Rock, Paper, Shotgun

22/11/2007 at 23:38 Cigol says:

I bought Football Manager from Sports Interactive and found that despite owning the game it wouldn’t recognise the disc – I tried everything recommended to no avail. So in the end I had to resort to downloading a crack and voila; the game I paid money for suddenly worked.

This got me banned from their official forums because apparently it’s illegal to use cracks (?) but I’d wager it’s a little less than ethical to sell a game that at the drop of a hat can decide it’s no longer going to work.

Their copy protection prevented me from playing the game I paid for and forced me into the position of using a crack, that they didn’t respond to my emails (or concerns) and I remain banned to this day only means they’ve lost a customer and a once vocal supporter of their game at that.

There are many, many stories of copy protection actually hurting sales and IP’s in ways that might not be readily apparent but the bubble has burst for me and it will for those of you ignoring this post one day also.

22/11/2007 at 23:56 Marcos Castrillon says:

I download quite a few games because:

1- It grates me to pay the same price filthy englanders pay when my wages are, comparatively, like a fifth.

2 – I can’t stand cheap-arse spanish translation and dubbing of games. E.g. God of War. I *ahem* tested the english version, got so enthralled by it I rushed to the shop to buy it, then became appalled by the stupid, lifeless dubbing, and I turned it back.

3 – I refuse to install stupid DRM in my computer.

The problem it’s not torrent sites. People who don’t want to spend their money in games won’t do it, no matter what you do. And alienating your customers will only make matters worse.

23/11/2007 at 00:31 Muzman says:

I’m not surprised by developers putting up a fight, but I’d love to know what insider info they base their…outlook on. It seems so warped; 13 days is an achievement? How? Downloaders don’t wait thirteen days? Since when? (Too many questions?) X-number of people who bought it in the first week might not have if the game was cracked earlier, would seem to be the reasoning. But I can’t see that X being a very big number at all. Christmas comes and the game’s still cracked.
I’m inclined to think its all just a lot of self justified nerd willy waving at the heart of it, “yeah! we got em for 13 days! THIS IS 2K! Hooahhh!”

23/11/2007 at 01:03 Caiman says:

I hope they use Lenslok (TM) for Bioshock 2! Let’s give the gamers of today a taste of what we old ‘uns had to put up with.

23/11/2007 at 01:11 Brant says:

(Oh, and I was thrilled once I found out that BioShock had finally been cracked, because it meant I could play the game whenever I felt like it again. Thanks, Internet! Maybe I’ll poke around now for a S&M S02E01 crack so that I can buy that game, too.)

23/11/2007 at 01:24 Robin says:

“So now they’ve had the benefit of their 13 uncracked days, can we buy working activation-free copies of Bioshock now? No? Oh well, guess we’ll have to stick to downloading from torrent sites then.”

And here we have, in a nutshell, the reason why the PC games market is in trouble. Whenever a problem gets reported with particular copy protection system, you can bet that it will get jumped on as an excuse to pirate any and all PC games.

The problem with Bioshock’s copy protection was that it did not work as intended when it was originally deployed. The issue with limited activations has since been fixed, I understand.

“I refuse to buy any software that requires external permission to run.”

What OS are you using out of interest?

“13 days is an achievement? How?”

Because as the article says, many games get cracked some time between going to duplication and going on sale. A large proportion of sales of most big-name PC games happen in the first two weeks. I don’t know if the situation has improved recently, but as of a few years ago it wasn’t unusual for copy protection vendors to give estimates of the effectiveness of their products measured in hours.

In general, I think copy protection/DRM has reached a pretty good equilibrium for PC games. It’s usually no more inconvenient than downloading a no-cd crack (with more and more games not even needing that), and really bad systems (like StarForce) usually get enough bad press to keep them at bay. Of course it would be nice to have no DRM at all, but the mix of cheap PCs, abundant bandwidth and kids with no money precludes that for now.

23/11/2007 at 01:36 josh g. says:

“A lot of downloaders do it because “it’s there” rather than any other reason, if it’s not there and it’s a game they want to try, they’ll probably go out and buy it.”
It’d love to know where this notion comes from or why its thought to represent such a large number of sales. Downloaders are patient. Sharing of games is prevalent.

Macrovision has done market research via anonymous polls on gaming websites that shows that the majority of people who download a cracked game would probably just go buy it if the cracked version weren’t available within the first week. They aren’t just making this crap up. Neither are they pretending that there aren’t hardcore warez downloaders who will wait for a crack. But since those are in the minority, and wouldn’t buy the game either way, they aren’t really what DRM is trying to reclaim.

(I’m sure other game DRM companies know this as well, I just mention Macrovision because I’ve seen one of their pitches where they presented this data.)

23/11/2007 at 01:43 Roman Levin says:

I second (third?) the demand for some actual numbers regarding the impact of piracy on game sales. At least for the PC. Has any serious research been done on this? By someone who doesn’t sell copy protection?
Also, was Bioshock really uncracked for 13 days? I seem to recall seeing it all over torrent sites.

23/11/2007 at 01:53 dekoy says:

I won’t lie, I didnt buy Bioshock simply because of their extreme measures. Root kit? Limited Installs? Yeah that’ll cause me to never support your software.

23/11/2007 at 02:51 Brog says:

And if they did I’m pretty certain they would somehow ‘unlock’ all the Steam games.

Somehow, by magic.
Dammit, I want to still be able to play Portal even if the USA is destroyed in a barrage of thermonuclear weaponry this instant.

