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Date |
: Feb 4th, 2002 |
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: N/A |
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: N/A |
| Author |
: Jin-Ning Tioh |
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Pirates Ahoy! Pieces of Eight, Pieces of Eight...
There is a famous old French saying - The more things change, the more they stay the same. In many ways, this proverb fits rather snugly into the gaming industry. While new and exciting games are being dumped onto store shelves at an ever-accelerating pace, one problem remains constant through it all - Piracy. Company concerns about the volatile issue of copyright protection have been growing of late, with numerous studies confirming that software piracy occurs at record levels globally. In response to this growing threat, developers have already taken a multitude of steps to discourage such actions, including the classic manual word hunts, silly code wheels and most recently, troubling players to insert the original retail CD into the drive to run an offering.
The main attraction of pirated goods is naturally, the absurdly low prices charged. In most third world countries, prices for each game can rise at incredible rates. A game that costs forty bucks in the United States can cost up to eighty bucks or more in say, Singapore. Twice the cost. The worst part is, that amount of money could easily chomp through a lot of peoples' monthly salaries. The result is a flourishing market for pirated games and applications alike. Each game usually comes as low as two bucks per compact disc, encouraging people to dabble in the wide and cheap world of piracy. Worst yet, games, movies and applications have a disturbing tendency to appear on the market either a month or a few weeks before the official release date. And now, with the rising popularity of the DVD for movies, the pirated market has jumped at the opportunity, selling each DVD for around four dollars.
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And so developers and publishers find themselves back in the same piracy predicament yet again, and consequently they introduced the same kind of solution they had done earlier - Insert disc please. While some companies have attempted to justify this action by arguing that they were saving consumers precious space, the consequences of CD copy protection schemes are still equally as painful for those who have legally purchased a game. Most new releases today take up hundreds of megabytes to install and still require the disc to be in the drive to run the software, even with the full install option. And in most cases, the CD light indicates that the disc is only being accessed at the outset, with the only purpose being to deter software piracy.
This just goes to show that zeal in attempting to prevent illegal copying of software can indeed be taken too far. However, I will be the first to confirm the legitimacy of game developers and distributors wanting to protect their investment, but the sad reality is that copyright protection methods have not been working very well. Hackers from around the globe always seem to be able to hack their way through the best anti-piracy measures. Copy protection schemes are often cracked weeks ahead of a game release, and it is often possible to find a full version circulating on the Internet prior to release. While it is clearly a prosecutable offense to distribute a hacked version of a copyrighted retail game, hackers don't seem to take much notice.
So despite all the increasing sophistication in game design and distribution, we have really not progressed much at all with regard to this thorny and difficult issue. The three main questions to be answered is how to tighten the global monitoring and punishment of illegal duplication, how to attain a long-term secure copy protection which hackers will not be able to crack easily and allows consumers to forgo the trouble of inserting the disc in the drive each time they play and perhaps how to lower prices to allow a greater selection of titles for consumers. Until progress occurs in this direction, flourishing pirates will remain the norm for some time to come.
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