So, a couple people may buy a copy becuase they were able to get a pirated version. And thousands more will just pirate the game and leave it at that.

dahwnpapaya

...And the games industry will still turn a profit next year.

Step 1: Pot-noodle states that the exact same product offered for free and easily accessed will not greatly affect the sales of the one priced at retail.

Step 2: Pot-noodle fails his commerce class or wins the noble prize in Economics for turning current theory on its head.

Nikalai_88

Instead of being rude about things, how about showing proof that someone who downloaded a pirated game, would of, in anyway shape or form, brought said game, had the download not been available? you can not, nor can i, or the games industry.

There is no way to tell that someone downloading a pirated game, effects the gaming economy as a loss. for all we know, pirated games help sell them. as stated in my posts, "I would like to know how many people downloaded the game, then went on to purchase a legit copy"

I know a few people who have downloaded the game, but then couldn't join me in MP mode, so went out and brought the game. and i can guarantee they are not alone in doing so, so from what i could tell there, is that the Pirated game actually HELPED sell the game. and thus did not have a detrimental effect on the gaming industry like they would have you believe.

don't listen to these guys, they don't live in the real world. in the real world where people cant spend 2000 dollars on a high end gaming pc, the 8600gts is a very solid card. i have a 8600gt and have been Extremley impressed with it. it's really stable, even though i bought it superclocked and then overclocked it myself, all on stock cooling. it can run must games on high or max settings smoothly, it's very reliable, and for the price, a great card to get.

now, if your looking for a game to shut the mouth of your friend, get crysis. your card should be able to handle med-high settings with ease, and even at those your friends jaw will drop. i play it with shaders on high and most other things on low, and it still looks much better than anything on the 360.

with_teeth26

Also a lot of people have a misconception that higher res ='s sharper looking, you can get just as good screen quality but with faster frame rates at a lower res with 2 x AA so best thing to do is experiment, higher res means its having to draw more to each pixel, with today's cards AA isn't such a performance hit as it used to be. where as higher res can be. try running crysis on a very high res and watch your FPS drop, then run it on a lower res with AA x 2 or 4 or even 8, still looks just as good but the performance hit isn't as bad. AA is for people who cant run games at super res. anyone using AA on a high res is just waisting performance. AA tries to blend the jagged edges of sharp lines with the background to reduce or get rid of the "stepping effect", higher res means less jagged edges meaning, where is the point in applying AA as its hardly going to be noticeable.

As for what game to get to show off your hardware? anything that's younger than a year old should do.

I'm going to go out on a limb of not being moderated and/or banned and say the reason my friend pirates games is because the digital purchase is not on steam, shops are too far away to warrant going there for one game (40 minutes drive theer and back) and relying on it to come through the mail is too unreliable.

He thinks all games should be released on steam.
moshakirby18

When i was doing my research i came across a very good find. it was when Sony released the PSP update to allow people to play PS1 games on the PSP.

Now the thing is, they kind of shot them selves in the foot with that one, as it only allowed you to play PS1 games that were payed for and then downloaded via the PlayStation store, this enraged some people who already had the originals sitting in cases at home and they questioned why they were being forced to pay for a game they already owned? so this in turn had a knock on effect of more people using custom software to allow the use of PS1 games on the PSP that they already owned.

[QUOTE="SOTE"]there is pirating on every system genius ever heard of modchips? so stop trying to be a fanboy on an issue that is concerning the industry as a whole and not a reason to make more console games so you can ***** about how xbox is saving the world one pirate at a time with gears of war 2 exclusive cause its not...moshakirby18

Actually its about the same for PC games to be pirated, as it is to pirate PSP and PS2 games, i think you mean, its easier to use a pirated PC game than that of the others.

As for the PS3, it can run Linux OS, so i doubt it needs a chip to make it viable for copied games. but then this talk is treading on dodgy ground. so I'm going to stop just there.

As for Steam games, yes they have been pirated, they by pass the steam account process so you don't even need steam to be installed to run them, its not hard to do a bit of research, (if you want to know why i know so much about it, i did a thesis on the effects of pirating on the gaming industry for a university project) then its just a matter of finding someone hosting an illegal server for online play.

I applaud the efforts of games companies to try to protect their games, from the studies I have done, the best way for a games studio to safeguard their work, is with the use of CD key checks, although it doesn't stop the use of the single player side of things, it does mean that someone would have to get an original copy of the work to be able to play online (or at least an original CD key), on official servers.

What i put to anyone though, is if you have an original game, that gets scratched beyond repair, would you down load a pirated game as a means to play the original still? or would you quite happily go out and pay for the same game a second time?

Its amusing how so many companies and forums shy away from talking about pirated games, i can understand why, but with so many questions that need to be asked, and no one is prepared to have that little bit of room or scoop to allow the discussion.

I frown on people asking for where to get them, so i can understand moderators coming down hard on that side of it,

But doesn't it interest you to find out...

1. Why people download games in the first place?

2. How many people who have downloaded a game and then gone on to buy it?

3. Why the games industry still wants you to put the game disk in the CD drive, to run the game, even though a No CD patch Proves that the copy protection doesn't work, and the fact you do not need the game in the drive to run it?

