The Great Gaming Crusade: "The Internet is a glorious invention that facilitates the transfer of information across continents. Unfortunately, the Internet is also a glorious invention that allows the transfer of pirated games, software, movies, and music across continents. From copying floppy disks back in the late 80s and early 90s to downloading 14GB game rips in the present, piracy has only grown in its ravenous fervor. With high-speed, broadband internet becoming less expensive and wider-spread, it is time that developers understand what they are doing wrong in their fight against piracy, before it’s too late."
Microsoft announced its financial results for Q3 of fiscal year 2026, including an update on its gaming Xbox business and more.
Not looking good. Hopefully Asha Sharma is able to turn Phil’s disaster around.
To me it's still quite remarkable how they can cash-in 5.3bn in revenue in a single quarter, since their hardware is basically dead.
The stock mark is what makes Microsoft remarkable, They have convinced every institutional and retail investor to just keep piling money into them. Like many big tech giants they are just a big growing pyramid scheme. As long as people keep dropping money into ETF's that cover the market Microsoft will always be liquid. At the same time it is completely stifling innovation and competition. People need to start being more discreet in how they invest their money as it's killing the system.
Riiiiight because people will just flock back to them for one or two games per year.
15+ years of bad performance is what they call irreparable in business. It is time for them to sell off the assets and get out of entertainment.
These declines are on the back of extra revenue received from releasing games like Forza horizon 5 on PlayStation. So I’m being sarcastic here when I said they should go back to exclusives. Killing off a revenue stream from Ps5 sales will only make things worse
Thanks to the slip-up of an artist working on the title, we now have more evidence that a new Injustice game is in the works.
Spiders: "We're going to cut straight to the chase so you're not left wondering: After a long period without clear answers, we have received confirmation that Spiders is being liquidated.
What does it mean? This means the company as a whole no longer exists. We'll cease our functions immediately. The planned DLC will release via Nacon, and then-- well, that's it.
We're sorry that it's come to this and would like to thank each and every one of you for your support over the years.
If you have any questions or run into issues with your games, please contact Nacon directly as we'll no longer be able to reply."
if they are losing its because they think developing a full game and then chopping off bits to sell as dlc is okay on top of that releasing things at different times for different platforms WTF all this amongst a laundry list of issues makes me rent or miss a plethora of stuff out there (a lot of devs consider renting piracy)
My reasons why some people pirate games.
1. Price
2. DLC Milking
3. No Demo
4. They lost/damage original copy.
Look at Batman: Arkham City on Steam. It's plagued with Steam, Securom, and GFWL. People are losing their saves and cannot even activate DLC.
AVG is going apesh*t everytime I start the game up.
I think developers are struggling to find ways to deal various issues but their "solutions" alienate gamers.
PC DRM was supposed to prevent piracy but it didn't. What did happen is people who legally paid for games had difficulty getting games to work. Google securom to see customers reactions to PC DRM. PC DRM pissed off a lot of gamers. Some gamers started pirating games because those actually work, other gamers moved over to consoles.
Online passes were supposed to help encourage people to buy games new. In reality a lot of people who bought games new to finish in a week then sell them back would skip games with online passes because the resale value for the game is less. Online passes reduced the new game market (all used games were originally bought new by someone). Some people tried to find out what online passes were but couldn't get details on them so they passed on games that included them.
Some gamers complained in forums that they had to pay $10 for online passes because they didn't realize that the game included one (there is nothing on most game boxes saying that the game requires an online pass, or that new games include an online pass). This is enough of a problem that Sony changed the description for online passes on PSN to say that if you bought the game new you didn't need to buy an online pass. This pissed off more gamers!
There are also restrictions about "game sharing" for things that you download. If you buy a game new and it comes with an online pass and take the game over to a friends place to play you can be banned for "game sharing" even if you only use the online pass with a single disc. New games have more restictions than past games. This pissed off more gamers!
There are also cases of people getting their accounts banned because they made a comment on a forum that EA didn't like so EA took all their legally purchased games away! This pissed off more gamers!
DLC was originally supposed to add additional content to games but game developers started cutting content from games so that they could charge you for the cut content as DLC. The problem is people found out that the "Downloadable" content was already on the disc and just needed to be unlocked. This pissed off more gamers!
Discovering that on disc "DLC" pissed off gamers caused game developers to adapt. They continued to cut content but now gamers were forced to download the content that was cut from the original game (like Catwoman in Batman, or guns in Gears of War 3). Gamers knew that content was cut which pissed off more gamers.
Companies also had slow sales for new games so they decided to shutdown multi-player servers which prevents gamers from playing the games they legally purchased. This pissed off more gamers! Gamers realized that the new games servers would be shutdown in the future as well affecting new game sales negatively.
Game developers also started releasing games that were so broken that you weren't playable thinking that they could patch the game later. The problem is if you play a game for 30 hours then you lose your save game this REALLY pisses off gamers! Check out the comments on Skyrim for the ps3 on amazon, or the user ratings for Skyrim on the ps3 on metacritic to see some very pissed off gamers.
The gaming industry depends on gamers to purchase their products to survive but they keep doing things that piss off their customers reducing the number of people willing to buy their games.
In the mean time pirates continue to laugh about DRM because DRM only prevents people who legally purchase games from playing the games.
I have always believed that people pirate for different things. Some doing it because of hate for the developer or nefarious reasons. Others do it because it cost too much or their country restricts the game itself. However I feel most do it because they have been cheated in the past by developers on games they have purchased but were piles of crap.
Companies chest beating on their DRM does not help in the least either. You will never stop pirating unless you stop the abuse of DRM and have a outlet for people to return crap games.