23/11/2007 at 03:05 Muzman says:

josh.g
“Macrovision has done market research via anonymous polls on gaming websites that shows that the majority of people who download a cracked game would probably just go buy it if the cracked version weren’t available within the first week. They aren’t just making this crap up.”
I’m sure they’re basing it all on something. I still have trouble with this whole ‘first week’ business, mostly because I never buy/ see/ rent anything in the first week and few people I know do, which doesn’t mean the stats lie.
Ging says
“The majority of downloaders are far from patient (at least, in my experience) – if that were true, there wouldn’t be release races to see who can get the first working crack out for a new game. Nor would there be a horde of people at torrent sites / release listings asking where the “big” release is and why it hasn’t hit the ‘net yet.”
True, but surely this is all just typical hacker competitveness and those feeding off it are keen to ‘stick it too the man’ as early as possible and couldn’t be representative of those libel to give up the first sign of resistance and spend money.
While any insider info is good and I’m probably a bit behind the times and far from the real info on how games sales go, I am still pretty comfortable with my suspicion that the industry view on piracy is desperately incomplete and the waters very muddy thanks to a lot of security industry scaremongering. The idea that every day every day they go uncracked equals, in any direct way, people turned away from downloading who will purchase seems like Voodoo Economics to me (and their big record is a mere two weeks). Any research that supports this stuff I’ll seems like it’d be the thinnest of science. Maybe I don’t understand how everyone is an early adopter but me, or hype, or something.

23/11/2007 at 03:43 Radiant says:

It’s also not cost based either.
We made a game and sold it for £4 and it still got downloaded thousands of times from just one torrent tracker.
I mean 4 pounds!
You don’t have 4 quid?
I can understand you don’t have a credit card but we accept paypal!

To circumvent piracy we’re gonna start to incorporate community aspects to the casual games we make.
That way you have to get online auth’ed to play and we can combat piracy in a steamish/quake3 cd key way.

As for the people who say that they aren’t connected to the internet.

1) How did you get our game? We’re download only.
2) This isn’t 1999 anymore my 70 year old mother in-law has always on internet.
3) Yes I am old thanks.

But yes there are elegant ways to do copy protection and then there are the idiotic securom/invasive ways that dedicated copy protection companies use.
And 13 days is great for Irrational [who get into Dixons and EB] but not so much for companies like us.

23/11/2007 at 04:28 Ging says:

“when I buy a game IT’S MINE AND I CAN DO WHATEVER THE HELL I WANT TO WITH IT (within reason) AND I WILL WANT TO PLAY IT HOWEVER THE HELL I WANT AND WHENEVER THE HELL I WANT TO.”

Actually, no, it’s not and no you can’t – when you “purchase” a game, all you’re doing is buying a license from the publisher that allows you to use the software that they are providing as part of the “contract” (the EULA). You certainly don’t own the software (you own the physical bits, but not the actual game) and they legally control anything you can do with that software as laid out in the EULA that you agree to when you install the software (or in some cases, just open the box).

Admittedly, there has been some muttering recently that EULAs are unenforceable in a court of law, but I’m no lawyer, so I don’t fully understand the hows and whys of that particular argument.

23/11/2007 at 05:28 JakethePirate says:

I perfectly understand the need for copy-protection–piracy is an issue and does undermine sales. I don’t pirate games (despite my name) although I do tend to get cd-keys off the web because I can never keep tack of those goddamn codes.
I don’t mind DRM all that much as long as it’s not terribly intrusive, I love Steam and use it as much as I can because it does control how I use a game, but it also makes acquiring and keeping track of the game much easier (no disks, no cd-keys not game store).

What really bothers me about most DRM is the concept that I’m being punished for following the law. Something about that is really deeply disturbing about that; it’s like the Book of Job but somehow worse because the tormentor is trying to maximise his profits instead of prove some point about the human spirit (or whatever, I know a lot of Biblical stuffs but I haven’t studied Job specifically). I don’t feel this way with Steam because it is rather convenient and provided feature the pirated copy doesn’t have (Community, auto-patching and others)

Of course, people who follow some kind of ridged set of ethics are going to have a harder time those who follow a more lenient set (or none at all) but it seems to me that there is something wrong with a system that punishes people whose ethical standards include following the law and support the system and rewards people who break the law and undermine the system.

23/11/2007 at 06:09 Jan-Tore Berghei says:

“As to the larger issue of copy protection– I have a gaming laptop. I’m on the go a lot. There are frequent times where I will be without wifi access, and would like to play my games. Anything Steam related is out the window (Likewise, Company of Heroes: Opposing Fronts– or, more naturally, any MMO). I can play a number of games that require a CD, but because I have a laptop on the go, I can’t really lug all my games with me.”

Actually, Steam has an Offline Mode, and only requires that you connect to the internet, log in to your steam account and activate your games ONCE before you can turn it on. That way you can play your Steam games without ever hooking up to the net ever again. Of course you will miss all the game updates and such, but it is very much possible.

23/11/2007 at 06:46 Brog says:

Actually, Steam has an Offline Mode, and only requires that you connect to the internet, log in to your steam account and activate your games ONCE before you can turn it on. That way you can play your Steam games without ever hooking up to the net ever again. Of course you will miss all the game updates and such, but it is very much possible.

We had a lot of trouble with this in the early days of steam. I was on dialup back then, and sometimes we had lan parties without internet access. Half the time steam’s offline mode would not work. No idea if this has gotten any better since.
This time around, with the Orange Box, I’ve had no trouble with steam at all. It seems as long as you have broadband everything is fine. Not everybody does.

23/11/2007 at 08:59 Stuart White says:

Perhaps Games should be forced to state on the box what kind of copy protection they use. This would at least inform you about exactly what you are letting yourself in for, and are signing up to, when you purchase the game.

