By Kieron Gillen on December 14th, 2008 at 8:20 pm.
Sunday afternoon is filled with delightful free comedy (Ever get a chance, go see Brian Gittins). But the evening? It will be full of pasta and sleeping. But in between, in the meniscus between the two, it’s time to compile a list of writing on games found across the internet this week while resisting linking to some piece of music that caught our fancy.
- This is the heftiest piece of the week, and if I had more time to do a proper analysis, I’d have done a real breakdown in an longer post. As it is, you should just go through it. TweakGuides do an enormous and relatively non-partisan 10-page examination of Piracy which includes at least a half-dozen good ways to start fights. Some numbers comparing PC and Console piracy which make anyone playing a “But it happens on consoles too!” openly laughable? A vivisection of the “DRM doesn’t work” and “DRM is always cracked” argument? Arguing that there uproar around Starforce and Securom was just hysteria rather than anything rooted in fact? And while we’re there, a strong critique of Steam? I wouldn’t agree with some of the fine detail, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s well worth taking on board. And… go, comment thread, go!
- Cheery RPS-tribute site The Reticule – and I suspect none of the Reticule Writers will get that particular in-gag – have been motoring with the interviews recently. As we approach the release of Sol Infernum, they chat to Cryptic Comet’s Vic Davis about making a hell set strategy game. Good stuff.
- I’d missed this Ben Fritz has been doing some impressively in depth reporting around the fall of Brash Entertainment. If you’re the sort who cry out for investigative journalism in games, you’re pretty much duty bound to click through.
- Gamasutra has some interesting demographic information about people who game, which seems to confirm the older gamer = pc gamer idea. Perhaps common sense, but good to see evidence to back up assumptions.
- Not strictly speaking PC stuff, but I did a profile of Rare Software for OXM US which has been lobbed online. I think it’s one of the better more subdued pieces of games writing I’ve done this year, and find Rare’s dilemma fascinating. Get a chance, do read.
- Minor PC Games writer John Walker writes a piece for his obscure blog. I think it’s just about worth bringing to wider attention. Its subject: “On Why Games Reviews Should Be Subjective”. It’s strong.
- I really quite like the demo that Ex-Pipette Rose Elinor Dougall has up on her MySpace page. Very lovely.
Failed.
But the evening? It will be full of pasta and sleeping.
Yes, it will be. By the way, the Brian Gittins link needs reworking.
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i protest and disagree with everyone below me!
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Piracy and DRM, you say? Hmmm.
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I’d still like there to be a study or at least some mention of how many console sales are lost due to the trade-in market – something exclusive to consoles and widespread as well.
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Skipping to the red meat :)
I think this piracy article is pretty much on the money. Its a fairly comprehensive only skipping out on some details. The section on the economic impact is particularly clearly explained and the ‘piracy is theft’ question clearly covered and debunked. However much people want to dispute the details I expect it will become harder to argue against the growing weight of evidence as to the effects of what publishers are blaming on piracy (fewer people are buying single player PC Games).
I believe that if you like mainstream single player PC games without DRM of some kind you are going to be disappointed in the future direction of PC gaming. There is a certain amount of inertia in publishers (multiplatform games being started several years in advance, patterns of work taking even longer to change) but if piracy of PC games continues to grow as this article seems to show it has been then I expect things will only get worse.
In the most optimistic future we’ll see developers using positive DRM-like downloads that come with additional content to encourage users to buy the original game to avoid the hassle of having to recrack it every few weeks to get the latest updates. Of course, that precludes a complete single player experience purchased on day 1.
In the worst case we could see publishers holding back PC versions of multiplatform games and putting less and less resources into PC ports…. Ah, I guess thats happening already. On the other hand if you like to only play TF2 and WoW on your PC you are going to notice no change in the PC market at all.
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I agree with dan from what i have read so far, i think its fairly spot on.
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Poor Kieron’s testicles..
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Damnit, you guys make me so homesick for my little brick house in the Gloucestershire Countryside and its cable internet… Especially on Sundays, because I get it on Monday…
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Piracy as Theft: Debunked!™
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Before we all drown in a sea of comments (yarr!), this might also be interesting to the Sunday Papers people (I won’t say “peeps”, because that’s just disgracefully shit): a piece by Blake Snow (?) called “The trouble with game of the year awards”, posted by Dan Hsu on his blog Sore Thumbs.
Don’t expect any amazing insights, it pretty much confirms what you’ve suspected, but still might be an interesting read.
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That Rare article was spot-on, KG.
Especially that last paragraph. Nuts&Bolts is one of my top three games of the year, console or otherwise, just because it was fun. The glee you feel when the crazy flying boatmobile that you feared might be too heavy to take off or even float actually works is amazing. People need to remember why games were made in the first place (okay, maybe second. Money always comes first.), and that’s to HAVE FUN.
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To be honest, the main argument for piracy is getting stuff for free and the limited possibility of being caught. Anything else is probably just an excuse. (But we’ve been here before)
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qrter: I think the big problem with game awards is that nearly everyone involved works for big game companies. The whole thing just smacks of corporate back-patting.
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I agree with John Walker in his blog that Michael Thomsen’s piece for IGN on Gears 2 is by far the best article/review I have read about the game. Thanks for that link!
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” One last point: some people are in such a mad rush to insist that Steam is somehow the solution to every aspect of piracy and DRM, they fail to consider that by giving Valve a monopoly in digital games distribution, this will only help keep game prices high.”(http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_9.html)
I find this funny because roughly a year ago, I bought 6 games(7 if you count peggle extreme) for the price of 1 game, from Valve. Also I don’t think that valve gets a lot of money for distributing the games, but I have no facts what-so-ever to support this.
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Interesting words from John!
Other professions also tussle with the ideal of objectivity as well. I know very well that there is some discussion amongst archivists about the pretension of objectivity in an area where collection policies (which are written by someone afterall) and murky and inherently biased terms like “significance” prevail. I think a good case for the necessity of critical evaluation of a reviewer is made in John’s article – although I am not sure if he intended to make it.
Um yeah… sorry about the archival ramblings… how about them games eh?
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He also doesn’t mention the social networking aspect of Steam, which admittedly has only become really strong the last year or so, but I do think it’s why a lot of people embrace the platform – in other words, Steam isn’t just about delivering games and therefore DRM, there’s more to the thing (granted, you might see this as Valve trying to obscure the DRMness of the platform, but you could also see it as them giving the community something extra, to show that it’s not all about restriction).
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True, but generally a monopoly is bad in any unregulated competitive field. Thats why we have government organisations tasked with stopping monopolies from developing.
If you’ve got only one place to buy your PC games in the future then I imagine you won’t see quite as many bargins or sales.
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Dreadnaught, its more about the products of other publishers then off valve, valve isnt afraid to cut there prices, other developers and publishers are.
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Dan Lawrence, pepper. I agree with you two. And I think Valve has this way of pricing stuff, because they know it is a good way to survive in this market.
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Funny he says Valve has no motivation to lower prices when i just bought TF2 for 10 dollars (50% off)
Also in one of his conclusions he says something like “Dont buy or pirate crappy games”, but how are we supposed to know what games are crappy? “Professional reviews” are a laughter, demos are taking the way of Hollywood trailers which show only what the publisher thinks will attract more viewers.
And call my pirate or whatever but i WILL NOT PAY for a 6 months late SHITTY console port like GTAIV, i will not reward laziness and speculation.
Also publishers have effectively killed the second hand PC market making it virtually impossible to sell your used PC games, i take caution in spending 50 bucks in what may become a coaster after 6 hours of cliche gameplay.
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I stopped reading the Tweak article when I reached the bit about StarForce. Whilst the commitment to evidence if laudable, this is cherry-picked evidence. I have no less than six optical drives in my garage which are broken because of StarForce. It took six to work out that it was StarForce and I know invariably that those games I have which have SF, if installed, will break my newest optical drive. Corrolation doesn’t equate to causation, but this is an invariable consequence when ever I have tried playing Prince of Persia 2 and 3 again. Those games are now unplayable for me unless I want to keep forking out.
The pre-conditions the Russian company set out in order to ‘prove’ StarForce harmed machines are conveniently not mentioned either. I’m not going to fly to Russia with my PC to show them personally the optical drive gradually getting slower and slower over many weeks until it can no longer play a DVD, just to get a refund off them to replace the broken drives.
To say that if someone is wrong in one thing, they must be wrong in everything, would be unreasonable. But the article isn’t wrong; it’s factually correct. It’s dishonest. The truth is being used to tell lies. Distorting the picture without smudging the paint. This is an exception where wrong in one thing really does mean it is wrong in all things because the conclusions being drawn require possibly more time to scrutinise than it did to research the article to begin with; we are relying on our trust of the author that the article as a whole is true and informative. Like in a documentary, a single mistakes doesn’t poison everything, but a single falsehood does.
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No, comment thread, No!
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I do agreen with most of that is said, but some of the points are just naive and wrong. When a finely polished package like the Orange Box come with Steam, I’ve got no problem with it. When a piece of crap (*cough*GTA IV*cough) comes with microsoft AND rockstar DRM, we got a big problem.
And anybody want to venture a guess to who would complain more about piracy, Valve or Rockstar?
I also hate DRM that restrict number of installs. Sure, I can call the publisher or whatever, but I don’t really want to everytime my PC hardware spec changes. That is why Steam is a good system, because while Valve is still running (not likely to bankrupt soon), I can install my games on as many computers as I want.
Demos are a joke, I remember the FEAR demo to be much more exciting than the actual game, in fact, I’m pretty sure the FEAR demo pretty much contained all the excitement of the whole game packaged into a short level.
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In my home country, you can’t get a bootlegged PC game unless it’s either very popular or you know which bootleg market to go to. Bootlegged console games, however, are sold right in the flea market, sunday market…everywhere there’s more than a smattering of people. To add to this, good broadband internet is expensive and ‘good’ is rather subjective depending on where you live, but it also ensures that anyone who torrents has to know something about how to set networks up. Naturally, most console pirates buy bootlegs and PC pirates torrent, for mutual convenience.
