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Game Developer's Response To Pirates
cliffski writes "A few days ago, indie PC games developer Positech publicly called for people pirating their games to explain why, in an open and honest attempt to see what the causes of gaming piracy were. Hundreds of blog posts, hundreds more emails and several server-reboots later, the developer's reply is up on their site. The pirates had a lot to say, on subjects such as price, DRM, demos and the overall quality of PC games, and Positech owner Cliffski explains how this developer at least will be changing their approach to selling PC games as a result. Is this the start of a change for the wider industry? Or is this the only developer actively listening to the pirates point of view?"
Most responses were, "we'd pay for your games if you'd remove the key protections"
Modding me -1 troll doesn't make me wrong.
Is this the start of a change for the wider industry? Or is this the only developer actively listening to the pirates point of view?"
Uh... I don't know? Ask me later.
When a no-cd crack or hacked exe for a game I purchased is released, I usually use it instead of carrying the CDs around with my laptop.
Kudos to Valve's Steam letting me download and install the game on multiple machines without treating me like a frickin' crook.
And the occasional time I've actually downloaded and ran a pirate game just to see if it was worth buying. I've been burned on way too many awesome demos and lackluster final games to drop $50 on a whim.
1. Lose the damn copy protection.
2. Use Steam or develop a system where people aren't chained to a CD or Jewel case with a cryptic serial number on it.
3. Release honest demos.
4. Don't get bought by EA, they have no honor.
Someone *this* in touch with not only their customers but with obvious potential customers definitely knows what they're doing.
I'm seriously considering buying a few of his games even though I've never heard of the company before.
PS: If you need a very experienced web developer...
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Nice to hear from you chris, and I wish you luck with that puzzley-platformer of yours!
Yarrrrrrrrrrrrr!
Some bring out the best in others, some the worst. Some bring out far more.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/8/8/
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
I used to find it amusing that people are willing to live with Steam's DRM, but complain about DRM in general. I've personally resisted Steam for years and years before I finally decided that Steam's DRM is actually palatable compared to some of the shit that's out there (securom).
What's disappointing is how badly the large shops are butchering the PC gaming market with DRM that absolutely sucks. Bioshock, Mass Effect and Spore are all games I wanted to play but at this point I will not dump the money down for them. Even the Steam version of Bioshock contains securom. How screwed up is that?
I'm at the point now where I'm slowly turning towards indie developers for most of my gaming neads (Stardock) and I'm really really glad that Positech has made it to slashdot or I'd never have heard of this company. I'll have to look at their games more closely.
This developer needs to be modded up. I wrote and told them that I used to pirate games after I bought them because the pirate editions were generally easier to use and I didn't have to have a disk laying around to play it. I then explained that due to my limited time as a father messing around with any of it was crap and that I pretty much quit playing PC games in general. If this whole asking our customers what they want thing catches on maybe I'll finally be able to get what I want, when I want it, and the way I want it. Perhaps I could get back into video games on the PC again.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
Piracy is what actually keeps the prices "low". If developers/publishers were the only entity to distribute a specific piece of software without alternatives, the cost would be higher as in every other monopoly. Piracy is in the best interest of everyone, except maybe those poor developers/publishers.
No one sells Ultima, Pools of Radiance, or Summer Games for the C64 anymore. If I wanted to play this game, my only choice would be to pirate it unless I could find a working copy on Ebay.
Services like Gametap and Good Ol' Games need to fill this market so that people don't have to become criminals to play games of yonder years.
He must be to believe that the 5% of "confessors" are accurate and that by addressing the concerns of the other 95% that he will reap significant monetary rewards from gamers who decide to actually pay for his games. If he were a bit more realistic, he would say that 5% of the posters admitted to pirating games because they can get away with it, while the other 95% engaged in cynical rationalization for their copyright infringement. I suspect that reducing the cost of his games will increase demand from people who think his games are too expensive and thus have decided not to play them. But, he is unlikely to see more revenue from the people who are playing his games without paying for them in the first place.
taking away control of our purchase through drm, paying too much for too little. it's blindingly obvious, but aparantly this developer needs the publicity or something....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Hi yall, back in the day they tried to RAISE school standards, can you believe it? But there weren't enough apple //'s and software even published to go around. Pardoned and released to public domain by Steve Jobs when he remembered one day. Case closed.
As far as having a good "taster", Id did pretty well with this. With say DOOM, you knew up front that the game would have a total of three episodes. Id let you play pretty much the first third of the game free. Hell, their demos even had some replay value. As it turned out, their clueful use of shareware pretty much made them back then.
Of course, not all games are as episodic but it you could draw some rules of thumb from it. A first time player casually making his way through DOOM's first 9 levels will take about 1.5 to 3 hours to do it. So it seems you have to give a quality experience for at least that amount of time to start some buzz going and of course the paid portion of the game has to maintain that quality so you'll tell your friends and blogs that the rest of the game is worth paying for.
I'd also suggest not continually have the player running into physical barriers and what not that aren't present in the payware version. Just structure the demo such that the game can be experienced for that critically addictive amount of time. Building in nags and frustrations will keep your prospective customer from getting hooked and wanting more. Rather you need an end that takes some period of time to encounter whether it be "level 9" or a decently far extent of a game universe. A game using the hub and spoke system should supply a quest or two say.
We can draw a parallel from the serialized stories of yesteryear. A good solid first installment is what is needed to get the reader caring about the story and characters. The "gotta know" sets in so the rest are bought.
It's simple as that. If you just make games where you have the biggest player audience instead of making games for those that are most likely to pay for their games, you're prone to having a lot of copies. If your market demographics consist mainly of people with little money and/or a low chance of getting caught, you will be copied.
There are simply people who buy and there are people who copy. And no copyprotection, no DRM, no law will get the latter to buy your games. If anything, DRM will drive those that would buy them (like me) away.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I sometimes use no CD cracks on games I have purchased, but people who download complete games rather than buy them are just rationalizing when they give excuses. They're stealing games, and while it's easy for them to sit back and make themselves feel better about it by saying that they're just trying out the game or they're protesting DRM, in the end they're just lazy thieves.
From TFA:
"This was expected, but whereas many pirates who debate the issue online are often abusive and aggressive on the topic, most of the DRM complaints were reasonable and well put. People don't like DRM, we knew that, but the extent to which DRM is turning away people who have no other complaints is possibly misunderstood. If you wanted to change ONE thing to get more pirates to buy games, scrapping DRM is it. These gamers are the low hanging fruit of this whole debate."
Yeah sure, people used to getting it for free will start paying for games once DRM is removed.
I like that guy's attitude.
Instead of corporate PR bullshit, he's honest, open and willing to discuss with his potential clients.
My answer to his question would most likely have been : I just fucking hate big games companies who are run by corporate idiots.
I'll probably give one of his games a try, just to encourage this kind of behavior.
I can understand people using no CD cracks and such but to claim that DRM is a reason to steal the whole game? Free is free guys, the genie is out of the bottle and pirates don't have those level of ethics.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
This guys sounds like a genuinely decent guy who's making efforts to make customers happy to reduce pirating; that's all great, but it seems to me, having never heard of his company, he's done an awesome job of getting a lot of free advertising.
Not that that will keep me from perusing his games...
Stupid sexy Flanders.
Your site says you do Mac ports. Can we get some Linux ports as well please?
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
The fact of the matter is that there are people who create these games. If you want to play them, you should pay what they ask. How would you feel if you had to work 40 hours a week for nothing?
The game developers spent money to go to school, they spent their time to make the product, and then someone comes along and rips it off. Its thievery.
If you dont think the game warrants $60 (or even $23 in this guys case) DONT PLAY THE GAME.
There's a roaming horde of Internet users out there who like to blow off steam by posting comments on Web sites and blogs. Here's how it works: The first few comments on a discussion thread will seem useful, but then the horde comes. As the thread grows longer and longer, it decays into an unread mess of nothingness. Yet that doesn't stop the horde from posting more comments.
I always ponder this when I run into sites on which a comment thread runs into the hundreds, and I wonder: At what point do these threads become a useless dialectic? Personally, I tend to get bored after the 20th remark unless the comments pertain to a subject I am seriously interested in, and the remarks are well thought out and bring me new insight.
Those sorts of remarks are hard to find, though, since they are usually buried beneath an avalanche of shallow opinion, trivia, and epithets. Much of the commentary devolves into political condemnation or religious diatribe. I recall a post made on my blog a few weeks back: The original subject involved neither religion nor politics, but the comment thread went off into a religious debate, and then politics were brought into it. And that's not as though there aren't plenty of commenting opportunities on religious or political posts!
It seems to me that online comment boards are becoming more and more of a place where frustrated individuals think they can air their petty grievances or spew some online venom. Comments should be for honest discourse and to correct factual errors found within an article, and there should be an online etiquette for comments. Here are a few suggestions:
What comments should do:
1) Comments should highlight factual errors and ask that they be noted and corrected.
2) Comments should add additional information or links to enhance the value of a post.
3) Comments should offer a well-reasoned alternative perspective.
I have many reasons for downloading games/apps, but there are only 4 main ones:
1) Lack of full non-gimped demos
2) Malware like DRM or licenses that require activation(how do I activate if the company goes out of business?)
3) Crappy games that are full of bugs or only hold my attention for a few days then I get bored, or they suck in general.
4) I have no money
Number 4 is mostly the reason I download games, applications, music, and movies. It's not that I'm cheap or just want to get things for free, it's that I have either bills to pay, or food to buy, and I simply can't afford it.
If a product is good enough, I'll invest in it, such as smaller companies or artists. I've purchased many games and music from people because of things I've downloaded to try out. Stardock games and games off Steam, all of which I've downloaded first.
Actually Kudos is a game I've wanted to buy as well as Democracy, and I admit I've downloaded both, Democracy was a good game but I feel needed improvement yet I will contribute money when I get more. However this is a good example of why I download games, in this case, my reason Number 3, bugs.
Kudos in fact did not work for me, the game was glitched, even the real demo didn't work, so if I had paid money for it, I would have ended up with a game I couldn't play. However I support the man's effort and will buy the game eventually after the bug is fixed since it was not through malice or incompetence but just a bug. I'm not trying to validate why I do these things, I'm just giving reasons as to why, consider me a thief if you want, it doesn't change anything. If games were cheaper and better, as well as full working demos with no malware DRM or activation, I wouldn't bother downloading.
I think all media (games, movies, music...) is priced way too high. Not because I can't afford it, but because at $20, you are guaranteeing that everyone in the developing world will pirate your game rather than be able to pay for it. I would love if people would try to sell things to the Indians or the Chinese by simply pricing it at a level they can afford. Writing it in their language would also help.
WRONG. *A FEW* pirates are able to circumvent DRM. They're the ones that give the cracked versions to the rest of the pirates.
But if you're assumming that everyone who downloads and burns a cracked copy is therefore "able to circumvent DRM", then you're begging the question, because you're saying "DRM circumventers are pirates, therefore all pirates are DRM circumventers". DOH.
Cracked copies have NO DRM. And Consoles copy protection != DRM.
