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Piracy Forced id's Hand To Multiplatform Gaming
CVG is reporting on comments from a GDC talk last week by id CEO Todd Hollenshead on the necessity of multiplatform development. Essentially, said Hollenshead, id was forced to start developing for consoles because of the rampant piracy of PC games. "Enemy Territory: Quake Wars was given as an example of id's multiplatform direction. Originally in development for PC at the hands of Splash Damage and id Software, the multiplayer-focussed action game is now additionally heading to Xbox 360 and PS3."
Thank god nobody pirates console games! . . . oh, wait . . .
Speaking of which, I wish they would stop lumping some guy at home who burns a game from his buddy to play on his machine in with some guy in china who produces and sells tens of thousands of copies of a game.
Anyway, I can't remember the last time I played a truly great id game, so I would say the real reason they had to start developing for consoles was to pick from a larger and less discerning player base.
Just buy them used.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
It's not about dorks, it's about casual piracy. Anybody can download Quake 4 for th PC from piratebay and be playing. XBox 360 piracy involves modding your DVD firmware (and unless your console is old removing the epoxy from the firmware to do so), burning DL-DVDrs in just the right way, etc.
Many people who own consoles don't even think of piracy, know it's possible, or care. They just want something they can turn on and play.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It isn't that nobody pirates games, it's just that there's less people pirating games. When pirating requires that I solder some chip into my system, there's a good bet that I won't be doing it, especially with the more expensive systems. Playing pirated games was easiest with the PS1/Dreamcast where you could pirate games without modifying the hardware (PS1 required external dongle). Most systems now require that you physically alter the machine, which most people aren't willing to do. Also, players of PC games tend to be much more savvy, and therefore know where to go to get the pirated games. There's a lot of people on consoles who wouldn't know the first thing about where to get pirated games.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Sounds like a bogus misquote of some sort.
The game in question is, reportedly, multi-player. Which almost certainly means that it will be linked to servers under the publisher's control. Done correctly, no amount of crackz, warez, numberz, etc can defeat an online, real-time verification system.
I think it is a lot more likely that they chose to develop for the consoles because, surprise there is a market there!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Right, when loaning the game wouldn't have worked?
Let's call them:
Big Evil Chinese Pirates - Pirates tons of games at $5 a shot, that the second class of pirate won't even spring for.
Little Cheap Skate Piddle Pirates - Extends the logic that, if I can make a back up copy as fair use, then I should be allowed to make back up copies and give them to my friends, cause it doesn't hurt that big company cause my friend would have never bought the game in the first place, and maybe even put the image up on a P2P and let untold thousands of my unknown friends use it, cause lord knows, they are all to cheap to even by a $5 pirated Chinese copy.
Yeah, I see your logic.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Does this put an end to piracy or are there some new and clever forms that will emerge?
Two words... Private servers.
"It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education." -Albert Einstein
Maybe, but this presents a problem in its self. What of the people that don't have an internet connection or have such a slow connection that this one be a hassle (example: dial-up)? Not everyone is on broadband and always connected and online. What if I wanted to play my Wii in my car on an LCD? Or at Grandma's house who doesn't know what the internet is? Or at a friends house who lives so far out in town can't get a decent internet connection? (don't laugh I live in Alabama =p)
Making someone connect to the internet to authenticate for EVERY game, EVERYTIME you wanted to play would be annoying and they would lose out on a big marketshare if all games required this. Don't get my wrong I like surfing the net on my Wii but if before I bought it I knew I had to authenticate my copy before I could play it I wouldn't buy the system at all (*cough* Apple's Fairplay *cough*).
Just my opinion though.
Bite my shiny metal ass.
Does anyone remember way back when, while Quake was coming out, and the over-board success of Dooom2.
If memory servers, John Carmack, Mr id., himself, once said 'that they are happy that there game is being pirated, because that means that so many people will want to play it. Eventually people will be happy to throw money our way'.
That came true in so many ways.
The whole foundation of their company is based on piracy.
Crazy, crazy days.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
amen, I've bought all ID games from doom 1 up to and including quake 3, even way back when I was living in Europe I did the honorable thing and ordered them directly from ID, but after reading up on doom3 and playing it at a friends' house I was very underwhelmed and decided for the first time to give it a pass. I was SO looking forward to doom with an updated engine, but that's not what doom 3 is about at all (at least judging from the reviews and from my 2 hours or so playtest), the engine might be great, but that's about it: and it's interesting to see how HL2 basically created a 'better doom' with the ravenholm levels, which were genuinely creepy and atmospheric.
