Space Empires V Pirated!

[Phoenix-D]

frightlever said:
Meh. Hardcore pirates don't buy games anyway. Casual piracy, if anything, can help a game's popularity by spreading the word. How many reading here pirated IV and either went on to buy a legit copy of it or V when it came out? I read an article somewhere years back that suggested for every legitimate copy of SEIV there were at least 5 pirate copies in use.

I'm pretty sure that was based on patch downloads, which is an idiotic method. By that measure, SEV isn't pirated as much, because there are less downloads of the patch..never mind the downloads are coming from the torrent, instead..

[Azselendor]

A few years back, a friend of mine released a program that was pirated pretty bad for a few weeks, we countered it by creating dummy-torrents filled with dead files (such as overly-large scans of various body parts in TIFF and BMP format) and distributed them to various torrent sites under the same name. I think we got about a dozen people in on the prank so that in the end, 9/10 torrents for his program was really one of us showing the dark side of the moon.

[Romulus68]

I read a comment from Sid Mier (sp?)(I think it was his article)(or Chris Taylor....hummm
) and he commented on pirating as such, "The majority of people that pirate a game would have NEVER bought the game in the first place. So, we aren't really loosing sales."

[AstralWanderer]

Romulus68 said:
...he commented on pirating as such, "The majority of people that pirate a game would have NEVER bought the game in the first place. So, we aren't really loosing sales."

I'd agree. I copied games in my youth when I couldn't afford them (back in the Apple II days) and that certainly did not result in any lost sales. Now that I can afford such things, I purchase them.

People should take a step back and relax a little. It's the lack of visibility on the high-street and mainstream games stores that likely harms independent publishers more (less chance of impulse purchases) and the fear of piracy is what engenders consumer-hostile monstrosities like StarForce.

[PvK]

As I said, I like the idea, though certainly it could backfire.

I remember being amused by how (the Atari ST version of) Rogue had a check to see if the player was trying to cheat death by abusing saved game files. If it thought it detected that, it would still let you play, but started introducing very deadly creatures into the game who were enforcers. I thought it was neat, and even though it could be fooled or might possibly go off when someone wasn't cheating, it made the point in a humorous way that one was not supposed to Save-cheat like in so many games.

Not that that's the same thing. You make a good point that spamming disk images would add to the bandwidth problem, for example. Again, I was mainly just saying I liked the idea.

[President_Elect_Shang]

Atrocities said:
I wouldn't give them the sweat off my groin if they were dying of thirst in the desert...

That's even better than the last one!