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Funcom No Longer Making Offline Games
1up has commentary from Funcom, makers of games such as Anarchy Online, Dreamfall, and Longest Journey. The developer has taken the drastic step of deciding to cease creation of games without an online component. The company's CEO pins the blame squarely on game piracy. "Several stats he listed were startling if ... true, including that 200,000 illegal copies of Dreamfall had been downloaded before the game was even released and anywhere from three to ten copies of any PC game are pirated for each one sold. Adventure Gamers suggests that future offline games such as Dreamfall Chapters may require an active internet connection to prove authenticity when you play, similar to how Steam works."
200,000 illegal copies of Dreamfall had been downloaded before the game was even released
So, where did the original come from?
It will definitely stop piracy, because we all know HalfLife2 simply cannot be played without a valid Steam account....
will be more likely to use hacks / pirated downloads of there games now.
What was the last non-offline game that Funcom made which didn't suck? The last game I'm aware of was Anarchy Online which was literally not playable after even a month and was a total abortion of a release.
Proably the same place as Doom 3?
I can see why they'd be interested in doing this. Look at World of Warcraft, it sells like mad cakes because not only is it a good game, you HAVE to buy it (I know there are private servers but that means playing online with like 10 other people and content that hasn't been updated in who knows how long). Steam games do well too because you can just buy your game right through Steam and the required online connection is just natural to those buyers. If this was five or more years ago, I'd say required an internet connection was going to cost you more sales than piracy ever would, but not any more. This won't stop piracy altogether, but it will help a smaller company that relies on a consistent fan base to move their games.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
If the choice is a game that requires a phone home to play, or a game that comes loaded with some totally nasty DRM that tries to root kit its way onto my machine, I would gladly chose the phone home.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
I'll admit it. I had originally pirated "Dreamfall", for any of a number of contrived reasons. I loved it, and am still loving it. So when I opened up Steam one day to find it available for purchase, I immediately payed for it and eased my conscience. I get the feeling I'd do the same for a number of games. How is this different from just ordering the games from Amazon? To be honest, I really don't know. Maybe it's my resistance towards actually accumulating more physical junk.
Huh, 200,000 copies downloaded before the launch of a game I've never heard of? Where have I been all this time?
The gaming industry is a funny place really, we the gamers want good innovative games with breath taking storytelling but whenever such a game arrives for the PC it ends up with horrible sales because it gets heavily pirated. So naturally smaller companies, one example being trokia, dies down due to lack of willing investors while giant companies like Blizzard and EA triumphs on by selling the same mainstream games year in and year out.
No I'm not a big fan of hefty anti piracy, but then I guess you need it in a world where people don't pay you unless they have too - whether they love the game or not. - Going for consoles is another sollution, one that has carried companies like bioware far.
Considering that FunCom refuses to release a demo for Dreamfall, and the sell-through rate for demos is often in excess of one hundred to one, and FunCom doesn't even have to pay for any of that bandwidth. I don't support pirating games, but I also don't support forcing the player to buy before they try.
I want to buy Dreamfall. I really do. But I don't trust them enough to buy before I try. I've long held that I will buy this game under either of these conditions:
* They drop the price to $20 CAD, or
* They release a demo, and I'm satisfied that it has good puzzles OR good writing, and runs on my machine.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
The first link on the navigation bar on the official Dreamfall webpage says "free trial". You can supposedly download the game as a bittorrent, and if you decide to purchase it, you just need to unlock it. (I haven't tried. I'd really like to, but I don't have a computer with a good enough graphics card.)
Having played the game (and also being a big fan of both TLJ and Dreamfall) I'll say that while the puzzles weren't Riven-style difficult (the really weren't even Myst III: Exile-style difficult either) the writing for that game is extraordinary. It's worth it just for the story alone.
He is right.
if its actually like steam then it sounds like a great idea, unless your still using dialup. for what its worth though steam is a good service, and it makes piracy less likely. however if funcom is building this from the ground up hopefully theyll make it harder for pirates to manufacture key codes, as i like many people have found that the code belonging to a game i purchased was being used in someones steam account. it was a minor pain in the ass, but it was resolved pretty quickly.