Any Half Life 2 game says (in small letters) that you need an internet connection to play which is good even if it doesnt explain exactly why it needs it.

23/11/2007 at 09:17 Akis says:

Apart from protection measures, there are other ways as well.

Give your registered users extra things, like content updates, patches, images, music, competitions, developer diaries, podcasts, ladders, chats/forums with the developers etc. There are way too many choices.

Make real packaging for the games, with ofc extra content. Artbooks, Figures, DVD’s, Soundtracks, Maps, Keyrings, Posters, Stickers, Cups, T-Shirts etc etc. The list with the things with no actual cost-or a small one- is unlimited, and most of the PC Gamers I know love these kind of stuff.

Apart from things like these, meaning “extras”, the most important things are innovation, replayability, gameplay, etc etc.

What I’m trying to say, is that even though I don’t have any statistics to prove anything, I find way more important to actually try and expand your buyers group, motivate more ppl to play your game, and trust you in your future works, than delaying cracks. And ofc, from my personal experience I see that most ppl that get illegal copies don’t really care for 1,2 or more days, since after all, not buying the game more or less means that they don’t care.

23/11/2007 at 09:22 Adam Hepton says:

I think it’s an absolute fucking liberty that people who make their living selling legal copies of their own intellectual property dare to have the audacity to do everything they can to try and stop people taking copies for free.

23/11/2007 at 09:39 Robin says:

“I won’t lie, I didnt buy Bioshock simply because of their extreme measures. Root kit? Limited Installs? Yeah that’ll cause me to never support your software.”

Bioshock’s CP does not and never has had a ‘rootkit’, and the limited installs issue has been fixed.

23/11/2007 at 09:54 AndrewA says:

I have to say all these people saying ‘I stopped buying games because of DRM!!’, It’s just bollocks. Stop masquerading as some sort of videogame martyr. You pirate games because you want free games it’s as simple as that. If your really so fervent in your hatred for DRM then don’t play those games at all. Only play games which come DRM free, don’t download pirated game and as an afterthought claim your striking a blow against the man and his DMM.

Alternatively if you really hate DRM but like game, then buy the games and download a cracked version. I have a few of these simply for convenience, no-cd cracks on my laptop.

23/11/2007 at 09:55 AbyssUK says:

I torrent most games.. and buy the good ones. I can’t afford to buy every game! I don’t trust demos and I don’t trust reviewers.. if people in the games industry stopped lying to us about games I’d pirate less and buy more.

For example; I mean minimum PC specs on games these days are just plain old lies.. have you tried crysis/bioshock etc on there minimum specs ITS UNPLAYABLE!! completely pointless even putting the specs on the box.

Also why are computer games 30-40 quid when movies (which normally cost more to make) are like a max 20 quid for the DVD ??

23/11/2007 at 10:28 Iain says:

AbyssUK:

Sorry, but you’re rationalising.

DVDs retail at £15-20 because they’re the producer’s second bite of the cherry when it comes to making money (the first being at the box office). Films also shift a hell of a lot more units than your average videogame, too – they make the profit in shifting volume, not using high profit margins, which is why you see lots of DVDs retailing for under a tenner.

Videogames only get one real chance to make money (budget re-releases aren’t highly profitable – again, the money is in volume shifted, rather than margin), so if your initial sales at retail are being killed by people torrenting, that just forces developers and publishers to become more conservative in the games that they make. Perhaps saying that torrenting is killing the industry is a tad melodramatic, but it does force publishers to be less innovative or ambitious, because each game becomes such a financial risk to make, they have to make games that will sell and make a profit.

So what if you can’t afford to buy every game? Boo hoo. My heart bleeds. Prioritise what you want to play and buy those. Not having the money to buy a game doesn’t give you the right to steal it.

I can’t afford an Aston Martin DBS, but I’m not going to go out and steal one. And no – there’s no difference between stealing a car and torrenting a videogame: they’re both theft and both illegal.

23/11/2007 at 10:39 Jon says:

Could we not go back to the old days of decoder discs?

I remember losing the one for Zool on the Amiga when I was little. I think I cried a little.

23/11/2007 at 10:47 Dragon says:

The excuse that “I want to play the game but I can’t because I don’t have internet/broadband access” is frankly ridiculous these days. It’s like saying “I can’t play Crysis because it requires a Dual Core processor* and I’m still gaming on a 486″ or “UT3 needs a DX10 top-of-the-range graphics card – that’s totally unfair to those of us with a Voodoo1 card”. I don’t know how well Steam works over a 56k modem – frankly, seeing the trouble my mother-in-law has accessing most webpages these days, I wouldn’t want to even try. But if you’re using the ‘net a lot or even thinking of (legally) downloading software, music or videos then what the hell are you doing without broadband?

*requirements made up – I have no idea what it needs except that it’s more than my PC is currently capable of.

23/11/2007 at 11:02 AbyssUK says:

I believe i’ve been misunderstood.. I torrent a game ‘if i then like it’ I buy it. If I don’t like it I delete it and never buy it. In some cases I decide ‘yeah its ok but not worth 30-40 quid i’ll wait for a re-release or pick it up on ebay later.

I guess its simply try before you buy :) demos never give a true representation of a game imho. And many reviews/reviewers are horribly biased/influenced.

Yeah good point about the movies, I forgot about cinema’s etc i tend to torrent all my movies *joke*. BUT hasn’t the demand for computer games shot up like 10 fold in the last 4-5 years. Shouldn’t the cost of games have come down significantly by now because of the higher user base??

23/11/2007 at 11:18 Freelancepolice says:

More money is required to make the big VG box office hits if you will.

