Great news for the PC version.

shadowburnxxx posted...
Why? It's been available to pirates on consoles since before the game was even officially released.

I'm not sure why people think people don't pirate console games. It's no harder than pirating PC games.

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It's a well documented fact that new GameFAQs users have a hard time realizing that console piracy is alive and well, thriving in fact if you can, and do, take advantage of things such as some of Sony's screwups with the PS3 and PSP.

It's also a well documented fact that if new users aren't ignorant they are subsequently trolling when posting such comments. /shrugs.
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Stop complaining. I could have done this more painfully. - Dryad from Sacred 2.

Radar posted...

While it might be just as easy to pirate console games, getting them to run isn't. On the PC, the game is downloaded, patched, and played. On consoles, you have to first mod the system, which means that you have to buy extra equipment and hope you don't break the system, because it does void the warranty.

That's not exactly 100% accurate. The PSP can be "modded" by installing a custom firmware which can often be done without any extra hardware like a "pandora battery" at all. Furthermore Sony let slip a small problem with one of the PS3's firmware updates that let people "mod" the system to play pirated games without additional hardware as well.

If that weren't enough when it comes to PC piracy not only do you have to download, or apply, a crack for the game, but many times, though not necessarily a majority of times, there are bugs in the cracks or cracked executables that require obtaining new files.

Case in point is Dead Space 2 where somewhere around Chapter 9 there was a game-breaking bug in one of the pirated executables that wasn't present in the legitimate file. A host of posters on this site didn't realize that, posted asking about it, and effectively revealed to the community that they were pirates.

Then you have to contend with the general malware/spyware/virus/trojan obstacle course depending on what you download and where you download it from. Worse still on some torrent sites you have "white knight" type posters who try to report false positives for different torrents to scare people off from downloading them

Finally there's the patching issue. More specifically the issue you'll have on deciding whether to patch the game and crack it again, ignore patches, or bite your fingernails waiting for a crack to be released so you can update to the latest patch. For games like Borderlands this isn't necessarily an issue, unless you play multi-player, but for other games like Skyrim where many mods or mod-enablers/helpers like SKSE are only able to function on the most recent version or two this can be mandatory.

/shrugs. On an individual case by individual case basis I won't argue that PC piracy is most likely easier than console piracy, but when you add up all the ups/downs across multiple games, patches, systems, and everything else it's really hard if not impossible to definitively say one is easier than the other.
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Stop complaining. I could have done this more painfully. - Dryad from Sacred 2.

Radar posted...

That said, what about firmware? It's patches for consoles. And on some systems, like the Wii, without those updates, you can't play the game, no matter what.

That's where custom firmware developers come into play. I won't try to say that modifying firmwares for consoles is comparable to modifying those of handheld systems, but folks have been doing it for years with the PSP despite Sony trying to throw wrenches in their paths with their official firmware releases.

With customized firmwares and similar software-based piracy measures console and handheld piracy becomes as difficult as it is to use said firmware without bricking your system.

Even were that not an issue and we were dealing strictly with hardware-based methods such as "mod chips" it still falls subject to amortization of a sorts. Modding non-PC gaming systems with either custom firmwares or hardware/software bypasses like mod chips or swap discs/software (as per the PS2) has a higher initial difficulty/effort investment than using patches/cracks with PC games, but depending on how much upkeep those methods have and how many games you pirate for consoles/handhelds as opposed to PC games the overall difficulty factor on a per game basis can drop until it's well below that of PC games.

All that is, of course, ignoring that you can buy pre-modded systems and/or pay others to mod consoles for you which can put console/handheld piracy on par with PC piracy with the very first game and for each additional game go lower and lower than PC games in terms of per-game piracy difficulty.
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Stop complaining. I could have done this more painfully. - Dryad from Sacred 2.