Advert In Retro Gamer


TheMinder

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I bought my copy of August's Retro Gamer late this month so apologies for the "old hatness" of this thread (i've done a search and couldn't find a mention of this), but something in the ad caught my eye and i thought it might be a discussion point.

Near the bottom of the ad "BitTorrent" is mentioned as being a source for games etc for the 2X, and this comes near enough just under the adverts for the "commercial" releases like Vektar and Payback.

If torrents of Vektar and Payback appear (let's ignore the "protection" they have) will that be welcomed by the retail sites/developers ?

Obviously not mentioning torrents in the ad doesn't stop them existing, but if people begin to pirate GP2X commercial releases can there be any point in moaning when the advert for the 2X promotes using torrents to get illegal ROMs and the like (i know it doesn't explicitly say that, but let's be grown up - what else are you going to be torrenting ?)
 
BitTorrent is a fact of life, several commercial games use it for updates (e.g. WoW) and dowloads.

There's no reason why it shouldn't be used for free games so it's not strictly encouraging piracy.

As for commercial games, the only way pirated versions are going to appear is if someone buys them, then shares them, so own up which one of you is going to do it? :)
 
Don't worry, as soon as games like Vektar and Payback appear on the torrent, I'll make everything to force that site closed.
 
Can you give us some context for this bit about BT? I can't imagine why that'd be in any 'official' GP2X ad. Sure, you can use BT to distribute commercial works or other legitimate things like Linux ISOs or game updates, as many organizations/companies are doing, as it offloads the ordinary massive network traffic loads and associated bandwidth costs-- but games like Vektar and Payback just aren't that big; there's no reason to distribute them that way and I doubt the sellers involved wish to write custom software to secure distribution only to legitimate buyers.

Which mostly leaves the statement to be interpreted as using BT for downloading ROM sets. Which is kind of a shady thing to mention in an ad, but let's not kid ourselves either- no one on GP32X is dumping the ROMs from their own legally purchased cartridges and multi-thousand dollar arcade PCB collections to play in their favorite GP2X emulators. But you don't usually come right out and say, "Buy _______! You can play games you downloaded illegally off the internet!"
 
I guess since there aren't that huge number of licenses sold of Vektar and Payback, it will be good if publishers started adding a watermark in each copy of their games that will point to the license's owner, this way if it was ever pirated, we can find who did it, sue them, and use the money to buy both GPH and GP and merge them back into one company :D

No seriously, we use this method in our company, and it will be easier if games were sold as soft copies for download.
 
Epicenter posted on Sep 11 2006 at 11:20 AM said:
but games like Vektar and Payback just aren't that big;

Payback actually is over 300 MB big... it's fully dubbed :)
But it won't be officially be distributed via a torrent...
 
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Payback actually is over 300 MB big... it's fully dubbed smile.gif
But it won't be officially be distributed via a torrent...
I'd expect so. Usually torrented things are, for example, 1400MB 2CD Linux distributions and massive game updates with hundreds of thousands of simultaneous downloaders. :lol:

sehs33 posted on Sep 11 2006 at 04:21 AM said:
I guess since there aren't that huge number of licenses sold of Vektar and Payback, it will be good if publishers started adding a watermark in each copy of their games that will point to the license's owner, this way if it was ever pirated, we can find who did it, sue them, and use the money to buy both GPH and GP and merge them back into one company :D
Like GPH could afford to sue some small-time software pirate; they can't afford to install D-Pads into their machines. :p
 
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For context etc i will try to scan the ad in tomorrow and up it for people to see (unless craig ups a copy himself in the mean time)
 
The bit torrent thing is talking about tv shows etc. that you don't have to re-encode them. Not all torrents are illegal, infact there are hundreds of legal torrents.

Since the BBC put their shows on their website like topgear etc. and also have torrents from the topgear site, and brag on the topgear site that topgear is the most torrented show on the internet, i don't think they mind.

I was not talking about torrenting warez.
 
EvilDragon posted on Sep 11 2006 at 10:13 AM said:
Don't worry, as soon as games like Vektar and Payback appear on the torrent, I'll make everything to force that site closed.
lol. piratebay.
 
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It's probably better to be a tiny bit more vague. It's talk like that that sets off people like the RIAA-- it's more to your advantage to just say, 'Plays your downloaded TV shows and movies' than 'Plays your TV shows downloaded through BitTorrent', etc. as in most places, BT is still viewed as being mostly for piracy. So the negative conotations are the first people think of.
 
I got a dodgy copy of Payback from torrentialgp.com the other day, and it quite literally made my GP2X go backwards.
 
craigix posted on Sep 11 2006 at 03:06 PM said:
The bit torrent thing is talking about tv shows etc. that you don't have to re-encode them. Not all torrents are illegal, infact there are hundreds of legal torrents.

Since the BBC put their shows on their website like topgear etc. and also have torrents from the topgear site, and brag on the topgear site that topgear is the most torrented show on the internet, i don't think they mind.

I was not talking about torrenting warez.
:D Yay for BBC embracing technology
 
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Goity posted on Sep 11 2006 at 05:52 PM said:
craigix posted on Sep 11 2006 at 03:06 PM said:
The bit torrent thing is talking about tv shows etc. that you don't have to re-encode them. Not all torrents are illegal, infact there are hundreds of legal torrents.

Since the BBC put their shows on their website like topgear etc. and also have torrents from the topgear site, and brag on the topgear site that topgear is the most torrented show on the internet, i don't think they mind.

I was not talking about torrenting warez.
:D Yay for BBC embracing technology
Ditto.
There's some good stuff starting to come out of the BBC nowadays.
 
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