Malfador Games Pirated

[Fyron]

Yes, but if you are a kid using your parents' computer, you will rarely have the money to buy games, especially not a lot of games. Most people do not want to spend 500+ dollars on video games for their children, so it is up to the kid to come up with the money for more than a few games they can get for birthdays and other holidays. Most piracy is done by kids and teens (the acquiring of the pirated copies, not actually pirating them in the first place), not older people with actual income sources.

[Narratio]

Originally posted by deccan:
Malaysia used to have a big problem with pirated Versions of movies on VCD. You could walk down any street in Kuala Lumpur and see stalls selling them on the roadside.

This year, I find that it is no longer possible to find pirated VCDs on the street. Why? Because the government decided to get tough on them. Not to placate Western governments and companies, but because the VCD pirates were getting too powerful and arrogant, threatening the families of police officers, burning their private cars, breaking into police compound to retrieve confiscated CDs and copying equipment. So, yes, I believe that it is a "will" problem.

On the other hand, I find that pirated DVDs and software are still commonplace.

I live in Thailand and I find the same thing. Anti-piracy was paid lip service until about 5 or 6 months back. Then was a huge fight between the police and a pirate. Result is now a very distinct lack of pirate copies on open display. Still available, but very much "undercover"

[ January 17, 2004, 08:45: Message edited by: Narratio ]

[Sivran]

I'd just like to say, I agree completely with Undertakr. There are games I will not buy because I got ISOs of them from a friend, and tried the game myself. The Sims is a frustrating, pain in the *** game. Its popularity defies belief.

There are also games I *will* be buying, because I got copies of them from a friend. I would never have even considered buying Aliens vs Predator 2. Now, I plan on grabbing a copy next time I'm at Fry's. Heh, I even almost convinced my friend to buy it too, but he didn't like it when he found out there's no gamma correction in it. :/

And yes, games are too expensive (and often not worth the money) these days. ~50 bucks for a game I might not like? I'll wait til it's down to 20, or borrow it from someone.

Phoenix-D, ~300MB is a lot of space? You can cut it down to ~165 if you don't copy the demos to your hd, and SF still works.

[Phoenix-D]

You can't just copy the directory, you need to make an ISO. The one I made is about 477 MB. Add that to the actual SF install, and do the same pairing for other games, and it adds up fast.

Of course, I can't actually play SF on the laptop- the LCD screen isn't up to it and produces a nasuea-inducing distorition when I turn.

[DavidG]

Originally posted by Imperator Fyron:
Actually... PS2 games (as well as X-Box and Gamecube) can be and are actively pirated every day over the internet and with cd/dvd burners... going with an easily copied medium for console games (as compared to game cartridges) is the downfall of what used to be hard to pirate games. Using these pirated copies requires altering your console system a bit with a "mod chip," but that is not too hard.

True. Although in the case of the game I want you'd need to get around the Region encoding (if that's on games as well as DVDs ) and more importantly the PAL video format. I'm not sure if that is doable but I guess I don't want the game bad enough to find out and then chip my console.

[Sivran]

Originally posted by Phoenix-D:
You can't just copy the directory, you need to make an ISO. The one I made is about 477 MB. Add that to the actual SF install, and do the same pairing for other games, and it adds up fast.

Of course, I can't actually play SF on the laptop- the LCD screen isn't up to it and produces a nasuea-inducing distorition when I turn.

Huh? That's exactly what I did, only I copied the CD to another computer's hard drive, then map that directory as a drive. Works fine for me. Presumably it'd also work if you have more than one partition, and dumped the contents of the cd to the root directory of it.