I personally pay for 100% of the games that I play on the Wii. Just wanted to throw that out there as a partial suggestion.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
I don't understand why so many people are proclaiming the greatness of what this single developer is doing by collecting opinions from his current and/or potential players.
He's not doing this because he actually cares about the "right vs wrong" way of going about things. He doesn't really care that you dislike DRM. The only reason he's removing DRM is because he thinks it will generate more revenue. If he starts making less money now that he's removed DRM, he's not going to keep it off because "that's what the gamers want". If adding DRM means more money, then he's going to add it right back on.
This whole thing just stinks of the usual "small shop's only marketing ploy is to cater to those who are sick of the corporates". And that kind of ploy only lasts until the small shop morphs into yet another corporate suck hole.
Here we go - as the link is already slashdoted :
http://www.positech.co.uk.nyud.net/talkingtopirates.html
I pirate games because I don't want to spend money on them. I really don't care that some programmer or company is getting shafted out of my dollars. That's money I could spend on other pleasures. Why would I give them my money so that they can use it to compete with me for tangible resources like real estate, luxuries, and women? I don't bloody care. Call me a thief, so what? What are you going to do about it? Is it unfair, uncivilized, uncouth? Not my problem. I do what I want. In an age when I can download whatever games I want for free, actually paying for them is like putting my money in a shredder. I'm not gonna try to tap dance around it and defend my actions because I really don't have to until I'm standing before a judge. This isn't a troll or sarcastic post. I really don't have any scruples about this crap.
When I wanted to check out "The Sims 2" I went out of my way to pirate it. EA's managed to alienate me (a customer who's spent thousands of dollars on their products) to the point where I'll actually spend more than $50 worth of my time to get a torrent.
Do the opposite of what they do, like George Costanza.
... also, I can kill you with my brain.
making corporate actions based off feedback from people engaging upon criminal activities upon your livelihood is even less intelligent than basing your retirement portfolio on the results of a slashdot poll
nasdaq: COWBOINEAL
Here's to finally giving Bush his exit strategy in November
Indeed, he _does_ need an experienced web developer.
After a few days of playing a new computer game, I get quite bored with it. Seems really pointless to pay 50 bucks for 1 week of gameplay. Besides WOW, I haven't been able to get into a game in years. Who knows maybe WOW killed the cat...
It's left blank because I have nothing to say to you punks!
"I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method."
Last I checked this is actually patented by Amazon. Another fine example of the retardation of the patent office.
A good start would be to stop calling people who copy software "pirates". Personally I don't like being compared to criminals who attack ships at sea.
I pirate games 'cause pirates are so cool dude!
Or I do it because I don't make enough to afford rent, food, gas, electricity, water (the basics) and internet, movies, music, WoW, etc. fun stuff.
Plus I have a relatively short attention span for most games, but longer than a demo version. If I truly like the game, I will spend money on it, so that I can own it. Though I usually wait for the game to come down in price.
The last great game that I... "Evaluated the full version" of was Call of Duty 4. I want to buy this game, I enjoyed it, and though I wouldn't play it daily, I'd still pay for it. But it's out of my price range (how long has it been out and it's still $50 "on sale" locally to me?). Once it drops in price a little, I'll gladly pay for the good game.
Basically I pirate, cause I'm poor, and cheap, and have the attention span of a coked out squirrel. Make a game fun, and affordable, and I'll throw money at you.
Honesty and didn't post AC? Wow! I'm seriously impressed.
It's refreshing to see that you're not a punk about it. I may not agree with you but something has to be said for the moxie you've displayed.
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
I am arguing that downloading a cracked copy IS circumventing the DRM, yes. They do circumvent it, albiet not by cracking it, but via tools other people develop.
It's not begging the question. All pirates circumvent DRM. No person who cannot circumvent DRM is a pirate. Hence the sample is skewed, as far as DRM is concerned.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
...from this entire discussion. Game Developers nurturing online games. Taking Valve Games completely out of this reply. (CS, DoD, etc) Many game companies come out with a great idea but fail to capitalize on a great idea like Valve has done with Counter Strike.
Example.
007 Nightfire by EA for the PC.
http://pc.gamezone.com/gamesell/p20312.htm
Great game that used the Half-Life 1 engine. AWESOME multiplayer. You had your choice of death match and CTF maps to choose from. One of the maps was a killer re-creation of the Fort Knox scene from Goldfinger and you got to play any of the major villians from across the 007/James Bond franchise. This game was generating tons of buzz online and got even more buzz when the game makers said that they were going to release an SDK within weeks of the release of the game.
SDK = More killer maps.
The online community started planning on making maps from every single game starting with Dr. No.
However, weeks became months and months and months. Then all of a sudden they stopped supporting the game online.
I know I'm repeating something everyone already knows about EA but EA doesn't know how to garner interest by keeping their online games that could make them money in the long run. They could have made a boat load of money if they had kept with the franchise. The 007 franchise has the ability to make lots of money with online multiplayer games but no one has stepped up to the plate yet.
This was 2002. Not much has changed since.
If you look at any of the Battlefield PC game boxes there's fine print on it that basically says we reserve the right to pull the multiplayer servers at any time.
Save the World! Use a Quote!
By the way, here's a link to the site that mentions the talk, which will hopefully provide a recording of the talk sometime in the future:
http://up.org.nz/Richard-Stallman-at-GGG/#av
Ask me about repetitive DNA
First, I've never pirated cliffski's games, or even heard of them. So kudos I guess for figuring out how to get free marketing.
But really, I think games have a lot to compete against. The local Community College is responding to overwhelming demand for video game creation classes. In an industry full of underpaid, overworked slaves, people are still willing to work for free. Think about how many games Valve had a hand in: Team Fortress, Counter-Strike, Day of Defeat, and probably more since I stopped caring. There's also Battlefield 2, which was based on a mod to Battlefield 1 called "Desert Combat". There's a history of unpaid labor here. Expecting to make a profit requires some clever thinking and is probably as likely to happen as becoming rich writing poetry. Enough people have figured this out that a few of them have given up on that dream, but decided to make an awesome game anyways.
Console games, for all their high price and lack of freedom, seem to be a better deal than the average PC game. It takes a very low price (read: free) to convince me to bother with it. There are, however games I would pay for. They're games that I like enough to keep, even though I could resell them. Yes, this basically means I don't buy PC games, since they equate selling the media with piracy. The sale and purchase of used games is a concept so central to me; I'm not buying a license to play the game, I bought a game. And I shall sell it, should it be made of suck.
I guess this means I'm on the fence about download only games; Fret Nice looked interesting, but it's sad to see it's gone to WiiWare / XBLA / PSN, and other end runs around first-sale. I might be willing to pay 50 dollars for a game that I can sell for 10 or 20 later (or perhaps even 50, in rare cases). But take that away, and suddenly I'm paying for something I don't think I need to.
All that said, I have an alternative strategy. cliffski says he'll make demos, though probably not make them longer than he already does. I say, don't give away demos and sell games. Give away games and sell endings. It's a bit mercenary, but I think many people would have bought the portal ending. Hell, make it so you can sell the final level and "cheats" / plot skips. It's not a strictly new idea -- I recall a recent game promoting a "DVD chapter" style level progression as a feature, where if you get stuck you can skip to the next "chapter".
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
IMHO, even if people have the means to buy stuff, they would still resort to pirating stuff if they can. These folks can definitely afford to buy DVDs, games, etc., if they want to but choose to pirate them instead. Why? Human nature coupled with the fact that the internet has made it too easy.
I mean, just look at software, most folks would rather download a cracked MS Office or Photoshop if they cannot get one at a huge discount. People saying they pirate games, software, etc., because of DRM, cost, etc., are most likely bullshitting... They pirate because it is easy, there is almost no penalty for doing so, and they don't want to pay for something they can get for free... even if this ultimately means killing the PC gaming industry.
I know people who would not hesitate to get a Quad Core for 300 bucks and a highish end videocard for 200 plus bucks but would not pay 20 bucks for a dvd much less a 50 bucks for a game if they could get it off bittorrent for free. The partial solution is probably to get rid of all box packages for games/software and just follow the Steam or WoW method of distribution.
> This is often more the case with indie games where there is not enough interest to develop a crack, than with major games.
Umm, what game can't you find a crack for and how hard did you look? Seriously, people bother to crack even the most obscure crap out there.
Heck, in my one and only crack, I once made a keygen for this cheesy Java game that I don't even remember the name of. It was made by some nobody and it was quite unbalanced, but it was pretty fun. So if even that got cracked, I don't think there are too many things out there that *don't* have cracks or serial numbers available.
P.S. I never actually distributed that crack, though. In fact, I bought the game and told the guy how I cracked it. But I did use it while waiting for him to email my key.
Why not make it easy for me to try out a demo and upgrade to the full version, I can pay $20 up front, or play an extended demo and play to the end of the demo (say halfway through the full thing, or with weapons/skills/whatever only in the full version) and pony up $20. But make it easy, like literally hit a key combo in game that launches my default browser to the right URL, payment should take ~10 seconds or less, and then the game goes legit (automatically or in some very easy manner). Literally make it as easy as buying a cup of coffee (probably one reason so many people buy cups of coffee =). It shouldn't interrupt the game for more than 60 seconds to upgrade. I suspect if there were games with this system they'd sell relatively well.
1. He thinks people like Steam for convenience. Maybe. Me, I am just afraid of giving my CC number to an unknown vendor. Sell your game through Steam or Walmart or Amazon or don't get my money.
2. He needs to explain to people how his games are original. What sets Kudos apart from the Sims? In fact his games seem like cheap ripoffs of well known franchises ("Rock Legend", "Starship tycoon" the names alone are enough to make you wonder if these are "Guitar hero" and "[...] tycoon" ripoffs). I may be wrong and they are all original games, I am just talking about the vibe I get from his website.
In short, every aspect of his marketing and distribution needs work.
lets cut the BS There are a lot of reasons why people pirate, the number one reason is... because its free! think about it. the other reasons are, because they can't afford it honestly there was a time in everyone life when you didn't buy legit because you didn't have the money. third reason, the item is lackluster, there is so much crap out there that you are not going to risk putting down cash for something that could be bad. solution to this, make quality goods and people will come. add things like DRM to make your crap even crappier and don't get surprised that no one is buying your cruddy software. Don't blame piracy for bad sales, blame your over inflated prices, blame your designers. People will rarely pirate goods that they deem worthy, and they can afford.
Did anyone else notice the 2 copyrighted images from "Pirates of the Caribbean" on the article. For some reason, I doubt he properly licensed those, but I'm sure that is completely different than pirating a game.
In honor of the parent, whose post can only go up to +5, of course. ;-)
(Yes, I do agree with the parent, as well.)
Pirate? Nah, I think I can be more convincing. Don't even play the games. I don't. Used to, but no more. Just plain been burned too many times by any kind of commercial software, not only games. Like, games shipped with the networked play unfinished so that they can only be played solo (of course they claimed the problems with network play were "bugs"). Then, when the "patches" were at last released, they didn't work. Or I get the basic game but still can't play with anyone else without first buying at least 2 more expansions. Then there's the old "hint" book trick, where you have no chance of figuring out how the heck to play the game without the additional purchase of the "hint" book that is actually the rule book.
