Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

[Dairuka]

In an article posted today over on videogamer.com, Creative Assembly has admitted that fighting piracy is a losing battle, going so far as to state, "All you can do is delay the piracy." Take a look:

Attempting to combat piracy is "pointless", Creative Assembly Australia's communications manager has claimed.

Speaking in an interview with VideoGamer.com, Vispi Bhopti, communications manager at Creative Assembly's Australia division, the studio behind hardcore PC RTS Medieval II: Total War, its expansion Kingdoms and the upcoming console and PC RTS Stormrise, said that piracy was "the nature of the beast".

PC game piracy was one of 2008's hot topics, with a number of high profile developers speaking out on the issue. Ubisoft Shanghai creative director Michael de Plater told VG247 that a PC version of EndWar would most likely ship alongside the console versions if it wasn't for rampant PC piracy, and that copyright theft is essentially destroying the PC games market.

EndWar is due out on PC this Friday, over three months after it was released on Xbox 360 and PS3.

When asked about this approach in relation to Stormrise, which is due out simultaneously on the Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in March, Bhopti said: "That's not that much of an issue. There's no additional thing that we're going for with that sort of stuff. That's pointless. If people are going to pirate a game they're going to pirate a game. All you can do is delay the piracy, really. But that's just the nature of the beast. We are a PC developer, that's where we started, so you do what you gotta do. We've got Games for Windows Live activation, so it's pretty solid."

To check out the rest of this new article, visit here.

[=98=]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

... Or they could embrace the technology and develop it in such a way that piracy becomes both a hassle and less attractive. This would begin with reducing the price of games

[Dairuka]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

... Or they could embrace the technology and develop it in such a way that piracy becomes both a hassle and less attractive. This would begin with reducing the price of games

If they could actually do that without stomping all over consumer rights in the process, they'd have done it by now.

[=98=]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Steam/Valve did it pretty well...

[Dairuka]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Steam/Valve did it pretty well...

Hence why I'm their number one fan, but even that's not perfect.

[TheHeartSmasher]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Problem is there are people that are playing all of the STEAM games, even though they did not pay for them using cracked versions of STEAM like they do with any other software based STEAM like application.

For the console, I know many publishers/developers believe that piracy is low for the console, but it is not. There are modifications that many have done to their consoles to enable them to play pirated games they download and still use the console's online services and either disable/bypass/modify the consoles built in anti-piracy protection/modification detection techniques. Then for those that want to play the safe route for playing online there are pirate networks that the consoles connect to instead of the official consoles network so they are not banned, if an update has been released that can detect a modified system. The big difference with some the pirated console games is the phone-home has been removed or redirected to authenticate pirates.

So trying to fight it is pretty hard if not impossible. As normally the methods that companies have put in place to try and stop piracy are removed and put up on torrent sites for PC and consoles a few days after a title is released. Then for the gamers that actually purchased their game, have restrictions and other problems that are not in the pirated copies of the game.

Now for the developers and publishers that have put a large amount of their lives into a product should get a full return for every copy played on PC or console, even if it is an indie game.

As one of the reasons behind building such great games is to entertain the gamer and make a profit from doing so. If all of pirated copies don't have the phone home removed and you look at the statistics for the game to find you have only 1,000 copies sold but over a million people playing online that's not good and will severly affect the chances of the studio to release another great hit, due to such low returns on such a successful product. Especially when a pirate comes asking for support for a game they did not buy or feels they have the right to complain, suggest features, or interact publicly/privately with the legitimate owners of the game. Which if they do need help and have a pirated copy of the game, wastes the time of those that have purchased the game when an error that the developers put in specifically for pirated copies of the game pops up.

[MrChris_CJ]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Creative Assembly have gone with Steam for Empire Total war, a sort of first for a game that size from a 3rd party dev

and they are right, they can't stop it, but going with Steam is a good idea even if it is cracked because you are also making your game available to a very huge number of people on steam

[Death Merchant]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Hardware companies should really be giving software developers a hand with anti-piracy, having dedicated hardware built into every motherboard which would accompqny software would make cracking far more time consuming

[Wizrdwarts]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Hardware companies should really be giving software developers a hand with anti-piracy, having dedicated hardware built into every motherboard which would accompqny software would make cracking far more time consuming

But then I'm not sure if that would be such a good idea considering how invasive software DRM is already. :hmm:

[imported_Slashiem]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

And having to buy new hardware to play a game?
Also hardware can just as easily cracked, like emulation software.

[=98=]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Hardware companies should really be giving software developers a hand with anti-piracy, having dedicated hardware built into every motherboard which would accompqny software would make cracking far more time consuming

Such a system is/was in construction.

[imported_Slashiem]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Such a system is/was in construction.

What was/is it?

[=98=]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

A hardware chip on the motherboard was proposed and prototypes made that detected what the screen should show and what it did actually show. That way they could tell whether anything extra had been added.

I don't think it was going to be profitable or successful, so i think it stayed in the prototype stage.

http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Researching-AntiCheating-Technology/

[Dairuka]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

A hardware chip on the motherboard was proposed and prototypes made that detected what the screen should show and what it did actually show. That way they could tell whether anything extra had been added.

I don't think it was going to be profitable or successful, so i think it stayed in the prototype stage.

http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Re...ng-Technology/

Seriously. Who would buy something that would limit their privacy and freedom like that?

[[Expletive Deleted]]

Re: Creative Assembly: Combating piracy is "pointless."

Seriously. Who would buy something that would limit their privacy and freedom like that?

If Microsoft backed it with their monopoly power, making it so that in order to run games with their Live crap you have to have the hardware, people would buy it. I bought GTA IV the day it came out for PC, but uninstalled it pretty quickly when I found out that Social Club and SecuROM and Live were all part of the package. Apparently it took over 7 months to work out how to screw over PC gamers...
There are plenty of people who talk about how awesome the PC version of GTA IV is, so I assume there are plenty of people just waiting to drink the kool-aid, sadly.