I think it's not a big problem. All those old games are cracked and pirated anyway. GOG is for those who missed the game (or no longer have the disc) but don't want to steal the game.

Come on, stealing Blood or Duke Nukem 3D is a disgrace. It's good that GOG offers us a way to buy those games. And you can copy the files to a flash drive and keep them forever.

P.S. They have Gromada yet? I have the original CD, but due to use of CD music it's almost unplayable with 52x drive. Not to mention old version of Starforce that's been used in the original release...

Got to agree with you on that one but pirating GOG's is just low-
Just saw an upload for the GOG release of PST!
People are waiting a decade to get a rerelease of the game and what do they do when we finally get one ?!!? pirate it...

My bad, I was bored. Peer pressure and all that good stuff. /jk

Score! They're going to refund my money and send me a physical copy of the game!

Whoa! Colour me impressed. :D

But it does make me wonder if it's EA's crafty way of ducking a question about a legal grey area.

Good tip for anyone who has issues in the future then. Threaten piracy and get your games for free anyway!

I'm actually quite impressed with their customer service; they responded to my issue very quickly and offered an alternative solution. Maybe I just struck lucky, but I'm now a very happy customer!

The problem with P2P piracy, for example, is that usually you upload as well as download. So even if you paid for the game, you're still enabling others to copy the files from you.

It's great to hear your problem has been resolved in an even better way than one could have hoped!

...making US pay for THEM :\.

True as far as default settings are concerned. But with something like uTorrent, it's possible to set it up so you're not uploading anything. Yeah, EA's support is very good, I'll give them that. They don't like the idea of a customer going away unhappy. That's something that's increasingly hard to find anywhere. Never mind in the games industry.

My favorite website. Off-topic, but yeah.

Agreed, verbatim. I've even bought multiple copies of games as gifts to support developers.

Yeah really, this whole piracy 'problem' has really gotten out of hand. Let's just say that if piracy is stamped out entirely tomorrow, I doubt you'd see profits increase by much. If they're not buying, then most likely they'll never buy. It's like a store giving away a free bottle of wine to anyone who asks for it. If they give away 1000 in a week, I'm sure you'd think it would be silly for them to say "since the demand of this wine is 1000 per week, we stand to make $10,000 in income per week if we charge $10 for it." Yet you often hear things like "did you know Company X lost $100 million in revenues last year due to piracy because their games were downloaded 20 thousand times?"

At least some bigger companies are starting to get this now. One that comes to mind is Stardock, who phased out DRMs long ago, yet puts up very strong sales numbers (Sins of a Solar Empire has sold more than half a million copies) despite their games being leaked onto torrents from day 1. I've always believed if you make a good enough product, people will buy it. Maybe if your game only sold 50 copies it's because there's something wrong with your game, not because people are pirating it.

Like others in this thread, like to buy games and support the companies that make them. Part of the reason I bought Fallout 1&2 from this site was to support Interplay. Since they're essentially back from the dead and very small, they need every sale they can get.

It's hard to say how much of a fiscal impact piracy has had. I'm of the opinion that most pirated games wouldn't have been sales. For pirates, it has to be free, and not a penny more. But, I don't want to give the impression that piracy isn't to be taken seriously.

When you're the developer of a popular game and you see your game being pirated much more times than you had legitimate sales, it would be pretty infuriating. Modern Warfare 2, for example, was pirated over 4 million times for PC (and likely much higher). Now, the PC is only 3-5% of the console market, whose total sales were around 5 million at launch, with lifetime sales probably tripling that, easily (feel free to correct these numbers, they're just for the sake of argument). This implies that the number of pirated PC games substantially dwarfs the number of legitimate sales. Even if we accept that only a small percentage of pirated copies would otherwise be sales, we're still talking about an enormous amount of potential sales.

Now, I can't stand Activision (specifically Mr. Kotick) but I chose them as an example for two reason. One, MW2 was one of the biggest game launches of all time, and Activision is kind of an industry leader. How they and other major publishers react to piracy is crucial. Second, losing out on these potential profits may not harm Activision, but for small studios, it can absolutely make the difference. I suspect that's partly why PC games are flocking to Steam.

On the other hand, for most consumers, the most important aspect of this is dealing with copy-protection schemes. There's not substantial overlap between the people who pay for their games and the people who don't. That's why draconian anti-piracy measures that are necessarily directed at consumers don't hurt pirates, because most pirates who are deterred wouldn't suddenly decide to put on their consumer hat and go purchase the game.

I like this interview from Gabe Newell of Valve best. I'll link to it, but basically he says that companies should mostly ignore pirates and instead focus on how they can provide a superior experience to their customers. I like Valve, and Steam generally (good sales, no codes to lose, and is minimally intrusive after install), although Valve's latest stunt to sell me digital hats for $18 in TF2 has me worried. The service that GoG offers is the right approach I think; they focus on rewarding their customers, not trying to punish pirates.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pLC_zZ5fqFk

I can see how you'd think that way, but you also need to look at it from other ways too. The PS3 version 'only' sold fewer than 2 million in its first month (4.2 mil for the 360), but doesn't mean piracy was involved in that. Similarly, the PC version sold 'poorly' because many might be opting for the console versions, since there was a controversy surrounding the online play in the PC version at the time. Plus I believe the 4% number is only for physical copies, and not accounting for the massive online stores like Steam.

Agreed 100%. Any DRM can and will be cracked. Hackers love a challenge that a new DRM brings. Even in the case of Assassin's Creed 2, which was dubbed uncrackable, was eventually cracked and pirated. Thus crazy obtrusive protection schemes only hurts paying customers, which goes against common sense, but is done anyway. I even know of cases where people refused to pay for games and pirated them instead to spite the company for using certain nasty DRMs (*cough*Starforce*cough*).

Steam actually offers a good service, and their DRM is very tolerable (i.e. unobtrusive at all), which is why I like them a lot. The ability to put all my games in one library, to install them whenever I want, as long as I have internet access, and to have all my gaming buddies accessible in one program are quite the plusses. Like you said, the sales are pretty amazing too. And as I said before, Stardock's way of ridding itself of DRM is just fantastic. Let the pirates pirate, but make it so that you reward paying customers by giving them extras (micro-updates, materialistic goodies, etc). Same with GoG, all great companies.