Quote:
Originally Posted by kylania
That's really the key to fighting piracy of games, music, movies and whatever else. Give us something that MAKES us want to buy a product and we will. Treat us like criminals and constantly slap us in the face with "don't pirate this or else" warnings and restrictions and we won't WANT to buy the product.
If every game came with a nice solid quality and accurate manual instead of a slip of paper telling us to read the childishly horrific PDF, real cloth maps instead of tatters of string loosely glued together, laminated keymaps instead of tissue paper sheets and Quality Tested software instead of crunched out bug fests I bet it would do more for fighting piracy than OSP ever could hope to.
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I Couldn't have said it better, Kylania! Thats one of the things that has continued to bug me about new releases...the total lack of any tangilbe hard goods in the package. I have literally hundreds of PC games going back to the late 1980's, and the one thing that really sticks out is the huge manuals, maps, and just plain cool stuff that came with them. Stuff you could'nt pirate...Stuff that makes me still keep the games to this day, even though I can no longer play them.
I have printed ship recognition manuals with a leather-like binding that served as copy-protection for one of them...I think it was Silent Hunter 1 or Silent Service 2 (but I am too lazy to check right now). I still use the fold-out KM map from SH3 and sometimes just for kicks I pull out the hard-back 3-ring binder that made both the manual and the packaging for Falcon 4.0.
Publishers like Ubisoft and EA Games have made it easier for the pirates by eliminating the tangible treasures that used to be considered standard in older titles...and in doing so have really hurt both the consumer and more importantly, themselves.
Pirates would generally never bother to re-print a nice thick manual...but give them a digital PDF 'manual' and "click", it's done and distributed in an instant. I really no longer fault the pirates...I fault the publishers who, out of their own laziness and greed have made the pirates job easier...and the honest consumers reward ever smaller and harder to find.
