Source: GameSpot

In the wide world of entertainment media, piracy and Peer-2-Peer downloading have become major financial and development concerns. Almost as soon as an album, film or game is released (and sometimes before), pirated copies appear online. This has led to a major movement across all forms of media to stem the tide of piracy to help prevent lost income.

PC Games have always been a favorite among downloaders (as if you didn’t know you little thief), but game publishers are always trying to fight back. The biggest, and most spectacular failure of ‘07 on this front was 2K Studios’ BioShock. The game required an auto-patch from their servers to install the game and the core DVD itself did not include an .EXE file required to play. Unfortunately 2K’s servers went down off and on during the initial release, which truly angered many legitimate gamers, and the anti-piracy setup totally failed to prevent the game from being hacked and spread online. And while 2K has said they will not repeat this plan exactly, they openly state they intend to do something similar for future releases.

Find out why after the jump!

To date most, of the inspiration to actually buy a legit copy of a PC game rather than download it illegally has been the desire to play online. Despite the mediocre hacked servers for a few titles, true Online play remains one of the only bastions of purity for legitimate PC gamers. Don’t have your own serial key? Sorry, no online play for you.

I for one think that it’s great. Despite the massive amount of piracy, games like CnC3 (ewww) and Company Of Heroes still made it to a high sales point because of their online play. I know more than a few “not so honest” gamers who have gone out and purchased games for that reason.

Until someone comes up with an over 80% guarantee that most gamers will not be able to get a pirated copy of a game that works, what exactly is the point of these cheap, pathetic, band-aid solutions? Preventing hacking for the initial release week does temporarily boost sales, but in the long run it’s the merits of the game itself that make it a success.

All 2K and other developers end up doing is pissing off true, loyal paying gamers, while the pirate community just laughs at the time devs wasted on a stop-gap measure that did not accomplish anything.

I work hard for my money, but I also realize that “most” developers work hard on their games. I have no problem coughing up the loot to buy a PC game. But dealing with ill conceived anti-piracy garbage is not constructive to my gaming enjoyment; all it does it make me angry. Stop putting bubble gum on my front door and calling it a better type of door lock, when it still only takes one swift kick to knock the thing down!

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