Isn't Funcom making Age of Conan? It's supposed to be pretty much the greatest MMORPG ever from what I can tell. Of course, most MMORPGs try to look like they'll be the greatest ever, and since SWG pulled the wool over all our eyes I guess we can believe anything.
the Political Inquirer
Funcom, putting the F U in fun since 1993!
/yay me
So FunCom are going to retrofit some lame online component to all their games now,
or are they simply becoming a boring old MMO company?
AO killed my inner child.
Assuming his number are correct, I'd say the only thing it really shows for sure is that for every person willing to buy and play a game at their asking price, there are a three to ten people willing to play the game at some price lower than that. True, that price may be zero for some or all of them.
But what if two of those ten would be willing to pay it at half the price? So instead of one player at original price, you get three at half price. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that would be an increase in sales, and most likely an increase in profits. This is especially true when you sell online and cut out a lot of the distribution costs.
Their problem with the alleged 200k copies being pirated before release has nothing to do with "normal" piracy. Those people did not choose to pirate a game rather than buy it, as the option to buy it wasn't available. That's a completely different ball of wax.
So really, all those number say to me is that there is a possible untapped potential. It does not say "we're losing the full price that three to ten copies would have made for every one we sell, because all of those people would have bought the game if they couldn't pirate it." That's RIAA math.
My inner child has been dead for a long time because of Anarchy Online. /212 soldier.
You can already get it for $20 CAD as I got it for that many months ago. (Provided you can find it - futureshop doesn't carry it anymore. Unpopular games seem to dispear entirely once they go to the bargin bin. Maybe this is a reason for the piracy? :P) If you enjoyed the orginal, The Longest Journey, I'd recommend picking it up but don't expect any of those hard adventure style puzzles. Instead we get dumbed down boring puzzles opening locks and hacking - that and an awful clunky combat system that should have been dropped from day one. The story is good but a horrible cliff hanger of an ending.
Makes them an offline video game developer? I liked Dreamfall and the Longest Journey (I own both), but to be honest, I only remembered the company more for Anarchy Online and their wacky attempts to bring in new subscribers.
Seriously. I'm sick and tired of all this "300,000 copies of X have been pirated" = "300,000x$$$ lost" crap.
The parent of this post got it dead on, mod up, mod up.
Here's to the software authors who know better, may they also be the ones who earn my coin.
...unfortunately no one can be told what The Mat^H^H^HGoatse is...they must experience it for themselves...
Wish this didn't sound like a troll, but I bought this thing when it first came out. The Longest Journey was by far my favorite adventure game of all time and even at the $40 dollar price tag, Dreamfall was far worth it. (Ending was bleh, but it makes me want the last in the series)
Just that the times have changed. No one wants to pay real money for games now a days. It takes just a few clicks to get a pirated game, its just that easy now adays. Why spend $40 bucks on a single player adventure game when it can be had for "free"
I really wish for a final game in the Dreamfall series, but I saw the seaders/leachers when Dreamfall came out, and I just think 200k is a bit conservative.
What are you smoking? The free Dreamfall demo came out more than two months ago.
"Just that the times have changed. No one wants to pay real money for games now a days. It takes just a few clicks to get a pirated game, its just that easy now adays. Why spend $40 bucks on a single player adventure game when it can be had for "free" "
Turn that one-eighty and you can see that mentality reflected against the intellectual workforce. Why pay "$40" for someone when you can get them for a much lower price (outsourcing). Karma can be a bitch.
The title of this item on /. is: Funcom no longer making offline games. But the article states Funcom said they decided to stop making "traditional" offline games. This could mean they will only make non-traditional offline games, like the ever more popular episodic games, or games you need to download and activate online to then be able to play offline. Nothing has been said about having to have an internet connection to be able to play the games. You cannot even conclude they will stop making boxed versions of games from TFA. The FA also mentions an AdventureGamers article they don't even bother to link to. You can find it here. There is also a discussion going on about this on the AdventureGamers forums.