But I do get some gaming in via a real old tech method known as the board game. So I am a customer who could be won back because I still enjoy games. Impossible to copy protect board games or pull most of the other shabby tricks that can be pulled with software.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
These idiots will rationalize for hours given half a chance. All this self-righteous, highfalutin BS does little to mask the fundamental, basic fact that most people are averse to paying for something that they can acquire for free. Spare us the crap--if you steal something (and who among us hasn't), you're just a thief. Ideology don't enter into it. The fact that the person you stole from gave you a soapbox to moralize on doesn't make you any less of one.
I think there is a world market for maybe five personal web logs.
The only type of game that will really make money in the new Internet economy is a multi-user game that is played by subscription.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
I am the only one who is noticing that 1/4 of all Slashdot stories that are posted here now were Digg top stories about 2 days ago?
Really.
I think 5-10 years after someone stops selling software, people should be able to redistribute it as abandonware for software preservation.
And developers should release the source code (public domain?) at that point too. Games that old and older are a major pain to get running well/properly.
Sorry for hijacking your thread but is there any way to just donate without purchasing one of the games? I'd like to support this kind of business model.
There are two types of demos that I really recommend.
1.)Give a large portion of the game away. 10-30%. If you get the feeling that this is a really bad idea, then maybe you're game is too repetitive, or just not as fun to play as you thought. If your game really is addictive, you'll have people paying for more.
2.)Make a demo that isn't part of the game. If you can spend the time to do this, it'll be rewarding. Not just in bringing new customers, but giving some bonus free content to people who already bought and liked your game. A good example of this is, if I remember correctly, what Blizzard did with it's WarCraft II demo back in the day.
Why do people pirate games?
Well, you know, this is funny, but I do get a lot of my stuff pirated at first, then, I try it, unlocked, no restrictions. If I don't like it, I delete it. If I like it, I go buy it, unless I have to work with DRM. DRM is a no-no.
If I can't make a backup of my game and play with the backup, I prefer the pirated version. Why? Because CD/DVDs can be scratched, simple and honest.
So, I don't have tons of games, but the ones I have for the most part, ironically, are not pirated and obviously no-DRM. I mean, let's face it, if I have to insert the original CD everytime I need to play, it will get scratch or become defective over time. Hell with that. As long as I can play from a copy of the game, instead of my original, then, I won't mind purchasing.
Cheers!
I remember when I started Pirating. I was really into the old Super Nintendo games and kinda liked the old Yoshi's Island on it. So when I had a Nintendo 64 and they released Yoshi's Story, I figured it would be a sequel to the Super Nintendo version, I bought it and paid full price and all. The second I got home and turned it on, I felt like I was robbed before the intro even finished.
Now I will download anything before I ever buy it. I have my Xbox and Playstation Modded and have a downloaded many PC games as well. If the game is really worth the value, I spend the money and buy item if not I delete them or just keep the DvD-R just to remind me never to waste money on it or to show my friends so they doesn't makes the same mistake.
That is how I got my Final Fantasy games (Try before I buy) and even my Warcraft game, played that on a bootleg server before I ever played retail, good think too, the level 20 cap would have kept me from playing as druids are boring before 20 so I would have never bought it.
Some would say to go to rentals but many of them around here are $8-12 to rent and at that price, I might as well go to a pawnshop.
If a game needs administrator privileges to install, its DRM is too intrusive. It's just not acceptable to give some no-warranty game the privilege to overwrite your system settings and install hidden software. There's a moderately high probability of hostile code being present, a strong possibility that the DRM system will open a security hole, and a high probability that the software will not uninstall fully.
If it won't install with unprivileged user privileges, it's hostile code. Send it back.
No matter what lame excuses or justifications you come up with - you are out and out stealing or doing something unethical!
Cliff (or Chris :D),
I read your letter and I am impressed. you ever consider just a simple paypal if you're having trouble with the providers?
Fraps was my pirate story and as soon as I got a job, I headed back to fraps and paid for it. Simple, fast, do exactly as advertised.
I've never played your game (let's take a look at mininova? hehehe), but will get some demos off your site soon and check them out.
And I like how personal your site is. Impressive. You do this all by yourself or what?
The Mission at hand:
Buy a few of this guys games so he posts a new blog about how successful his methods were, then main stream developers will catch on.
And this guy will make some money, you could possibly get a good game. Everyone is happy.
Isn't it ironic... I went to the "response" page listed and what did I see? Two screencaps from Priates of the Carribean. That is porperty owned by Disney, did Cliffsky get copyright approval to post those images on his "response to piracy" page? Is he no better than the very pirates he is trying to appease?
Yes, and that would be possible only when graphic support from @$$hole vendors improve - a lot - for Linux. I am typing this from my T60 running Ubuntu, and no more ATI for me anymore. Can't even run Google Earth, and here we are, talking about proper games.
(Yes, I know how to make Google Earth work, but that's not the point.)
Indeed. Including a cloth map, a moonstone and an ankh in the packaging (Rest in Peace, Origin :~( ) will make more people buy the actual game instead of copying than any DRM ever will.
I was thinking the same thing - maybe I should buy one of this guy's games to support him. But this part of his response changed my mind about that:
Some people may have a 'silly' attitude, but there are some very real questions about the nature of intellectual property which cannot be dismissed so easily. I accept that this does not justify piracy (it really only justifies non-participation in the IP system, in my mind) but to dismiss out of hand any argument which raises political/intellectual questions about the validity of IP rights is equally silly.
Read Pynchon.
pirating is cheaper
full price is expensive/ripoff
you get a copy of something and its out of date a couple months later
Kudos 2 seems nice, but will it run on a beowulf cluster ?
No sig for now.
I do not live in US. But i have a kickass machine config, a fast 2 Mbps internet, and buy most of the games like CoH, CoH: OF, Age of Empires, etc.
Most games sold online or through Amazon are available only to US residents/credit card holders.
This forces me to pirate games that i love to buy, but CANNOT buy because the stupid publisher thinks US==World.
I had to ask my sis-in-law to buy games like Company of Heroes/Opposing Fronts from US, because these games are not available where i live and amazon refuses to ship them.
OTOH Stardock/Impulse pioneered a way to buy games without the US restrictions. So i ended up buying most of my games from them.
Second reason is DRM crap.
I bought crysis and i ended up with SecurROM which slowed down my DVD read/write drive to such an extent i had to reinstall XP.
Now? Crysis sits on my desk and i play CoH.
Third is the way the authentication of keys work.
I had to reinstall XP (problem above) without uninstalling anything (could not boot up PC).
Most games allowed me to reinstall without trouble (like CoH, Age of Empires, etc).
Stardock automatically allowed me to download same games once again without asking major questions.
WarCraft refused, saying am pirating.
Rise of nations refused to go online stating same reason.
Both support people were helpful, but wanted me to scan the original DVDs, proof of purchase and a signed affidavit stating i bought it from so-so dealer.
I bought Rise of nations a long time ago. Shifted homes thrice. P-of-Purchase NA. So no online! I sent the jpg shots of my game DVD, and a CD key paper i had retained.
When support refused to activate it, i cracked it.
After all, am "helping" the company to provide me the service i paid for. Right?
Short story: KISS and allow anyone to purchase your games from anywhere. Don't insist on stupid lawyers to restrict regions/countries.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
He says he cut the price of Kudos in half, which indeedy-do he did... for the Windows version. The Mac version is still $22. He just lost a sale.
Sure, I only know very few game writes, so the stats are a bit thin, but the game writers I know are the worst pirates of all the people I know. They will readily pirate both material as well as development tools, OSs etc then bitch like hell if anyone rips off their games.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Sony's Creative Software division(Formerly Sony Media Software, formerly Sonic Foundry) isn't nearly as evil as their main entity. I worked there for a time and in the non-corporate-megalopolis of Madison, WI it's mostly the same people who worked for the startup Sonic Foundry to create the original software and concepts, as well as a lot of the same code. They're honestly doing it for the product, and not just for the money. While it's easy for me to say their stuff is the best because I got it for free, I also paid for and used it long before I worked there - it was a motivating factor in going to work for them. -R
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
1. You already bought it for one system, so why do you have to pay for it again just to play it on another system you own?
2. (related to 1). Updated game for PC version, It sucks to have bought a game for your console just to have them release an updated game with extra stuff(levels,quests,abilities,etc) for the PC later(fable, assassins creed, jade empire,etc).
It's quite simple. Gaming in general (both PC and console) has evolved quite a bit in the past couple generations. I can't say that there won't be any new innovations, but I can say with certainty that almost everything has been tried at least once.
With that in mind, there are a number of gimmicks that game studios use when producing games. IMHO, the worst are the following:
1: Adding artificially hard/non-linear barriers to progression. The most recent splinter cell game is a great example of this. While the previous ones were quite linear and relatively free of frustrating gaps, "Double Agent" had several things that seemed as if they were put in there just for the sake of taking up the playerâ(TM)s time. Don't take a 7 hour game and try to stretch it to 12 with garbage.
(2 and 3 are somewhat similar and several games are offenders of both. They are, however, separate problems)
2: Using flashy pre-rendered cut scenes to advance major story points or game play. Part of me misses the age of cartridge consoles. With only 64Mbit to play with, these kind of antics were basically impossible. In todayâ(TM)s age of double sided DVD's and even BD-ROM discs, a game could conceivably have hours of cut-scenes. If I wanted to watch cut scenes (no matter how well animated) I'd rent a movie. If they take up more then 50% of the time spent playing, I generally skip them or have a beer/sandwich. Consequently, I miss out anything that's contained in them that is important or significant to the game
3: Trying to make up for poorly designed or un-engaging game play with flashy/unique/overly high-quality graphics. Thanks to the availability of substantial hardware resources in the current generation of consoles (excluding the WII, of course), it's quite easy to fill a game with high polygon count skinned, boned models wrapped in super detailed textures, multiple light sources and hand perfected pixel shaders. It might look really spectacular, but that doesn't really mean anything if it's not any fun. Once again, if I wanted to look at something rendered absolutely perfectly, I'd watch a Pixar movie.
4: Having a selection of difficulty levels that has little effect on the game. 15 years ago, Doom offered 5 different skill levels. While the playerâ(TM)s choice didn't massively change the game, it did incrementally increase the difficulty. The monsters were harder to kill, more populous and while health packs had less effect, more ammo was spawned. I would hope that modern games could do better then that. Doom ran fine at 33Mhz. Modern consoles have roughly 10,200 MHz at their disposal. There is no excuse for difficulty levels to do nothing more then spawn more or harder to kill Napâ(TM)s.
Finally, the biggest and most annoying thing about the current generation of video games:
5. Today's game producers tend to front load their game's content. I've never found a published statistic, but my estimation is that only about 40% of games purchased are ever fully completed by their purchasers. The player either tires of the game before the end, or gets another game to play before they finish. Since most games today are part of a series and are expected to remain viable for use in future sequels/ newer consoles, the game companies cheat on the content. They put, in my estimation, 75% of the best content in the first 50% of the game. The hardcore gamers and series fans will always buy the next sequel. They're hoping that by front-loading the best content, the semi-casual player that only finished half of the previous title in the series will have liked it enough to buy the new one when it comes out. While I understand their logic, I'd really like to get more for my money. 8-10 hours from a game that costs $50-60. That's between $5-7.50 per hour. I don't know what everyone elseâ(TM)s thoughts are, but I think that minimum wag
He thinks people like Steam for convenience. Maybe. Me, I am just afraid of giving my CC number to an unknown vendor.