Granted, countries like mine are markets with little attention paid to by developers, though I’m not sure whether piracy causes this or if it is the other way around. Even localized titles are never in our language, and shops selling bootlegs outnumber legit copies ten to one, so I’m not sure whether anyone ever adds this to the total or not. But just in case we’re willing to look at it as a global problem, this may account for some of the numerical discrepancies?
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I think it’s stupid to create an article like this just as you have closed down your forums. But hey, often when he wanted to just present his own view he was making locked threads anyway. I love his work with guides and such, but I dislike pretty much everything else I know about this guy.
Needless to say I disagree with a lot of what he wrote in there, some of it is sound but a lot of it is pure speculation which he tries to pass as fact.
For example, I don’t think anyone can measure console piracy. Why? Because it’s not done via downloads as on PC on its largest part. A single person will usually download a game, then distribute a ton of copies, which he actually sells to naive people. That’s how it’s usually done. We can’t measure it, because obviously if they knew where those people are, they’d simply arrest and shut down their “business” duh. So I’m afraid the “it happens on consoles too” argument isn’t debunked at all.
Many other points have similar uninformed speculation, like if the industry really is affected to the worse and what not. It reminds me of Ubisoft’s stance with having no DRM in Prince of Persia just to prove what nobody argues anyway instead of actually service the customers which is only a side effect of their intention it seems.
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Oh yeah, as for giving Valve the online monopoly, uh, so what? It’s no worse than the oligopoly of the giant retail chains in the largest markets. And it’s better in ways already explained in some other comments here. But hey, how about recommending other platforms like Impulse and Good old Games also then? Oh, that’s right, they have no DRM so they must advocate piracy lolol?
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Install limits ARE a problem, since you have the thing of when your uninstalling it can sometimes fail to connect to the server meaning that you have uninstalled the game but once you have installed ti again you have one taken away and the unistalled hasn’t put one back. Also Red Alert 3 do not have these uninstalls so you only have 5 activations.
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Right, not to mention pirates don’t have limited installs anyway, that only hinders legitimate customers and makes them jump through hoops. That’s the whole point of not wanting DRM that is intrusive like that, that pirates are not affected in the least, even the most casual uninformed gamer has learnt how to copy paste a crack or use a patch file, while legitimate customers get the shaft.
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Honestly, I’ve never had an actual issue with SecuROM, and I’m not even aware of the problems others have gotten. I have pretty much no ill-will to any DRM that doesn’t prevent me from playing my games (unless it apparently does that?). The install limit of 3 or 5 though, is completely bogus as I like to keep games permenantly and replay them whenever and however I want. It’s not enough to keep me from buying a really good game, but I’d be more likely to buy it from Steam or not at all if I was in any way on the fence about it.
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Also sad about Rare, they were the best SNES and Nintendo 64 developers and ever since they were brought by Microsoft they sucked basically. I will always know you rare by the greatness that you made..
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RC-1290′Dreadnought’: The timed demo for L4D was interesting – I can’t think of anyone else who has done this, and it contributed to me not buying the game, after umming and aahing about the £27 price tag for a multiplayer-only game.
I think it’s valid to suggest that people shouldn’t pirate games as extended demos. Aside from lying about your reasons (if you, say, pirated a game and played it all or most of the way through before saying it was crappy and you won’t buy a legit copy) every product has that limitation. If publishers don’t provide demos or reviews are inaccurate, then just wait for opinions on the internet. This is what I did with GTA4, and they lost a sale. The publishers lose early sales, but tough shit to them for not providing representative demos or review copies.
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Weaselwords, with a huge heap of writing on the nose. How about, answer the question – why pay to have a worse gaming experience? I guess his answer is, “those with little patience do it”. I guess the rest will keep not paying, apart for the odd game without DRM. It’s also interesting to see a lot of online music stores starting to sell music without DRM.. somehow, they must believe it possible to make money, even without DRM. It must be that “different user demographic” at work again. Because pirates don’t listen to music?
I’d also say that WoW is piracy-resistant because it sells an online service (server access), and not a digital product that can easily be copied. You’d have to hack the server and make fake accounts to crack WoW – and if you did, you’d risk your characters that you put months of hard work into being locked if you were discovered. Also, if I’m offline somewhere out in the shticks and cannot play WoW, I won’t complain – being online is integral. But if DRM or Steam risks stopping me playing a single-player offline game.. well, that’s one product I wont buy.
The future may contain DRM, but I think WoW is the smarter business model..
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You are the first person I’ve ever seen who has even claimed to have actual evidence of a hardware failure related to StarForce. And I was pretty involved in the debate back in the day.
It’s not difficult to believe that the same is true of Koroush, so I wouldn’t go around calling him a liar just because he’s not spoken to you.
(Additionally, it sounds a lot like you keep hitting the WinXP bug that erodes drive speed when a disc with corrupt sectors is encountered. There’s an update out that fixes that…I thought it was on WU?)
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WoW is obviously a smart business model. But does that mean developers should only make MMOGs and ditch other types? I’d rather have single player games on Steam than not have them at all.
But I’m not worried that genres will disappear. Genres disappear when they simply aren’t popular anymore, cue the adventure or space sim games, though I think we see a resurgence in both. It has little to do with piracy. And obviously not everyone can invest in making a MMORPG. People can only play so many. Just look how horribly anything that isn’t WoW fails over here. Conan? Failure. Warhammer? Started good, now they’re doing server merges. Tabula Rasa? Dead. Etc.
There’s no reason to fear that developers willl only make MMORPGs and other online games thanks to piracy as the article tries to say. Genre decisions have little to do with piracy, just what’s currently “hot” and such.
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Theory, lots of ppl say the same things as Gorgeras about Starforce, including myself. Heck, that’s why people mostly hated it, as most have no clue what ring 0 access or what not really means. One would have to do some heavy searching to find Starforce debates without such mentions, rather than with.
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Music: Data that is read by code. I can’t play protected files in Audiosurf.
Games: Code that read data.
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Well, I think the article argues that some developers have said they’ll only make single player games for consoles, so some genres might just shift to different platforms. For example, Brutal Legend was primarily announced for Xbox when Tim’s earlier work was all unashamedly PC.
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And yes, we magically stop getting the hardware corruptions when we stop using Starforce. It took you 5 seconds to solve a problem we’ve obviously encountered and researched for months (according to his 6 drives mention), thanks a lot dude.
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Al3xand3r, I saw plenty of people claiming that damage was caused, but nobody who had actually had it happen to them.
The same is true of those who complained about Spore’s install limits. “Have you been affected?” I always asked. Nobody posting ever had.
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Al3xand3r, disc read speed degradation (if that’s what it is/was) was an OS thing that would by its nature stick around after any software triggering it had gone.
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Theory: I’ll be the second person to claim an actual hardware fault because of Starforce. Burnt through four optical-drives.
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The nice thing about Steam is that the company that runs it is privately owned, and thus has no ethical imperative to brutally extract as much income from its customers as possible in the short term at the cost of reputation and long term customer relationships. If they feel greedy, they can, but they can’t claim they did so because they were obligated to some third party.
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That thief breaking into your house analogy it terrible.
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A few years back I replaced multiple CD drives too, until I realised all my problems were caused by Starforce – after lots of research and pulling my hair out.
I’m not some illogical hysterical tit. In my experience the corrolation was clear. I’ve never had any problems with CD/DVD drives since I started boycotting all starforce games.
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On the Sore Thumbs game awards article, I have to say my response is a big “so what”? Awards are compromised, arbitrary and more or less meaningless in every industry (remember Titanic’s Oscar haul?), but at least in games they don’t have any real impact. There’s no equivalent to the Oscar bounce that I know of. Occasionally you’ll get a “Game of the Year” edition, but it’s always just an excuse to package an already blockbuster game with some post-release content and sell it again. I’d be amazed if more than 1% of any (mainstream) game’s sales came as a result of an award. The IGF awards are an obvious exception, but the article doesn’t talk about them at all.
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Just in case anyone has forgotten this is a 10 page article of which Starforce forms only a minor and somewhat insignificant part. If there are legitimate problems with Starforce it makes little difference conceptually to the author’s main thrust.
Also, as another commentor pointed out it is wrong to assume ill intent when the article writer may just be uniformed about the damage Starforce causes. If anyone has some kind of well researched piece on the destruction wrought on certain models of optical drive by Starforce then feel free to post it, but its not the main thrust of the point the author is trying to make.
His point is that in some cases DRM does work in stopping piracy for a short period contrary to the popular (and indeed my until recently) belief. If DRM works enough and game sales appear to be higher as a result then you can bet publishers will try it even at the expense of minorly inconveniencing their users. I also don’t think the author is in favour of ‘you can only install this game X times’ DRM, but as he rightly points out most, if not all of the games that opted for this route have allowed an uninstall to regain installations or upped their installation limits to something larger.
I still don’t think its particularly great to be entrusting the fate of my future games workiness to the health of a corporation and its willingness to disable activation should it go down the tubes. However, that surely does not justify piracy? Instead it might justify buying the game playing at as intended and then if the worst happens popping onto the internet for the crack?
In short; all DRM is not equal the author is aware of that fact, sometimes DRM works, sometimes DRM like steam actually becomes popular. DRM forms a small part of the article in total there are large passages on the economics of piracy (and regional piracy fans, he also comes out in favour of simultaneous world wide releases).
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“The same is true of those who complained about Spore’s install limits. “Have you been affected?” I always asked. Nobody posting ever had.”
Wasn’t there a story the day after the game came out where a guy had the game fail whenever he tried to install, and then got to his ‘install limit’? I can tell you that I format my drives every 6 months or so, thus a lot of games would be unplayable within a few years.
And I still play Quake 1, so.. yeah, consider that.
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(What I meant was, of course they haven’t been effected when you asked, the game had been our what, 2 months?)
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On the PC vs. console piracy statistics…
The websites mentioned as sources of piracy are very Western-centric. I’m living in Beijing, and it’s difficult to buy an unmodded xbox360 over here. When I bought mine, I couldn’t take it home, because “it wasn’t ready yet.” They mod it in the shop for free, then give it to you.
And I still haven’t found a place to buy legit games. I’d like to; there are a few that I’d love to play on LIVE. But when you walk into game shops in Gulou and see hundreds of spindles of copied console games ready for distribution, and each game costing about 1 Euro, you can see how legit copies wouldn’t be stocked.
