Piracy isn’t exactly the best way to get what you want, especially since there are often extra risks involved with downloading things illegally. First is the obvious legal implications and the second is that many of the sites are often less than safe themselves, leaving you at risk of downloading viruses and other unwanted software. One uploader obviously knows this and has taken the opportunity to turn some extra profit from the piracy scene.
Posts have started appearing on TPB that a pirate copy of the Watch_Dogs is being circulated, that does actually contain the game, but also comes loaded with a few extra files, the most important of which being the sneakily named winlogin.exe, very similar to winlogon.exe, a genuine Windows service.
Turns out this sneaky file is a crypto currency mining app, which is using peoples hardware to mine a currency, most likely BitCoin or LiteCoin for the person who created the upload, effectively letting him steal from the people who are stealing the latest Ubisoft title.
It’s a little ironic really, and it’s not like the people involved have a legal fight here, but it’s certainly a great example of why piracy can be a gamble.
Thank you Reddit for providing us with this information.
Image courtesy of Reddit.
The game is that poorly coded it’d take 10 years to hash some coins as all resources are needed to run the game. #consoleport #avforums
Very true. lol
Well if you pirate you deserve it but some of these AAA games are so badly coded and full of bugs that never get patched it sometimes make me wonder why I paid for the garbage in the 1st place, that said I’ve learned my lesson and won’t pre order or buy any game until it goes on sale so if it’s buggy or crappy I don’t feel so bad about wasting my money. I couldn’t care less about pre order incentives.
I’d have to agree with that. Pre-Order incentives can actually break the early game.
I never get a game on release for the reason you’ve states, they’re often buggy and broken.
however, when you have 20GB worth of code (plus 20GB of pre-rendered cut scenes), it’s also not entirely suprising that it’s buggy and broken.
I support software thats about 2 or 3 GB and ALL OF THE BUGS.
99 little bugs in the code,
99 little bugs in the code,
Take one down, patch it around,
117 little bugs in the code
It really angers me when they release titles that are fundamentally stuffed. If they can’t make the release deadline, postpone it until it works as advertised but it’s all about making as much money as possible. The publishers don’t do themselves any favours by following this practice, in fact it alienates a lot of customers. Minor bugs are to be expected, it’s all part of the “game” but when you plonk down a whole wad of cash for a new release you want it to be playable immediately, not wait a day while a 6 gig patch downloads then to have salt rubbed into the wound when you find out it’s still all but unplayable.
EA are most famous for this hence I personally take absolutely no interest in ANY game of theirs anymore and it’s a shame because some title could be fun.
Watch Dogs, set to release in a couple of days was postponed for a bit while problems were ironed out and that’s the way to do things (lets just hope the wait was worth it), it doesn’t look good when a new franchise with a massive budget launches and all it receives is negative press, not because it’s a lousy game (and I doubt very much it will be) but because it’s more buggy than a mangy, flea bitten junk yard dog.
I have to agree that it’s highly frustrating to have a game released with so many bugs.
Back when patching was a pain in the backside or not possible, games had to be made to a higher standard and were released with better written code.
Publisher deadlines don’t help anything at all. as you said, EA are very good at bodging launches.
The fact that a game has to be out before Holiday X, no matter what, is a really bad practice.
Something that all the large publishers seem to not get these days.
There will be bugs, that’s coding for you, in fact, when everything is working, that means something is going to go very wrong normally.
But you expect games to be released to a higher level of quality.
Granted. if 100,000 people get the game on release and each play 3
hours, that’s 300,000 hours of bug finding right there… And QA testers
just can’t keep compete with that.
Very true wayne, you can spend your hard earned money on pig porn.
What does it take for you to write an article about something? A post on 4chan? For Christ’s sake. There is NO bitcoin mining virus to be found within any of the watch dog pirate releases. This is simply hearsay, something 4chan does more often, which you would know if you were familiar with the imageboard in question. To make it even more questionable, there is no ”official” Skidrow group. Nobody from Skidrow communicates with the world because it’s a private group. Skidrow does not ”call anything out” and never will. Skidrowcracks.net are a bunch of amateurs trying to be Skidrow, which makes their releases about as legitimate as any other group out there.