Those things combined, yes. But you do have to start somewhere.
While I'm at it, I use Paypal with Steam -- so there's that additional layer. But I would say, interface with every vendor and with every payment system out there.
He needs to explain to people how his games are original. What sets Kudos apart from the Sims?
Well, your response suggests he needs to simply shorten that to a catchphrase that he can plaster everywhere, so that people like you will actually notice. But here:
Kudos is a turn based strategy game where you control someone's life.
The Sims is many things, but it is not turn based. There are other differences, but that was the most obvious, and took me maybe 20 seconds to find.
Now, excuse me while I hijack (pirate!) your thread to respond to the rest of TFA:
People think demos are too short. My demos *are* short, because the marketing man in me sees that you can't give away too much. I've wanted people to feel a bit annoyed when the demo cuts out, so they buy the game to keep playing.
I would say, the solution is to make the game longer, but also to make the demo long enough. The point of the demo isn't to irritate them so that they go buy the game -- it's to lead them on. It's to get them hooked so that they can't easily just stop there.
Take the WoW 10-day trial. Can you really stop after 10 days, abandon your character, and go do something else, if you played at all during those 10 days?
A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating.
I would say, that is a factor, but it's nowhere near as much a factor as how easy it could be to buy those games. Take Penny Arcade's comments -- honestly, at $20 or so, it's not huge.
Then again, lowering his price may help -- after all, Portal cost $20. Let's see -- do I want to play Kudos, or the best game of last year?
I get the impression that if I make Kudos 2 not just lots better than the original, but hugely, overwhelmingly, massively better, well polished, designed and balanced, that a lot of would-be pirates will actually buy it.
Somewhat, yes. But that's not really why you want to make a better game.
You want to make a better game, because if it's good enough, pirates really won't be a dent in the kind of profit you'll be bringing in -- and people will be satisfied. And a satisfied customer is, quite possibly, a repeat customer.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
does anyone think the pics he has on his response are ironic and makes him a hypocrite?
Is this the start of a change for the wider industry? Or is this the only developer actively listening to the pirates point of view?
If you read his site, it's one, small developer.
ozmanjusri's debunking is quite on-target to be honest. I've played WoW under Gentoo, and it's maximum frame rate was about 2/3rd that of windows (natively). In fact, Wine's average framerate before I added 2GiB more RAM was generally better than Windows. (Of course, this last tidbit might be due to the fact that Windows, with 1GiB RAM, was eating up far more than X--but I suspect a better VM, too.) If you plan on playing a game under Wine that is purported to do well, you should probably at least check the Gentoo World of Warcraft Howto and browse the performance tweaks section. Applying the registry tweak really does work, if you're playing an OpenGL game.
Of course, the game very likely has to be an OpenGL game in order to work in the first place. But, in the case of WoW, OpenGL mode isn't slow because it's running under Wine--it's slow because of Blizzard's implementation. (Seriously--try running WoW in OpenGL mode under Windows, you'll lose approximately the same FPS as you would under Wine.) Plus, in a rather odd twist of irony, Tribes' dedicated server (the original Tribes!) runs somewhat better under Wine!
He who has no
Here's a thought. Most people hate DRM, because it's a hindrance to them from playing the game. Put the cd in the drive. No virtual drives. Install this crappy software. All that stuff.
Would it be possible to use a one time keypad, like the kind you use in bank transactions instead? The small electronic keypad thingies. No cd/dvd requirements, no odd software to install and so on. Could even install it on as many computers as you'd want, including multiple simultaneous online accounts.
Obviously it'd cost you something as the publisher, but what would the "drm sucks" pirates think of this scheme? What of the regular players? As a plus it'd make it insanely hard to steal your online account if you had to use the token to log in. Downside would be selling characters, but that could be fixed in-game by allowing character transfer across accounts anyway.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I really hated how he never dealt with the scarcity argument, games are abundant, not scarce, hence according to supply and demand, they shouldn't be able to make money (technically) but they do anyway.
There's a lot of games like that.
Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance is another example of a downloadable game (I got a copy from Direct2Drive, which a friend purchased for me) that has SecuROM enabled. I had to muck about for a good hour or digging around on the THQ site looking for answers. The only suggestions they had weren't particularly helpful, either. These were things along the lines of "SecuROM probably detects something it doesn't like on your system, so you should uninstall that software."
Oookay, so I have Visual Studio on here and its debugger might be upsetting SecuROM? Hah! I'd rather not play a game if I have to remove something I need for this upcoming semester!
Anyway, I eventually learned that I could apply one of the various patches released to the D2D version, which worked well enough such that it didn't pester me for activation codes. Not like the activation codes were much use, the game refused to send them to the authentication servers in the first place. But, that experience alone left a somewhat sour taste in my mouth.
To be honest, I've found it much more redeeming to stick with older tried and true games. Hey, they don't pester me about authentication rubbish or the likes. And Tribes is still a great deal of fun multiplayer. It's just a shame that Tribes 2 is the epitome of everything that can go wrong when the developer kicks the bucket. (That's another raw spot to rub. If you want to get friends in to play a round of Tribes 2, you have to find them a key--and good luck there. You might find a copy used or new from Amazon, but then there's the issue of hoping the auth servers are up.)
He who has no
The fact that Pirating software is rampant today does not mean that if the act of pirating wasn't happening, software company's monetary problems would be solved. If you really look at what copying is, you would find that this argument is a bunch of red herring. (If you don't know what red herring is my suggestion is to look it up before you respond).
To date there is no data that can prove without a shadow of a doubt there is a link between pirated software and lost money. People assume that piracy is a direct result of lost revenue as it is easy to draw a parallel between the two without having to really look at the dynamics of the situation (Software company's choices as to how they relate to their customers and the potential customers who pirate that software).
For the most part, the real problem lies in a couple of different areas.
1) The misperception between your software companies product asking price and your potential customers needs.
2) Not having a direct and productive relationship with your customers.
3) Not displaying a responsibility towards the betterment of society.
4) Releasing something digital into the open and then expecting net citizens to play by your rules.
Secondly making copies of something does not deprive the rights holder of anything. This is software we are talking about. It's like telling someone about an idea you have and then expecting people to pay for it. People might feel obligated to pay you because it makes their life easier and they feel a certain sense of loyalty toward you, but that only happens when you create a space for it. Expecting more than what people can give is the wrong way to look at this issue, and that's why there is so much pirating today. Software publishers think they can get away with it but there wrong. Intellectual property is hot air, it sounds like a good idea but the truth is we all build off of each others ideas and ultimately, there is no such thing as property. Only in your mind does that have any reality. When that idea becomes more important then the relationship between publisher and customers, its time to put it aside for a moment and look at the big picture.
Thirdly if you are a publisher and want customer loyalty (I.E people paying for your software) YOU have to create a person connection with each of your customers. Nobody is going to feel wrong for copying your stuff if you don't create a positive relationship with them. Working with people, not attacking them though legal means cause people to think twice about getting something for nothing. Everything else just makes people resent you, your company, and your position. Large corporations are big entities that have no person to person value because for the most part there is nobody to have direct responsibility or contact with so who cares if their stuff gets copied?
The ultimate result is that there are too many companies, to many large entities, and not enough direct contact that obscures the relationship between the customer and the publisher. The spirit of providing a service to people in need is lost, replaced by an oversized need to obtain wealth and any cost and forgetting what matters most. People and Relationships. Money is just a one of many possible byproducts of what you do to enrich a life, you lock yourself into your own destruction when you have an expectation that people are not able to deliver, remember that.
Give away the single player mode as the demo, and charge a subscription for the multi-player online mode. It works, its a business model, everybody's happy.
The method would be similar to what some online-rpgs seem to do. The game would require the user to connect to a server in order to play. The game is divided in: a client executable (which runs on the user's computer) and a server executable (which runs on a large-bandwidth computer owned by the software house).
The key point is that part of the logic runs on the server and never gets to the client. The client contains the graphics and some logic, but some important calculations (e.g. player positions) are done by the server, and only the result of those calculations are sent to the client.
It seems to me that such game could not be pirated, unless you crack the server (but how likely is it?) or you are willing to rewrite large parts of the logic. Imagine an adventure game done like this.
Do you think this could work? Are there some games (e.g. rpgs) which already use this technique? Thanks for any opinion.
If you just code and do nothing else then fine, I can see you won't see the problems. OK, here's a *simple* example from c.a. 1990: You have a simple dictionary program which runs on MS-DOS (using a memory swapping TSR). Three editions. Easy huh? Wrong - dead wrong - try QA/ing that across at least (I stopped counting at 13) variants of DOS, network shells, DR-DOS, PC-MOS 386.. (it goes on and on). Oh and by the way marketing doesn't want pirates to be able to take the Lite version and use it with the "Pro" files etc. etc.. (That's just in this example a little Greek-English dictionary called Gword).
This was also a good example of insane copy protection as it (I fought this hard but lost!) locked to many of the hardware features of the machine it installed on. Net result: the more copies the company sold, the more support calls generated for new S/N's...
The funniest thing was that someone *did* hack me (yippee!) and I got sent a SYMDEB script to patch the code. Took a while to stop laughing about that. The later windows version only had a registration number and was (is?) widely pirated, but I always took the view that it was a good advert for the company anyway...
Re "most users don't want tech support" - here's another anecdote, this time from the mid 80's. When I was at TDI in Bristol UK in the 80's porting the UCSD p-system one of my colleagues ported it to the Sinclair QL. TDI had decided that there was to be *no* tech support for this system. Very clearly in the manual it said that. Didn't stop Sinclair QL users swamping tech support - nobody reads the manual anyway.
Andy
I think thou, even if there were no pirates, there would still be DRM. The publishers would just change the definition of piracy to include a good chunk of people doing things which are reasonable. Like installing their game on 2 PCs they own, or making a backup copy.
it increases the specialness of his pronouncements.
What a dick you are cliffski.
Is they often look good up front but very quickly peter out. I recently bought a slew of indy games from Stardock's Impulse (well, SDCentral at the time) service. Basically I decided to do their 10 token deal. So I made up a list of candidate games based off the descriptions, tried demos, then made up a list of games to buy, then picked a number off that list to use up my tokens.
Well, it's been a little hit and miss. Some of the games are real good. Only thing keeping them from being commercial games is polish, more or less. Depths of Peril is a good example. Take that thing on a more powerful engine, throw some professional graphic artists at it and you've got yourself a store quality title. However others really didn't live up to the demo. It isn't that the demo was fake or anything, just that the game ended up having very little depth. Aveyond is a good example. I really liked the idea, I'm a big fan of the old 2D console RPGs. Game starts off pretty well and obviously I liked the demo enough to go ahead and get the game. However I discovered that if you've played the demo, well you've played the game. The only thing that really advances at all is the story and I didn't find it all that compelling. There are balance issues, blandnedd issues, etc.