-- the cake is a lie
I remember the big mess when Doom 3 came out. History has not looked upon Doom 3 kindly, but upon first release the game was touted as a graphical revolution with incredible twitch gameplay. The whole "duct-taped flashlight" joke didn't even kick in till weeks after the game's release.
D3 is also a prime example of what piracy does to sales. The game was pirated far more than any other game before its time, there were torrents *everywhere*, and *everyone* had a copy. Anticipation was high, and when a warez group let slip the ISO *days* before the retail date, sales were instantly decimated.
Die-hard fans and casual interested gamers alike downloaded the ISO in great anticipation - why wait 3-4 more days for the actual release when I can get the *revolutionary* game right now? Of course, the die-hard fans that just couldn't wait for the retail release played the game (just to check it out), and ended up never paying for it.
Piracy ruined Doom 3, but one of the main factors was the combination of anticipation and an early ISO leak. If the ISO came out the day Doom 3 was released to retail, I bet piracy numbers would've been a lot less.
Would an electronic entertainment world that requires online registration ultimately be a bad thing for gamers in some way?
This is probably the way things are going to go, but this AC thinks it's a bad situation overall; probably moreso for the average consumer than priates. Ultimately it's a form of DRM, where you're shackled to a company's service rather than a tangible product.
What happens when your favorite game company tanks, gets sold, or just simply doesn't feel like running the registration servers for your game*? For that matter: what's left after your favorite MMOG shuts down? At least standalone games have some kind of "keepsake" potential; provided they're not unintentionally crippled by online registration that's years defunct. In almost all cases, the clock is ticking until you're stuck with a useless lump of software that won't run.
Another way to look at it is this: you can play all your old NES games on your original console just fine, and those old PC games are great provided you still have the manuals (for anti-copy passwords, of course). But will your kids be able to do that in their 20's and 30's, with all of their favorite games, without resorting to (illegal) hacks or platform emulators?
I can see a day when companies open things up after a product's usable commerical life is over; ID has done amazingly well in this regard and should serve as a model for others. Sadly, I don't see a whole lot of that going on, especially for the MMOG segment.
(*Why would they do this indefinitely? In the long run, it will only cost them money.)
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I really don't believe that piracy has made id go multiplatform. Their main money making is not from selling games, but from selling game engines. A multiplatform game engine is going to sell better than a single platform game engine, so its in their best interest to have the best multiplatform engines on the market. While all their previous engines have supported consoles, if they also make games for the consoles its likely to help them improve their engine because they'll have more experience with seeing what problems you get when using their APIs on specific platforms.
I hope that makes sense...
You talk as though the rules are sacrosanct. What you ignore is that they exist as a result of a social contract, the entire point of which is to grow the public domain. The idea is that we, society, benefit from the production and public release of works. Thus, to encourage this process, society agrees to certain provisions (copyright). However, the media industry has violated the spirit of the contract by manipulating the system. They are successfully preventing the growth of the public domain. We are thus no longer beholden to abide by the contract either.
I think its more a case of Dev costs spiraling out of control, and game costs being static. As for QuakeWars, surely without an online key the game is worthless, you'll always get cracks etc of course, but in that realm, those people are more demo'ing the game rather than wanting to spend serious time with it. If your spending 5-10hrs plus with a multi-player, net based game you'd have bought it.
I spend thousands of dollars a year on groceries. Am I entitled to steal the odd packet of biscuits? If the biscuits really *rock*, then I might buy some of them next time.
It's ok right?
Taking stuff you haven't paid for is morally wrong. you can call it what you like, it doesn't change the fact that its a dirty low-down thing to do.
Most games have demos, there are reviews, previews and screenshots, movies of gameplay etc etc.
And its not like its buying a house, its a thirty-fourty dollar PC game.
People who pirate games do so for one reason -> they think they can get away with it. All other excuses are just that...excuses.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
I don't know Mr. Hollenshead personally, so all I have to go on are his public remarks. And it seems every time I see his name in the press, he's bleating about how much money he's "losing" to unsanctioned copies all over the net.
