Digital Pirates Battling Digital Piracy
Sat, 04 May 2013, by Syrsly
I saw Green Heart Games' post about the new game, Game Dev Tycoon, and I found it hilarious. It is a must read for anyone who has a sore attitude toward piracy. Here's the summary of what happened. The dev made a torrent of his own game and altered it so the game teaches the pirates a lesson: piracy hurts the industry. It also gave the game dev a lot to laugh at when the pirates started complaining that their virtual games were being pirated. The same people who normally would use anti-DRM arguments to support their reasoning for pirating games were now thinking about researching DRM to put into their games at release.Unfortunately, I seriously doubt the pirates will really change their ways without some serious legislation that allows law enforcement to police the internet or somehow prevents the activity in the first place. I think we will eventually see the internet become a fully regulated media, similar to television and radio. Until that day, there will be selfish people doing selfish things on the internet with rampant disregard for their own computers' safety. The publisher could have put a virus in their pirated version to steal password information or to make users' computers shutdown at random times with no warning or even to delete system files and set up the hosts file to go to a fake Facebook site. The possible ramifications or trusting shady channels for your entertainment are endless.
The dangers of piracy do not scary pirates straight, though. According to the game dev, Green Heart Games, the pirated version of Game Dev Tycoon was used by 93.6% of their audience. That was an ungodly amount of lost revenue in my opinion. Just think about how much more potential income the game could have brought in if piracy was better policed and proper e-commerce was enforced. The developer would see a greater amount of income, legit customers would feel less robbed and spend more money as a result, and a lot fewer people would be killing their computers with malware. There would be less need for DRM in games, meaning we would no longer have to worry about registering accounts to play offline games. No more always online bullshit, I say!
I think Game Dev Tycoon is also a nice-looking game. You should check it out, vote for it on Steam Greenlight, and
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