its not like they're hurting financially though you would think these guys would want to support the guys who make the games they love so more can be made.

[Poofta!]

Completely untrue. Did you ever own a C64? An 8 bit computer of any sort? Everyone pirated games in those days.

i actually have not, but i was referring to when "IBM compatible" came into power, up until maybe 1997 or so... but either way it was no where near as bad as it is today. the impact of giving your friend a copy of a cassette or diskette is severely different than seeding a torrent to dozens of people an hour.

during this time (ibm days) most of today's developers and publishers got their start (as well as many of our favorite franchises). this, in my opinion, was the golden age of PC gaming (actually gaming in general). but pretty much as time progressed from this age, piracy became more and more rampant, with internet and broadband coming to more and more homes.

[Cryomancer]

I don't see this as a surprise. The industry keeps seeing how far they can push the customers before they decide they don't want DRM, or super hype over every shitty game that comes out and ends up sucking. If you paid full price for Spore on release and only then found out about the excessive DRM and how the game is not even much of what it was hyped to be, wouldn't you be kinda pissed too? Maybe tell your friends? Hell I'm sure many of these downloads were from people who DID buy the game, and just want to actually be able to use the damn thing as they would like to instead of how the company decides they get to. I'm sure this post comes off as be being a total asshole, but really now, the industry has been pulling some dumb damn stuff lately.

[skaar]

Growing up there were RETAIL STORES selling BOXES and BOXES of pirated/bootleg games all over Montreal. Most of my Apple II software library carried the logos from these stores. And I'm willing to bet most people had no idea they were buying pirated software. I didn't figure it out until Grade 4 - I thought they were just distributors ;)

If anything I think it's not that piracy is more prevalent it's just that it's become so freaking easy - you don't even have to leave the house.

[roushimsx]

Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 (470,000)

GG, European pirates!

(well ok, maybe a couple hundred of those were in the US)

[misfits859]

Completely untrue. Did you ever own a C64? An 8 bit computer of any sort? Everyone pirated games in those days.

I remember those days, my ratio of legit to pirated games in those days was about 200:1...They were so easy to crack. Fast Hack'em FTW!

[Famidrive-16]

1. Thrill Kill (23,950,000)
2. Mother 3 (20,000,000)
3. Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing (19,480,000)

[Jorpho]

Many questions. How many of those people who downloaded those games would have bought them in-store? How many people downloaded those games and played them for more than five minutes? How many people downloaded those games and bothered installing them at all ? (Spore seemed to get many people so upset that it seemed like some people were just downloading it in protest.)

[p_b]

i actually have not, but i was referring to when "IBM compatible" came into power, up until maybe 1997 or so... but either way it was no where near as bad as it is today. the impact of giving your friend a copy of a cassette or diskette is severely different than seeding a torrent to dozens of people an hour.

during this time (ibm days) most of today's developers and publishers got their start (as well as many of our favorite franchises). this, in my opinion, was the golden age of PC gaming (actually gaming in general). but pretty much as time progressed from this age, piracy became more and more rampant, with internet and broadband coming to more and more homes.

I used to play on an IBM in those days...well, from the late eighties on. And we all pirated like hell, so I don't believe it's got worse to be honest.

[NE146]

I remember those days, my ratio of legit to pirated games in those days was about 200:1...They were so easy to crack. Fast Hack'em FTW!

Let me put it this way.. I have absolutely ZERO legitimate Apple 2e games. Zero, man. I don't think I even ever saw an Apple 2 game BOX back in the day even on a store shelf! LOL

Really.. nothing's changed at all.

[kedawa]

I'd be interested to know how many of those downloads resulted in an actual game being played.
There are a lot of people out there that just download anything and everything they can, and only play a tiny fraction of what they download.
How many of those 940,000 Crysis downloads ended up on a system that could actually run the game?

[The 1 2 P]

How many of those 940,000 Crysis downloads ended up on a system that could actually run the game?

Like 2%LOL

[Ze_ro]

my suggestion is save your money and not spend it on DRM for your games, pissing off the masses will backfire, (spore), make it worth people's while so purchase your product or make a good enough game to warrant your support.
Not likely to happen anytime soon. These companies will still waste their time and money, if only to show the shareholders that hey, at least they're trying.