Now this sort of thing isn't surprising. It is a whole lot more work to come up with a lengthy game that continues to be new and interesting and is well balanced and so on than it is to just come up with a great idea that could become that, and only do a little work on it.
I just often find that commercial games are WAAAAAY better for the money. They cost maybe twice as much, but are more than twice as entertaining. Thus a better investment overall. Aveyond just can't hold a candle to Mass Effect or Baldur's Gate 2, for example. I'm not talking graphics wise, I'm talking story, game play, etc. I still replay BG2 from time to time, I've never finished Aveyond and don't think I ever will. So sure, Mass Effect set me back $50 whereas Aveyond only set me back $20. However I've already gotten like 50 hours of playtime in Mass Effect and I imagine I'll get twice that just this year, it'll probably also be a periodic replay one like BG2. Aveyond I played for about 6-8 hours I think.
Thus though the indy games may be cheaper up front, they often aren't cheaper in terms of hours of entertainment per dollar. There's also the quality of that entertainment to be considered too. I really, really enjoyed Mass Effect. Had to make myself stop playing to go to bed and such. Aveyond was amusing, but amusing in the same way that watching a TV show you've already seen is amusing. I don't want that part of my life back or anything, but I'm not going to rant and rave about it to my friends.
So I do understand where they worry comes from and it is legit. I say this as someone who does buy indy games, and will continue to do so. However I'm quite sure I won't get as many as I do commercial games, despite the lower cost per unit.
So you can't, legally, crack the software.
Unless cracking DRM or other copy protection schemes is made legal.
A high quality troll. I salute you.
No because you could get the cracked Baldur's gate in the same week it was on the store shelves.
Bioware should be thinking they will get paid BECAUSE THEY MADE A GOOD GAME. Not because they put DRM in it.
To be fair, usually it is the publisher and not the developer who is pushing the DRM. (This is also reflected in the fact that the DRM-developers mainly market their DRM schemes to publishers).
But yeah, I agree with the others:
1. Lose the damn drm.
2. Online selling and download, I would buy so many games on impulse it's insane.
3. Keep these price ranges: $10, $20 and $50. Period.
Do this and I will buy so many games I will make my savings account go deep into the red.
I keep pounding this drum: the future is already here, at least in China.
Problem: the core gaming audience won't pay for games. (Maybe its because they're poor, although darn, they cough up money for their iPods, sneakers, designer clothes, meals, computers, and ...)
Solution: don't sell games.
Sell items -- $1 for a Sword of Extra Harming. Sell server access -- $12 for a month of WoW. And when it ceases to be profitable, turn the whole system off and let the customers whine if that makes them feel better. They'll be back, because your business model is the only one in town. (Ever wonder why you can find a zillion Japanese games in the US, but the only Chinese/Korean imports are item selling games? It is not because Korea couldn't do a console RPG to save their lives -- it is because no Korean businessman is going to front $100 million to develop the Korean Final Fantasy when they can actually make money on Item Selling MMORPG #416.)
Slashdot should be careful of what it wishes for. It is very possible that in 2020 you'll never be accused of stealing a game ever again, simply because there are no games which can be owned in any sense of the word we're familiar with.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I think something developers really need to look at when in early development is how single-player concept games can be slightly modified to encourage co-op play. Most RPGs are amenable to this approach; I see little reason why it couldn't also work for adventure games, as well as the last single-player holdouts in the platform area. All too often, I'll get really into a single-player game, only to realize there really isn't a good way to share the experience with someone else; they'd be, at best, a spectator. I look at many new games coming to market even today and desperately wonder why their host companies didn't add a co-operative mode. Yes, they'd have to find workarounds for some system limitations; there'd be some serious rewriting to get more actors involved, no joke.
For instance, in spite of my assertion, I'm likely to purchase Fallout 3 (cue a tune-out from anyone in marketing). Still, I'm foreseeing the same problem there that I had in TES:Morrowind; I can get into exploring the world, but in the end, I'll be roaming alone. Nobody will ever see my character or my hideout. Given that there's no advantage to letting the game's producers know I exist (like playmatching services, or some sort of active hub for player mods), why buy the game? A good feeling? I got that from paying for Mount&Blade (best "independent" game I've played in years), since I know it's going to the coders. I'd be astounded if most of what I pay for Fallout 3, um, won't.
Pokemon should have been the definitive proof of this concept. At its heart, it's indistinguishable from hundreds of other little rock-paper-scissors SINGLE-PLAYER combat RPGs, but for one thing: you can't "complete" it alone (or with just one copy). Cue hordes of people egging on friends to buy in (and many buying EXTRA CONSOLES so they can do more solo). I've seen moderately educated 30-year-olds of both genders at my job who otherwise don't game getting sucked into these little Pokemon vortexes, and as a known gamer, I've been bugged repeatedly to join in (handhelds really aren't my thing, so I'm still Poke-clean).
Segue back to TFA. I haven't played this guy's games, legitimately or not, but they all look to be single-player standalone "sim" games. Democracy (2) is apparently some sort of elections/politics simulator. Why, oh WHY, is it single-player only? Why can't I link up with someone else to see which of us is better at controlling the masses? Why can't we work together to craft an anarcho-syndicalist empire (besides, the obvious, I mean)? In real political setups, there are ALWAYS new players arriving on the scene; another player could join mid-game, get voted/appointed in, stir things up, then leave office (for a lucrative consultation job or something). This ain't rocket science.
Yes, some modifications of this sort would take some inventiveness to make work. One of the games listed at TFA's site is a little 90's-console-style RPG called Aveyond. No multiplayer possible? Lies. I remember having fun many times playing Final Fantasy 3 (6? Whatever, it was 3 when I was playing it) with a friend. One player had total control walking around the maps, yes, but you could set the game up so that the characters were split between two players in battle. Great fun for two, and since you could target your teammates in that game, we often fell into stretches of just beating the crap out of each other's characters, which was far more fun than beating up the wimpy enemies (nothing was a challenge for a level 30 [out of 99!] team in that game).
Back on track once more; if this guy wants game pirates to go legit, he needs to make the legitimate gaming experience better than the pirated gaming experience. You can pirate anything, (even MMOs like WoW!), but if the game loses something vital in the process, many people will pony up. Matchmaking and/or identification services worked into the next batch of those sim games would be a darn good start.
I still don't get how buying from steam is any different to buying from me, other than you may already have an account on steam.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
[...]
I'm really hassling my payment provider to support amazons one-click method. For me, I think that's even more convenient than steam.
Well, that's basically it for the digital distribution point - people don't like to fill out forms, they don't like to give away their data; not their email, not their name and especially not their address, so the common accounts most people already have, Steam and Paypal, should be used whenever possible.
Since your payment provider requires people to fill out that boring form every time someone purchases something, why don't you support Paypal directly? Just return a page with a download-link and/or serial key like other services do. One of your competitors when it comes to getting money from pirates, Rapidshare, does exactly that. If that's not possible on part of your payment provider then you should consider switching to a different one, perhaps one that doesn't support Paypal on it's own. Even if you drop it altogether and use Paypal as the only payment method, you might be better of.
For the record, I'd love to get my games on steam. I wish it was that easy.
Didn't they create Steamworks and recently released an SDK so that every developer can finally get their games on Steam? I didn't really look into it but where is the problem? Do they have some kind of requirements you can't meet?
Actually I was serious...
Unless the server was required for the gameplay (MMO), I certainly would not buy and play such a game that relies on a constant internet connection and a complete dependency on the company to keep the server running for as long as I care to play the game.
i already have a $70 copy of Auto Assault lying around that makes a rather expensive coaster, I don't wish to repeat the experience.
I know that I should reliably be able to install and play any of my games (besides AA) in a decade or two if I feel nostalgic for them and want to boot up an XP or Dos emulator on the holocube 3000 : b
--
Sometimes the wolves are silent and the moon is howling
We'll see.
I know where to look if I have a job opening for a creative engineer.
Thank you Rowanyote.
Games, music, movies etc. play a significant social role - they generate topics for conversation. So, to "get into the club", you gotta have this game, album or movie. They may not be that valuable to one by themselves - just as a social ticket. Hence the unwillingness to pay much (trends come and go, stuff becomes obsolete ever so quickly) - you'd get broke pretty soon if you paid for every piece.
The server may not be required for gameplay, but it could still be required to produce the game in the first place.
For example, suppose you are planning to create a a niche game, such as an old-style adventure game, which has a small audience of aficionados. You calculate that, if piracy did not exist, there would be enough buyers to justify the production of the game; but with piracy, you won't have enough customers, and therefore you will not produce the game (otherwise you would be working at a loss).
So the technique might make sense even for games which wouldn't really require an internet connection.
...feels that he isn't required to license/attribute the photographic material that he "pirated" to make his web site? AFAIK, those images are copyright to the studio that released Pirates of the Carribean...
Steve -- If you have to call it a system, you don't know what it is.
These days, I view people who copy games (or other media) as being as evil as the games/media companies they're ripping off as well as being weak-minded.
I'm in my 40s and I've done more than my share of copying stuff, right from the days of the ZX Spectrum, through the Commodore to the PC. Maybe it's an age thing but about 6 or 7 years ago, I came to the realization that I had horded a mass of copied games and music that, ultimately, I spent more time cataloguing, archiving and burning disks for friends & family (I never ever sold any of the copied stuff that I amassed) than I did actually playing or listening to the stuff myself. I also understood that because I could download the stuff so easily, it actually had little or no value to me & couldn't therefore see any further justification in downloading any more of it. So I threw away just about all of the CDRs I'd burnt and erased my hard drives.
At that point, I started listening to my legal music collection & playing some of the legal games I'd purchased in the past. There was a lot of stuff I no longer liked so, over a period of time, sold it off on eBay and used the proceeds to buy stuff I did want. I actually got a real buzz from finding the best & cheapest prices for games & CDs, read all the reviews that I could & for music, I'd still download an album from Usenet or BitTorrent just to play it through before deciding to buy it or not. In the end, and to this day still, I have a really treasured music & PC games collection, all of it legal.
The point I'm making is that I am by no means a saint but I have now got into this mindset where I don't consider anything as something I *must* have, or indeed, *must have there and then*. I'm very cynical of advertising, I try my best to ignore it, & even though I'm at an age and salary where I don't have any great financial worries, I set a monthly hard budget as to what I will allow myself to spend on entertainment for myself - consequently, I appreciate more the money I allow myself, I eke it out as much as I can & I just refuse to buy stuff unless I'm pretty sure that, to me, it's worth the price being asked for it.
For example, I'm a big fan of Unreal Tournament & was looking forward to playing UT 3 when it came out. But I simply will *not* pay anywhere near the standard £34.99 price for a PC game here in the UK. So I just waited, picked it up for £15 last week and I think for that price it's great value for money.
Think about it for a moment. When people queue up for 24 hours outside a store to buy the latest Harry Potter book or the latest iPhone, what message does this send to the corporations that produce all of that stuff? As far as I can work out, it sends only one - there are a whole heap of weak-minded people out there with a great big wedge of money that, by the power of marketing alone, can be manipulated into believing that they need something so bad, they'll stand in a line waiting for it and happily hand over their money as soon as they get to the front of the queue.