On the other hand, I’ve never even seen copied PC games for sale over here. I think everyone just slurps them right off the torrent sites, hence the whole Asian micro-transaction model, etc., etc. Heck, I even heard some people saying WotLK was going to be a free patch over here.
So no, it probably doesn’t change much overall. But the obviousness of the cracked consoles and distribution of cracked console games is amazing.
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Brad Wardell of Stardock said he could eliminate 100% of GalCiv2′s piracy by running the AI code through a server. Without a valid key code and access to the server, piracy would be impossible. I expect all games, singe or multiplayer, to eventually use such systems. In doing so, piracy would completely vanish. Those who object (and those with shitty internet connections) would probably be a minority and could be financially written-off, if you will. Brad said he’s not at that point yet, but my understanding is that such measures are comparatively trivial to implement.
If I had to choose between increasing amounts of Starfoce/SecuROM/[root kit] or constant online activation, especially if the publishers get rid of DVD checks and throw in Steam-like features, I would chose the latter.
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I thought that Spore and other recent limited-activation games had a system which would give you back your activation ‘ticket’ when you legitimately uninstall?
I really liked that piracy article. I’m not going to use the ‘eww StarForce’ argument as a reason to not buy excellent products like LO:MAC Flaming Cliffs and DCS Black Shark now.
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Insofar as I know, the problem with the activation ‘tickets’ is that they can be corrupted with bad installs, etc.
I’ve only ever ‘pirated’ two games though; Close Combat 3, which I tried to buy for a year and couldn’t, and Starcraft, because my CD was so scratched to shit it wouldn’t read. And I’d bought 3 copies.
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Why is Walker’s reviews piece not on RPS?! I DEMAND SERIALISATION OF THIS ARTICLE TO RPS! THE INTERNET NEEDS TO HEAR THIS!
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I’m happy with the Tribute status so long as we don’t have to pay you guys royalties! Friendly banter!
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@RichP : I love how half my country could be written off here! I mean, I sure hope they improve by the time such measures come into place, but one thing that pleasantly surprised me since coming to the States is that our regular 1M broadband is only slightly faster than your 128K at peak times. No, I’m not being sarcastic, it’s just…ironically funny.
And it’s not a problem of people not having enough money. It’s a problem of there being exactly one national outbound bottleneck. Clearly the architecture can be improved, but well…
Of course, if people would simultaneously stop torrenting all sorts of things all over, we may just see a sharp increase! Now that’s something to look forward to.
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RichP, they could do that, but then they have the costs of running and maintaining that server (well, the multitude of servers to satisfy demand), and that cost will likely have to be passed on to the consumer somehow. And what if the server had problems, bugs, what not, I wouldn’t be able to play the game whenever anything unexpected happened. So, again, legit customers would get the shaft, thanks to pirates. Just as bad as any DRM, and worse. How many would be willing to pay fees for a single player game anyway? Not many should be anyway.
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I’m roughly half way through that 10 page piracy article.
I currently feel like stopping there and crying myself to sleep.
I mean, I want to get into the games industry and make games for my preferred platform, but as long as this goes on, and the free rider problem continues to gain traction, how can I possibly convince any publisher to do that?
Whats the point?
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@semi: Wardell thinks such measures are several years off at the earliest, in part because broadband still sucks in many regions.
@Al3x: All valid concerns. Tens of millions of gamers already pay to play online-only games that can be shutdown at any time or rendered temporarily inoperable due to server issues. The challenge is getting people to do the same for single-player games. Maybe by adjusting the pricing model (subscribe instead of buy)? In any event, something has to be done, or there will be fewer and fewer publishers willing to assume the risk of PC-centric games. I thought Brad’s idea was novel, if impracticable for every game, because it’s impossible to circumvent.
Interestingly, EA’s next PC-exclusive RTS game, Battleforge, will be online-only and supported by microtransactions. Piracy is therefore impossible.
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I did have problems with an earlier implementation of (Starforce or Securom I think) where a legitimate copy of Black & White 2 wouldn’t run until I downloaded a CD key cracker… Guess the DRM didn’t like my CD/DVD/Whatever drive.
More recently I haven’t had actual problems with an implementation of DRM, I still more or less disagree with them on principle of DRM potentially giving legitimate users a poorer gameplay experience than that of other users.
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Another solution to the publishers-dying thing might be to have a timed lock on them, so that they no longer require server intervention after x years. Of course, that might be crackable more easily than forcibly doing some of the calculations server-side.
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It’s a novel idea RichP, but again, one not applicable to every game. I’m sure the gameplay is vastly different to that of say, Command and Conquer, which allows for that model to work. That doesn’t mean “regular” games of the genre will disappear, though I guess they just might as no RTS has been able to make a big splash lately.
And on the opposite side we have Starcraft 2 which keeps a similar model to that of the original. Blizzard certainly know the game too, perhaps better than EA some would argue.
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Piracy has been around on the PC since forever.
I didn’t know anyone with an original version of Doom.
What is most likely ‘killing’ big budget games sales on the pc are low budget laptops.
I don’t know anyone who is willing to shell out £600+ on rig when a £200 laptop can let them do the big 4 pc needs easily.
It’s about CHIME.[Chat,Internet,Music & Movies and Email].
If people no longer want to buy rigs then I don’t see a future for big budget pc gaming past hobbyists.
Lord knows I haven’t upgraded this machine since…’03?
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That’s the developers and publishers fault again, even moderate PCs are capable of a lot these days. Instead of aiming for a decent middle ground though, they seem to just try to take advantage of the latest and greatest hardware, as if the market is ruled by the people who buy those, instead of the majority which uses much lesser PCs. Valve know their shit, that’s why for four years on almost all of their games have remained with almost the same requirements. Blizzard also know their shit. Studios like the Crysis’ developer clearly do not.
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@Radiant : Hardware hogs have been around since forever, too. Lord knows, we had fun(????) making alternate autoexec.bats and config.syses on dad’s computer to squeeze out enough memory for our Ultima VII playing time. Although I suppose that with that line of logic, games was enough of a hobbyist thing back then that it didn’t make much of a dent. Saleswise or production cost-wise.
Ah, the good old days!
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@Dan Lawrence: Yeah, I realise it wasn’t the main thrust of the argument; it was more for Theory’s benefit as he says he hasn’t encountered anyone whose had hardware problems due to Starforce. Don’t worry, I know that anecdotal evidence isn’t the strongest basis for an argument, so it would be foolish for me to even attempt to argue against it anyway.
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I imagine Walker saying to himself “I’ll write something lengthy and considered about that innovation/role-of-the-reviewer debate, just sneak it in while there’s a lull in the piracy fu… Doh!“
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@Al3xand3r
Although I agree with your point I don’t see it as anyone’s fault.
It’s more a side effect of the push for cyclical console gaming.
Instead of pushing newer innovative game experiences; what drove the last two console cycles was wiz bang graphics.
How many power point presentations did we see Microsoft and Sony pull out in an effort to excite us?
And you know we sort of bought it… so blaming publishers and developers for giving us things we were already sold on isn’t really something we can hold them them for.
If we can take anything from Kieron’s Rare write up is that devs and publishers really are in a bind when it comes to innovative games now. It’s simply easier to sell 50 eleven million copies of Metal Gear Halo 12 then it is to sell the same amount of World of Goo.
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@Radiant
The guy uses the sales of add in GPUs from Nvidia and ATi to guesstimate the PC gaming userbase. Since they’re still selling 20m per quarter it’s safe to say there’s at least 60 million PCs capable of playing the latest games. I agree that cheap laptops and integrated graphics aren’t good for PC gaming but looking at those numbers the market is still very large.
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It’s true. Chaos Theory took a year to get cracked, and Beyond Divinity never was (though the devs later stripped Starforce out of it.) But they were distinct exceptions to the rule, and many other games shipped with Starforce that were all over torrent sites almost immediately. One or two exceptions does not disprove the rule.
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I sincerely disagree.
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Also, I am deeply skeptical that heading off zero-day piracy really has a significant impact. Who are these pirates who’d rather drop $50 on a game than wait a week or two to download it for free? Mythical creatures, in my estimation.
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That’s always been my biggest point of confusion too. I can’t really concieve of anyone except some 5yr old screaming “Gimee NowNowNow!” tipping an otherwise free game into a sale that quickly. They can’t account for very many sales.
Many do assure me that it’s a huge factor in how many get sold at all, but it’s rather inconcievable to me. Game copying was always about patience when I was a kid, sometimes waiting months. Sure the world’s changed and sped up but people who’d rather pay ninety dollars than wait a week? Who are these people?
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@malkav: Yeah, I’ve never understood why preventing zero-day piracy is such a big deal. Are publishers banking on people impulse buying? (What!? No pirated copy!? Well, then, time to drop $50 on game X!)
PC gaming is a crazy thing that defies easy explanation. Just look at this thread. Piracy killing PC-exclusive genres? Maybe, maybe not. Stardock makes great PC games that sell enough copies to make the endeavor pretty damn profitable. StarCraft II and Diablo III will sell millions and millions of copies; WoW is one of the most profitable games ever made; Valve’s games still better on PC than the 360… That Gamesutra story indicates that plenty of people still play PC games of all sorts. We clearly need DRM that reduces or eliminates piracy, yet publishers create DRM schemes that piss thousands and thousands of people off.
Then again, if PC gaming was easy, and easily categorized, what the hell would we have to talk about? :p
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Gosh, there’s so much wrong with that piracy article I can’t even start or I’d be typing all night. Here’s a fun thing to try: count the number of times he supports his argument with anecdotal evidence without presenting any actual facts those statements were based upon. Or save yourself some time and count the number of times he doesn’t…
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Dan Lawrence,
I mentioned in my post that ‘wrong in one thing, wrong in all’ is a silly conclusion to come to when a mistake is made. But in this case, it isn’t a mistake that the author neglected to mention the outrageous pre-conditions the Russian firm demanded(mirring that of Creationist or anti-vaccine loons that want many irrelevent or burdonsome criteria to be filled before they accept evidence proving them wrong) whilst still using the fact that no one had come forward to ‘prove’ SF was harmful to demonstrate there was no evidence at all.