Now it's getting to the point though, where people are getting pissed off about all the hoops they have to jump through to run legitimate purchases... the GTA4 debacle is just the most recent one. More and more people are realizing that it's easier to use a cracked copy, even if you really did purchase the game legitimately.


Completely untrue. Did you ever own a C64? An 8 bit computer of any sort? Everyone pirated games in those days.
There were some pretty inventive and insidious copy protections back then that were essentially impossible to copy with a 1541 due to strange tricks with sync marks and track layout (Even today, it's extremely difficult to get a proper copy of anything with the Vorpal protection). People had a really hard time cracking these in an effective manner.... You pretty much always lost the fast-loader (which really hurt, given the slow as molasses 1541), and in some cases the game got bigger (a 2-side game sometimes blew up to 4-sides, which meant more disk swapping).

Of course, most people ONLY played the cracked copies, so they never knew what they were missing.

--Zero

[kedawa]

I think the C64 games might be a little bit more faithful to the originals if they are in .g64 format and can be run through emulation, either on a pc, or on a C64 with a drive emulator.
Some of the old floppy disk protection schemes are pretty ingenious, though.

PC gamers have only two options if they want to play games without dealing with obnoxious DRM; either pirate instead of buying, or pack it in and go console only.

[boatofcar]

Let me put it this way.. I have absolutely ZERO legitimate Apple 2e games. Zero, man. I don't think I even ever saw an Apple 2 game BOX back in the day even on a store shelf! LOL

Really.. nothing's changed at all.

The only thing that's changed is the money--video games weren't a billion dollar business back in those days, so not as much was made of it.

[alexkidd2000]

I pirate ALOT of games, but I also buy as many as I can possibly afford so I think its not as big of a deal. Those who only pirate are creating problems though.

[Singapura]

I guess the least pirated games would be World of Warcraft and other MMORPG's. That shows that the business model of standalone offline games is outdated. With a large online community you need to design your game in an online way. Assasins Creed would have a heck of a lot more replayability and would be uncopyable if it was set in an online world. It wouldn't even have to be multiplayer, as long as the main content could be played through for a small fee with quests, items and weapons added for another small fee. The first company that gets that model working properly will have the future.

[Push Upstairs]

Let me put it this way.. I have absolutely ZERO legitimate Apple 2e games. Zero, man. I don't think I even ever saw an Apple 2 game BOX back in the day even on a store shelf! LOL

Really.. nothing's changed at all.

The only program (aside from the compilation disks) that I recall ever seeing was "Print Shop" (Toy Shop?), and that was really for the other materials to build the cars/planes/whatever else you could print up with it. The rest of the games for our //c were trades/copies. :D

[kedawa]

I pirate ALOT of games, but I also buy as many as I can possibly afford so I think its not as big of a deal. Those who only pirate are creating problems though.
I agree with this to some extent. What really bothers me is when people pay for pirated games. That's taking actual money that could be spent on legit games and giving it to lazy undeserving douchebags. It's also just plain stupid to pay for something that is easy as hell to make yourself.

[icbrkr]

You pretty much always lost the fast-loader (which really hurt, given the slow as molasses 1541), and in some cases the game got bigger (a 2-side game sometimes blew up to 4-sides, which meant more disk swapping).

Of course, most people ONLY played the cracked copies, so they never knew what they were missing.

--Zero

I'm guessing you had some seriously bad cracks then (and not of the drug type! ;). Groups were rated by the size of the games, whether it had a trainer in them, high score saver, intro picture, etc and a fast-loader was almost always a must. If the fastloader was 1541/Euro/NTSC specific, it tended to be ripped so you could use your own kernel or ROM based speeder. The less features you had, the larger the file size, the less chance of it spreading and the lower score you'd get in Gamer's Guide/Mamba/Sh0ck, etc. No one wanted to spread a 2 disk game that was unpacked to 4 across a 300 baud sea-line connection from Europe.

Ice (ex DWi/Device/Epic and way too freakin' many other groups)

[Daria]

I bought Sims 2 for PC along with a couple expansions. Then my PC took a shit and refused to run the game for more than 15 minutes at a time. So I downloaded the MAC version. And now that runs like crap too.

Really happy I didn't buy a second copy now.