People need to calm down with the "I want it now" mentality. It's great living in a part of the world where we have lots of money to spend but if we part with the stuff so easily, why do all these corporations need to bother with making good quality stuff any more? Just churn out any old stuff and force people to want it through marketing - and that explains why today, in music, computer games & just about everywhere else, there is simply *SO MUCH CRAP* about.
And when there's so much crap about at so high prices, some people find their own justifications to pirate it rather than buying it, this gives the corporations the excuse they need to use copy protection and DRM as a basis for extorting more money out of the people who do buy the stuff, pisses the pirates off even more, etc. etc. *WHERE DOES IT END?*
People *NEED* to start developing some self-control. If something isn't worth the money, don't buy it and don't copy it. Then the corporations have no justifications for DRM, the only thing they can do is reduce prices, churn out better stuff or go out of business - it's that simple.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
When I was a teenager, I used to pirate every game I could get my hands on. Now that I am older and make a bit more money, I buy them.
This is my sig.
A small story. Long ago I meet a rehabilitated thief through a friend.
But he had gone from stealing to buy from others that steal. His
motivation was like "I can't afford to buy such an expensive camera
that I want".
But it was not only about that he could not afford things he wanted,
it was also about an egocentric view. It was clearly illustrated by
his comment on someone stealing his stolen bike, "if I would see
someone passing by riding my bike I would kill him".
I remember thinking his view of life was so distant to "the rest of
us ordinary people" that saved up to buy something we wanted
or concluded we could not afford it and did not buy it.
I worry that media teaching us that a good life is to be have material
things is creating a generation with a similar attitude. The most
important thing is no longer friends, education and a good job, but to
have those "things". And with software, music and movies, it is so
easy to just take it, "I could not afford all those....."
Reading the answers he got from the pirates makes me more
convinced this is not true. It makes me feel better, but I still
worry a bit...
I hope this guy hasn't pirated the images of pirates (taken from Pirates of the Caribbean) that he has on his site and has paid Walt Disney for the rights to use them..
It's kind of funny that some people are saying they got so frustrated with PC game DRM, that they started buying console games instead. How are console games better than PC games with DRM? A console game can only be played if you have the disc inserted in the console - that is DRM. Even though an upcoming 360 update is suppose to allow you to install games to the drive, you still have to have the disc inserted. Moreover, console games generally cost more than their PC counterparts, so you are getting DRM, and paying more for it. I don't get it. Rather, I don't believe what they are saying - if they were pirating PC games yesterday, they are pirating console games today, or they will once they get their mod chip installed.
--- What?
i'd pay for games if they were native to Linux operating systems.
And this is relevant to an article about software piracy how?
Are you kidding me?
This was a BIG complaint in slashdot - along with DRM - in the previous thread where the pirates opinion was asked for.
Having more games native to Linux means you won't have issues trying to run them under wine, often losing some performance, because you won't have to.
You also won't have that feeling that you (linux users) are being ignored.
It seems the pirates have convinced him! :)
How else could he have pirated pictures on the reply-site?
http://www.positech.co.uk/talkingtopirates.html
So it was all very worthwhile, for me. I don't think the whole exercise will have much effect on the wider industry. This wasn't ever designed to start change in the wider industry. After reading the article, I got the impression that this developer would prefer if the industry did NOT change, aside from himself, so that it would improve his sales.
This space for rent, inquire within.
... I bet he cannot post those pics from Pirates of the Caribbean without paying something to someone
I can't access TFA from work. Thank you very much!
First, a "you need to connect to the server every time you play" scheme is exactly what Steam does. I actually kind of like Steam. So long as Valve stays in business, all of the games on Steam (except Bioshock, of course) can be installed on as many machines as you like; you can suffer as many hard drive crashes as you want to, you can upgrade your machine as often as you want to. The only restriction is you can only play on one machine at a time, which isn't so unreasonable as all that.
I admit, when I bought Civ IV, I bought the retail box copy so that I could swap the disc between my machine and my wife's, so we could both play at the same time. I'm an evil pirate. :P The number of times we've actually done that is pretty low, though, as we're both busy professionals.
That aside, there are a few problems with this idea, although none of them are so dire that they can't be overcome.
First, putting some of your logic on the server means that customers on dialup, and customers with poor net connections are going to suffer from lag. Lag in a single player game is kind of unacceptable. Maybe you can pick logic that doesn't need to be updated "in realtime" (the price of arrows at the market in a game with a free market economy, for example).
Second, putting logic on the server means you need have the added expense of maintaining and running this server. If you ever decide to stop running the server, then no one can play your game anymore, and this is going to turn some people away from your game. The more complex the logic you want to move out of the game engine, obviously the more powerful and more expensive this cost is going to be.
Third, if you want to stop pirates, you have to move some substantial logic out of the game and onto the server (see the last point about expensive servers). Why? Because otherwise the pirates will just re-code the logic and add it back into your game, or else write an open source version of your server.
of games that i think are not worth the money. I have my good old version of unreal tournament and unreal tournament 2004, i still play both. They stay fun. I have not pirated the newest version (ut 3) but when the time coems that it finally drops into a decent price (like 20-30$) i'll just go out and buy. Games that are worth the money simply don't get pirated. I even pirate movies, and the movies that actually are a hit to me always end up legally in my dvd-storage. As for DRM, i outright hate it. Basic things like a serial are fine for me, but let's take doom 3 for an example. The first few times i joined an online server, i got bored quickly and went for a new server. "key already in use" - game crash. When i restarted the game i had the joy of typing in my key again. Great. IF you use a key as means of protecting, it doesn't require a cd/dvd, it's at a fair price and it's a good game, then noone will pirate it, or, if they pirate it they will probably have a legal version sitting in their shelf anyway. Lastly games are supposed to have good gameplay, these days developers are edging towards the insanity of graphics. I for one don't follow this trend - instead i play the gameplay-oriented games.
...That the people downloading or obtaining a "pirated" copy of something is called the pirate? The pirate, is the person that made the illegal copy available. They are the one stealing from others. Stop calling me a pirate, and I'll stop looking for copies of the game that don't contribute to spreading falsehoods and making me feel like criminal.
Doesn't anyone else get it?
No good deed goes unpunished. - Avon, Blake's 7
Most multiplayer games will have an update which will require an account to do that. So, if the pirates want to steal the game, let them, they cannot play on the public server since they cannot update their version.
Stardock is a perfect example. SOASE was immediately patched when it went live. The hidden reason was due to piracy. The game can be installed without a CD, but you need a Registered copy to obtain the updates off Stardock's Impulse program in order to play on Ironclad's servers. The CD key does allow you to share the game with one other person to play in a direct multiplayer match. Put it this way, wouldn't you want the full benefits of a balanced game rather than playing version 1.0?
My motivator for downloading cracked games was always to avoid paying for the software. The pirated version was free, and free was good. Obviously.
And even if I managed to circumvent protection on a game myself, I never redistributed software. I'd have no problem downloading the games but I would never upload them, or give them away. I was a user, not a dealer.
I used to pirate games, but I don't any more. I met a friend who convinced me that it was wrong. And now that I have a job where I can afford to buy some games here and there, I fork out the money. I've done a quick survey of my friends and they all think of me as being abnormally honest in this regard. I don't mind though. I have a clear conscience and a trophy room of shiny original CDs and manuals. I even buy my music and movies. I have original CDs for all the mp3s in my library, and no DVD-R's with the movie-title in sharpie. Apparently I'm also an outsider in that regard.
This got particularly costly for my music composition software. Which I found a free copy of online, but instead shelled out a whopping $900 for the software to have a legit copy. The software just isn't worth that much. But whatever, I support them in principle -- in that I expect other people to pay full price for my products, or don't use them.
It's odd that you can buy a PC for $399, but it will cost you another $59 to play a major title game on it. Or should I say $29, because the $399 computer won't play the $59 titles, for that you'll need a $1500 computer, and a $799 graphic card. Whatever, I mean, I spent $2500 for my Apple ][+ back in the day, so hardware costs, and you can't download hardware. But it was so hard to find software for the Apple ][+ that very nearly all my titles were pirated. It was the only way I could get stuff. I also lived about 300 km from the nearest store that sold software at the time.
I used to think that shareware was a good model -- release an unprotected demo version that people can play for as long as they want, and then ask people to pay for the full version or for more content. The idea was supposed to be that the shareware version was going to proliferate more than the cracked version -- yeah right.
I think that when I pay full price for a game though, that I shouldn't have to buy a second copy of the game to play LAN multiplayer with my family. My wife and I play video games and it sucks when we buy a game that we really like, but each of us needs a disk in the CD drive to be able to play multiplayer. It used to be that I'd try duplicating the disk to see if that works, which it almost never does. But now I go buy the second disk. Call me a sucker. It's ridiculous that the price of the multiplayer version is proportional to the number of players. I remember a game that would have a ratio, something like 1 disk required for every 3 players on the LAN. That seemed much more reasonable to me. I don't mind buying a second copy when the fourth player joins.
I'd say that this at least partly depends on the level of complexity you're trying to program in, and the number of available libraries (and sometimes "make your own" or "buy one" isn't a viable solution).
Some things can be done - or at least much more efficiently - on windows that can't be done on 'nix, because there's already an existing framework in place. Ditto for things that can be done on Linux/Unix.
The API's in some cases may be comparable, but in some cases there is *NO* API for what you want to do on a given OS. Yes, if you're making a simple office app, perhaps even an OpenGL game, then going cross-platform might not be that much more difficult. But how about something that depends on a networking capability that windows doesn't have, or some media library that linux/mac don't really support. As for the hardware being the same, how about a hardware device which doesn't have drivers in a given OS, or drivers that function differently?
Yes, there are a lot of apps out there that wouldn't be difficult to make cross-platform had they been created with that in mind. There are also a lot out there that would be hell to do so with.
No, No, No, No, No!
Stardock is the perfect example of a company who gained the trust of their user base and then proceeded to shit all over it.
Their original party line for Sins of a Solar Empire was, "We aren't going to treat our users like criminals. We're going for simplicity, no DRM, no copy protection. Our customers are grownups."
Then, the bait and switch.
Now, in order to even DOWNLOAD A PATCH for their game, you have to install their "Impulse" crapware. As far as I can tell, Impulse provides "download" technology, which apparently my browser is no longer good enough for. What else does it do besides "help" you download? Who knows. It appears to require Internet connectivity, so one can only assume it subsequently behaves as spyware, snooping around the software you legitimately bought and reporting back to home base (reporting what else, who knows?) Hmm... Sounds a lot like DRM, copy protection, and other malware that is more and more starting to ship with legitimate games software.
For a company that built their fan base on their pro-customer attitude, it's Shameful.
This is related, and worth reading. It's a post on the Stardock forums about why they don't use copy protection on their games. http://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/post.aspx?postid=303512
You said : Software publishers fail to appreciate that their software is an add-on to an operating system and collection of existing software and data and should try to coexist and cooperate within that environment as a guest should behave himself in your home.