None of the info in the post checks out
Nobody has reported a virus.
If you also knew something about ButtCoins you’d know that at best the ”uploader” would make about 1 to 2 USD a day from this little scheme, and that’s with 50.000 users infected.
Shame on you for not checking your sources.
Earning 1-2 a day from one release, while you sit on your arse and do nothing, isn’t too bad to be fair. What if this was the first of many? If he released another 50 torrents all with the same, going unnoticed, he’d be on 50-100 a day 😉
1. it isn’t stealing, it’s PIRATING.
2. that’s fucked up
1. The only difference is physical and digital world. If you keep stealing from a shop, even if you don’t get caught, that shop will eventually go out of business from lack of sales. Same thing with piracy.
How in the fuck is it the same thing with piracy? When you steal a freaking cereal box from a shop, the market loses a physical box of cereal, meaning it loses the money it would have got for said box. When you pirate a game, they don’t lose money. They loses exactly nothing. It’s impossible to count loses in this situation, because you can’t know if the person would’ve bought the game in the first place. The product is digital, meaning it’s an infinite amount of supply. Also, many who pirate end up buying the game anyway, how does that factor in the calculation of the loses due to piracy? You know how the companies lose money? Second-hand games. When you go and buy a used game, the guys who developed it get nothing. That copy could travel through many people. not just two, so the product has been sold more times than it was supposed to, with the developers only getting money for the first purchase. This means that instead of them getting profit for, let’s say, 7 copies, they get profit for just one copy that has been sold 7 times, to 7 different people. That means they have lost 6*amount the game costs. Gamestop and places like that is the actual cause of loses.
While we’re at it, fighting piracy is like clearing the driveway while it’s snowing. It’s stupid to try and DRM is the worst “solution”, because it hurts the guys who buy these games (referring to SimCity launch, Diablo 3 etc.). Pirates will get through anyway, they sometimes even get the games days before official launch (downloaded a pirated version of Watch Dogs two days ago and am playing it with no hiccups, while waiting for my preorder to arrive) so DRM is the most useless and unnecessary shit ever! Seriously, it’s a lose-lose situation.
Also, I suggest reading this: http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/TommyRefenes/20130318/188683/Apathy_and_refunds_are_more_dangerous_than_piracy.php
Have a great day, everyone!
“It’s impossible to count loses in this situation, because you can’t know
if the person would’ve bought the game in the first place” That arguement is entirely invalid. If a shop lifter goes into a supermarket and runs out with a leg of lamb, you could easily say he would not have bought that otherwise.
Pre-Owned games are just the same as every other second hand purchase ever, so, again, that argument is invalid, that’s just how the world works. Could you imagine if Ebay had to give a percentage back to each manufacturer for everything it sold?
DRM is shit, no point denying that. I wish they had a means to make it less intrusive or suger coated it in a better way. you’re right, adds hurdles for the customer, hurdles that are simply removed by pirates.
I’m not going to sing the anti piracy crap as i think there are two sides to every coin.
however i will say that if someone deserves the money, they should get it.
in your case, you say you’ve already got a pre-order and you just wanted to start playing the game ASAP, for me personally, I’d say that’s probably the best possible situation.
however, some people get most their single player games as pirated versions with the intention of never paying a penny. I’d say that’s unfair, a team of people have worked for potentially 5 years to make a game and that person doesn’t want to pay a penny towards their hard work.
Granted, some software shouldn’t cost £50 a pop, and some profesional software shouldn’t cost £500 + (I’m looking at Adobe here). In some cases, people can only pirate otherwise they have no choice but either go with an inferior product or go without.
I’m pretty sure that if this idiot download this pirated game i’m pretty certain that the idiot download other pirated games as well could it be that you/he discovered this virus from another pirated game that you downloaded on your computer and you want to blame skidrow for it or are you one of skidrow competitors or maybe just maybe you work for ubisoft hmmm just speculations just may be true cause i read on forms others haven’t experience any of these crashes and nor did they find or see “winlogin.exe” in the task manager or the resource monitor or any of the bs you claim.
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