[SegaAges]

Hahaha, DRM is stupid. Yes, I have Spore, but at the same time, I also have Black Ice Enterprise Edition (meant for an entire corporation) on my pc, so Spore did not effect my computer at all with DRM.

The answer to piracy for pc's is so easy. This is why I need to hurry up and pay off my student loans so I can make an actual difference in the industry instead of just talking about it (yes, I sincerely plan on becoming a game programmer as soon as I get my student loans paid off).

All you do is make most of the content streaming. Simple. Saves hard drive space for people, and servers are out there that are already handling it. The game price also helps support the servers.

If there are not many sales on a game, cluster one server to run multiple games. So if one game is super successful, than other games can be clustered on that server and the server will be paid for (I am assuming PSN is this way).

The only way to pirate at the point would be to get the stuff from the server unless you want to try and reverse engineer a game.

No more pirating, half of the game (maybe one third) is on the disc (client executable files), so there is still a physical copy.

You have to connect to the internet to play the game, yes, but how many people do you know that can't connect to the internet with their computer that are buying new games? Go ahead, I'll wait.

[Pantechnicon]

Many questions...How many people downloaded those games and played them for more than five minutes?...(Spore seemed to get many people so upset that it seemed like some people were just downloading it in protest.)

I'd like to know the breakdown on that figure for Spore as it regards PC versus the NDS version. I understand that pirating either one takes money from EA, but that figure still seems a little high.

[otoko]

I guess the least pirated games would be World of Warcraft and other MMORPG's. That shows that the business model of standalone offline games is outdated. With a large online community you need to design your game in an online way. Assasins Creed would have a heck of a lot more replayability and would be uncopyable if it was set in an online world. It wouldn't even have to be multiplayer, as long as the main content could be played through for a small fee with quests, items and weapons added for another small fee. The first company that gets that model working properly will have the future.

I'm pretty sure I can kill this idea in a second.

OH NOES TEH SERVAR ISH DOWN! Your game is now useless.
Your game gets old, the server is shut down for future games. Your game again is useless.

That's the problem with MMORPGS once the server goes down... useless.

Also the term "uncopyable" would be untrue because it just takes someone who is ingenious enough to recreate the server.

If you do not believe me look up free WoW servers. They do exists.

Besides, how many people here want to play a subscription fee for a single player game?

On a related note,

I am a pirate myself... in a sense, I do not distribute anything, but I download in only the pursuit to back up information I already purchased.

That's my personal use for it anyway... = /


All you do is make most of the content streaming. Simple. Saves hard drive space for people, and servers are out there that are already handling it. The game price also helps support the servers.

You have to connect to the internet to play the game, yes, but how many people do you know that can't connect to the internet with their computer that are buying new games? Go ahead, I'll wait.

It's a good idea in theory, but how many companies do you know will keep a game on streaming server running for 10+ years just so those strange people who actually play games long after their projected life is dead can get a random game fix?

At that point they are (more than likely) no longer making money off it thus eventually the money to keep that game on there will deplete.

Oh, right. Don't worry I'll humor you. Okay you have plenty of space on that server for multiple games? Eventually that server will become full or the server will be completely replaced, well at this point what do they care about a game they're no longer making money off of? The game will disappear off the web then you have another disk to decide whether to throw it away or recycle.

At that point your way of stopping pirating went from just being annoying, to rendering a possibly classic (and all time best) game to be not only lost to the ages, but also a burden on waste management.

That and refer to my "OH NOES TEH SERVAR IS DOWN!"

[Xander]

The answer to piracy for pc's is so easy. This is why I need to hurry up and pay off my student loans so I can make an actual difference in the industry instead of just talking about it (yes, I sincerely plan on becoming a game programmer as soon as I get my student loans paid off).

All you do is make most of the content streaming. Simple. Saves hard drive space for people, and servers are out there that are already handling it. The game price also helps support the servers.


May God have mercy on us all.

[Daria]

You have to connect to the internet to play the game, yes, but how many people do you know that can't connect to the internet with their computer that are buying new games? Go ahead, I'll wait.

My dad for one. His gaming set-up is upstairs. And his e-machine is downstairs. He's scared of getting viruses on his 'good computer'.

You're also fucked if your internet connection goes down. No one wants to be tethered to the net just to play a game they already paid for.