4. why the games industry still believes that copy protection is going to stop there game being copied?

I find these issues very interesting, yet hardly come across any games studios asking these questions in public?

lol someone change the topic title to "The Big GS / GF question"

As for piracy, who cares if someone is pirating the game,

To start with you can not prove that the person who had pirated it, would of gone out and brought it had the download NOT been available in the first place, so no one can honestly say for sure that it has any effect what so ever on the games industry (Please note the gaming industry made over 18billion last year http://uk.gamespot.com/news/6184847.html and that DOESNT include PC sales) so if piracy was effecting the gaming market as much as people said it was, then i highly doubt they would of even come close to that figure.

I find it funny how so many people are against something that has inadvertently helped a lot of people out, in the form of no CD cracks. i know its a sour subject but if it wasn't for the nocd crack Race driver GRID would be a nice coaster sitting in its display case at the moment, because of securom (check out the grid forums if you don't believe me)

As for the PC suffering due to piracy, people single out the PC for pirated games, when the PS2 has the highest amount of pirated games going.

I don't condone piracy, but i don't make a song and dance about it either. if someone wants to pirate games for what ever reason, then that's up to them. but it doesn't make as much of a dent as people would have you believe.

At the end of the day, if you researched, you would see that on average, a new game will have around 900 to 1000 sometimes even 3000 people downloading a pirated game, this number is small compared to the 1million to 2million copies they sell legitamately for a high quality game. and doesn't take into account of those with out the means or no how to download a game illegally.

Copy protection is a joke, and i can not understand why people are still trying to "protect their games" with electronic counter measures, half the time the games are cracked with in a day, or sometimes made available before they even hit the release date?

I would like to see is a survey done that shows how many people went on to buy games based on an illegal download of it? now that would make for some interesting reading.

As almost everyone else has said, do not get a laptop, they go out of date faster than a cheesy bun. and you can not upgrade them past the ram / hard drive. (sometimes the CPU if your lucky)

Also as someone has stated, MAC are only really good for editing video / making music / work related things.

Shop around, you might be lucky, never go for the first price you see,

And NEVER believe the hype about having to spend over £1000 on a decent gaming rig.

OK i come from the land of stupidly high prices (the UK) but from what I've seen you can get things in the US a hell of a lot cheaper.

I build my PC for £590 and although on the exchange rate that comes in at over $1100, if i was in the US, i would of been able to build it for a lot cheaper (damn those websites that don't export to other countries)

Anyway, system specs below

Q6600 (quad core CPU, but a duel core will be just as good)

2 gig of DDR2 @ 800mhz

Gigabyte SLI motherboard

8800GTX 768meg version

its best to shop around, but if you can find one website doing things cheaper than any other, get it all from the one source, will save a lot in postage.

The one thing you do have on your side at the moment, is that the new nvidia 9800 has just come out, so if you can find a website clearing their stock of 8800s, you should get it a lot cheaper than when it first came out, its a very good card, and its going to take at least 3 years for it to start struggling with in games id imagine (it was around the same amount of time for 6800ultra to start showing its age)

But as you are new to PC gaming, or rig building, the one thing i strongly recommend getting, is a power supply that can handle it.

Rule of thumb for PC gaming is build a very good rig to start with and you will spend less time and money upgrading when things start looking their age.

The misconception about PC gaming is that your constantly upgrading to run the latest games. this is a view only made by those unfortunate enough to not be able to build a monster rig to start with. where person goes out and gets a low to medium end rig, that will last about a year before they have to start upgrading, the high end rig will last about 3 to 4 years before it starts struggling, its been like this since the days of the 486 DX2 66 and voodoo graphics cards and ATI rage pro's

This is true about everything PC. the higher end stuff takes longer to start struggling, so saves you money in the long run.

Many moons ago (about 2 years actually) i purchased a so called top of the line 550w PSU, to run my old p4 3gig and Geforce 6800ultra. it was a thermal-take PSU, it had a lovely Big fan on it. anyway, one day i was happily playing away when all of a sudden, the PC lost power.

Upon closer inspection, the internal fan had stopped working and overheated the PSU to the point it just stopped giving out power.

Anyway, cash was tight at that point, (having my son on the way an all) so i had no choice but to opt for a cheaper alternative, to power a £450 GPU (at that time) So got my self nice cheap Q-TEC650W PSU (£31) , anyway cut a long story short, I'm still using my 650W PSU, its now powering a Q6600 Core 2 Quad, with a 8800GTS and 3 hard-drives

I always find it funny how, people believe that the more expensive something is, the better its going to be....

I linked because it took me all of 2 seconds to search Google for the information.

He was lazy because of the way he asked, I was lazy in the way I answered.

Problem?

(Is there some strange problem with this damn board, every time I've sorted out my post, once posted, its grouped words together as if i haven't used the space bar?)

http://enthusiast.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTIzMywxLCxoZW50aHVzaWFzdA==

read /digest and enjoy