I am not going all the way to Russia to show them how installing PoP 2 or 3, or PsiOps leads to a gradual reduction in speed until useless.
A mere mistake isn’t enough to justify use of ‘wrong in one, wrong in all’, but downright dishonesty is. I simply can’t believe the author was unaware of the policy on StarForce where the makers insisted people go all the way to Russia and even then, they will only refund the proven damage, not the expense of flying and staying in a hotel for a few weeks coming into their building every day to repeatedly boot up your PC, load the SF-infected game, re-start, etc.
Theory,
I’ve been using Vista since last summer when I built this new machine. When was this update for XP released? I encountered the problems with my drives in 2005, so did it really take Microsoft two or three years to fix it if it is the real cause? I noticed my drives refused to play DVD games at first, ones on CD were fine. They would still run, but only after about five minutes of a strange clicking noise being made.
But this catagorically did *not* happen during 2006 when my games with StarForce were not installed at all because I was drunk on World of Warcraft. It wasn’t until I went away to college in 2007 and took Prince of Persia: special edition and my laptop there to play as it was residential. Drive gave in after 2 months and I didn’t catch on until I decided to transfer save-games and finish the two thrones on my home PC. Drive packed in. Sod it, I used my savings to build a new comp with Vista. Then I read about StarForce and what it does to optical drives. I’m just lucky StarForce caused my Vista machine not to start at all after installing PoP and I had to go into safe mode and do a system restore. If it had allowed Vista to start and play PoP 2 or 3, it would have destroyed my latest drive too.
After reading about the policy where they actually want you to show them your machine disintergrating in front of their eyes(something that actually happens over a period of time rather than instantly) which was widely disseminated on the numerous complaint forums, I decided against contacting them about it.
I’m waiting for UbiSoft to finally sell their Steam games in the UK so I can play two of my favourite all time games again, without StarForce.
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The only problem I have with the piracy article is that it makes it seem like piracy is a recent issue.
In the 80s and 90s, piracy was standard here in Portugal, and I have a very hard time believing that it has changed in any way until today. I literally had over 200 pirated games at home for the Spectrum, my next door neighbour had dozens and dozens of pirated games for the Amiga, my first PC came with a bunch of pirated games installed by the store, and until the age of 16 (that’s the year of 1996), I played dozens of PC games while only having bought a single one(Chip’s Challenge, at Selfridges, of all places). Obviously, this was all without Internet. Everyone who used computers pirated software, back then, and I have a hard time believing that things have gotten any worse. In fact, things have probably gotten better over the years.
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Tweak guides need to stick to things they know. That article had massive amounts of FAIL!
The person who wrote the article I’d question if he used the internet in the 90′s at all and obviously had no clue about the BBS scene(80′s) or IRC which was very popular in the 90′s. Plus the fact since most games averaged 10 or less floppies you didn’t need fast internet or could pass it on to mates.
That article fails to mention that even tho Starforce did stop the scene to release a working crack for 12mths+, you could still d/l a clonecd of the game and with a special app could get around the starforce BS. Alot of legit owners did it this way as well, to avoid having starforce installed. The only problem was you had to physically disconnect the drive to get it to work! That alone would make you wonder what starforce was doing in the background…
He obviously now has a pro-starforce stance. He tries to compare it to speedfan yet fails to mention that speedfan is
1) Freeware,
2) The developer is open to what he is trying to achieve
3) Is an app that is monitoring your pc, not trying to stop certain software from working
4) is considered safe from security software companies.
Starforce
1) developers are making money on starforce
2) Secretive about what star-force did early on
3) the earlier versions did not uninstall themselves from the system even when you uninstalled the game/demo.
4) had an arrogant view about the program and anyone questioning them, must of ment you were a pirate.
5) they covered their ass by saying it was part of agreeing to the EULA.
The whole 0-day discussion is flawed. They complain that they lose sales if a game is released on the net b4 it’s sold in shops and people will always get whatever comes 1st… Well it takes up to a month for a game to go from GOLD to shops. That is at least 2weeks before the scene gets their hands on it. That is plenty of time for the publishers to release a special DD “GOLD” release on a system like STEAM and still release the normal “retail” box version. The DRM haters can wait for the drm free box version and the so called players that just want to be 1st to play will have put some money down. I know some people have cracked STEAM games but they still have to wait till the day its released.
The Spore and Amazon issue was not because they needed to install a serial number or have the CD in the drive to play. The issue was DRM limiting how many times they can install the game before calling support. The concept of calling anyone in 2008 is ludicrous. He rambles that the DRM haters are only 1%, well that’s because most ppl can’t be assed to make an effort. I’m sure if RPS showed us some stats on how many ppl RSS/read this site vs how many ppl post, the ratio would be large. 500,000 d/l vs 2mill sold would suggest DRM haters are more than 1%. He even mentions that its the most pirated game That would imply that more people than usual went to the effort to d/l a pirated version of the game.
He finally mentions the business of piracy which is indeed an interesting subject but again his logic is flawed and is picking on the wrong crowd. WareZ sites make money from traffic not from selling games, noone is fooled here. You don’t put money down to buy a game. Google makes money the same way, you could search for kiddie porn and google will make money from it.
The real issue has always been the street sellers and counterfeiters which would make money on unsuspecting customers trying to get a bargain and its still a big problem in alot of markets. With police crackdowns in the western world its not so much a problem as it used to be so people just don’t know that existed and point fingers in the wrong places.
His “conclusions” show a lack of understanding on the topic. Everyone whined about Bioshock and what did EA do? Release another game in exactly the same fashion! Alot of poeple whine about the way Steam works when it was 1st released yet it still works in a similar fashion today.
How much more “working with publishers” do we need to do??
Not buying games as a protest, does not fix the problem the market is still large enough that the big games make money so any so called protests are silenced, if it really worked we would of had DRM-free games by now on all releases and all games would only cost $10 a pop.
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Ha, support Starforce now? Back in 2006, Starforce posted a link to a GalCiv2 torrent on its official forums in response to Stardock’s anti-DRM stance as a twisted way of proving a point. What a dick move.
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WareZ sites make money from traffic not from selling games, noone is fooled here.
I wonder what brings in all that traffic.
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Alot of poeple whine about the way Steam works when it was 1st released yet it still works in a similar fashion today.
my steam experience in 2004/2005 is far different than my steam experience these days.
your experience may have been different.
Yeah, I’ve never understood why preventing zero-day piracy is such a big deal. Are publishers banking on people impulse buying?
flip it sideways – they’re banking on preventing impulse downloading.
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And games tend to sell the most in their first few days, especially if they are greatly anticipated.
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@dhex
“flip it sideways – they’re banking on preventing impulse downloading.”
And keeping those fans who are SO HYPED UP THEY’RE GOING TO THE MIDNIGHT OPENING TO BUY THE GAME from downloading the pirated version that’s available a week earlier.
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That Gears of War 2 article John links is really interesting and everyone should read it. Here’s a couple paragraphs:
“Over the last ten years, shooting has taken the place of jumping as the lowest common denominator mechanic in gaming. Gamers instinctively reach out for a trigger button and right analog stick in the same way that they would have mashed a jump button during the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. Shooting as gameplay can be a powerful and expressive mechanic, but I can’t recall many instances where I would call it fun. Cliff Bleszinski has compared the act of shooting in a 3D environment to touching. He’s right, to an extent, but it’s an exceptionally limited kind of touch whose only outcome is destructive.
The inherent power in shooting is that we’re subconsciously aware that it’s wrong. We’re not supposed to kill people, or destroy things. Games that guide us through simulated thrill rides where shooting is required to progress is a perverse kind of wish fulfillment. Like a lucid nightmare, shooters sate our morbid curiosity. Unlike Mario’s jump, or Madden’s juke controls, I don’t wish I could shoot and kill in real life. When I shoot at something in a game I’m not delighted through empowerment or wish fulfillment, I’m subconsciously horrified. That experience, like a great horror film, is a psychic acknowledgement of fear and mortality without having to endure any of the painful consequences. It’s pornographic in the best sense of the word.”
The part about shooting replacing the jump is just cool to think about it, but I don’t agree with being horrified by the shooting. I suppose I could have just forgotten my initial reaction, but whatever remnants I have of that fear seem to be long gone. I think it’s more of a wanting to be an action hero thing, like the gun nuts who own 10 guns for self defense yet live in the suburbs.
http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/933/933174p1.html
Or, you know, talk more about starforce because it’s so fascinating and I have never heard it before.
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He repeats the popular lies about Steam. The software has an offline mode where one can play installed games without contacting the server.
Fondness for Steam is not the overflowing of love for certain titles: a miniscus is clearly visible. Steam is well liked because:
A. Purchase-to-download-to-play is fast. It’s faster than driving to the store, and faster than downloading a pirate copy.
B. Patches are fast and applied before launch. It’s irksome to load a title, then be told a patch is out.
C. Data collected is also used to improve the games.
D. No limits on installs.
E. A whole catalogue of titles is available, not just the “flavour of the month.” If I go to retail, they probably won’t have what I’m looking for, since they concentrate on things that sell in high volumes for the first month.
F. It just works.
True, you can’t resell a Steam game, but seriously, does a used PC game market exist?
I also find it weird that he’ll refer to casual piracy to explain drm, then use downloading figures to explain why consoles aren’t a problem. People rent console games, and they buy them used, and guess what activities the game industry wants to shut down? Counterfeiting and piracy on consoles is a different world with different rules.
DRM systems like Starforce and Securom can only damage the consumer’s perceived value of a product. They sit in the game’s critical path, and break stuff. It’s a bigger risk the more games and high-end hardware is installed. But the point is to get people to BUY more games.
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Some stuff like StarF*e detect CD emulators and refuse to play, if detected. Now, can a game choose what software I am able to run? and, what If I can’t uninstall the emulator, because i deleted it the bad way?
DRM is evil, but the implementation of DRM in a PC using a driver is a serius precedente. TweakGuide is not taking the issue in a serius way, so I will lower my expectations for future TweakGuide articles.
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I quite liked the piracy article. I learned a lot from it. There was one thing said which didn’t make any sense to me, though: “If Valve is serious about getting digital distribution to truly take off it needs to insist that publishers sell their games for a much lower price on Steam.”
