General Discussions

I bought both Witcher 1 and 2.

yea...i can't seem to swallow this whole try and buy thing. y will u buy a game that u just finished downloading and playing without forking a dime?

CD Projekt has done a terrific job with The Witcher 2 and being the first game of the series for me i don't regret buying this game at all. even though it was a risk for me i don't see any reason to justify piracy. we need to really support fair minded companies like CDPR.

Believe it or not, there are millions of people in this world (I last attended a Pirates Anonymous meeting two weeks ago to celebrate my fourth year without a pirated game, it was our global meetup so there were about three of us) that are illegally downloading software ever day without ever being aware that piracy is a disease of the mind, nor that pirated software has been proven, in a Big Media Inc. privately funded study, it is the most addictive substance on the planet.

All jokes aside, there are people with principles left in this world, and even if nothing can ever validate/justify a reason to pirate in your eyes people will still attempt to do so. I think "lost sales" get blown a little bit out of proportion with the inability to track who pirates the game then buys it, but I'm willing to bet a pretty decent amount do so. Some to support the developers because they made a good game, some because people just feel that particular game was worth it, (especially if there's a Steam sale for the game) and, albeit very rarely some people who do it simply don't believe in free rides. You also get official support and don't have to jump through hoops to update the game, or wait for crackers to release an update: you get it straight from the developer, the publisher, or third party software and retailers the game is sold through digitally. (like Steam)

I was a mix of the first two types, though conversely I would not buy a game if it was a buggy mess - no free rides. Ironic, eh? I stopped pirating when I realized it actually was capable of hurting indie games, and I honestly prefer to have all my games on Steam legitimately anyway (unless there's a boxed CE, then I'll buy that) - all in one place, in-game interface, etc etc. I can actually see peoples' reasoning behind it now easier than I could when I did it myself. Pick any you heard of troubles with and/or played: Sword of the Stars II, Stronghold 3, Red Orchestra 2, or even RAGE. All had very severe issues at launch, all could've been avoided if the developers had worried more about quality over release dates and sales numbers. RO2 had a beta, so there's that - but it was so buggy that many people downright canceled their preorders and didn't look back, (I initially thought this was a stupid move on their part, since it was a beta) which a lot of people probably wish they'd done now, as nearly nothing was improved from the beta to launch, and several new issues crop up daily, requiring 200MB minimum patches. (that's UE3's fault for the most part though)

I guess what I'm getting at is:
tl;dr: There does exist such a thing as "honor among thieves" in the world of piracy, as it were. Though you can't pin a solid number, or even a consistent number of them across people who pirate multiple games then only buy one or two of them. And a pirated download =/= a lost sale by any means in most cases: it'll either lead to a purchase, or the person doing it will be too cheap to support the people who slaved behind a monitor creating it. I guess the more appropriate term for digital pirates would be "honor and sharing amongst thieves, the world weary, the OCD game shopper, the 'demos lie and do not represent real game quality' gamer, and the simple "I preordered this game and it's been leaked, might as well" player.

Do note that I don't actually condone piracy, I think it's pretty much here to stay, so I might as well look upon people who remind me of myself three years ago (when I did pirate) with morbid curiosity and at least attempt to put things into perspective, though I imagine I'm failing horribly.

China's population 1,338,299,500. Amount of Chinese pirates over 50%. Trust me ive been to China and every corner store is packed to the brim with all bootleg games, movies, etc. So when they say "the number is higher", 4.5 million is a conservative statement.

I would like to be able to say that Piracy started for real with unfinished games and lazy game developers, but thats only partly true, there has been piracy as long as there has been the internet and even before that back in the amiga/commodore 64 days.

Piracy can only be stopped by putting more pressure on the isps to surveillance their customers what and where they download and not, then block the websites they use, wich only happens now in extreme situations with child pornography and is otherwise illegal due to online privacy.

While i like the idea of pirates getting punished for what they do, i think its wrong that a company can infact sue a single person for 150,000 dollars and ruin that person's life because he or she downloaded a few songs of the internet.

Still i do think it should be enough to change that person's life forever, so that they never do it again.

There is methods in place just now that most ISP's use to monitor traffic to and from known sites or protocols. Phorm was close to being introduced in the UK which would have done that.

But there is still monitoring in the UK besides Phorm.

That is the lengths some people have to go to protect their copyrighted material from thieves, the warez monkeys can go "blah blah copyright infringement is not theft blah blah" or whatever wordage they want to use to make them look less criminal, but at the end of the day they are thieves. And as said the lengths are to spy on people, its very "1984" big brother watching you kind of thing, but if they can find the heavy offenders and take them to court I say good on them, because targeting the heavy offenders they may get lucky and find someone who burns the stuff and sells it to make a profit (thats a pirate, people who download stuff are warez users not pirates).

But as it stands, the "spying" is not producing diddly, and it's only hurting the people downloading, if lawsuits even come of it.

I don't get why you're all dehumanizing people that pirate. If the law were to crack down on it, most of the people getting sued would be the families of kids who do it without knowing or considering the legal ramifications. Hell, even when people get sued now it's only done because companies can sue them for an exorbitant amount of money - money that they do not have, and will never have, because they're pirating things instead of buying it without caring about it trimming $50 off their $50,000/month paycheck.

So by your logic, let's be incredibly generous with the ratio: for every 10 dumb kids, 5 leechers get caught. For every 5 leechers, 1 seeder gets caught. The average company sues each person, not knowing which is which, hoping to get "lucky," for $25,000. More than half the households in the US can afford - if they're making $50,000/year then that kind of money is still impossible to obtain all at once.

All the numbers in that argument (except the household/income figures, those are official) are gross underestimations of what the legal system, and the companies, would be willing to do. It would be damning 10-15 people to debt they can't crawl out of/jail time so that one pirate could get caught, if it worked that way.

But that's okay - as long as you don't pirate, it's a perfectly valid reason to clump them all into one group under the "scum of the internet" section. Or that at least seems to be the general line of thinking, rather than "well maybe these people trying to rationalize it are actually trying to rationalize it/don't know better. The people who have taken a moment to understand it and still do it, those are the ones I don't like."

Pretty much any given country in mainland Asia is exempt from that, since they pretty much don't recognize any of the laws/don't enforce them and pirated material is freely sold on the streets.

Such a shame, never played the first witcher i dived in and bouth witcher 2 and loved it CD have done a great job and if companies like this are going to be able to make great games people need to buy them! fingers crossed they continue to succeed!