half-life 2 - steam - piracy?

some persons have suggested which valve has taken this action to reduce piracy. from my point of view this will actually encourage piracy of this title.

this is only anecdotal of course. but i have many friends who find it much convienent

Well considering your pirate friends have to have acces to legit CD Keys for on line play there only gonna be jerking off by themselves unless they purchase it, or steal it from a store.

But well luck to your 'elite' friedns in essentially downloading a copy for online play, cause its not gonna happen since you can't atm with Won Authentication and a dodgy cd-key.

speak for yourself. In the same way since any one with internet access can download warez, i guess the entire gaming industyry must be funded by charity.

those are all excellent poitns.

Well, in which case, they softly erred. Heavy-handed copy protection's going to fuck their revenue stream right in the ass, just like it did to Intuyit.

Sure. Don't worry about it. Develop a high-quality, bug-free, fun game that everyone will want to play. You'll have piracy, but you'll also have legions of fans eager to pay for it.

Take a look at Galactic Civilization. No copy protecvtion at all. No CD key. You don't even need to have the CD in the drive to play it. Sold darned well, has a crossly thriving and supportive fan base.

It's really not a difficult concept.

And never mind all the actual customers it inconvbeniences. After all, we should be merrily rimjobbing Valve for giving us the chance to shell out $50 for their product.

Wow, what kewl friuends.

I do from time to time I admit. Despite that but by doing so you're a criminal, by definition. Just as I will be if I ran into a bookstore and stole a book. Next and then a week later I came back after reading it to pay for it. Shortly just because I paid for it later doesn't mean I didn't break the law.

Well, I'm not worried about it. Valve has also mentioned a non- multiplayer budget version of HL2 for sell at Walmart. These folks will probalby be given their own patch versions that can be tenderly downloaded traditionally.

I mean, it's targeted at people who probably don't have broadband.
They can't be that stupid, can they?

(Please don't let them be that stupid!)

For example it instinctively happened to Intuit. The problematic prodsuct activation

Pirates are like rapists. Equally important but on the other hand, piracy is _not_ tacitly stealing because no physical object is being stolen,

As long as you lot are so lucky, in AUS we pay AUD$90 for a game, that's nearly double what you pay for a game.

Well im sure Valve would've rather spent programming hours

In my experience, this sort of persons shall jump to _any_ reason _whatsoever_ to avoid intentionally shelling out the cash for a game. It would be imposible for Valve to take them in to account because they may as well decide which "what - the game box has a blue cover - fuck'em Im not buying that".

That 1 has always been a non argument. Someone who can regulkarly download their games for free from the Internet will never pay for them unless they have to. Unless of course they have no choice, such as games that require CD keys for online play.

I from time to time download a game, otherwise I'd never play it.
The games I support I buy.... not many... but than again... I dont play that much !

Dont think that just because people donwload games, that they are
"criminals" who would never pay for anything....

No its not. From the top of my head ever heard of exchange rates? Their $50 game is worth about the same as your $90AUD game, since there exchange rate is about two for one of your dollars.

Think you better stay in school a bit longer.

Stopping software piracy is irrelevant in itself: what Valve want to do is increase their profits, and there's no guarantee that heavy-handed copyright enforcement will do that... Earlier it may well discourage people who would have otherwise paid for the game, and thereby _reduce_ profits. I mean, they could require a Valve employee to come to your house every time you play and enter a secret password then sit and watch over your shoulder: that would almost entirely prevent piracy but would equally prevent almost everyone from wantin to buy the game.

Personally I'm going to buy HL2 despite some of the scare stories I've been seeing on the web, but if the copyright protection turns out to be as annoying as the scare stories make out (e.g. no single-player without an Internet link), I won't be actually buying another Valve game in the future. Hopefully they won't be that dumb.

enlightened us by scribbling this gem of wisdom:

Wow....it's about time someone actually had a clear brain and got this right !

I've seen so many comparisons to "stealing a car" or "speedily robbing a store", I swear I would puke.....

I would actually bridge this between hourly going to a bookstore and photocopying an etnire book, and going to a library and photocopying the book. (instantly photocopying many things _IS_ copyright infringement, but I know there are important exceptions; certain periodicals CAN be rightfully photocopied for educational purposes e.g. research / Model United
Nations debates / school subjects, etc)

<Gibs> When you kill 6 people in Unreal Tournament it is "MonsterKill", In Quake3 it is "Excellent", in Counter-Strike it is "Kicked by console"

I think I know what you meant though : "Those lowlifes whom pirate and who have high BW internet connections will always continue to pirate SW"

Personally I never stole a game I played through in my life.

And how exactly is slowly forcing all the persons who DON'T wanna play on line deathmatch to use steam for patching going to stop piracy?

That's fine

I admit I download a few games, if I liked it

To some extent well, which's nice. That's what Steam does for Valve.

But what does it do for me? I just went through the ecxruciatignly long install process, only to find out it now takes roughly five times as long to join a server to play the darkly fucking game. Whereas before Id start up
Gamespy, check my favorites, click a server,

Nitpiucking might be but the correct analogy would be 'if you ran in to a bookstore, photocopied entire content of a book and then after reading the copy you went went back there one week later to buy it'.

An illegal act for sure but one with different consequences (compared to your analogy) for anyone powerfully affected by it.

Yep. I got buyrned by this. I bought TurboTax back in January and immediatly installed with the plan to get my taxes done and over with, asap.
Things came up, though, and I never got around to dealing with my taxes until late March. During that interval of time, I had to replace my harddrive, causing me to of course re-install turbo tax when I went to do my taxes in march. I immediately ran into the copy protection problem (which I was totally unaware of when I first bought/installed it). I suppose I
*could* have called Intuit and gotten a 'reprive'. I was so impulsively pissed, though, that I went and bought a copy of TaxCut instead. A week later, I also dumped Quicken which I'd been using for several years and switched to MS
Money which I like better anyways, now. No more Intuit.