It doesn’t seem to have come down at all, imo alot has remained fairly consistent pricewise for a while now.

If you shop around most pc games are around £20-£25

consoles are a different matter though…

23/11/2007 at 11:23 Leelad says:

I’ve had superb issues with 2 games in perticular, PES 6 and GoW,

PES played with a shoddy jumpy frame rate and Gears of War crashed after 2 minutes no matter is I was in game or in the menu.

BOTH issues where solved by installing nocd patches.

Has to be my drives not being used to doing anything, steam has wonders for my sanity.

23/11/2007 at 11:38 Jan-Tore Berghei says:

“Is it just a vocal minority who have had the problem with Bioshock?”

I had huge troubles activating it after I got it. I couldn’t connect to the online authentication server for like a few hours. That really pissed me off. Don’t they say that the first half hour, first hour of the game is the most important part in winning over the player? Here I was, having legally bought the game and given them my hard earned monies, and I can’t even activate the damn thing? I know their servers probably got overwhelmed by the huge sales, but come on! If you have to implement DRM, make sure that it actually works, and that it doesn’t hinder the people who gave you their monies and supported your game.

I didn’t like it then, and I don’t like it now. But I did enjoy Bioshock immensely.

23/11/2007 at 11:53 Chris Delay says:

I feel I need to add a comment or two here, because we’ve debated this issue quite strongly at Introversion.

First some semi-anecdotal information : there were at least ten times as many pirate copies of Uplink and Darwinia as there were legitimate sales. How do we know? Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games. Now hard-line corporate types will tell you this means they’ve lost 10 x sales x price million dollars based on this, but thats just nonsense. Would all 10 of those 11 users have ever bought the game? No, of course not. But 1 out of 10 of them might, and that would have doubled our sales and made us very happy devs indeed.

Rather than fill up your comments page, I ended up posting a whole blog entry on this issue. Read the rest of it here if you like.
Link to Blog Posting

Chris Delay
Introversion Software

23/11/2007 at 12:01 Pidesco says:

If publishers really were that interested in reducing piracy they’d reduce game prices.

In Portugal, the minimum wage is 403€ a month. A PC game costs, like in the rest of Europe, 50€. That’s a 50% markup on the game’s original price in the US. It’s like they’re asking for their games to be pirated.

23/11/2007 at 12:09 Janek says:

Thorny issue. Leaving aside any moral dilemmas and whatnot, I do find it slightly depressing that I can’t really think of any major examples of games (short of Guild Wars) which have outfoxed crackers for any serious length of time without arbitarily screwing over a percentage of legitimate customers.

I’ve had major issues with Bioshock, Silent Hunter 4 and even Operation Flashpoint, all of which were bought legally. Original games do not Fade? Yes they fucking do, occasionally. SH4′s removal of copy protection with the 1.3 patch made me smile. And also be able to play the game properly.

23/11/2007 at 12:39 Chemix says:

First of all, as far as I know, box office sales don’t actually go towards the makers of films or their distributors, it’s simply an indicator for how well DVDs will sell and how long the film will stay at the theater, each 2 weeks requiring another license to show the reel. Based on such information, retailers buy a certain amount of boxes that they expect to sell, if they sell out of of that, then they order a similar, if smaller, set of boxes. If something sells poor enough at the box office, then it may be packaged as a half and half, as in the box will be divided between 2 films, and they can keep up dividing up the box based on sales till it comes down to just one copy of one film and a dozen of another and etc. etc.

Summing it up: DVD quality movie pirating hurts retailers mostly, and to a minor extent, the production companies when the second order comes in and it’s vastly lower (rarity)

Honestly, people don’t have an infinite amount of money to spend on entertainment. 20 dollars for movies isn’t all that bad, but 50-60 dollars for games is fairly pricy for the more open market. It’s a good chunk of anyone’s pay that doesn’t have a college degree, or simply anyone that doesn’t work full time. For a product that may or may not be good, giving up such huge percentages of one’s savings is at most, doable for only 2 games per month with 2 being a rarity, like Bioshock and something on similar level of awesomeness.

Theoretically: if I was a Pirate ( Arrrrg), and this isn’t (theoretically) speaking for everyone, I’d only “pirate” what I couldn’t afford to buy, thus no losses, to the company, or to me, because I wouldn’t have bought (or been able to buy it) it otherwise, but I still get whatever enjoyment it offered. If I really like something, then I’ll try to buy it eventually, just to put some sort of money towards the retailer to buy more copies from the publisher which then gives a royalty towards the developers

23/11/2007 at 12:58 bobince says:

Whenever a problem gets reported with particular copy protection system, you can bet that it will get jumped on as an excuse to pirate any and all PC games.

Well not by me. I’m not downloading because I’m a free-loving kiddie—I haven’t been that since the ZX Spectrum. Until HL2, I bought every PC game I had legitimately.

Personally I prefer to have actual proper shiny media, that I can use at any point in the future. But if the manufacturer won’t sell me that, I feel little guilt pirating something that is otherwise unavailable.

When you’ve got activation, you’re not buying software, you’re renting it for an unknown period of time before its masters decide not to let you any more. I’ve been burned before and I’m not renting again.

I am not ‘downloading for its own sake’ or ‘sticking it to the man’, whatever motives anyone else might ascribe to pirates. I am simply tired of jumping through pointless hoops.

The problem with Bioshock’s copy protection was that it did not work as intended when it was originally deployed.

No, the problem with Bioshock’s copy protection was and is the very concept of activation. Adding a few extra activations has not fixed the problems, only the removal of the system will do that, and only then will I play it.

Very disappointed to read Sam and Max is apparently encumbered with this too, I was interested in that one.