-- Cheers!
Whenever I see that bit, I tell the people sitting there, "You know, the pirated version doesn't have that ad..."
Let's think about this. They want pirates to stop pirating, so they go and try to beat their message into... their own legitimate customers? To the point where they actually end up driving some of them to piracy, just so they don't have to be called a pirate?
My own compromise has generally been renting and ripping. I think the rental price is fair, especially considering I simply don't have the hard disk storage to keep the movie, and it's not worth the hassle to burn and keep track of a huge archive of DVDs (especially when most movies must either be re-encoded or cut (special features, etc) or split onto two disks).
But yes, that's generally my procedure with any game, whether I buy it or not: If it includes CD-based copy protection, I go download a crack and/or convince it to run from Daemon Tools on Windows or cdemu on Linux. (Haven't gotten the cdemu to work for one of these, yet, but I think I'm getting closer.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I don't even want to have to use daemontools, much less some nasty crack. And I'm certainly not going to be a good little consumer and put the game disc in every time I play, scratching it more and more until it's unreadable.
I honestly could care less if the game works offline, though others will certainly want them to work on their laptops even without wireless. I don't even care if it's horribly inefficient -- say, a 5k/s trickle of data -- my gaming rig is always plugged into nice fast DSL, except when it goes out, which is usually when the power goes out anyway.
I'd much rather have a completely DRM-free game. I actually bought Darwinia and Uplink. Both are available in downloadable form, and the downloads, as far as I can tell, have absolutely no copy protection at all, other than the limit of only being able to download it 3 times (which is fine, considering the games are only some 50 megs, I can back that up forever). So, as far as I could tell, even the Windows version should have been easy to find on a filesharing network, but I didn't care, I went and bought them anyway.
But given the choice, fuck it, saturate my connection all you want, send them everything you can find on my computer -- not that you'll find much (my Wine is isolated enough, and my Windows has NOTHING of value on it) -- just don't lamely insist on a CD.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I actually downloaded and played through Call of Juarez and vowed to buy it because it was so teh awexome.
I would actually have preferred to buy it from the game directly from the developer or publisher (even at the same price), partially because buying it from Blockbuster just made me feel dirty (but in a thrifty way, they had the best offer on it at the time).
I'd actually wish that more games were available as downloads for several reasons; if not for any other reason than it being easier for me to pirate a copy than to get the original in some cases. Same goes for TV shows ("This Show Is Unavailable (also for purchase) Outside The United States And Canada. Also, You Have A Stupid Face For Asking And For Not Being An American")
*
Damnit, already modded in this discussion. Sorry for being anon.
Is it just me or is everyone getting sick of the piracy argument?
I remember back in the day before the internet was huge and you could find out whatever you wanted about a game, you paid a buck for a demo, if you liked it, you bought the full version.
so the execs are saying, "here is an idea!" Lets stop releasing demos but blame our plight on piracy, lets jump on the bandwagone of having everyone say our game is shit on the net but say that it is piracy that is fucking us over. Hell, it is working for movies, it is piracy that is releasing shit movies, not producers.
as a side note, anyone else looking out for spiderman 3? Looks awesome, something I will definitely pay for.... mostly because it's piracy that's fucking over the franchise....
Personally i block most games at my PC's firewall.
Simply put, i don't trust any games publisher to refrain from sending my personal information down from my PC to their servers.
An easy example: the vast majority of games nowadays tries to phone home even those with no online multiplayer component. Now, what exactly is a valid purpose for a single player game to "phone home" everytime i start the game?
I will allow a game to contact the internet (though i often block some addresses) only when it has an online playing component and i want to play it online.
This move by Funcom just tells me not buy their games anymore: my personal information (such as my gaming habits) has monetary value (as in it can be sold and resold for $$$) and i don't see why i should give them access to it free of charge and pay for their games.
The funny part is that for future Funcom games, any pirated copies out there will probably be beter than the official version since this "phone home to authenticate" crap will be disabled by a crack kindly provided with the pirate distribution.
