On 3 Nov 1997, Marc Horowitz wrote:
Someone recently told me that game manufacturers have stopped worrying about piracy. Why? Because most new games come on CD-ROM, and copying a CD-ROM is an expensive, time-consuming operation. Bulk duplication of CD's is substantially cheaper than one-off duplication, and since games are cheap, people will usually buy them rather than copy them.
No, most game manufacturers have stopped worrying about piracy because no matter wht ehy do about it, some cracker defeats it in under a week and posts the whole game (or a useable subet) to the Internet. Take Diablo, one of the more popular games of the last year. It filled a CD - 600 megabytes of sound, animations, etc. It was *one* big file, encrypted, with dlls stored inside it. The guy who cracked it broke this in a week, chopped out a bunch of the sounds that weren't adding anything to the game (most of the music, and the voices of all the characters). He ended up with 1 150 megabyte version. This got passed around the net. This is *common*! Over the last 20 years, the long-time game companies have realized that it simply isn't worth th effort. ID for example doesn't even bother with a pretense of copy protection (at least with Quake they didn't). This probably contribted to the overwhelming success of Quake. In an even mildly technical group of friends, even teen-agers, somebody probably has access to a CD-Rom burner. It's trivial to spend a coupld of days connnected to the net downloading the archives of a game, and burn them onto a cCD to pass around to several friend to play. (Or, have one person buy the game, copy all the CDs, and return it. This is trivial with large computer chains such as CompUSA and Computer City) Typically it will costy $6-$12 for a copy of a popular game in incremental costs, with the game costing either $0 ro $50 depending on whether or not someone wants the manuals (increasingly useless portion of the product, BTW). Startup hardwar costs are typicall $300-$500, and occassionally the access is through work or school, reducing even this to virtually nothing. It is interesting to note, however, that this problem seems to exist where the lack of jobs and income prevent people from purchasing the games. Typicall this is with students of middle-class (to upper-middle class) families that are going to college and have little spare cash. As soon as this group begins to get the income necessary to support such a habit, this trend changes. So, I'm not sure it's something the game companies care about, becuase they're simply locking in a portion of the market that wasn't going to purchase the games anyway. Ryan Anderson - Alpha Geek PGP fp: 7E 8E C6 54 96 AC D9 57 E4 F8 AE 9C 10 7E 78 C9 print pack"C*",split/\D+/,`echo "16iII*o\U@{$/=$z;[(pop,pop,unpack"H*",<> )]}\EsMsKsN0[lN*1lK[d2%Sa2/d0<X+d*lMLa^*lN%0]dsXx++lMlN/dsM0<J]dsJxp"|dc`