The Anti-Piracy Experiment

I have been an illegal downloader for some time and a fan of the PC gaming industry for even longer. Like most, it is all too easy to illegally download, with good intentions of purchasing later. Other times illegal downloaders believe PC games are too expensive, which they feel gives them the right to download [...]

DRM–Something–Profit!

“Phase one, Underpants. Phase two, erm… something. Phase three, Profit!” After playing the Duke Nukem Fovever Demo, I can see this phrase going global. Of course it originally came from SouthPark, where Gnomes are stealing Underpants in preparation of their business venture. It works on every level, just replace the word “underpants” and you have [...]

Digital Pirates Will Pay!

I am not talking about walking the plank, or spending an eternity in Davy Jones’s locker, I am not even referring to seafaring pirates! But I am talking about digital piracy, illegal downloading, and one of the hottest topics on copy infringement today: Will a Pirate pay for a game they have downloaded illegally? The [...]

Free Rider vs the Illegal Downloader

There are different classes of illegal downloaders and each group makes a part of the whole piracy market. In its simplest form the Piracy Pyramid looks like the picture below and the illegal population consists of Crackers, Uploaders and Downloaders. As the colour gradient suggest, the top of the pyramid represents a very small percentage, [...]

How would you crack the UbiDRM?

Of course I am not going to tell you how to do it exactly. For a number of reasons, the first and foremost is that I don’t know how Ubisoft DRM works. Just like the crackers of the DRM software, you make good guesses, explore the program and try to work around what you have. [...]

Call of Duty-Black OPS Breaks even the Illegal Download record

Following the much praised Modern Warfare 2, again the Call of Duty series has broken all records for the first day sales. After all the court cases, the feuds, and the tantrums that followed MF2 Treyarch has pulled this one out of the bag. The first day sales being reported as 7 million copies worldwide, [...]

The Glorious PC’s Greatest Shame!

As a PC man, this is hard for me to say, so listen carefully as I shall say it only once. “Consoles might be a more popular gaming rig!” Oh… I think I am going to be sick… Well it’s true, while there are many benefits of all platforms, the PC has always been highly [...]

Convincing the Hard of Hearing

One of the main problems that I come across is no matter what I show people, they still don’t want to listen. And I am quite well aware of the lack of statistics and vagueness of the whole topic of illegal downloading. Also the vagueness and lack of any proof people post in return. Still [...]

How many days is a PC Game Pirate free?

What would you think? (The number of days between the release of a PC Game, to the day that someone is able to search, download, and play it illegally?) A quick explanation: Cracks are the game files that have been altered and had the security DRM removed from them. As in they have been “cracked” [...]

Is Piracy Growing?

The teacher stands before the class. “Children, today we are going to answer the question of piracy?”  The little boys and girls, all beaded eyed and fixed on the teachers professional authority, are hanging on every word.  “Now hands up who here is a pirate?”  A number of hands fill the air! And the teacher [...]