The head of id Software shared his thoughts on dangers of piracy

Todd Hollenshead, head of id Software, the company which developed Quake and Doom, in the course of his speech at the Game Developers Conference (GDC), shared his views about the future of the PC as a gaming platform. According to him, in the coming years many leading gaming studios can give up developing games for PC because of the growing level of piracy According to the analysts, in 2004, the loss of American developers from pirates were four billion dollars. At the same time, about 50% of copies of games installed on american players PC`s are counterfeit. For the countries of Eastern Europe, Asia and South America, this factor reaches 90%. Despite this, biggest developers haven`t seen serious threat in the piracy until recently. It makes no difficulty to find free pirate copies of almost any new game in the network now - Battlefield 2142, Tom Clancy \ 's Rainbow Six Vegas, Fahrenheit, Need for Speed Carbon and so on. id Software is currently developing multi-users shooter Enemy Territory : Quake Wars, and the company is taking unprecedented steps to prevent internal leakage. However, despite all efforts, leaks could not be avoided, and on the Web from time to time screenshots of the game appear, employees of id, according to the head of id Software have nothing to do with. In order to prevent illegal copying of the game id is planning to distribute Enemy Territory with a special hardware key without which the game will fail to start. Hollenshead stressed that the development companies have to develop more effective methods of protection against copying physical media. It is also very important to educate users about the dangers of piracy. The first step is to change the attitude of the players to pirate products, BBC news says. Meanwhile, a recent study of analytical company Screen Digest showed that the complexity and high cost of the development of modern computer and play station games often makes such projects unprofitable. Much time and large amount of employees, required in the development, also reduce the final income.