GC 2008: Peter Moore doesn't want to punish pirates

by Kevin Kelly on Aug 22nd 2008 12:00AM

Despite his fondness for authentic, handmade pirate headwear, Peter Moore was talking about video game pirates at the Leipzig Games Convention, telling Eurogamer that he doesn't think the rapscallions should be made to walk the plank. After all, that didn't work when the record industry tried to sue people for illegally downloading music, Moore reminds us.

Granted, this doesn't mean he wants people to run out and torrent the latest EA title but "there are better solutions than chasing people for money," Moore says. "I'm not sure what they are, other than to build game experiences that make it more difficult for there to be any value in pirating games."

So will Moore change his tune and start keelhauling PC pirates? Probably not, since he's "not a huge fan of trying to punish your consumer." Avast, me buckos! Might we expect a subscription-based Madden on PC then?

Source

Tags: ea, EA-Sports, Electronic-Arts, leipzig-08, peter-moore, piracy

Reader Comments (33)

Funny, considering it was just announced that the Mac version of Spore (and other EA games for Mac) will "feature" SecuROM.

http://www.tuaw.com/2008/08/21/transgaming-to-use-securom-for-cider-games/

There's a difference between punishing pirates (aka fines and lawsuits) and punishing consumers (aka DRM, software validation).

'So will Moore change his tune and start keelhauling PC pirates? Probably not, since he's "not a huge fan of trying to punish your consumer."'

And yet...

last i checked Spore wasn't part of EA Sports....

The DRM on crysis freaked me out at first, it makes certain models of dvd drives make a clicking sound. It sounded horrible.

Spore is going to use Securom? Well, they just lost a sale. I say that with extreme sorrow, but seeing as how it took me half an hour to delete the fudged registry entries and locked folders that the World in Conflict demo left on my machine, I'm certainly not going through that again.

The sad part is, the "pirates" will quickly rip out securom and play the game freely, while paying customers will have to suffer the major security hole that securom punches into their machines. You'd think will wright would have stopped them from turning his supposed opus into a rootkit propagation machine, but I guess it's too late.

As for Me? I'm going to play it at a friends house.

I haven't bought an EA game for a few years now. This is why.

Yeah but then there is the Criterion/Burnout Paradise situation, of which are both owned by EA. Weird eh? That said piracy is simply another form of competition and publishers need to realize the best thing they can do is make you want to pay for the content they provide. And you should, unless they're totally dicking you around. Valve and (now) Criterion both do this and it has a wonderful effect. Hopefully more developers/publishers catch on and realize they key to your wallet is through your heart (yeah I know I just wrote that).

Absolutely correct. Punishing pirates really isn't the way to go. I think that they should somehow automatically detect pirated consoles/games and limit them somehow. Though I do not know how this could be done...

Well, the problem with stopping pirating is that countermeasures -can- be taken to simply make pirating impossible but some of it crosses the line of "too costly and unwieldly" or even 'too complicated for the end user' such as the proposed weekly re-registration with EA which will piss off the users. Too little and the pirates will eat it up, too much and it'll piss off finicky gamers, it's a fine line.

Nobody knows how to do it, and therein lies the problem.

The problem is that half-assed anti-piracy solutions get cracked in a couple of days, and then everyone can download your game anyway.

You might as well do what Stardock did with Sins of a Solar Empire and simply put no DRM on at all, and instead reward the people who do buy it with extra content patches.

Exactly. Reward the people who purchase the game. Microsoft (and now Sony) do this best by including options (i.e. Achievements and online play) that you can't (normally) get by pirating the game.

While there will never be a way to stop pirates, developers can cut down on the number of times their game is bootlegged by providing us more of an incentive to buy their game.

Modding my Xbox isn't worth it to me if it means that I'm going to loose Live, its (friend) leaderboards and achievements. Hell, the friend leaderboard in GeoWars 2 is like digital crack to me.

Make horrible games and nobody will pirate them.

Step 1: Horrible game
Step 2: ??
Step 3: EA Profit

Smart man.

Pretty cool of the guy to understand. Now I feel bad for beating the shit out of him in the Facebreaker demo.

Team Fortress 2 has great anti-pirating features.

They are so unfair though, it requires you to be online to play!

Nice Avatar AxelFury, and most new online games are hard to pirate, especially through steam.

The hard part is to stop the pirating of single-player offline games that cant be constantly checked for authenticity.

@tiptup300

I see what you did there :P

http://cristgaming.com/pirate.swf

Limewire? Really?

I don't think WoW is pirated that much...

Plenty of pirate servers of WoW still running around though.

Ship 2 dual layer dvd's packed to the max with uncompressed stuff (has to be required for the game like uncompressed sound or it will just be ripped out). People arent going to want to download 18gbs from a torrent with thousands of leechers, it would take weeks. It wont stop piracy dead in its tracks but a lot of people would be scared away from such a huge download. Sure it will cost more to manufacture but if they actually believe they loose hundreds of millions of dollars from piracy then I dont see the problem.

Pirates/crackers aren't that dumb though. They will just lossless compress it or exclude all of the 'junk' data from a new build/copy, keeping only what's necessary. This 'padding' is already done in a good amount of games, though not to the extent of your example.

Keep on keeping on Pirate Petey.

And why not go after software pirates?

Maybe going after people for money is silly, but last I checked they still put price tags on games in stores. Go after the pirates, and stop punishing the consumer with DRM. And lower the prices. The problem the music industry is having is probably mostly related to the fact that CDs are overpriced to the point of absurdity.

a) It's not cost effective.
b) Global markets makes it infeasible for the most part.
c) It's not cost effective.
d) See point (a)
e) It's not cost effective.

right click
save image as...

piratemoore.jpg

Didn't I just read that 25,000 game downloaders are getting sued in the UK?

The solution is making games as easy to get legitimately as to download off bittorrent.. put preinstalled versions of something like Steam or gametap on every PC sold.. with lots of free (ad supported) or demo content.. something like Wiiware or XBLA.

They won't punish pirates. They will however continue punishing paying customers with SecuROM nonsense, limited installs, and other "features".

The moral of the story? They want you to pirate their games.

Piracy must be eliminated.

People stop blaming DRM for piracy.. little whining bitches, Securom is a nightmare? give me a break, remember STARFORCE???

DRM EXISTS FOR ONE REASON: TO SLOW DOWN PIRATES!

If you are savvy enough to bitch about DRM chances are you are savvy enough to download a fucking crack if it bothers you that much.

Good on Peter Moore, Aye Matey!

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GC 2008: Peter Moore doesn't want to punish pirates

Reader Comments (33)

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