MTV Multiplayer › Piracy

Piracy is a real problem for PSP. It's not hard for your everyday consumer to simply download games to their handheld.

One of the ways Sony hopes to battle piracy is by offering their first-party PSP games as downloads through the PlayStation Store.

Is that enough?

We'll have to wait and see, but John Koller, Sony Computer Entertainment America's head of hardware marketing, told Multiplayer they've seen piracy slow down in the last few months.

Why?

Read more...

Everyone's talking about video game piracy.

Everyone either has reasons why piracy shouldn't be allowed to happen (because it's bad, right?).

Or they have reasons why it can't help but continue (because restrictive publishers/developers are practically compelling would-be consumers to be pirates, right?).

And almost every single person who enters this debate -- from EA CEO John Riccitiello to people posting on message boards justifying why they've ripped a copy of a game they didn't pay for -- is willing to offer their ideas about how to make a world that has less pirating of video games.

The solutions tend to involve rules. Or a Bill of Rights. Or legal prosecution.

But what ever happened to pride, shame and peer pressure? Why don't the anti-piracy people borrow a page from the pro-environment green movement?

After we published Patrick Klepek's excellent interview with Bethesda's Pete Hines earlier this week -- in which Hines said that his peers claim that up to half of customer service calls to game companies come from pirates -- I had an idea about this seemingly intractable issue:

The anti-gaming-piracy movement needs to find a way to make people feel about pirating games the way more and more of us feel about not separating our garbage from our recycling. Read more...

Piracy remains one of the biggest issues facing PC gaming these days.

Last week, "Fallout 3"product manager Pete Hines told me that some development studios now calculate that up to half of their customer support calls involve dealing with people who have pirated copies of the game.

That's bad.

Hines discussed the problem of piracy with MTV Multiplayer just days before, ironically, the Xbox 360 version of "Fallout 3" leaked. Piracy is still far more prevalent on the PC side, which has serious implications for studios like Bethesda Softworks, whose development bread-and-butter has been PCs.

"It is probably the most...[long pause]...probably the most difficult issue specifically facing PC gaming right now," said somberly-toned "Fallout 3"product manager Pete Hines to me after playing four hours of his new game a few weeks ago. "How are we gonna walk that line?"

With this kind of concern at Bethesda, you'd never guess what kind of copy-protection they're putting on "Fallout 3"...

Since our talk, circumstances have changed. "Fallout 3" has leaked. But the problems remain the same. The biggest obstacle, explained Hines, is figuring out who actually is a pirate. Read more...

Piracy continues to hurt PC gaming, and no one has a clear answer to the problem.

Development studio Crytek has proposed abandoning PC-exclusive game releases. BioWare, however, is less radical. They're looking at downloadable content, access to multiplayer and -- here's a new one -- simply encouraging consumer loyalty.

"We're doing a lot of post-release downloadable content on all of our PC titles going forward," said BioWare co-CEO Ray Muzyka to me last week. "We think it's a good thing to encourage players to make them want to buy a PC title. That's ultimately the best, most successful path to prevent piracy -- to have players that want your games, want to believe in them and think they're high-quality and realize they're going to get a lot of value out of them as platforms for long time afterwards."

Muzyka said "Dragon Age" -- to be revealed tomorrow -- will join "Mass Effect" as a BioWare game supported long after launch with new content.

It won't be long before we find out how BioWare's hypothesis pans out.