How to prevent piracy.

employ ninjas to fight the pirates

They are always some people who would even pirate games that you can get under 1$. Thats how their nature is, and you wont change it. So the devs and pubs should focus on the paying customers, that is: - realising bug-free products - focus on the story and details not only on the graphics - offer their products for a fair price, 60€ for a 4-hours-playtime game is cheeky - focus on the community and updates/free downloads - a plastic box and a dvd in it is cheep, I like the blizzard game cases, you always have something to read in it, a short story summary and some pics

Long story short, if you want to stop or reduce the piracy, you have to release a good product people want to buy, but in the end you wont stop it completely.

Hamachi. And Lan.

If you really want to prevent piracy do what Steam does, and what Gabe Newell believes in.

How to prevent piracy:
1- Stop making milk-cow games!
2- Make PROPER DEMO's!
3- make good games
4- Dont lie about the features
5- keep your promise!

i think your on the right track but i think you should expand that answer to : Have Devs make games that dont suck and actually have a good price. Oh and i almost forgot, games that are finished/ aka not in beta :/

Jeez, my list how to stop piracy is expanding. There is much wrong in todays game development....

I thought piracy was dead... Why would you pirate anything if there is a free game being given away every other week here and there (Metro 2033, PvZ, Green Man Gaming games, etc.), and if it's not free, you can pick it up for a dollar or two (HIB, Amazon packs, Steam sales, etc.)

I don't know about everyone else, but with the competition between digital distribution stores as fierce as it is, I don't think I have to buy another game over a $1 ever again and never run out of games to play in my lifetime.

Make games easy to install(steam did it, i think)and use and thank make it cheap(like steam does on sales) and there will be less piracy

Ridiculous.

To me it would work if the games weren't so damn expensive. Secondly, developers with lots of money kind of start to suck most of the time, they only keep wanting more and more with stupid DLC and pay to win stuff. Awful, just awful.

A good method to prevent cyber-piracy is to make a brilliant game and to not ask for a huge price for it. People will buy it to show support for decent developers. But when developers make a not so brilliant game and ask 60 euros on it.. that's well deserved piracy.

Create quality product and lower prices. ubiSHIT and Electronicfarts (bugs in Assasin Creed 3 , Far Cry 3 ) , ( crap like Medal of Honor Warfighter better I not buy it)know how to fail.

I think a good method of preventing some piracy would be to stop combating it so stupidly. I mean really, no matter how much DRM you stuff into a game all you're doing is inconveniencing your legitimate customers and giving them more reason to pirate the game.

lol, I read the name of the thread as "How to prevent pregnancy." :D

I hate pirates... thanks to them we have crappy ports, stupid drm, great companys going bankrupt, lot of crappy F2P games, less single player games are released...

Armed crew.

I'm partly a pirate. I have eyepatch and wooden leg.:) All I need is a parrot and a ship! Yarrr!

I'll tell you right now why most pirates avoid cracking multiplier : So that people actually buy the games. They can and have cracked multiplier before countless times.

No. NOOOOO! OH GO NO! NO! NOOOOOOOOOOO!

Agree. I almost NEVER buy a singleplayer only game.

All you can do is curb piracy. A lot of games don't need and shouldn't have multiplayer (I'm sure there is at least one game you've played this year that was primarily single player with a tacked on multiplayer). Personally I think if you release a quality game at a fair price, you will have more legit players than not. Also maybe in the future we'll see more services like OnLive, where you really can't pirate the game.

Until then Steam DRM FTW (while files can be cracked and played as soon as they are preloaded - aka even before the official release date - Valve makes sure this continues to be more of a pain in the arse, esp. on the individual pirate compared to a group who releases the files).

It's kind of ironic that person with AC3 (the game, which really encourages me to pirate games[Uplay <3 and Boston lag, which makes the game unplayable on a pretty good PCs]) starts a topic on how to end the piracy...

This will ruin gaming, not prevent piracy.
A good way to reduce and prevent piracy is to get rid of all those shifty DRMs and create quality products. Take a look at GoG.com.
And I am saying this as a dev.

And if you are really looking for a way to make piracy impossible I'll give you one: Cloud computing. Move everything in to the cloud and use online streaming for delivering the output. This way the user won't have access to the app its self.
But it sux. If the Internet goes down the user gets screwed. And if the user doesn't have the money when the subscription expires or if the user doesn't have access to a payment system or if the system has problems, he's back to pen & paper.
And let's not forget the Internet speed.

It is very simple, give people good salary and lower price for AAA titles and people wont have a need to get pirated game.

Why you might ask ? Well average salary in my country is about 200 euro average new game title is about 50 euro if i would buy new games that i like every month i would starve because i wouldn't have money for foor and bills. In other hand average salary in us is about 3k usd and average price of game is 50 usd.