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 [...]

The Piracy Misconception of Multiplayer

Often the PC multiplayer is quoted as 100% safe, and that it cannot be pirated. This is normally followed by quoting some WOW stats on profitability, and then accusing developers for being stupid, for not jumping on the band wagon.   The problem with this type of genre, people tend to commit to only a [...]

The exciting sets my Heart Flickering!

It’s been a while since I have written a new blog … and that’s a good thing. In the small break I reflected and realised a few things; one that previous blogs where too long. And two, droning on about the facts of piracy can be a little annoying. But we are all gamers here; [...]

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 [...]