The problem is that the demo was released 9 months after the game.
Games like The Longest Journey and its succesor Dreamfall already are going to suffer from a limited audience. Adventures just ain't that popular. Yet for some reason the first game was localized to hell, for the tiny market of the netherlands (everyone in the netherlands understands english) it was nonetheless dubbed. Dubbing in holland is a special art, the art of the silly voice, you cannot do a dub with normal voices.
So I had to really search for an english copy, offcourse this was in the day when the internet was still new and downloading several CD's was a pain in the ass, so I kept looking.
Dreamfall on the other hand also suffered from a limited release, stores apparently not getting any copies or just one and it being sold out, but there was bittorrent, a mouseclick away. Oh what to do?
I own a legit copy of neverwinter nights BUT play with a no-cd key, when inevitably they are going to release addons that are not available to someone in europe without a credit card I will just have to pirate them.
On the other hand you can't pirate WoW, wow doesn't bother with forcing you to have the CD/DVD in the player, because it is online and all piracy problems are a thing of the past. Go ahead and check on a torrent site for both games. Eh and you get a long list for both Dreamfall and WoW. Oh well, but Dreamfall is the full game were a pirated version of WoW will see you playing on some pokey private server.
So obviously going online seems attractive for game companies, yet there is a catch.
Do you know how many MMORPG companies offer payment in europe without the use of credit cards and instead use local banking systems? One. SOE. NOT a single other online game company accepts non-credit card transactions.
STEAM? Sorry, they are not even considering using anything else.
It is not like it is hard, SOE doesn't handle all those varied payments systems themselves, they contracted it out to a specialized firm. I myself have worked with other firms that also offer these services, in online retail they are extremely common.
So go ahead, put your game behind a credit card payment system, I haven't bought a single Steam game because I don't trust them to not screw me over with credit card only addons like Oblivion and its addons.
Funcom may well find itself stopping people from pirating the game because they don't want to pay for them, to stopping people from pirating the game because they CAN't for them.
The first group, well they are already lost, but I am for now a paying customer, do they really want to turn me into a pirate?
Very good point. I absolutely refuse to purchase a game without trying it out, be it a demo or a full version 'demo'. Sometimes it backfires for the company though. I pulled down Doom3 and deleted it within the first 20 minutes.
Just because the demo runs on your machine doesn't mean the actual game will. PC publishers like to tack on stupid "copy protection" schemes that hose your computer (if you have a legitimate copy but have a slightly different CD-ROM drive than both the ones they have tested) on final products even when the demo does not. Which is why people don't buy PC games (console games sell many times as many units, because they actually work).
So, when Funcom goes under, are all the people who bought games that need an ok from a remote server going to be plumb out of luck? Sucks to be them? Same for Steam, actually.
More Twoson than Cupertino
If it is indeed how they say, than I sympathize with them. I just hope they are not making stuff up as an excuse to put totally ridiculous copy protection ont heir games in order to increase sales. I realy doubt that copy protection will increase sales that much. People who pirate have been doing so for so logn they no longer would purchase a game at all. Well maybe they would buy one game instead of pirating 10. Regardless, I hate piracy. I have no problem paying for a game in order to support future development of whatever genre I am interested in. The fact that the games are expensive only makes me a more careful customer. I will not purchase bad games, and I try to do as much homework before a purchase as I can. Nothing beats a demo in my opinion. Whenever I come across someone who is using an illegal copy, I let them really have it. Even if they are my friends. In the end if they cause the end of the PC game market, I will be the one who is hurt the most. I am the one putting in lot of money by purchasing games in hopes of seeing sequals for years to come. They get the game for free and wouldn't give a damn if there is a sequal or not. And if one comes, they will just pirate that.
205 Nanomage Fixer.
Worst. Combo. Ever.
This is the start of gaming companies transitioning to online only games. We saw EA and iDSoftware waste premium GDC time whining about the topic. Now we see Funcom doing the same. This is no coincidence. The RIAA/MPAA type rhetoric is filtering into the gaming market, it seems.