Dyre Straits

http://news.softpedia.com/news/Fallo...60-95512.shtml

Fallout 3, one of the most anticipated titles of the fall, can be illegally downloaded from various torrent sites. In a world where piracy is rampant, this is not too surprising. The big news is that the pirates are not targeting the PC version of the game. The torrents are, at the moment, only available for the Xbox 360 version of Fallout 3.

Piracy is rarer on consoles mainly because a hardware device, called a “mod chip”, has to be attached to a machine before it can run pirated games. The chip breaks the warranty and is illegal, but there are thousands and thousands of users who have one installed. It seems that the Fallout 3 pirated version has already been successfully downloaded at least a couple of thousand times. It appears that this is the gold version of the title and the leak could have originated at a plant where the game is supposed to be transferred on disks which then go on sale.

Bethesda are probably not too happy about the development and they are likely to be looking to pinpoint the source of the leak. Over a similar incident regarding videogames, Ubisoft sued the game disk manufacturer.

Lately, a host of publishers and developers said that developing for the PC is a risk because of rampant piracy. Crytek even stated that it is abandoning PC exclusives and that it plans to release a PC version of its games after a certain delay so that the console versions are not threatened by piracy. Fallout 3 is not pirated on the PC and it will be interesting to see if and when a pirated version comes out.

Fallout 3 is set to launch later in October and can be played on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC.

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Zamoldac

haha not surprising and also yesterday's news ahooy

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ご自身の没落を見て、証人の終わり

Unixlord

Nice!

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IQ, when aggregated, follows Ohm's law.

Zamoldac

saints row 2 was also cracked like 2 days ago before the official release.

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ご自身の没落を見て、証人の終わり

IModIntel

I can understand the fact that people like to save money but this is just nailing the gaming industry further down.

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DOOMJESUS

oh those poor game developers. whatever will they do in the face of abject poverty?

Regeneration

That sucks, since Bethesda are good people. Well, Steam is the only solution.

DOOMJESUS

is steam un-crackable?

the only solution is for developers to not waste their potential profits by investing in copy protection schemes because none of them are immune to crackers.

the crackers will never stop cracking, the people are going to get the games for free if they want them. copy protection just serves to raise the developers overhead for no good reason and of course the cost of implementing the copy protection scheme will naturally be passed on to the consumer.

people who purchase games are going to do so regardless.
and people who pirate games are going to do so regardless.

you can't force pirates to pay with copy protection, if they can't crack it then fewer people will being playing it.
hence fewer paying customers will be familiar with the games, hence fewer paying customers will be seeking out the games, less popularity = less profit no matter how you slice it...

Unixlord

Piracy boosts popularity and people purchase good games for the multiplayer and avoid DRM ridden games.

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IQ, when aggregated, follows Ohm's law.

IModIntel

What I find stupid is really paying for a game then having to pay for it again when you want to play online, like WoW, but anyways thats a shitty game so who cares?

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