Let me clue in the business types at id Software on why they "lost" a sale to yours truly.
Doom III was widely anticipated, yes. And it looked like it was going to be a visually amazing piece of work. However, it was also widely reported that, unless you had the absolutely latest and greatest PC hardware at the time, it was going to run very poorly. Well, at the time, I didn't have the latest and greatest PC hardware. All I had was a paltry dual-CPU Pentium-III running at 1GHz (and 100MHz memory bus) with 256MiB of RAM and a GeForce FX5900. It was apparent from the press that Doom III would run like crap on this rig. So I didn't buy it. I didn't buy Quake 4 for the same reason.
It wasn't until last year that I finally bought a completely new machine (AMD Athlon X2 4400+, 2GiB RAM, GeForce 7900GT) which would run Doom III well. But after downloading the free demo and playing it, I decided against it. I just didn't find stumbling around in the dark to be terribly fun, and I'm not really into horror for its own sake.
Quake 4, on the other hand, seemed like it might be fun. However, every time I visited the shelf at Fry's, it either A) wasn't there, or B) was priced at $40.00. So I waited. And waited. Eventually, Fry's started selling them for $20.00 a copy, and that's when I bought it.
So there you have it: id Software "lost" money to me, but somehow it had nothing whatsoever to do with unsanctioned copying (imagine that!). The Executive Summary you should take away from this is, to make good sales, you should release games that are:
The importance of point #1 cannot be overstated. If you hit #1, you can kind of fudge on #2. I've grabbed all the Serious Sam games, despite their uneven game play, because they're reasonably priced. OTOH, there's absolutely no way I'm going to buy a copy of "Sonic and the Secret Rings" for the XBox 360 until it drops from the preposterously stratospheric $60.00 they're charging for it.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
While pirating games on the PC is much more attainable than on the console (no modding required,) there is more to it than simple piracy.
Probably the largest factor is that, today, console games are where the sales are at. A "hit" game on the PC might sell 250k copies, where on the console it would be at least a million. Of course, there are examples like WOW, that have become massive enterprises unto themselves, but for the run-of-the-mill AAA PC title those kinds of numbers are only a dream. The PC simply does not touch the consoles in terms of sales potential. Sure there are more PCs in the world, but how many of those are used primarily for gaming, or even gaming at all (excluding casual games, which we're not talking about.)
As budgets for triple-A titles grow larger, you can only respond in so many ways without raising prices on the game itself: Opt to keep the budget small (lower development costs), increase your potential consumer base (more platforms), or charge for "extras" (expansions, subscriptions, micro-transactions.)
In the end it's all business and a simple investment-benefit calculation: They believe that targeting consoles will bring in more money than what the additional work will cost them. As game budgets continue to grow, while simultaneously tipping more and more towards the cost of developing the artistic assets and the code behind the game makes up less and less, it only makes sense to hit as many targets as possible if the art assets can be shared with minimal or no tweaking, even to the point that it will make sense even if little of the code is shared between platforms -- which we'll see more and more of with the architectural differences between the 360, PS3, Wii and PC.
I think you'll find that if you took these two cases before a judge and jury, the outcomes would be very different, and they might even be prosecuted under different statutes. The OP never said personal-use piracy was OK, just that it was different from running a massive pirate empire for profit. And he's absolutely right.
Piracy and theft are different in two major ways. First, as many others have stated, when you steal something, you're depriving its rightful owner of physical goods. If you steal something, you have it and he no longer does. That's not the case with piracy.
Second, it's relatively straightforward to measure the (monetary) amount of damage a thief does, but it's extremely difficult to do so in software piracy cases. If someone steals a CD from Best Buy, that's $14 in damages. If that person instead downloads a rip of that album from a BitTorrent tracker, how do you measure that? Not everyone who pirates something would have purchased it at full price. If, say, 10% of pirates would have bought the album if they couldn't get it otherwise, does that mean the company is out $1.40? And who, exactly, was deprived of that money? Are all of the retail stores in which a person might have bought it entitled to a cut? It's not at all a clear-cut issue.
As I'm sure is obvious by now, IANAL. YMMV. LOLOMGWTFBBQ.
You're putting words into the grandparent poster's mouth.
