Dear Future Gamer,
Thursday evenings are much looked forward to now FG is delivered to my mailbox - good work guys!
I started out with a ZX81 years ago and progressed to a Speccy, ST (incidentally I even spent £200 for 4Mb of memory on that one!), then a P60 and currently a P200MMX. The Spectrum had good, cheap games and I was horrified to find I out it was £25 for an ST game after spending an average of a fiver on the Spectrum.
In the '80s I can understand why piracy was rife - £25 to £35 for a game of (at the most) 1Mb; and disks were relatively cheap and games quick and easy to copy.
Now though, excluding budget titles, even you can buy games for £20 from a retailer and these come on CD, span hundreds of megabytes, took months to develop and give hours, possibly days and months of enjoyment. Games are no longer bad value for money, especially considering the support, extra levels and so on which software companies supply us with after the games' release.
What I am saying is choose your software well and there is no need for piracy any more - no-one can argue they can't afford software if they own a PC! Judging by the amount of software companies in trouble at various times, it can't be a licence to print money can it?
With CD Writers becoming more popular I am worried that publishers will react by re-introducing annoying "copy protection" such as "Please enter word 3 at parag... etc" does anyone remember trying to get into JetSet Willy 2 (spectrum) and F1GP (PC)?
Games are cheaper and better now than they have ever been. Piracy is theft and spoils everyone's gaming experience in the end! Please don't think that I'm taking the moral high ground here for the sake of argument or that I'm in any way connected to the software industry because I am not - I just don't want to get lower quality games or have to type in words to play a game.
Yours sincerely,
Anthony
FG:
I do indeed remember the old-fashioned manual protection that early PC games came with and no, I wouldn't like to see a return to that system, but software houses do have to protect their investments. It's not so much the small-scale piracy that worries them - someone copying a CD and flogging the copy to their mates - but the large scale operations, based mainly, but not exclusively in Asia, whereby copies are made in the tens of thousands. And although games are not such bad value for money, people do love a bargain.