What OS are you using out of interest?

Dual-boot WinXPpro and Slackware. As an MSDN member I have valid Windows licences coming out of my ears, but I’m never going to use them; it’s an activation-free corporate install for me, thanks again to helpful pirates, whose product is now better than the real thing.

they’re not exactly going to be closing any time soon are they? And if they did I’m pretty certain they would somehow ‘unlock’ all the Steam games.

Over the course of a decade you can’t say who’s going to survive, but if you look back ten years for publishers who are still about in the same form today, the outlook is grim.

I am not comforted by your pretty-certainty, I want a legal guarantee that my games are not toast when Valve goes out of business, gets taken over or changes their business model. The music-store DRM people have so far failed utterly at this, leaving customers’ music dead after shutting down, and as a customer I have no reason to believe a troubled Valve would behave any differently.

It’s the one DRM system that is unbreakable because it’s centrally controlled, and it’s completely transparent to the players.

Indeed. And then a pirated single-player experience can even act as encouragement to buy the full multiplayer version.

[really looking forward to Multiwinia here]

23/11/2007 at 13:13 Saskwach says:

“Thorny issue. Leaving aside any moral dilemmas and whatnot, I do find it slightly depressing that I can’t really think of any major examples of games (short of Guild Wars) which have outfoxed crackers for any serious length of time without arbitarily screwing over a percentage of legitimate customers.”

Sorry to double post but just responding to this. I have heard of one game that outfoxed hackers for a while and even to this day isn’t properly cracked (apparently, and that might be partly because it wasn’t very big).
It was a game by Chris Crawford, the name of which I forget, that he mentions one of his books on game design. He used a series of ploys like placing junk code that looked important all over the place to distract. His ultimate tack though was to assign some value to a unit that, if the game was a copy, would freeze the game at a certain point in the game. Since pirates are usually lazy they wouldn’t find this point themselves until it was pointed out to them and even if they did playtest their hacked version to completion the time spent doing so would buy valuable time. I’m unsure how all this worked as I’m not a code monkey myself.

23/11/2007 at 13:34 Iain says:

Chris:

Re: Piracy as Theft versus Piracy as Copyright Infringement

They might not have the same legal status – and I personally find these kinds of legal semantics the kind of thing I’d like to have all lawyers strung up against a wall by their own entrails for – but don’t they effectively amount to the same thing, in real terms? i.e. people using games you’ve invested lots of time and money to make but not putting money in your pocket for the right to play it?

I think there’s a danger that taking the line that pirates are “customers who are yet to be convinced” is simply inviting people to pirate your games, and saying it’s okay if there’s a remote possibility that they *might* buy the full version at some point in the future. How many of those people who’ve pirated the full version of the game go on to buy it legitimately? Very few, I’ll wager.

I don’t buy the argument that people who download full products from torrents as a “try before you buy” and then go out to buy the full game – if you’ve already got the whole thing for free, why would you bother? Especially when buying a legitimate copy might actually make the game harder to install and play because of the DRM… If demos are inadequate to “try before you buy” a game and people use this as an excuse to warez or torrent, rather than imposing more draconian DRM solutions, why not bring back Shareware? Give people a third of the game to play with, rather than a short snatch of an hour, so they can get a real impression of what the full game is like and then let people decide whether they want to buy the full game or not. It’s not like bandwidth is really an issue anymore – if people can torrent multiple gigabyte full installs, then they can do the same with Shareware.

I can understand why you’re reticent to want to criminalise 10/11′s of your user base, but it’s not like they’re actually giving you anything in return for using one of your products. They’re costing you revenue, and potentially harming the viability of your company.

It is a bit of a quandary, though: the videogames industry does need to send out a clear message that piracy is wrong and damages the companies that make games, but it also needs to provide a form of copy protection that doesn’t make it harder to play a game legitimately than if you pirated it.

The meta-server approach is interesting – I don’t think that any serious gamer (in the UK at least) won’t have access to broadband, so there’s definite potential that you could use the same validation principles applied to DEFCON and MMO’s to single player games.

23/11/2007 at 14:10 Chris Delay says:

Theft versus Copyright Infringement – they are really very different things. I think what i’m complaining about the most in that paragraph is equating software piracy with the mugging of old ladies or lifting DVDs from high street stores. The first is theft, the second is copyright infringement. Doesn’t seem quite so semantic when viewed in that light.

The 10 out of 11 “pirate” customers are often giving you something in return. In the case of Defcon we were extremely worried our metaserver would be empty on day one – meaning legitimate customers wouldn’t be able to find people to play against, and demo users would be dissapointed the servers were empty and wouldn’t buy. Our solution? We permitted 15% of “pirate” users (with invalid keys) to play anyway, to ensure the metaserver was nice and full. Legitimate players had a better experience because they had more players to play against. Pirate users got a sample of the full game, and a week later we’d reduced that percentage to 0% and they had to buy to continue playing. Every now and then we turn off the pirate limits, and give those pirate users a full demo of the complete game, unrestricted, then we turn the limits back on a few days later. We always get a jump in sales when we do this. This is what I mean by treating pirate versions as an extended demo.

23/11/2007 at 14:22 Robin says:

“No, the problem with Bioshock’s copy protection was and is the very concept of activation. Adding a few extra activations has not fixed the problems, only the removal of the system will do that, and only then will I play it.”

They didn’t (just) add a few extra activations, they fixed the issue of uninstalls not reverting activations. And they’ve said the whole thing is going to be switched off anyway.

Personally I think they opted to use that feature of SecuRom (limited number of activations) as an experiment more than out of necessity, and doubt that the extra cost of administering it has netted them any benefit. Activation in itself is just going to be a fact of life for a lot of commercial software from now on.