I don’t think that this is fair. I doubt Valve has the clout to insist on such a thing. If they tried, the publishers would probably just decide not to put their games on Steam.
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“Oh yeah, as for giving Valve the online monopoly, uh, so what?”
Wow. you should maybe look up why monopolys are bad on wikipedia.
Would you like microsoft to have a veto on what games get made? If not, why valve? what makes you think valve will be owned by the same people next month as own it this month?
Lets say microsoft buy valve next week. Still happy that 100% of PC games are controlled by them?
What is so fucking hard about going to a developer’s site to buy a game?
What is so fucking difficult about developers just selling you a link to a DRM-free exe installer with no bullshit bloatware taskbar-hogging crap attached?
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Dan(WR) – you don’t make it clear: were the drives actually physically broken? ie were they still no good after you reinstalled and started boycotting starforce games?
I don’t think even the most ardent Starforce apologist, or even the company themselves, would say there weren’t software incompatibilities and that in certain situations and with certain versions you can a) Not be able to access the starforce-protected game, or even b) have starforce vomit all over your OS and cause problems with the drive in _other_ situations
is b) what happened to you, or was it genuine hardware failure? If so, then that’s at least 2 people claiming it’s happened to them now, who, given the relative intelligence of RPS readers, I’d be inclinced to believe. That’s up from 0 when I actively went looking at the height of the hysteria.
Anyway, not a bad article that (although it could have done with mentioning Lenslock :P )
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That’s it, I’m boycotting Steam for the rest of my life.
SAY NO TO VALVE!
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“Digital distribution should logically be about reducing prices due to lower production costs.” We’re talking about IP. The ‘production costs’ come in development, not making the friggin’ disc!
Re Cliffski: The only problem I have with going directly to a small developer (and I do it pretty frequently) is because y’all aren’t completely reliable. I buy stuff online so that I don’t have to back it up. Even if you don’t crash, I’ll have to keep a copy of my passwords, etc. to download it again and check your site for the latest patches.
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Fuck you and your selective quoting and pretend-responses.
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@frymaster
I used to regularly reformat and reinstall windows to clean up my PC – and I ended up doing it a lot when I was experiencing drive problems. But those problems persisted afer OS reinstalls, until my drives were no longer able to recognise CDs. I was sure at the time that that Starforce was the trigger.
I’m not an expert by any means. Perhaps I was wrong. I don’t think I was, but I can only look at how many other people had the same problems as a way of verifying it now.
I don’t like software piracy, despite being rampant with it while growing up. I just wish I knew what the solution was. The thing that’s left a bad taste in the mouth recently is law firms sending out letters to people on the flimsiest evidence and demanding compensation. Atari dropped a certain firm like a bad penny, but there’s nothing to stop the bigger games companies from hiring lawyers for the same sort of horrible shit.
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This is getting pretty damn tiresome. Next time there is a cue for a very low quality discussion of piracy/DRM, it should be in a separate comments thread from stuff that nice people want to discuss ;<
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I like John’s subjective games reviews post. I want more subjective reviews. Objective and formulaic reviews that list everything in a game are why I’ve given up on most reviews and try to rely on demos.
My favourite example of reviewers trying too hard to be objective was the spate of reviews for Earth Defense Force 2017. There were a heap of reviews talking about what enormous fun in was, and then refusing to give it more than 70%. IT WAS FUN. They should be focusing more on that than anything else.
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A-Scale: Yeah, so you disagree. Surely the point of the discussion is to say why? So, for example, explain why World of Goo had a roughly 80% piracy rate.
The important thing is also to be honest about your own motives. There’s no reason why people should pirate in my opinion – PC gamers with a rig good enough to play Crysis have enough money to buy the game itself. If there’s no demo or good reviews, wait for the internet buzz to see if you like it. If games cost too much, then don’t buy them.
Like I said, it’s a crime of convenience. The most important thing is to be honest with yourself about everything you do, and don’t make excuses for committing crimes if the main reason for doing it is because you can.
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On the point of John’s article: I was reading Kieron’s Eurogamer Space Rangers review, in which he slates the poor translation before noticing a line in the manual that says that the game is set in the future, so “correct” future English has drifted away from modern English. Genius.
In any case, I don’t think any review I’ve ever read has been truly objective.
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Seems to be a lot of steam bashing going on in this thread. Not sure if I like that. I’ve been very happy with the service despite a few initial setbacks (and also Far Cry 2 took me a few days to download). The best thing about it is that I can re-download my games again and again. I bought the orange box and the disc got stood on, but I discovered all the games from it were downloadable once I had initially registered (BTW I think every publisher should be offering this service anyway….).
I understand people’s issue with the monopoly, but valve have been very open about the system. They’ve given it away for free as an SDK to anyone, so anyone can set up their own Steam based distro service, without having to pay any money to valve. But so far, no publishers have actually embraced this, they’ve just happily sold it all through valve’s version of steam.
HOWEVER. Although I’ve been recently quite happy with steam, I’m sensing that my love may be coming to an end. This new localised currency stuff they’re trying out is all well and good for you lot, but its hugely unfair to Euro people. Lets take Left4Dead as an example:
Left4Dead
US Price : $49.99 (= £33.36, €37.13)
UK Price : £26.99 (= $40.44, €30.03)
EU Price : €49.99 (= $67.30, £44.91)
For now, I can still buy in dollars, saving myself €12, or £11, or $18 on the US price, but once this leaves beta, I’m assuming I won’t be allowed to buy from the US store anymore. I certainly can’t buy from the UK store.
Try it out yourselves.
http://store.steampowered.com/?localizedcurrency=1&cc=ie
At this price, its almost the same as the retail price of games here, which is at best cheeky, and at worst an absolute crime. (€54.99 in GameStop for Fallout 3, which is £49, or $74)
I initially thought that this was due to what we call ‘Rip-Off Republic’, or sometimes ‘Paddy-Tax’, which is the outrageous mark-up we suffer on EVERYTHING in Ireland which is often erroneously attributed to us ‘being an island’ (even though the UK, malta, crete, cyprus etc don’t suffer the same). However, it turns out that substituting any other Eu country code for IE results in the same prices.
http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=fr
http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=de
http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=es
http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=nl
http://store.steampowered.com/?cc=it
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RE: Review Subjectivity (NOT PIRACY)
I think I have mentioned in the past that I’d prefer an objective review to a subjective one. I just wanted to point out that this is simply in terms of using the review as a buyer’s guide. Personally I don’t find descriptions of the reviewer’s unique personal experience to be a very reliable way to gauge what my experience will be like.
That said, I don’t just use reviews as a buyer’s guide. Sometimes they are a form of entertainment in their own right (imho this has been true of all art-criticism since the dawn of critics – and in terms of a lot of high profile literary criticism I think that the articles in question sometimes approach 100% entertainment) and in those cases I enjoy exploring the reviewer’s personal perspective.
I think the honesty problem only exists if you are thinking in terms of readers demanding an objective take on the subjective experience of playing the game. Personally I agree such a thing would be impossible or at least unhelpful in practice, but what I am after when I am looking for an objective review is really just an overview of those features of the game which really are objective.
I realise that writing about things like performance, stability and number of hours of gameplay might not be much fun, but if I’m looking for a buyer’s guide, and a discussion of your subjective experience isn’t very useful to me, then these are the things that are going to have a bearing on my decision to purchase. I don’t expect reviewers to exclusively write this way of course; if I am just collating info to help me decide whether or not to buy I don’t begrudge having to skim-read a bit!
As I say though, this is just me as a buyer, as a consumer of entertainment I do sometimes enjoy getting a bit more NSJ ;)
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I think I may have gotten a little off topic there, apologies for that
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I made a forum post re subjectivity\objectivity and reviews, as we are up to 100 posts about piracy again.
Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!
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It’s interesting to see so many straw-man arguments and excuses that the article refers to fill up this comments thread. I thought the tweakguides article was excellent.
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But the article itself is full of straw-man arguments also.
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It’s ironic, really.
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Well the statement that says DRM causes piracy is false is false, since Spore is the top most pirated game and many many people I know on The Pirate bay said they are downloading it because of the limited installs and DRM so yes that is false.
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I have to admit, the article failed to impress me. I’m not sure I’m convinced either way by Starforce/securom arguments, although I dislike being forced to install programs that may cause problems so companies can protect against people… who aren’t me. What I find most frustrating about this article is the claim that drm is useful. With little evidence. Industry people clearly believe that zero day protection is important, but I just haven’t seen any evidence for that. Yes, obviously if you have zero day protection, then there will be no piracy on that day…. But how does one measure the scale of gained sales there? This is actually a difficult issue, and requires some decent statistical analysis, something that is lacking. One could, for example, attempt to create a statistical model to incorporate factors on sales- model terms I might consider would include DRM usage (probably just a binary yes no parameter to make things simpler), metacritic ranking, advertising budget. You know, if a games company wants to pay me, or another statistican to do this kind of analysis, I’d be happy to do it. Obviously this kind of data exists, along with sales data, which is the only outcome variable we are truly interested in!
Ideally one would like to conduct an experiment where one releases a set of games, half with drm, and half without it, and see which perform better. This would have to be randomised… so I doubt you’d get any company to agree to it. That sort of thing would be much more useful to settling this debate once and for all. I know one of the main reason’s I have not picked up Spore or Red Alert 3 yet are feeling uncomfortable as being treated badly as a consumer. I never felt that with Steam, although I will note I didn’t buy bioshock through it.
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ok, that last sentence makes no sense….
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Well, one problem with modelling sales is that it’s very difficult to predict what people will do in any given situation. The thing is, World of Goo circumvents a lot of the classic arguments for piracy that people make – as the article says – and yet it was still pirated to hell and back. It’s not a big company that made it, it has no DRM, was reasonably priced and was openly available globally on release. Anyone who complains about the lack of early European Steam release and pirates it as a result has no sympathy from me – they’re a pathetic, whiny criminal.
I think the World of Goo point is one of the more convincing arguments that the article makes, and I can’t see any way to justify pirating World of Goo other than because people like getting things for free.
