Its already been pirated... sad...

Am not a new gamer but have always been curious as to how pirating of games actually works. Am always curious about PC technology and now about the stealing of games. If anyone has the time and interest to feed my curiosity would like that very much.

Can this pirating now be such that it will affect Big Finish income enough to affect future games? Not sure how correct I am but the old time games like Tex Murphy series, Zork games etc. I know were often presented to me with 'code breakers' which I refused to buy into. Enough of that and game sharing I thought brought such games to extinction what with rising costs etc. Such is the world today - sigh :evil:
First off I'm going to tell you that you won't get ANY details from anyone here on "How" Pirating works... The people of this community are honorable and upstanding members of the gaming community... Regardless of any knowledge one or some of us might have in the Pirating areas of the Gaming Industry...

As for the Pirating of this game hurting Big Finish, only they could tell you... To my knowledge they haven't said one way or another if the pirating has hurt their bottom line... I would assume if it had, then they would not be close to releasing a 2nd game already... So if I had to guess, I would say No it hasn't hurt them to great extent...
That's not to say that Pirating hasn't hurt them at all, of course it has... There are many people out there playing the game for free when that money should have went to Big Finish...


You are right in a way though... Pirating of games has been around for many years and it has led to the closing of companies and has resulted in the halt to sequel games... Because though you may have a million people playing and enjoying the game, you may have only received money from 300,000... So when you break it down, it isn't worth it to spend the money to create a sequel... This has killed many games, not just adventure games...


I hope this answers enough of your curiosity... This is probably the best information you'll get off of a site such as this...
The Paved Straight Road, Won't Always Get You Farther Than The Winding Dirt Road...


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Sorry you took my remark/curiosity as trying to "to do something or get inside info" somehow. I will hesitate to ask any questions here anymore about games and the workings of such.

I consider myself an honorable person so much so that when I first began to play the Tex games I was completely new to gaming and all its problems etc. A friend had sent me burned games of Tex and had no knowledge about the situation.

Have since learned what they mean and so I went and bought all three Tex games from Gog to download. Not much remuneration for Connors and Jones but at least it is something!
I wasn't accusing you of trying to learn how to Pirate games, but that is how your question came across and I wanted to explain to you why you might not receive an answer...
If you're not interested in doing it, then there really is no reason as to why you would need to know that kind of information, but I understand curiosity... As Tex says in Autotech, it's better to just leave sleeping dogs lie...

You don't normally find people asking how to Pirate games... No one is telling you that you need to be hesitant when asking questions... I was trying to answer your question the best I could, I'm sorry you took offense to my response...


Maybe this Wikipedia section on Software Piracy will help you better...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_ ... f_software
The Paved Straight Road, Won't Always Get You Farther Than The Winding Dirt Road...


Can You Run Your Game??? Click Here And Find Out...

*Note, Not All Games Have Been Tested & Therefore May Not Be Listed...
I actually read an article that it be soon the end of cd/dvd games due to pirating the developers losing too much money
Lynne
tex murphy is back in town
So we've lost out on some good adventure game sequels due to pirating? Wow I never really thought of it that way.
Bjyman wrote:So we've lost out on some good adventure game sequels due to pirating? Wow I never really thought of it that way.
Most people that pirate wouldn't have bought the game anyway, and since the companies aren't losing anything physical they aren't losing any money.

Of course they will lose SOME sales, but I think that number is fairly insignificant. Piracy rates stay in similar proportion to how well the game sells. If a game sells well it will be pirated a lot, if it sells poorly they no one will care enough to pirate it. There are exceptions to this rule but again, not significant.
Travis Jacobs

"You might not sound so idiotic if there were at least something excitable in my post to begin with..." --Baf
I asked previously if there would be security to stop this but I didn't get an answer....







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ribeika wrote:I asked previously if there would be security to stop this but I didn't get an answer....
BFG believes in the whole DRM Free bit... By doing this they are likely to draw in more customers because they are being a player friendly developer and those who have the few bucks to spend for the games will respect that and opt for the supporting of the developers over pirating it... It's sad that people feel the need to pirate the Indy Developers, but it's going to happen whether there is security programs in place or not...
If you put them in, you harm the people who pay for the game because most security programs mess with people's computers and make it harder for people to pull things like music and video clips from the game itself... Plus what's the point really??? If you put a security program in a game it only takes the hackers a day or so to find a work around, if not only hours from the time of release...

So Big Finish decided early on that they wouldn't bother with those types of programs... They knew they'd be hacked, but they also know that they have supporting fans out here as well...
The Paved Straight Road, Won't Always Get You Farther Than The Winding Dirt Road...


Can You Run Your Game??? Click Here And Find Out...

*Note, Not All Games Have Been Tested & Therefore May Not Be Listed...
I'm afraid I have to agree with FreePizza (I can't believe I just said that :lol: ).

I do NOT believe ANY games have failed because of piracy. Studies have been done over the years that show that it's not anything like 25% (as 1 poster mentioned) of lost sales to piracy; it's less than 5%, and many think it's more like 1 - 2 %.

The point is, piracy usually does more good than harm. Hard to believe, I know, but apparently it's true. The publicity that's generated by piracy leads to way more sales than would otherwise have been the case.

Now, am I an advocate of piracy? In a word, NO! I pay for all my games. But, it's a fallacy to believe that piracy can make or break a game or a company. It seems intuitive that piracy does harm, but it's wrong.

There are any number of examples of this. Way, way back (the 70's) Wordstar became one of the first highly pirated programs. It was estimated that there were 3 times as many illegal copies as legal. However, it was also estimated that sales were 3 times what they would have been without piracy.

More recently, music companies have been up in arms about CD piracy. Funny thing is, the higher the piracy rate of CD's, the higher actual sales became.

Much the same has been shown true for movies. Piracy of them is at an all time high, yet theater attendance is also at an all time high. Go figure.