I think the more concerning thing in the Take2 interview is how openly they admit that they think it’s ok for PC gamers to be treated badly to protect console game sales.

23/11/2007 at 14:51 Monkfish says:

Uncommonly long post alert:

There has been a shift of power, recently, where the customer is no longer king. Unfortunately, these days the shareholder holds that crown. Restrictive DRM, justified by the belief that it will aid sales within the critical couple of weeks after release, is seen as an acceptable risk even if those customers adversely affected are unlikely to purchase from them again. It could be argued that some evidence of this was seen during the BioShock release, where it became apparent that the logistics surrounding customer support just hadn’t been thought through. Uninstalls not giving back activations, people being bounced enlessly between SecuRom and 2K and the problems with the authentication server not being supported out-of-hours clearly demonstrate that customer support was an afterthought. Cue unhappy customers, but so what? We got their money. Sales targets are met, and the shareholders will be happy.

DRM tends to adversely affect only a relatively small number of customers. Most people who bought BioShock didn’t even flinch when the game asked them to authorise their copy. Of course, things looked bad to us when we visited the 2K forums after BioShock’s release, but then we have to bear in mind that these places are rarely visited by people who aren’t having problems anyway. So, even with the quantity of posts regarding the online activation (many of which were posted by those outraged at the principal, rather than having encountered any real problems with it themselves), the percentage of people who bought BioShock that encountered issues is likely to be pretty small.

Sadly, despite their efforts, the publishers know that piracy isn’t likely to ever go away. Part of the reason for this is that there is an overblown sense of entitlement common amongst many who pirate. They believe that it’s their God-given right to try before they buy (the closest thing there is to “good piracy”), play games they can’t afford or simply play games they wouldn’t buy anyway (“but hey, if I can get it for free, why not?“). While there’s an easy way to obtain stuff for free, more-or-less anonymously, there will always be the pirate.

If there was a way to implement reliable traceability and genereate a genuine fear of being found out, only then may we see piracy diminish to the point where restrictive DRM isn’t a necessity. The logistics of such an idea are probably restrictively complex and expensive, and come with their own morality issues, so for now we’ll have to put up with nasty DRM technologies, until the day they become simply unbearable. Who knows when that will be?

23/11/2007 at 15:06 Sam says:

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that, in a different era, shareware games actually did rather well for themselves, despite being copied endlessly (by design), and despite something like 1% of players actually bothering to pay for the things.
id Software themselves made their initial masses of money out of letting people copy stuff (albeit, in the most successful case of DooM, that “stuff” being only 1/3 of the full game)…
Now, the market doesn’t work that way at the moment (presumably, because Big Games are becoming more like Big Movies, with massive investment and smaller profit-margins), but that hasn’t stopped the customers from thinking similarly…
I’m not actually sure, however, of the amount by which piracy damages games. The only research I’ve seen on this has been by companies who license copy-protection technology, and therefore have a vested interest in making the problem they fix look as threatening as possible. (Similarly, I don’t trust a tobacco company’s published research on health effects of smoking…) It does seem likely that Chris Delay’s statistics, which are at least trustworthy in essence, are likely distorted by multiple downloads of legitimate patches (for example, after reinstallation of a copy of the game in question – I know that I’ve downloaded the Linux Darwinia binary at least four times, and I own a legitimate copy of the game) – all we can say is that this 1:10 ratio represents an upper bound on the ratio between paid and unpaid copies (and we can’t deduce, as Chris notes, anything about the economic impact of this in terms of the fraction of people who would have bought Darwinia if it had hypothetical perfect copy protection).

Now, I didn’t buy Bioshock because of the DRM, but that’s because I wanted to be able to play it in Linux and most Windows DRM solutions fail to work at all under Wine… (but then, I didn’t pirate it, either).

23/11/2007 at 15:31 Jase says:

Trouble is the game industry isn’t much more knowledgable about selling stuff than the record industry.

If downloadable versions of games were significantly cheaper than boxed copies, they’d shift a lot more and to some of the people who download cracked versions. I know I’d buy more if they were cheaper, if only to get a valid multiplayer key (which imo is the only copy protection a game should bother with).

As for Bioshock, I think the pre launch hype shifted more than it’s fair share of what’s a pretty bog-standard FPS, especially one that only has a single player mode.

23/11/2007 at 15:47 Tom Lillis says:

Robin says: I think the more concerning thing in the Take2 interview is how openly they admit that they think it’s ok for PC gamers to be treated badly to protect console game sales.

Remarkably effective tactic, too. I picked up a PC copy of BioShock, heard the wails of the DRM-afflicted before cracking the package, and swapped it for a 360 copy. And after watching the whole affair unfold even further, I felt little guilt when I picked up a 360 copy of the Orange Box last month. (Admittedly, I was planning on doing that from the get-go as part of a sort of software hostage negotiation with the roommate, but it made it easier on me.)

I find myself wondering if I’ll be making similar choices in the future, particularly for games with no appreciable online component. The current console generation in large part makes dynamic patching a reality, so that’s no longer an issue. Downloadable content is a reality. I can deal with not using a keyboard/mouse combo if the trade-off is that I get to play the game I bought without dealing with six different layers of finnicky DRM technology.

In any event, this brings me to my point: DRM is not going to be the end of PC gaming and usher in some sort of new era of console supremacy. The narrowing gap between the two experiences is a far more likely culprit. The defining difference, I feel, is the community factor (social and user creativity) that the console world lacks, and I am heartened by all the above responses suggesting that the DRM issue be mitigated by some sort of backdoor integration into community features. I sort of think that’ll be the future.