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@ Xercies (“Well the statement that says ‘DRM causes piracy is false’ is false, since Spore is the top most pirated game and many many people I know on The Pirate bay said they are downloading it because of the limited installs and DRM so yes that is false.”)
But is it? how many of those people are merely saying that the DRM is their motive for pirating the game, when deep deep down inside they know that in truth its actually because they can, and because any excuse is excuse enough for them to do it.
Just because they say thats their reasoning, is no gaurauntee that it isn’t just an excuse for their behaviour.
I hate DRM, but it doesn’t stop me from buying the games I’m really interested in buying (Never was that interested in spore so in the end I never bothered, haven’t played it and probably never will. If I was interested in Spore I probably would’ve bought it anyway, especially once EA had backed down and softened the demands of the DRM a fair bit.).
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@Cliffski:
Well, I bought Kudos 2 straight from your site and was pretty satisfied with the process.
I think this might be a case of people’s natural inclination to aim for the most “recognizable.” Brand names, product loyalty, the lingering effect of advertising and word of mouth… perception’s really important for consumers, for good or ill.
But hey, at least one guy trusts you. And other indie folks whose games look interesting, too.
And on Steam: Well, I’ve no beef with Valve, personally. And I’ve also got no beef with Stardock’s new competitor, Impulse. As a paying customer, it’s nice having a choice.
With the Steam pricing fiasco, though, that puts a bit of a kink in the consumer “trust” thing. And it’s ultimately all about trust.
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The article does admittedly fail to mention the investigations of one indie developer that suggested DRM prevents something like 1 pirate copy in a thousand, anyone remember where that article is? – As I ought to refresh myself on the wording of what that developer reported.
(EDIT: After further consideration, the above comment about 1 to 1000 pirated copies can be considered unreliable, primarily because its a casual game and therefor its relevance to AAA titles can be heavily disputed. Also, if a pirate is no longer able to play a single player experience, they’ll just go do something else, what impact this might have on an online game like Battlefield, I don’t know)
Also sure, that article seems to be pretty critical of Steam, regardless, its right in its statement that Steam should have a good competitor, because that will encourage steam and its competitor to reduce prices all around. Its curious how prices on steam are often higher than that of boxed retail despite an absence of printing/boxing/transport/storage costs, not to mention that retail has to pay its staff a fair amount (As in, at least minimum wage, this adds up), in fact there are reasons why adoption of 2nd hand/trade in games have taken off so much – Retail (Indie retail especially) feels it needs the extra revenue.
So yeah, as much as I like steam, it needs a viable well known competitor/brand so that market forces can take full effect.
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@Al3xand3r – You seem to have real issues with the facts and arguments in the TweakGuides article. Could you elaborate on them (especially an example or two of his straw-men arguments)? I agree that quite a bit of the article is speculation, perhaps as it has to be since it doesn’t sound like there’s a lot of solid information available. But I don’t think you can write off his whole argument because of a few weaknesses in his sub-arguments.
The points he raises sound fairly reasonable and valid to me (as a layperson I admit). No, his argument isn’t flawless and much of his ‘evidence’ may be questionable, but at least it has had a lot of thought put into it. I’d genuinely like to see a similar article in favour of piracy, so we could get both sides of the argument in a well thought out, structured way.
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Larrington: Worth re-reading. I think people quoting the 1 in a 1000 number without remembering what it’s specifically talking about is misleading.
(i.e. It’s a casual game)
I also wish they explained more of the maths behind their 1 in 1000 number.
KG
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Re Cliffski: The only problem I have with going directly to a small developer (and I do it pretty frequently) is because y’all aren’t completely reliable.
I’ve been selling games online longer than valve. from the same site, same URL.
just saying…
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Also the company who did the 1 in a 1,000 research are heavily criticised for having the weakest, lamest DRM scheme ever. There are universal cracks for their stuff everywhere.
So they didn’t have much incentive to show how strong DRM works.
In fact most indie games go totally uncracked until they appear with portal DRM… I know several devs who refuse to use some portals because of the inevitable cracking of the game the day they release it.
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Cheers for the info Kieron/Cliffski, most useful.
Note to self: Research “Portal DRM”
@Cliffski: Ouch, portals take 80% of the price from you for each copy sold? Thats outrageous!
Additional Edit: Hmm, games journalistic opportunity has just occured to me – An artical asking if ‘Games Portals’ are worth going near, if what I’ve read recently is anything to go by, the answer is a resounding no.
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I’d say the World of Goo case questions whether DRM is useful: it had roughly the same piracy rate as games with DRM. So while DRM may not cause piracy, DRM also seems to do nothing to decrease piracy.
Then again, I do agree with the statistician above, who pointed out that all this is anecdotal, until there’s some randomized testing. WoG and e.g. GTA4 may or may not have the same demographic buying them: we have no way of knowing if DRM was any factor whatsoever in the piracy rate of either game. It may all be down to the demographic buying, or some hitherto overlooked factor. Unless we test, we wont know.
As for MMOs as a business model, to me, it seems most devs are making the mistake of trying to make the next WoW, instead of going for something totally different. WoW-type MMOs seem to be hell to develop, needing gigantic budgets and having a high chance to fail – so why not go for something that focuses more on gameplay and less on glitz? Less fancy graphics, but hang on to that MMO part of it? Throw in a little RTS or something else, perhaps? Hey, it’s just a thought, but I think MMO games can be so much more than graphics-heavy grind “RPGs” like WoW. It’s just a matter of exploring other ways in which a persistent online world can be used in an interesting way in games.
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I do have to say, that TweakGuides article uses a lot of very wobbly logic.
A couple of examples – when the author shows us how many torrents he counted for PC versions of popular games compared to 360 and PS3 version torrents, he says:
“For those questioning whether these figures are even remotely accurate, one well-known piracy site recently released a Top 10 Pirated PC Games of 2008 listing, and they even went so far as to insist that torrent figures compiled in this manner should be highly accurate.”
The list on that ‘one well-known piracy site’ featured in a previous RPS post and what a lot of people (including myself) noted was how the site gave absolutely no indication at all how they arrived at those numbers. So the author is underlining his own findings with numbers that are at least as questionable as his own.
“The console versions of each of the above games is exactly $10 (20%) more than the PC version, which is actually quite common. Console games will generally cost more than the PC equivalents. Quite clearly, the price of console games would tend to imply that they should in fact be selling fewer copies than their PC equivalents, and being pirated more often due to cost, when the exact opposite is happening in reality.”
This is just naive – cost of a version is only one of many elements of a buying decision.
“This is because by the very act of obtaining and playing a game, they’ve clearly demonstrated that they place some value on that game. After all, if something is truly ‘worthless’, consumers won’t bother to obtain or use it in the first place, regardless of whether it’s free or not.”
No, they’ve “clearly” demonstrated that they place some value on downloading the game. It says nothing about how worthy someone might find the game to play it.
I’m not even touching that “locked house” analogy, I’ll be here all night.
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Oh, the locked house analogy?
Yeah, if everyone in the world could make working pirate copies of everything in your apartment, without you losing any actual property, as soon as someone just *once* cracked the lock, somewhere far physically removed, with little chance to get caught. Err. Yes, in that world, the practice of crackable locks on doors might indeed be somewhat different. Because it seems to be a world somewhat dissimilar to the current reality, at least as far as your ordinary locked door goes..
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I know that having the P word on the menu cancels any other type of discussion but I’m going to try. The post of John is excellent but I never understood why Kieron’s piece about New Videogames Journalism got so much hate or how it ended being a lazy tag for bad writing, he addressed the need of a change in the way of writing reviews and gave it a personality, a name and a purpose. I really think it was a brave and revealing piece and it´s still something meaningful to me. It saddens me to see it reduced to an uncomfortable seal applied to bad writing.
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Locked house analogy made sense to me. Pirates can’t physically remove Z Developer’s assets, but by cracking the game they allow people to play it without paying, robbing Z Developer of revenue. It’s not the physical or intellectual asset which is being lost to the developer/publisher, it’s the revenue from it.
As for first-day sales and their significance, a lot of game publishers say it’s important. A lot of People From The Internet say it’s unimportant. Who’s got the detailed sales figures in this debate? Whose job depends on knowing exactly how and when games sell? I’m betting that first-day sales are as important as the publishers claim.
So having a lock which will hold for two weeks, protecting your first-day revenue, seems very worthwhile to me.
Here’s an idea: why not have the draconian DRM on launch-day, and protect the precious first-day sales, and then release a DRM-free version a few months later, after the game’s been cracked anyway? That’s more-or-less what happened with X2-The Threat, although it took 18 months or so.
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@ Gpig: I like the cut of your jib. I too find myself in an odd limbo of desensitisation with regard to the act of shooting (and in games!). Oddly enough, I find guns that imbue a real sense of kineticism into the proceedings – rickety old sub-machine guns that rattle around as the bullets fly, or gravity-gun style weapons that fling projectiles (or people) with speeds that make your graphics card go “eh, no. I’ll render that by triangulation” actually fun – in the same way throwing a ball is fun – whereas more the mundane shooting fare prevalent in 90% of war games (and thus 70% of all games) doesn’t really affect me at all – which in fact I find myself doing for exactly the kind of ‘tactile reinforcement’ of the gameworld and its inhabits that I think CliffyB was getting at as referenced in Thomsen’s article.
I do think it was an astute observation regarding shooting replacing jumping – but my distress when starting up Bioshock for the first time at the A button not making my character jump was palpable (and, the neighbours tell me, audible). I wonder if that’s telling?
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So if platformers are defined by having “jump” as their main verb, and shooters are defined by having “shoot” in the same role, what defines the RPG? “Wander”, perhaps?
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“Min-Max.”
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J-RPGS: “Grind”
C-RPGS: “Refer to game-faqs”.
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“uninstall”
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(A long posting in three parts: StarForce, Steam, and general.)
—
I’ve never bought, pirated, or played a StarForce-protected game — by the time I might have done so, the controversy was in full swing, and I figured I’d just stay away.
I do wonder, though. Was there an actual bug in XP that meant corrupted sectors on CDs were slowing down the drive, eventually killing it? If so, that could go a long way to explaining the StarForce problem. There have been various copy protection schemes in the past that use deliberately corrupted sectors on various kinds of media, since these cannot be easily reproduced in a pirated copy of media.
