StarCraft II pirated 2.3 million times via BitTorrent

Nice speech : D

Ran out of space. Disclaimer: I am not a pirate, I do not condone piracy in the face of legit alternatives...nor am I a PC gamer. I turned my back on PC gaming partially because of not being able to afford the upgrade treadmill, and partially because my PC is mine; when DRM became invasive, I switched to being a console gamer. I personally believe that if companies took logical, rational measures to reduce piracy rather than taking a 'jail them all, let God sort 'em out' attitude, if they began treating their paying customers as customers rather than as criminals, and if they gave potential customers the ability to make informed purchases and/or spread word-of-mouth [how many copies of Starcraft 1 were purchased due to spawning with a friend?] the problem would largely go away. It won't be eliminated completely, there will always be someone that can justify it in their mind, but it could be reduced back to a non-issue.

At the end of the day, it's not a black and white situation; no party involved is wholly innocent in their part of the problem. - Some pirates are indeed sleazy, taking the 'why buy it when I can get it for free' attitude. They are lost sales. A subset of these guys are the really unscrupulous 'why download it for free when I can pirate it for free' ones, which were made famous by the Humble Indie Bundle. - Some pirates use torrents as a glorified demo, as a way to be sure their $60 isn't wasted. Reviews don't guarantee a specific person will like it; there's plenty of times I've loved games that got slammed in reviews, and hated games that got a coveted 10. - Some pirates are OCD, collecting ISOs they'll never so much as burn for the sake of collecting them. - Some pirates are paranoid about DRM; they'll buy a legal copy, then go snag a torrent with the DRM stripped out to actually play. - Some pirates take the 'The company treats me like a criminal, so I may as well reap the benefits of it' stance; normally honest people that are tired of being treated like crap by the companies they used to support. - Some pirates use it in lieu of 'spawning'; they'll snag something to play at a Lanparty, but never touch again. - Some pirates replace legally-purchased but lost/stolen/broken media. - Some pirates are willing to deal with a foreign language to not have to wait until a company 'gets around to it' for localization. - Finally, some pirates cannot find what they want for legit purchase, and turn to downloads as a last resort; the ones that heard all the stories about games from before they got into it, and want to see for themselves. Good Old Games is carving out quite the nice niche for themselves there, so this group should disappear as GOG becomes a mainstay. And the companies are doing very little to encourage people to be honest. Some are even punishing the honest people. - Gamers cannot return games if they end up not liking it. - DRM techniques that hit false positives for honest purchasers. - DRM techniques that subtly or not-so-subtly take over the user's computer. - DRM techniques that throw a fit if 'blacklisted' programs are installed, no matter what purpose the user has them for [such as running legally-ripped copies to prevent damage to physical media] - Companies that rule their roost with an iron fist, leveling unrealistic expectations of their paying customers [Kids want to play on a road trip? Sorry, we won't let you, they don't have broadband in the car! Internet access cut out in the middle of a game session? You must be a pirate in disguise, flag the copy! Upgrade your hardware? You're a pirate, we know it!, et cetera]. - Companies that demand it be played the way they say it should be played. Today it's banning someone from using their legally-purchased product for cheating on the single-player game. Tomorrow, it could be banning someone for rushing in an RTS, bunny-hopping in an FPS, or even e-braking across the line in a racing game. At the end of the day, people...even honest ones...will take the path of least resistance. When one option is 'Go to store, plop down an inordinate amount of money in blind faith on something that cannot be returned or re-sold (due to DRM) if unsatisfied, drive home, put in disc, jump through a dozen related hoops, pray authentication servers are up, install nannyware that takes over the customer's computer, stand on one leg, hold breath, spin around 3 times while humming 'Stars and Stripes Forever', then finally get to play the game...maybe...and if you do anything the devs don't like, your game is bricked' [Heaven help you if your OS panics or a hard drive dies and your hardware signature changes...] and the other is 'Go to website, click link, wait for download, run virus scanner on download, burn to disc/mount ISO directly, install game, play game'...a lot of honest people are going to be tempted. The sooner the industry learns that locks are created to keep honest people honest [most burglars can get past a lock with little effort...or will just opt for the window], that the game is not about 'beating' the pirates but luring them away from their habits, the sooner the problem goes back to the shadows it was in 15 years ago. In the late 90s/early 2000s, piracy was less of a big deal because one option was 'go to store, buy game [that can't be returned, but can be resold], go home, install game, input CD-key, play game', and the other was 'scour net for reliable site, click link, pray someone is hosting, wait ages to download, run virus scanner, reconstitute .rar file into a single archive, run virus scanner again, find crack, run virus scanner on crack, find keygen, run virus scanner on keygen, install game, pray game works'; piracy was more trouble than it was worth to the layman, so they didn't do it.

blizzard is already drowning in money, those guys are just helping them!

I wouldn't pirate games if I could. My internet provider cuts half of the speed if they see any bit torrents on the computer.

So what if they pirate it? You still need a copy of the game registered to your battle.net account to play it. Unless you got a cracked offline only version in which case you're missing the whole point of the game. recaptcha: W-herewma. Say it out loud.

@ CancerMan Yea ok there were plenty I pirated and played but never paid for but the fact remains 1 torrent does not necessarily mean 1 lost sale.

@JohnyMaverick Yeah I payed for every game I ever pirated and liked too, *wink*.

OH SHIT that's a lot of data.

hmph, well those pirates don't care about Multi Player at all. Not like there's LAN, and I'm willing to bet a lot of people who pirated it actually bought it later on, people like to use torrents as demos.

What people forget is somebody who pirates a game doesn't always not pay for it. As somebody who used to pirate games, if I liked it more often than not I'd end up buying it anyway, perhaps not for release price but always new (try finding second hand PC games in Portugal where I grew up and you'll understand why I couldn't have bought them used if I'd wanted to). These days I've left home and have enough money to lay down cash on anything I want to play. But really that's beside the point, the point is if your game is good, is on PC, is as good on PC as it is on other platforms, isn't six months or more late and isn't wrapped up in oppressive, horrible DRM, it'll sell just fine on PC and what's more it'll enjoy a better longevity in sales than it will on console. Starcraft II isn't going anywhere soon, I mean look how long it look them to make this sequel and look how much content is yet to come. Give it 2 years and it'll have broken five million sales, not counting the single player expansions, which will probably sell a further couple of million individually, and what's more it'll all keep selling for years to come. I mean christ, they're still making a profit off the first game today.

damn. not 1st. :'( WWWWAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HAHAHAHA poor Blizzard lol

First!!! (1st time i've sed this so don't rain on my parade...) Anyway. Wow. that's like a lot of data. oh well, blizzard still has millions from WOW so...

Thats too bad, its worth the 60 bucks.

THis amuses me