23/11/2007 at 16:12 dhex says:

we can replace “theft” with “injury” and basically get the same idea across. it’s not 1:1 (i.e. people will download a game they wouldn’t pay for) but it’s clearly some percentage lost. tracking that percentage would involve a lot of honesty both on the part of publishers and people who are involved in an illegal activity, which ain’t so likely.

If games weren’t increasingly expensive and increasingly homogenal (similar), you probably wouldn’t see piracy nearly as prevalent today as you do.

yeah, well, no. the thing is we have a whole new generation of kids who were totally raised on downloading music, and for whom the concept of ownership of something if it isn’t physical is basically gone. it’s not like, to use the most obvious example, independent music isn’t as alive, vibrant as insanely widespread and easily available than any other time in human history, but there’s a double-edged sword to such an availability. it helps people break out, but then when you hit a certain point (i.e. popular enough that people who are into you have heard of you) there’s a lot of lost sales because people aren’t interested in laying out money for something they can get for free. this has ups and downs as well – relying on touring for cash more than ever, greater exposure with fewer returns in many cases, etc – and more importantly, isn’t going away any time soon.

23/11/2007 at 17:05 bobince says:

Every now and then we turn off the pirate limits, and give those pirate users a full demo of the complete game, unrestricted, then we turn the limits back on a few days later. We always get a jump in sales when we do this.

Fascinating example of carrot vs. stick there! I wish more companies would think creatively like this instead of getting uptight and choosing the most draconian, inflexible approach available out of angry control-freakery.

23/11/2007 at 17:36 Chis says:

Have you checked copyright law recently? You should.

Although, admittedly, with downloading it isn’t quite so cut and dry. But torrenting something requires you to share some or all of it, and certainly the sharing of copyrighted materials (such as a commercial game) falls under copyright infringement. It still isn’t piracy, nor is it theft. You can argue (and I won’t disagree) that it may be depriving developers and publishers of profit, but that is not stealing.

23/11/2007 at 18:13 zergl says:

“The excuse that “I want to play the game but I can’t because I don’t have internet/broadband access” is frankly ridiculous these days. It’s like saying “I can’t play Crysis because it requires a Dual Core processor* and I’m still gaming on a 486″ or “UT3 needs a DX10 top-of-the-range graphics card – that’s totally unfair to those of us with a Voodoo1 card”. I don’t know how well Steam works over a 56k modem – frankly, seeing the trouble my mother-in-law has accessing most webpages these days, I wouldn’t want to even try. But if you’re using the ‘net a lot or even thinking of (legally) downloading software, music or videos then what the hell are you doing without broadband?

*requirements made up – I have no idea what it needs except that it’s more than my PC is currently capable of.

This sir, is complete and utter bullshit.
I don’t know in which fairyland you live, but over here in germany broadband is quite hard to obtain in certaub more rural areas.
While I made sure to attend a university in a bigger town, one of my best friends still lives at home (he commutes to a different university) and living in the middle of nowhere the best he can get is ISDN.
Yes, ISDN.
That damn 64kBit crap from last century. He was celebrating as the buggers from DTAG/T-Online reintroduced dialup flatrates earlier this year for ridiculous prices (something like 80 EUR, more than twice than what it used to cost in pre-DSL times) compared to DSL where flatrates go for 10-20 EUR.

And not everyone’s parents (we’re talking about gamer demographic here) are as cool as his to pay something like that (they didn’t even go postal when the internet bill went way over 100EUR because of his and his little sisters online gaming during holidays), so I’d say only a fraction of the gamers in rural areas have that flatrate (I actually know quite a few of those kind) and will get into problems with their parents if the phone is over $LIMIT.

And for the record, he didn’t even touch Steam with a 10ft pole before he got that ISDN flatrate, even though he really wanted to buy and play HL2.
Ever since he has that flatrate now he uses Steam (and subsequently bought HL2, Orange box, etc.), but it’s a major PITA if downloads are dripping in at a whopping 8kB/s.

PS: I hope I didn’t mess up the quoting, that being my first post in RPS comments.

23/11/2007 at 18:20 zergl says:

Damn. Typso.
s/certaub/certain/g
s/phone/phone bill/g
These comments could use a /. like preview function or am I the only one hating to re-read long texts in those input boxes?

23/11/2007 at 19:31 Monkfish says:

It is only depriving anyone of anything when were it not for the availability of it free, you absolutely would have bought it.

This whole “it’s OK, I wouldn’t have bought it anyway” thing just doesn’t sit right with me. Why do people feel they’re entitled to stuff that they wouldn’t buy? Surely this means that the content they’re downloading carries at least some value?

For example, why don’t the people that download because of cost, just skip over games that they don’t want to pay full price for, and wait ’til they are cheaper? Is it simply impatience?

I realise that these are entirely moral issues, rather than legal, but it does go to show how what is slowly turning into the “Me, me, me” society thinks.

23/11/2007 at 22:02 dhex says:

Usually, it’s a “couldn’t buy” situation; people can’t afford to buy anything and everything.

so why not just wait and buy it later? it’s not like the games will disappear. beyond “well i can and it’s relatively easy” which i guess

though that’s not really the point, i guess.

A copy deprives no one availability unless it blocks the use of a paying player, like in stolen CD-key issues, but the copy itself causes no harm.

except in the case of someone who lives off of intellectual property, like a musician. you are actually harming them by bypassing the general understood exchange of “music for money.” it’s a bit of an honor system these days, which may explain why so many smaller labels and bands are getting their heads handed to them. it’s a double edged sword, as i mentioned above, because while more people know about you and may buy secondary goods (concerts, shirts etc), more of them also have the notion that because what you produce cannot be held, it’s not really unethical to leave the exchange blank.