Thats Wrong, no one buys a computer to run an OS, people use OSes to run applications on their computers. Apps sell computers OSses run those apps.
You also said : People are willing to buy when it's worth buying.
Thats wrong too, if people can get it for free and dont get any kind of punishment for it , they wont pay for it (I know there are a few exceptions).
I wont judge the motives that anyone copies something, but one thing is for sure, there are no noble motives either, a game isnt exactly food or medication or any kind of thing you need to live. There is NO justification for copying software and using it on a regular basis, there are : free alternatives for most apps, games arent a prime necessity, if games are too expensive is because people DO pay that kind of money for them, try this, do not buy new games if they are too expensive, buy 2nd hand ones. So IMHO if you want to copy games and movies do whatever you want but dont waste bandwidht saying that you do so because of _insert_noble_and_oh_so_sad_story_ , you do it because you are being selfish and do not want to pay the price that someone asked for it, and because you can do it and get away with it !!!
Jorge
We dont need the crap, especially if burdened by the cruft you describe?
2) Demos
People think demos are too short. My demos *are* short, because the marketing man in me sees that you can't give away too much. I've wanted people to feel a bit annoyed when the demo cuts out, so they buy the game to keep playing. Too many people are put off by this and pirate games so they can see exactly what they are getting. I'll be making my demos much better, and longer, and will retrospectively change this when I get around to it for some of my older games. (I'm swamped with work right now)
I haven't played any of his demos so far, but something that strikes me as a workable idea would be to move the demo from the beginning of the game as quickly as possible. I seem to recall HalfLife2 doing something like this, but in my mind the best demo would shape up as:
A) Starting area, tutorial, etc - short and sweet.
B) Mid-level area displaying one of the game's best attributes. Maybe a plot point, game feature, what-have-you. Give the gamer a glimpse of your style and your intentions.
C) End-game extravaganza. Drop the player, fully powered, into an un-winnable, but exciting situation. Give them an idea what powers and challenges lie at the end of the treadmill, and preferably kill them off.
D) Splash screen offering an easy means to buy the game online...
The general idea is to keep it short enough to establish 'not giving away too much for free', yet showcase what lies in store for the prospective customer.
Kinda like a movie trailer... but hopefully more accurate, since it is actually the game itself.
When myself and some friends decided to launch an upmarket fanzine back in the 90s, someone copied Photoshop 2.5 for us, which I duly learned to use. Since then, as I have moved from job to job, I have been the direct reason that at least four distinct copies of Photoshop, not including upgrades, have been purchased. Smart developers know this - why do you think Adobe's trial versions are only 'protected' by a serial?
Thanks for your comment Digital_Quartz.
For some games it might be possible to move substantial logic on the server. These may be: 1) games where there are no strict lag requirements (e.g. adventure games, puzzle games like Puzzle Pirates); 2) games where the needed bandwidth for each client is small and the client does some prediction and/or interpolation.
It is true that you have the additional cost of the server (which would need a lot of bandwidth _and_ computational power); but this cost might be more than compensated by the additional income due to less "piracy". (Or it might not.)
DRM *is* economically beneficial, but in an extremely strange way. This is my very rough version, details may vary.
Day 1: Game Released.
Press announcement mentions "game includes software protections."
Joseph Honorable Customer, Esq. in Hadleyville is proud to jump through the DRM hoop.
Investors like that "steps were taken" and *give more money*.
Day 2: Game cracked
James Almost Honorable Customer, Jr. half heartedly tries the crack, messes it up, then decides his church pastor was right and the damn pirates should go to hell anyway. He jumps through the DRM hoop.
On Wall Street, stock goes up.
Day 3: DRM server crashes.
On wall street, ShortSellers make their profit, Spin Doctors play it down, someone files a copyright suit. Lawyers and politicians make money.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
... because I for one am so relieved to see someone out there who actually "gets it" that I'm tempted to buy one of his games for that reason alone.
Why? Just to support his methods and to send a message to other developers (as well as the RIAA and co) that actually *trusting* your customers rather than treating them as suspected criminals until they prove otherwise, will actually attract more people into paying.
Yes there will always be hardcore pirates, and they will never buy anything whether it's easy or difficult to pirate it. But if more extra people buy the game (or perhaps more importantly, subsequent releases after they were happy with the first one they bought) because they didn't feel like some guy who had a security guard following him around a shopping centre muttering "yeah I'm just following this really dodgy looking guy who I suspect may steal something" into his radio - then it'll be worthwhile. Chances are there will be enough of these repeat customers who enjoyed the game and enjoyed not being treated like a potential thief, that it will outweigh the hardcore pirates.
I've bought more legitimate copies of Apple's Mac OS X by the way (no serial/activation/DRM, nothing) than Microsoft's Windows (which goes out of its way to try and prove you're a criminal). Make of that what you will, but I've been waiting and waiting for someone to remove DRM and find that their stuff got pirated *less*.
Admittedly, I could just be supporting a very good marketing ploy. I'd never heard of the developer or any of the games - what better way to get yourself known than to stir up something like this. But let's put it this way - if he's willing to trust that his customers aren't pirates, then I'm willing to trust that it's not just some clever slashvertising. Good idea this whole "trusting people" concept isn't it :)
OT thread and all I disagree. I am really happy with how Eve runs in my AMD X2 5600, GeForce 8600gt, Ubuntu and Wine. I run two premium clients in dual monitors pulling up to 80fps each.
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Personally, the only time I pirate a game is to see if it's worth buying. Demos produced by the developer are usually not very representative of the full game.
Most demos are extremely polished, and damn short. A half hour to an hour of gameplay, and very rarely will you encounter a bug. It's akin to the games published in the 80's, that didn't have bugs very often, because they didn't have the internet to patch a shoddy product. So, you have this pristine, nearly utopian product to test.
Then, you buy the game, and find out that the demo was only representative of a tiny snippet of the game, and the rest of the game is completely different. Or worse yet, the demo was not just representative of the whole game, it effectively WAS the whole game.
When I've pirated games, I've done it to sample what the *real* game is like. Good games I buy afterwards. Bad games I don't.
Besides, even with Usenet, I can often download the whole game in a few hours, and the demo may take an hour or more to get, even with Fileplanet. So, I get the game with crack, load it, and test drive it for a few hours. And it's the same as being in a beta for other games, like MMOs.
Games that have impressed me enough to buy, that I would have never bought without the pirate run?
Sacred, Galactic Civilizations, Dungeon Siege/Dungeon Siege II, Might & Magic series, Half Life, The Witcher, and Pools of Radiance.
And the funny thing is, I bought Atari's "Temple of Elemental Evil" based on my love of AD&D. Well, the original play CD won't validate the SecureRom crap, and even the NO-CD crack won't let it play on my system. I had to pirate the game and use the pirated copy to install and update my game to make it work.
I own legitimate copies of Civilization 4, but I have to install a crack so I can play it without the CD in the drive. Its not just the inconvenience of putting the CD in the drive but it is also wear and tear on my paid copy. As a paying customer I am being punished with DRM, and have to turn to 'pirating' tactics to enjoy my game without destroying it.
A friend I had over at Loki said that lots of people said they wanted Linux versions, but when they actually did the ports, the market wasn't there.
The key seems to also be to release concurrently if possible. With Linux or even MacOS you either need to do release concurrently or get the port out before it works with Wine or Cedega or people just buy the Windows version (mac gamers will dual boot or run Windows or Linux in Parallels - I have an acquaintance that runs Parallels-Linux-WINE on a macbook pro because he refuses to run Windows and loves Counterstrike).
Check out Greenhouse Games. This is an effort by the Penny Arcade guys to reach out to indie or niche game developers and put them on a non-suck digital distribution platform. By non-suck, I mean, it's easier to buy the game from them than it is to pirate it. They only do one featured game a month, and for the two months it's been around, I have bought both games and both ran flawlessly.
And you know what? I'm a Linux user.
That's right, both of the high-quality games that have been released there have had Linux, Windows and Mac versions. When I brought this up on the forums they said, basically, "We can't do this for every game, but we are seeking out games that run on more than one platform."
I actually wrote a review online for the first game, which was Penny Arcade's own Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. In the review I touch on how great Greenhouse is. I have a lot of hope for this distributor.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Read the Subscriber Agreement. You don't own Steam titles, you just pay a one time fee for a permanent subscription. The GP is 100% correct.
The rumor goes that Gabe Newell promised that in the event of bankruptcy he'd release the master keys for Steam (anyone actually got a link for that? I couldn't find it with 1m of Googling), but given that agreement I find that unlikely. Those keys are the valuable property of Valve so in the event of Steam going under they'd be kept under lock and key and sold to the highest bidder.
Nick
n/t
Nick
You know what I love about Slashdot? When people post snarky grammar corrections that are themselves incorrect. So someone should go ahead and fire up their response to me now.
I do not think the word 'objective' means what you think it means. It doesn't mean 'rigorous scientific study'. It means
So, for example, if you were to turn on an FPS display (for example, by pressing CTRL-R in WoW), then run once in linux and run the same scene in Windows, then reported the framerate the display told you, that would be objective.
If instead, you just ran around in the game on both platforms and said 'this one feels slower than that one', that would be subjective.
Of course, don't let silly things like 'facts' get in the way of being snarky to an anonymous person on the internet. I sure didn't. :)
I currently have no clever signature witicism to add here.
Check out this talk where RMS explains his views on copyright in more detail.
The short version is that he thinks there should be different categories of copyright. Tools, i.e. software and manuals, should be freely distributable and editable. Creative works such as films should enjoy protection but for a much more limited time (I think he said 10 to 15 years) with more freedom to create derivative work. I think he also had another category which I can't recall.
Oh yea, and using RMS and IP in the same post? I'm surprised someone hasn't marked you troll :)
Nick
When I was younger, I really wanted a "tricked out" sports car with flashy ground f/x, neon lighting, decals down the sides of the doors, the whole bit.
I also got a kick out of bragging about all the costly software apps I had cracked copies of, and was able to use for free.
You grow up and the things that amuse you change a little bit. It's just life.....
I still find, today, though - I use a fair bit of "pirated software". I also pay for a LOT more of it than I did when I was younger, though.
Honestly, for me, it usually comes down to a simple "value judgment", with a little bit of "ethical justification" thrown in the mix too.
First and foremost, is the asking price of the software within my reach? If not, can I just use something different that's less expensive and get similar results? When the answer to BOTH question is no, then I'm liable to pirate it.
Secondly though, does the software I'm considering pirating come from a source I've given money to in the past? How much have they made from previous sales to me? Morally speaking, I'm far more "comfortable" with pirating a Microsoft or an Apple-branded app for personal use, because in the first case - I've been responsible for companies purchasing many tens of of thousands of dollars in MS software licenses over the years. These were usually licenses that would NOT have ever been purchased at all, if I wasn't cost-justifying them to people and promising our dept. would get them implemented for them afterwards. In the second case, I've bought close to 10 Apple Mac computers, 2 iPods, an iPhone, a retail copy of OS X Leopard, a copy of the iWorks suite, the iLife suite, and convinced 4 or 5 people I knew to buy a Mac, as well. Apple sure didn't ever give ME any commission on those sales I made for them! So if I decide to pirate something like Final Cut Studio (that I can't afford or cost-justify for the mere sake of "wanting to tinker with it, to learn it") - I don't feel bad.