The grandparent poster didn't say it is was all right, they said that there is a difference. Which there is. A gas station would rather you shoplifted a single pack of cigarettes instead of hijacking their next shipment of cigarettes. Both are still wrong, but they warrant entirely different responses.
Of course, it's a sillier comparison because you're comparing traditional theft (which deprives the legal owner of a scarce commodity) with copyright infringement (which reduces the artificial scarcity copyright creates). They're different problems with different economics to consider. Indeed...
I haven't been a teen for a bit over a decade now, but I'll try to explain anyway.
Theft of property and copyright infringement are different crimes. They have different victims and different economic effects. If a thief breaks in Best Buy and steals a $50 (retail price) Sony TV, Best Buy suffers because they no longer has a TV. Best Buy has lost $40 (or whatever wholesale is). Sony has lost nothing. If the thief breaks into my house and steals my TV, neither Best Buy nor Sony have lost anything, but I've lost $50.
Conversely, (for the sake of argument) if an infringer breaks into Best Buy and makes an infringing copy of a $50 (retail price) game, Best Buy still has the original. The value of that original is slightly reduced because the artificial scarcity has dropped. This is potentially a "lost sale." This lost revenue from potential sale impacts both Sony and Best Buy. How much? Definitely not $50. The reality is that some portion of copyright infringers, if infringement was not an option, would not purchase the game. It's hard guess what the percentage is, but let's guess only 10%. Now on average over multiple illegal copies, Sony has lost $36 (90% of the $40 they'd expect) and Best Buy $9. Total loss to "the world": $45.
By any stretch of the imagination, clearly individual copyright infringement cases are slightly less harmful than individual cases of theft. The total economic loss for the above hypothetical example is $45 to $50. Both are bad, but given the choice I'd prefer losing $45 to $50. The situation because even more clear if you believe the "can't or won't pay for it" percentage is higher, or if the thefts involve damage to other property (breaking a window to get in).
The situation gets even weirder when I buy the game. So when I bought my $50 Sony TV, I also bought this $50 game. Our hypothetical and slightly insane thief breaks in, steals my TV and makes a copy of the game. I'm out $50 for the TV, but for the game I've lost... nothing. Perhaps a very small amount of value from potential resale value on the game, but nothing significant. Despite the thief having broken into my house the real economic damage is done to Best Buy and Sony. That's a heck of a trick, to have a thief break into my house, "steal" my copy of the game, but have third parties suffer financially.
This is not to suggest that copyright infringement is "okay." Indeed, copyright infringement has a definite detrimental impact on society. But it's a different impact from theft. The steps to defend against these crimes are different.
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I spend thousands of dollars a year on groceries. Am I entitled to steal the odd packet of biscuits? If the biscuits really *rock*, then I might buy some of them next time.
It's ok right?
Taking stuff you haven't paid for is morally wrong. you can call it what you like, it doesn't change the fact that its a dirty low-down thing to do.
The difference being that when you steal a packet of biscuits, the store is now missing a packet of biscuits that could have been sold to someone else. When you copy electronic media, no one loses anything concrete. The best you can do is to argue that copying electronic media deprives the producer of revenue, but to say that everyone who copies a game would have bought the game if they hadn't copied it simply isn't true.
Is it copyright infringement? sure. Is it illegal? sure. Is it morally wrong? good question.
I'm curious where your information comes from. Doom 3 lost 10% of its sales because of the early illegal release? How can you know what the number would have been without that release? It was pirated more than any other game previously? I wasn't aware that NPD was tracking those numbers. "Everyone" had a copy? Hyperbole just makes you look like you lack real evidence.
Ultimately you're guessing. You have no more evidence that piracy caused fewer sales than expected than the grandparent post claiming that the game just sucked.
Here are some actual numbers. You've suggested that "Piracy ruined Doom 3...." Doom 3 sold 3.5 million copies. Most publishers would love to sell 3.5 million copies of a game. Games generally considered to be highly successful, like Warcraft III , Baldur's Gate , and Unreal Tournament didn't sell 3.5 million copies. There are only perhaps a dozen or two PC games that can claim to have topped that. id claimed Doom 3 was "...id's most successful game to date." If that's ruination, I'm afraid of success. Assuming you claim of decimation is correct, we're talking about id losing about 350,000 sales. That is a huge number of sales; many PC games never sell that many. But really is the different between 3.5 and 3.85 million copies really ruination?
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