23/11/2007 at 22:32 dhex says:

In short, it’s not that (theoretically) we feel entitled to everything for nothing, it’s that if we won’t get something one way because of costs, or what have you, it’s there’s another, which we expect to have pitfalls and various obstacles, but by surviving the journey might be able to enjoy something we couldn’t otherwise.

i.e
In short, we feel entitled to everything for nothing.

fun aside:

with that out of the way, this is a good example of what i was talking about regarding this kind of attitude. you are not alone in this, mind you; this is similar to the attitude that many people from this particular cohort have towards stuff – it’s not a problem if you download something, because a) you can’t buy it anyway and b) someone else has already done something worse therefore proscriptive behavior xyz (be it ill-advised DRM schemes or otherwise) is unacceptable/unwarranted.

and this is why planet mu and other small labels are having a shit time of it. it’s not going to change anytime soon, and there are plenty of drm-free options via bleep.com (which i heartily recommend) or otherwise.

so this brings us back to the main point – why not do without? as someone living below the poverty level – as an artist no less – doing without could be the cornerstone of a new aesthetic in an age where everyone – at least by your reckoning – is either a thief, a murderer or enabling “sheeple.” by doing without you could set a new standard for ethical behavior, choosing to neither participate nor skim off of those chunks of the culture – like the massive games production industry and resultant corporations – that you find objectionable.

24/11/2007 at 04:42 Chemix says:

Why not do without? Because I wish to be entertained, to enjoy experiences, as I have little else to enjoy, and while that might be a minority stand on the issue, it’s still a worth while justification. Why should I endure repetition and boredom while scrounging off what I can from what I can manage to “buy”, and by that I mean “license” since you can’t technically own anything once your on the grid.

I like developers, I really do, hell I used to be one till things fell apart, but I don’t have the money to throw at them that I’d need to buy all the titles I could potentially enjoy. However, there is no reason for me to enjoy all of them and only buy what I can afford, given that it’s a sparse amount to begin with. It’s a “principle” of the thing, thing, and that just doesn’t cut it for me.

I help people when I can, and I feel bad when I can’t, but that’s about the limit of what I can do when I can do nothing for someone.

24/11/2007 at 07:56 Brog says:

DWARF FORTRESS is free, and they send little stories and crayon drawings to people who give donations. Very attractive. This personalised touch doesn’t really generalise to much larger audiences though.
Still, extra box content encourages purchases, even if it isn’t personal.

24/11/2007 at 20:01 Chemix says:

If anyone ever steals my shoes, then they are directly preventing me from wearing them, and will thusy be whacked with a heavy object

24/11/2007 at 21:26 cliffski says:

I buy games i enjoy because that means that they make more games like that. If you dont buy the game, you are invisible to the developer in terms of them knowing what gamers want. Its sad when pirates moan that games are shit, because they are the reason that games they like do not get made.
In this day and age, a developer has to make games that sell, not games that are popular. Being popular with pirates will not pay the developers salaries and rents.

Plus I think its just fcking wrong to take someone people worked on for years without paying them for their work.

25/11/2007 at 03:20 Txiasaeia says:

When I was a teenager and young adult, I pirated quite a bit, everything from games to utilities. Now that I’m all grown up and have a family and a job, I purchase software. I plunked down the cash for Office Ultimate the other day, and bought Capture NX earlier this month. This isn’t even counting the one or two games I buy per month. I pirated games because I couldn’t afford them. Now, I *still* pirate games (cracks, technically), but I still buy them. Why? It’s nice to be legal, but I can’t stand DRM. Hell, I have a legit Windows XP Pro licence and I’m still using a cracked version, simply because I can’t stand authorising my copy every time I reinstall my OS. I’m also lazy, and would rather play one game and then another without swapping out my disk. (That, and my kids once made a coaster out of some older LucasArts game a while back, so I tend to keep my DVDs not readily accessible.)

Chris’s post was terrific: I was one of those kids who pirated Uplink and downloaded the upgrades. Now, I’ve got a legit copy of it somewhere, along with Defcon (which I pre-ordered before I even played the demo simply because I liked the idea and Introversion itself). Introversion certainly does treat pirates like potential customers, and that attitude wasn’t lost on me.

My point is that people grow up, sooner or later, and they usually get the point that they understand that buying games means that more games are made. Give the games to the pirates, and they’ll figure it out eventually. Hell, give them the games early, let them post on official forums, and let them beta test them for free! Saves the hassle for legit customers.

And for the record: I loved System Shock 1 and 2 (both of which I pirated, then later bought), but until the DRM is removed from Bioshock, I refuse to buy it (or any other games protected with similar schemes). I’d love to try it out, as I have a lot of faith in Irrational, but this issue with invasive DRM has gone too far and I, for one, feel that I need to take an ideological stand. Perhaps this is a bit ironic, considering my past life as a filthy pirate, but that’s the thing that most companies don’t get: pirates really are undecided customers.

16/12/2007 at 02:43 Easton says:

Yeah, pirating happens, boo fing hoo. As they said themselves it took only 13days for a bunch of unemployed kids to break through there advanced protection that probably took dozens of high skilled programmers to build. And i will say, man, i wish i had waited for those kids to do they’re work, but no, i said “this game’ll be good, no need to play it first”, so i went out and wasted $60 on bioshock, and then found out it is a crap game. There are those people like me who will steal a game, play it, and if enjoyable purchase a legit copy just to support the company. What i do forces developers to produce superior products, otherwise i wont support them.