Obviously, if you stop using StarForce, that means you stop using StarForce-protected media. Hence, sure, your problems go away.
—
Regarding Steam: I’m not really too concerned about the lack of competitor. Other companies are sure to try, and Steam is just leading the way. They’re also setting a great example for those to follow, as well as raising the bar (quality-wise) for entry.
IMO, Steam is “DRM done right”. That is, while customers would prefer a world without DRM — and publishers would prefer a world where they could make enough money without it — we apparently don’t live in that world (now). It’s thus unfair to compare “Steam versus nothing”, but very fair to compare “Steam versus other DRM schemes”, which is very favourable for Steam.
I’m also only mildly wary of purchasing games digitally via Steam, or purchasing them as a boxed copy and registering the CD key with Steam. Yes, I realise that it represents a single point of failure — but the more people use Steam, the more of an “essential service” it becomes, the more they invest in keeping it up and running at high speeds 24/7, and the more likely Valve is to stick around for another few years to run it.
Ultimately, Steam (and digital delivery) isn’t just about prices, it’s about convenience. I purchased Left 4 Dead on a Sunday night at around 8pm, and I was playing by 10pm. There’s absolutely no way I could have gotten a legal copy that night, and a torrented version probably would’ve taken way longer.
People are willing to pay more for convenience. With Steam, that means both “get it when you want it”, as well as “log in and play it from anywhere” and “no fussing with CDs or other wacky DRM stuff”. I’ve never used the offline mode, though I might someday, so that’s an extra bonus.
If it comes down to paying $50 for a boxed copy of a game using some third-party DRM activation service (reliability / longevity unknown), or $50 for a digital copy of the same game that activates via Steam, I think I’d choose the latter, unless there are some serious goodies in that boxed copy. Heck, I might even pay $60 for the Steam version.
Note that all of the above only applies if companies let Steam do all the DRM. If they try to layer their own stuff underneath Steam, then all bets are off. (Frankly, I think the Steam store ought to be noting the presence of non-Steam DRM on every applicable product.)
—
Those issue aside, the article has certainly opened my eyes to a few things. I’ve found myself slipping more and more into piracy over the years, and yeah, it’s just too easy to self-justify.
In some situations, I’ve tried to do good, but been driven to piracy just to actually get the goods I already purchased. In one case, I purchased most of the seasons of a TV show before reaching one with a corrupted DVD at a critical point in the season. Unable to return it or contact the publisher, I was forced to pirate it.
Unfortunately, it’s a slippery slope. Once you’ve downloaded a season of the show and had a falling-out with the publisher, the urge to buy the following seasons isn’t particularly high. Worse, you don’t know where your true motivations lie. Are you “punishing” the publisher for releasing a bad product and refusing to stand behind it? Or are you just happy to have an excuse to do what you would have liked to have done otherwise?
Games are the same story. There are those of us who try to maintain some moral code in the face of rampant piracy, yet it’s still too easy to fall prey to our own excuses to justify downloading instead of buying.
The most common is the “I wouldn’t buy it anyway” excuse, which is true in some cases, but tends to be overused. We’re just not able to completely put the “free version over here!” fact out of our head and make an objective decision. Hence, every little flaw in a product has an inflated effect on the perceived value of the program, so you can decide it’s “mediocre” enough to justify pirating rather than buying.
Ultimately, deciding whether to pay money or not isn’t a fair decision when you get the product either way. :)
The only real solution is to cease pirating and go back to the “old way” of either buying stuff or not touching it — and in some social circles, that can actually make you the odd man out. That, more than anything, is probably the best barometre for how crazy the current piracy situation has become.
Personally, while I’m not ready to give up piracy altogether, I do try to be as fair as I can. If a demo is available, I’ll always play that rather than using the “I’m trying it out” excuse to pirate it. I’ve pirated stuff and then gone back and bought the real thing — particularly from indie companies who keep prices low and don’t use DRM, like Introversion (Darwinia, Uplink, DEFCON).
(Introversion also has a fantastic hybrid delivery system. You buy a boxed copy and they send it to you, but they also immediately let you grab a downloadable copy. It’s even better than Steam, since it gives you the best of both worlds, not to mention being devoid of restrictions.)
Having read this article, I know I’ll be a lot more selective about what PC games I download. I’m a lot less willing to grab something for free when I know the developer is hurting for it — and when I’m hurting myself right along with them, in the long run.
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I’ve actually just finished rereading the Gowers Report on Intellectual Property (which the British Government commissioned, accepted the findings of… and recently seem to be ignoring again now they want to do things that it noted were stupid), and I thought one of the more relevant things that it noted was that the evidence suggested that people considered copyright violation to be “okay” because copyright currently restricts acts which aren’t harmful to the copyright owner (copying CDs to your iPod, for example) as well as acts which do harm the owner. Hence, the reputation and image of copyright are harmed sufficiently that people don’t care about any copyright violations…
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I thoroughly agree with the piracy indepth article. I don’t know enough about Starforce to know whether he was right or wrong, but as it was obviously just a sort of urban-myth-disproving corollary to the rest of the article, it doesn’t particularly matter. His figures all seem very plausible, and the section on PCs versus consoles was excellent and unequivocal (if a bit UK- and US-centered).
Oh, and as an aside to people who claim consoles have just as much DRM as PCs and don’t represent a solution to the problem – yes, but there’s one key difference. It works. I buy a game for my console, it will work for ever without limits, and I can play it on as many consoles (mine or other people’s) without any problems. I can lend it, resell it, and in short do whatever I want with it so long as I don’t try to play it on more than one console at a time, and I’m fine with that. A model for the PC, perhaps?
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I just want publishers to stop forgetting to put the CD keys in the boxes, or if they must forget, at least have their support department email me a CD key instead of helpfully advising me to waste my valuable time taking it back to the shop. I’m looking at you, Valve/EA.
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And by the way, I enjoyed the quote from Cevat Yerli in the piracy article:
“At the end of the day, I think our message is if you’re a PC gamer, and you really want to respect the platform, then you should stop pirating.”
I think if you’re a Crytek executive and you respect your wife you should stop beating her.
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Oh, I’m sure first-day sales are important if the publishers and developers (who yes, have that sales data) say they are. I have no reason to disbelieve that. What I don’t believe is that a few days wait for a crack turns potential pirates into customers, and like many other piracy-related numbers, there’s no real hard data on that.
But here’s a compromise I’d be more than happy to live with, if zero-day piracy really is the main thing DRM’s meant to stave off: use whatever DRM you like. Make it as insanely hateful as you want. And then, when the pirates have gotten round it and put a fully functional pirate version up for download (i.e., usually within a few days), immediately patch the lot of it out of your software entirely and remove it from any further print runs of the discs. After all, it’s served its purpose, hasn’t it? And what, exactly, is the point of leaving the DRM on if the only people still dealing with it are your legitimate customers?
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malkav11: The part about removing the DRM from further print runs is problematic, since I’m guessing multiple versions means higher costs in terms of production, testing, and support.
I guess you could just have your online authentication servers no longer enforce the limited installs rule, and simultaneously release a patch that people can use to avoid further phone-homes. But unless you alter the source media, it’d be tricky to avoid the initial need for online activation, unless you give people a patch they can run before install, or inbetween install and activation.
Sure, if you draw attention to the fact that one CD = limitless installs, people will start to casually copy it. But I suspect that casual copying, once the bane of computer software, now has an extremely minor impact compared to piracy.
Mind you, I’m not really sure how much of a difference it would make anyway. I’m betting the biggest sales factors are quality, the nature of your target audience, and how long your product remains uncracked. Except in particularly “loud” cases like StarForce, the people who boycott your product due to DRM are probably just a very vocal minority — and one that’s likely to shrink if strong DRM becomes the rule rather than the exception.
Personally, I’ve pretty much had to accept that if I want to keep (legally) playing any of today’s titles ten years from now, they’d better be console titles. But then, I guess the same can be said of anything that came out fifteen or twenty years ago today, since it’s not like I’m able to play old PC games off the original floppy diskettes. ;)
The strong “abandonware” community suggests that we’ll still be able to play the best games of today in ten or twenty year’s time, even if we have to use emulators and illegal cracks to do it. But I still can’t decide whether saying “you’ll be able to play the pirate version even once the activation servers go offline” is reason to accept harsh DRM schemes, or just a cop-out by people who want to have their cake and eat it too. Even if it’s a lie.
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“Some numbers comparing PC and Console piracy which make anyone playing a “But it happens on consoles too!” openly laughable?”
Let me see there are 42 million PS3+X360 and they have 110 thousand pirated CoD4… and there are over a billion PCs but lets say only half of them can run CoD4, 500 millions with 566 Thousand Pirated CoD 4. Yes, consoles are openly laughable.
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I learnt a lot from that article. On a couple of occasions, there’s an appeal to possibly dubious authority (such as with the torrentfreak piracy rates for 2008), but the lack of authenticity is a pervasive problem in this matter anyway. For lack of better data, I suppose I could say the results are depressing even if they’re skewed by up to an order of magnitude. {sigh}
@Another one: The data you mention is off. The article estimates the number of CoD4 capable PCs at close to 100 million or more, based on medium and high-end graphics card sales since Q3 2005. The number of CoD4 capable consoles is estimated to be 42 million, as you’ve mentioned.
With the torrent numbers you mention, that comes to 1 pirated CoD4 copy per 200 (or less) PCs- the console piracy rate being 1 pirated CoD4 copy per 420 consoles. So CoD4 piracy is about twice as rampant on the PC, and factoring in the volumes themselves, the difference is even more pronounced.
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Oops, there’s an idiotic flaw in my argument. I’m sorry, I should have compared the CoD4 PC and Console version torrent download numbers with their respective PC and Console sales numbers, not the maximum available customer bases. As it stands, my previous analysis is meaningless. I’m off to see if I can find CoD4 sales figures on that article.
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@Another one: Better figures from the article- 566000 CoD4 downloads with 766000 legitimate sales (inclusive of estimated digital distribution sales) on the PC. 3 million copies sold on the Xbox alone- so PC CoD4 piracy is at about 3:4 based on torrent numbers, Console piracy based on torrent numbers alone is certainly 1:30 or more (in favour of legitimate sales).
