[Wolfehunter]

Originally Posted by CCIP

One of the really dumb, ironic problem with invasive copy protection is that much of it (especially Starforce of course) came out of the Russian market where many legit publishers actually competed (successfully) with pirates by driving down the prices of legit games to a level where they only cost a bit more than the pirated copy, with the pricetag certainly justifying owning a license to a game. Note - I said owning a license. When games cost what they do in a place like Russia (i.e. several times cheaper than in Europe or the US), it's certainly understandable and excusable to be paying a modest amount for a restricted form of "ownership" of a game copy and putting up with some inconveniences for their system.

The really stupid thing is that Europe and the US pretty well adopted Russia's fiercely competitive copy protection system without adopting Russia's likewise competitive pricing. Most of the time the pricetags on new games here are around $60, which is completely ludicrous and has no justification given the way copy protection and user control over the game copy are treated. There are a few niche exceptions to that I am happy to put up with, where an unusual game by a small publisher and for a special audience needs to be priced higher to make a profit and keep up development. But most of the time, the pricing is unjustified.

I would not be so displeased with a certain level of copy protection if the average new game cost $15-20. At $50-70 however, publishers are making a huge mistake - blaming piracy for what is actually a problem caused by a combination of invasive copy protection, overblown and unreasonable pricing, and of course poor quality of many of the products marketed for this price. Publishers are getting into all sorts of posturing about losing trust in gamers, but in fact it's they who are losing the gamers' trust. And for good reasons.

I buy very few new games nowadays. Most of the games I do buy new come from smaller publishers. Otherwise I just don't feel it's worth the price and cost (two different things in this case) at release.

CCIP you forget Publishers are gods and can not do wrong... Everybody else is wrong and must be punished by gods hand.