I remember my first job out of college, I was asked to write code that caused our software to cheat at a certain industry benchmark. I was very junior, but still realized it was wrong. I finally worked up the courage to tell my boss that I had an ethical problem with doing this and wouldn't do it, and to my surprise, he said "Oh, that's fine! We treat software developers well here. I'll just give you a different bug ticket to work on!"
Jim, a few cubicles down from me had no problem writing the benchmark-cheating code. It's kind of futile.
It is worthwhile for us to read and reflect on the ACM Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct.*
If you consider mechanical and chemical engineering there are also people who develop nerve gas agents (usually deployed against civilians), butterfly mines, cluster munitions and incendiary artillery rounds ready to burn your enemies cities to the ground.
Some anti cheating / piracy software that "arguably works" is pretty tame compared to that.
Otherwise, I would be subjected to shitty racers who would ruin every race in the first lap, and cheaters who compete on hacks instead of talent.
I am also sure there are equivalent bad apples in every single gaming platform.
But sure, we can pretend that cheaters don’t matter as long as it’s not blatantly obvious to all other players.
How do you solve cheating problem though? When I sit down playing a multiplayer game I don't want to see anyone cheating, botting etc. It's not fun.
Yes it's a cat and mouse game between the cheat makers and the devs and anti cheat solutions are not perfect but without some anti cheat system most online games would be totally unplayable.
It works fine as far as I know.
Many of these solutions, both DRM and anti-cheat, work using the principle of checking if the user is using the original unmodified files, and checking if the user is not also modifying the memory of the running program with some tool.
Some people just like to cheat for the sake of it.
The only meaningful difference between Denuvo and floppy-DRM is that Denuvo employs a bit more sophisticated obfuscation scheme.
Funny, I don't remember any code wheel having kernel level access to my system... They also never caused performance issues https://www.extremetech.com/gaming/282924-denuvo-really-does...
I’ve bought games because there were no cracks available, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a game after pirating it.
There’s no way I’m alone in this.
I own literally thousands of games on Steam, and thousands more outside of Steam. I also relentlessly pirated every game I wanted to play for decades. The way to "fix" piracy is by companies providing a superior user experience, not by beating their paying customers with sticks.
The lack of availability of a pirate version of a game increases sales. This has been observed for many very popular games. Not so much for small and unknown ones.
At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.
> At the same time, I have paid for games when they became available in Steam, years after I have played them, so I disagree on that point.
Presumably for vastly less money than they were charging at launch?
I’ve seen this claim repeated often, but never with good evidence.
Plenty of others have pirated games and then paid for them. I often pirate games after paying for them. Piracy enables people to try games in genres they aren't willing to take a chance on at full price, it serves as a form of advertising giving people a chance to get into a game or franchise they might never have come across otherwise, and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.
I doubt a meaningful amount of people did this, but I’d love to see evidence to the contrary.
>and plenty of people (myself included) have refused to buy or play games until a crack is available.
Well, yeah, but it’s HN and we have all kinds of crazy people here who aren’t very representative of the overall market.
Multiple studies have shown that pirates are often the best customers. (see https://torrentfreak.com/pirates-spend-much-more-money-on-mu...)
It makes sense. If somebody is supper passionate about games, or music, or movies they might pirate to get early releases, alternate versions, and to try new things. Collectors may even want to keep their purchased media untouched/unopened or may just want easy access to their purchases.
I've pirated things I've purchased just because it was faster than ripping a CD myself or even going into the next room to take a DVD off the shelf and using the player.
But that’s a completely different claim, no?
Also, Torrentfreak is horrible quality agenda-pushing blogspam. I wouldn’t take their interpretation of a survey of unknown quality (which they didn’t even bother to link to) at face value.
And if we were to do that, perhaps the best explanation is that more technically oriented pirates were more likely to spend money on streaming services in 2016 than the average person. Perhaps piracy was just a proxy for tech savvy?
DRM today is largely used by bad publishers to prevent buyers from realizing how trash their games are before paying for them.