The number of CoD4 capable PCs does not factor into this at all.
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That TweakGuides article on piracy bothers the shit out of me. It’s the kind of shit that will just further the FUD about the PC platform among game publishers while contributing nothing noteworthy, in spite of the PC platform’s $33 billion annual profits (according to the PCGA) in spite “rampant” (god he sure loves to use that word) piracy.
Even retail NPD figures the PC makes more money than all consoles and handhelds combined ($10b PC compared to $8b for all the rest).
Also yes, there’s a lot of opinion in that “factual” look, like the claim that cartridges are what made the Atari succeed (ignoring how they crashed and burned entirely separate from any piracy related issue- they failed hard in 83 despite the claimed superiority of their cartridges), or saying that the N64 used cartridges as an anti-piracy measure (They used catrtridges because they didn’t think consumers would put up with the long loading times the CD platform had) and that the Playstation had “rampant piracy” (again with that phrase), even though the PS1 owned the hell out of the N64, profits-wise.
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That guy on Tweakguides is very thorough but there are serious issues with his methodology and some bits of it just don’t bear up to scrutiny.
I’m not convinced by the numbers he comes up with for number of copies downloaded of different games, for example. How does he count them? Does he join the swarm and count individual IPs? Does he keep track of any new IPs that join the swarm each day as well as keeping a list of all IPs who were already in the swarm from the previous day and slowly building up an aggregate of all the people who had joined the swarm of a torrent over the course of a month? And he manages to do this for several different torrents, each with hundreds of peers and seeds, over a period of many days? Does he also keep track of each peer’s individual progress, so that he knows to remove them from the aggregate if they haven’t finished downloading the whole torrent? And does that account for dynamic IPs?
All he does to explain his methodology is say “For those that don’t believe my numbers, here’s someone else’s numbers” without explaining THAT person’s methodology either!
Even if those numbers are accurate, they don’t account for people who are downloading the game even though they own it (for backup purposes, or because they lost the disc). You might think that’s a negligible number, but I personally have downloaded lots of games I already own: Max Payne (scratched disc), Max Payne 2 (lost one of the discs), Far Cry (wouldn’t work with my virtual drive software), Prince of Persia (ditto), Beyond Good and Evil (ditto), Baldur’s Gate 2 and TOB (left the CDs at my parents’ house), Deus Ex (left the CDs at my house and wanted to play it while visiting my parents’), Planescape Torment (1 disc was scratched), and there’s probably more that I can’t remember now, and that’s not even counting all those really old games that I own on 5.25″ floppies that I don’t have a drive I can read them on.
The “most downloaded game ever” moniker for Spore kinda proves that this is a major source for downloading. Could it be that a lot of people resorted to torrents because they knew about the restrictive DRM? And could it be that the fact that only 1% of people who bought it reached the installation limit was partly due to the fact that the restrictions were widely-publicised, so people knew not to install it as many times as they possibly might have wanted to under ordinary circumstances? Or because, knowing these restrictions, they resorted to downloading a cracked copy even though they owned the game?
(I’m not saying that the MAJORITY of downloaders are doing it for legitimate reasons, I’m just saying that the image which both the gaming industry and the article on Tweakguides are presenting is that 100% of peers in a torrent are “pirates”, and that’s completely misleading – going by my own experiences with games I’ve downloaded even though I owned them, it could be that a high percentage of them are legitimate downloaders.)
I could write another lengthy argument about why I think labelling all illegal downloaders as “pirates” is semantically inaccurate, and that label should be reserved for people who SELL illegal copies of a game, but I’ll restrain myself. When I was 11 and loaning and borrowing games from my friends though, I would have probably thought that calling me a “pirate” for doing so would be cool, and I wouldn’t have protested. Although even back then I KNEW that ninjas were, of course, cooler than pirates.
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Do the pirated versions of Spore work with the online sharing?
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@ M.P.
Wouldn’t it actually be fairer to say that a negligable percentage or torrenters might be getting downloads for back up purposes (or in your case convenience and damage replacement. If only all goods were as friendly as games, damage your car? No problem, we’ll fix it right up for you!). Since in a lot of cases the quoted numbers of downloaders exceeds the actual sales of the game and, in my completely subjective personal experience, almost noone who buys games then goes and pirates a version for a backup, especially not in the first month on sale. I think it would be more confusing for the author to ramble on about the 1-2% of users who use pirating sites for backing their games up.
@ Jetsetlemming
Yuo really believe that publishers believe an article on tweak games over actual sales figures? I can tell you that the chaps who make these decisions spend their nights at home in bed with pie charts of sales figures. Also, always worth remembering that around $2bn of that $10bn you quote comes directly from one game (WoW).
@ Noone in particular
Generally I think the whole point of the article is not that PC gaming as a whole is going to collapse but that certain forms of products which some of us are quite attached to playing on our PCs are going to. Browser games, MMOs, multiplayer only games are all the sorts of things that can thrive even in a heavy piracy environment. Single player games? Not so much, unless users can be persuaded firstly to be honest and just buy games they like the look of (yes, shock horror not everyone will be amazing just like when you got to see a movie, eat in a restaurant or have a night out on the town) and that DRM is like delicious chocolate candy (a trick Valve seems to have pulled on some people with Steam, and well done to Valve for performing that master feat).
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“I think if you’re a Crytek executive and you respect your wife you should stop beating her.”
Whut? Is your point that Crytek should talk up the PC platform more, or that the CEO actually beat his wife? On the former point, there’s no reason why Crytek should stick to PC if there’s a business reason not to. Crytek is a business, not a charity or advocacy group.
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Devil’s advocate here:
I’m guessing that the people who object to the DRM on Spore are probably the more “advanced” users — the ones who know about the issues involved, who know that the new breeds of DRM are going further than ever before, etc.
Unfortunately, I would expect that’s also the demographic of users most likely to pirate the game.
I’m reminded very much of that Brad Wardell posting about piracy:
It seems likely to me that the large majority of Spore purchasers were from the more casual crowd, the ones who buy all those Sims expansion packs, and the ones who don’t really know or care what DRM the product uses.
Conversely, a lot of the “advanced” users were probably going to avoid Spore anyway, after reviews made it clear it was a decent concept with very shaky execution.
When your userbase is laid out in that fashion, it’s hard to recommend caring about how restrictive your DRM is. Most people aren’t going to notice or care, and the ones crying foul are the ones least likely to have bought it anyway.
Really, the whole issue resolves around the notion of companies adapting — of ceasing to promote to high-piracy markets, and focus on the more profitable ones instead.
One of the common excuses for piracy has been that companies are just being whiners and need to learn how to better adapt to the “real world” of today. Well, great, they’re doing exactly that … but you probably won’t like the result.
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@Gap Gen
Not at all, I was simply using a clumsy rhetorical example to suggest that his inference that all PC gamers are pirates is unhelpful.
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Gap Gen, plurium interrogationum or the fallacy of many questions, or the loaded question, is what Cevat Yerli commited. It’s simply been pointed out by asking a hypothetical loaded question in return. The fallacy presupposes a condition in which any yes or no answer is an admission of the presupposition.
So if we want PC gaming to stay healthy, we should stop pirating? If we refuse, we are admitting we are pirates, if we agree, we are admitting we are pirates. We are prejudiced by Yerli who can not imagine that he holds any blame for why Crysis did not sell like a block-buster and why it was pirated quite heavily.
No, Crytek is not a charity or advocacy group, *but neither are the customers Yerli despises* even as they keep him warm and fed. His entire reaction to the reception Crysis got was of a sulking brat that thinks the world owes him something. If he wants any goodwill, he should give it liberally first.
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@ Dan Lawrence: That’s sort of the question – how negligible is this percentage? I mean, if my experience with copy protection (especially the kind Ubi used to use, that refused to work if you had CloneCD or another virtual drive software installed on your system) is anything to go by then it must be a fair number. And the examples I cited were just the games I downloaded in their entirety – there’s loads more that I downloaded no-cd cracks for, simply because I hate disc-swapping, and I think a game played on a platform with gigabytes of storage shouldn’t require the sodding DVD in the drive on principle.
Certainly the number of torrent downloads the dude cited for Spore seems to suggest that the more annoying the DRM, the more the game will be downloaded. At least some of these folks will be people who decided Spore’s DRM wasn’t worth the hassle and they’d rather have a cracked version.
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It’s really hard to pick out the compliments for me amongst all this P-word bitching, you know. I wish you people would be more sensitive.
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That’s why Cooper dedicated an entire forum topic to discussing your everlasting brilliance! Speaking of which, it’d be nice to see the RPS writers frequenting the forum a bit more (besides Kieron who’s quite good at posting there every now and again). Though understandably you’re all quite busy.
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eyemessiah*, not Cooper. I really need to pay better attention.
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@Dan Lawrence:
“@ Jetsetlemming
Yuo really believe that publishers believe an article on tweak games over actual sales figures? I can tell you that the chaps who make these decisions spend their nights at home in bed with pie charts of sales figures. Also, always worth remembering that around $2bn of that $10bn you quote comes directly from one game (WoW).”
The current industry delays PC versions of games weeks to months, if they come out at all, claim the system is dying at worst and “lacking direction” at best, and in general badmouth it all the time. So, yes.
And WoW’s profits are NOT from retail sales of the game, they’re from subscription fees. NPD data is only for retail purchased copies of games. The only part WoW has in that $10b are copies of WoW bought at Gamestop and Wal-mart for $20, the subscription fees that are Blizzard’s bread and butter go completely uncounted by the NPD. They probably count in the PCGA’s $33b total figure, though.
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http://www.igda.org/columns/clash/clash_Dec08.php
“What struck me was the sudden realization that killing, or violence of any kind, may have been getting a bum rap in games all this time.”
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I finally got enough time together to not TLDR the TweakGuide thing. After a biased, condescending and wordy but valid majority, page 8′s where it really gets ‘good’: Apples-to-oranges, anecdote-to-conclusion, victim namecalling, and I thought you just said teh toreents killed PC games but what are these numbers in your Spore section? Starforce’s ‘fly to Russia and prove we made you crash’ contest is held up as evidence with a straight face!
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