When DICE made Battlefield 3, it was PC first, and the PC version is superior in all aspects, including framerate, graphics, and simultaneous players of 64 vs 24 and so on. What happens to the superior version? It gets torrented to a ridiculous level. On torrent sites, a crack for Battlefield 3 has already made its way around the internet and several tens of thousands of people, 33k at one person’s count, decided to simply pirate the game.
This is no big surprise, but every 15,000 people pirating Battlefield 3 is $900,000 not put into someone’s pocket. That’s right, nearly a million dollars. This is why we have DRM in spades these days, and even then the legit gamers are getting a bum deal.
However, the cracked version has a major flaw that makes me wonder if those pirating it are completely missing the point of Battlefield, which is 64 people in team-based multiplayer combat. Those who play the cracked version will find they cannot take part in multiplayer or on official server.
According to Gamezone, an excuse used by pirates is that they don’t agree with Origin’s EULA that allows them to collect third-party info from users, never mind that this has been amended at some point in the past. Of course, theft is seldom justified. Theft is theft in my eyes and I’ve already put down my opinions on piracy, $60 isn’t a lot of money, but when 33k people band together with $60 each, it’s a colossal sum.
That’s a cool two million dollars from that count alone out of the budget for Battlefield 4, nice job breaking it, Hero.
Chris Hernandez
The argument could always be made that the money lost wasn’t money the company would actually see anyway. These same people either wouldn’t have bought the game at all or would have rented/ bought it pre-owned.
Maybe 2,000 people actually would have bought it new had they not been able to pirate it.
Nick Hernandez
Yeah.. piracy doesn’t actually hurt anything.. The people who want to buy it will, the ones who don’t well they don’t and for some “pirating” it is to simply do a demo to see if it’s worth while before putting their money down on the game.
Your way of looking at it is the horrible corporate way of thinking and what they are brain washing you to believe. They take home millions on a big title like this.. they aren’t hurting.
Deividas
60$ is a lot of money
Dgh
33 000 people, and games these days sell millions of copies, my, my, that must hurt poor old EA