I want a product. I want to be able to rent software. I want to be able to buy it, take it home, find out it runs like crap on my system, and then *gasp* take it back. I want to be able to sell it, loan it, whatever.
Or, I want a license. I want free support for the period of the license. I want to be able to refuse/cancel the license for a refund of the unused period. I want free basic support for the legnth of the license. I want it licensed so that no licenses are longer than 7 years, and all software is released at that point (unless something is based on it that is still being sold, in which case it is released sealed to the Library of Congress). Released means free/beer/libre. Released means that it is 100% free in cost for everyone for the executables and all DRM uninstalls/disables itself. Released means that the source code is released for all commercial software.
Instead, I get something where I can't buy the software, I get a license. And the license is so restrictive that I can't use the software. So, I've found myself in the position of paying money for something that I then used in violation of the license anyway. If I'm in such a position, I'd be no better or worse legally than just pirating it and paying nothing for it. The "crime" is the same whether I pay for it or not, so why pay? And, with this license, I get DRM that lasts forever, threats of lawsuits if I sell/transfer the license, and often threats directly on the disk I bought. If you are going to treat me like a criminal, I might as well be one. It's easier to download a cracked version online than drive to the store and buy it, let alone deal with the DRM that's on almost everything these days.
Learn to love Alaska
Disclaimer: I have never bought, pirated, or played any of Positech's games. Possibly because they don't get enough exposure for me to notice (or even hear), or I just don't game enough these days, so when I actually get the chance I only get the more popular titles or games I know will be good.
Today was the first time I heard about the game Kudos. And when I saw its website, I feel it's a website I'm unwilling to purchase stuff off. To be blunt, the site looks quite shoddy and untrustworthy to purchase online from.
I understand that it is an independent game company. If Positech tries to market its games only to other developers or programmers, it may be a good enough website. But when Positech tries to market it to the general public, it does not look very presentable.
Perhaps I'm a more visual person than most programmers; however, I do strongly think that presentation is very important. Especially for a business. If you open a real store, say a small convenient store, wouldn't you want to make it look nice, clean, and organized? Wouldn't that attract more customers than a dirty and unorganized store? Of course the quality of goods and services are also important, but that's another story.
Today's game producers tend to front load their game's content. I've never found a published statistic, but my estimation is that only about 40% of games purchased are ever fully completed by their purchasers. The player either tires of the game before the end, or gets another game to play before they finish.
There's finishing a game, and then there's really finishing it. By "finishing" a Pokemon, do you mean beating the Elite Four and getting the ending, or do you mean catching them all? Has anybody managed to "finish" Tetris? And how would one finish, say, Nintendo's Animal Crossing?
From what I've read, the author states that DRM is the #1 reason that people pirate games. Assuming that this is truly the case, then scrapping DRM is guarateed to increase profits, because:
- More people will buy the game
- Cost savings from not having to implement/support DRM
- No additional piracy, since DRM doesn't work anyway
Dropping DRM would then automatically raise profits.
Me, I'm a bit more cynical. I think a lot of people who pirate just don't want to pay. Some are honest and fess up, while the rest are using DRM, quality, or lack of demo to justify their cheapness. To those who say that they wouldn't purchase a game because it sucks, then why are they playing it at all?
With that said, I do believe that dropping DRM would cause sales to rise slightly. It would make existing and potential customers extremely happy, and sales would not drop much, if at all, as DRM doesn't really prevent piracy anyway.
See, I think people like you are going about the ENTIRE thing the wrong way. The O.P. gave an excellent example of what can happen when you don't "bite the hand that feeds you", by trying to enforce copyright "to the absolute letter of the law".
Just because the law ENABLES a recording company, software publisher, or anyone else creating "intellectual property" to press criminal charges against people "pirating" their works, doesn't mean it's WISE to pursue it all the time.
You ask "What about the hundreds of other artists whose music you stole?", but in return I ask; "Yeah! What about them? They ALL jockey for a top position in your music collection and brain as a favorite artist. Obviously, only a few will succeed with any given individual."
The POINT is, people only have so much disposable income to spend on things like music. They spend what their budget allows them to spend, and after that, they can either follow copyright law "to the letter", owning, listening to and promoting by word of mouth the few albums they paid for. OR, they can take the approach of "pirating" whatever strikes their fancy, broadening their musical horizons in the process and giving all those additional artists a better shot at being on their "short list" to spend their limited income on down the road. PLUS, doing this means they'll be helping promote many of those artists to others, so even IF they didn't buy the album personally, they might get a friend, or some stranger who visits their Facebook page, to buy it. Net win for the artists who got "pirated", really.
Well, part of the big joke is that a game, once cracked, a game effectively has no DRM, no nag screens, no internet phoning home
No phoning home means no online leader board or matchmaking. The latter is especially important on PC games, which have one PC per player much more often than a split screen or a full arena view with multiple gamepads. Or do the crackers run their own servers for that?
All I want to say is Steam hit the nail right on the head. Pretty much the only PC games I've ever paid for were through Steam. Why? SEVERAL REASONS: 1. I can easily demo games I may want to purchase assuming they're good. 2. The games are actually quite entertaining and regularly updated (team fortress 2, day of defeat, etc) 3. The online aspect is what makes so many of them so good and I'm not charged a bullshit monthly fee like 'world of time-wasting ripoff.' 4. I don't have to pack around discs and can easily and quickly download the games on any PC via my account. 5. No driving to the store or paying for shipping to purchase the game. There's probably a ton of other things Steam does that I'm not thinking of or have begun taking for granted. But my point is that Steam has it figured out. It took them long enough, but they definitely understand what consumers want and need. Follow their example and the PC gaming industry will be just fine.
I have been using that for a long long time now, and would kill to purchase it legitly.
I almost never use it to it's full capacity, but I now know how to work w/ layers, apply filters, work w/ text, etc. You can do some really neat effects very quickly! But it is just personal use, I'd pay $50 for a full registered version if they offered it, but not a penny more for something I use maybe 3-8 times a year.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Who knew making a high quality product available at a reasonable price would entice people to purchase it?!
Ave Molech Setting
and find that it does "almost" everything PS does, it just feels funny. Kinda like switching from a sports car to an economy car.
I hear there is a PS UI skin for it, and the next time I need to use PS, I may install that instead.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I haven't really played that since beta .8 (or somewhere like that)
Started at .2x
How many times can you play CS_dust before you are bored to tears?
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I completely agree with this. I love Linux and would happily pay money out to game developers rather than to Microsoft for windows.
8')
It's true. I just took a break from WoW to play Crysis, and now I can't look at it w/o being disgusted by the ancient graphics. I can run wow Maxed out, and it's still ugly as my mom.
I switched over to UT3 for a bit till I get a new mobo/proc to play crysis multiplayer, and or find a new hobby.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Over the years it would bother me quite a bit, not having a legit version and all, but I just couldn't afford nor even justify the cost of it, and then I got a hold of a Elements CD that came with a scanner, and saw it as Photoshop without the plugins, etc. So when the next version came out I bought it; it was a few hundred dollars rather than over a thou... that's when I discovered that they'd decided to bring back plugins and whatnot, but limit the colour depth you could ultimately work with, making it an utterly useless purchase (for me).
So I decided that I'd paid my dues.
At least on the old gray GameBoy. Play on B mode, from 1-1 through 9-5, and you get to watch the full band play the victory song.
Obviously A mode does not have an end - its like a (then contemporary) 80's pop song that just fades away at the end, like the contrast on the screen as the batteries die after 8 hours of play...
There is "Heart Mode" (a difficulty enhancing cheat mode basically) but I've pretty much given up on that being beatable at 9-5. You can move the blocks a maximum of 2 space sideways before they touch down making line completion impossible.
New philosophy for games marketing:
1: Company develops game
2: Company inquires about why games are pirated, feigns genuineness, and posts on many news/blog sites
3: Company responds with stating that it will strongly consider releasing *new game* at a reduced price
4:???
5: Profit!!!
I mean honestly, I had never heard of this guy and his games until a few days ago, and I imagine theres alot of people who know about him now, and a few that will probably buy his games.
Brilliant!
I know that MS has told people they don't mind installing office at home also, but I don't recall them saying it was ok to bring visual studio home. The idea that people can bring software home from work is totally bogus and is just plain stealing. If you need to work at home, get a notebook from your employer and make sure your copy of VS is legal. I really hate Microsoft, but that doesn't entitle me to pirate their software. I think MS are the scum of the earth, but I still own a legal copy of visual studio 2005that I paid for. If someone gets pissed off and turns you in to the SBA, that $200K fee will seem a lot worse than whatever the going rate is for visual studio. Stealing from your employer isn't cool, and disliking a vendor doesn't excuse theft. Nothing makes me feel more hurt than a customer that bought one copy of my software telling me later that all their customers really likes my software.
You are what is called a sociopath, and I feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for you because I now that you cannot feel sorry for yourself. If we could isolate the gene that creates people like you and eliminate it, the world would be a better place. I could try to convince you that all the trouble it takes to create something should be rewarded it the product is worthwhile, and most normal people do understand this, but you are incapable of understanding it. That is why it will come down to you or us eventually, and we will have to kill you. Down the road you will go too far, and this will catch up with you. I am sorry, but it cannot happen soon enough to suit me.
WarCraft refused, saying am pirating.
Just to check: when was this? A Warcraft III update turned off the CD check a while back, and I wasn't aware that it did any sort of hardware check/call home, apart from checking whether the CD is in the drive. Or is this battle.net? I've always thought of Blizzard as one of the software companies that "got it", sort of. I'll be very disappointed if they're into this DRMaddness.
My experience is with Warcraft III on Mac, no expansion pack, so maybe that's why my experience was different.
so even IF they didn't buy the album personally, they might get a friend, or some stranger who visits their Facebook page, to buy it. Net win for the artists who got "pirated", really.
Or, more likely, they'd just share their downloads with their "friends or strangers", so they have no longer have a reason to buy it, even if they were going to in the first place.
Basically, what you're promoting is the idea that if you can't afford something, it's ok to steal it, because of the remote possibility your word of mouth will cause other people to buy it. Why would they buy it if you didn't? Do you always hold this idea of superiority to your friends?
Dude, they specifically purchased two licences for me, one for home and other for work, i am not stealing anything from work. MS has a problem with that ? I have got two other laptops around, and on both of those i use VS Express, if i bother to boot Win on them at all.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
I am impressed. I jumped to an assumption and I had you all wrong. I apologize. I had just read too many postings from pirates and I was filled with contempt. I am really sorry I said what I did to you. Please forgive me.
Warcraft on Mac is different. Hell any game is better on a Mac.
Age of Mythology CD has no DRM on Mac. So is Civ III.
This instance was blizzard.net.
Warcraft III update did try kicking away the CD Drive, but kaspersky caught that operation and screamed bloody murder. I "Denied" and the update failed.
Probably that is why blizzard kicked me out...
Second time in 1 year i had to reinstall XP.
The last time i installed TIGER on my iBook was when i upgraded the hard drive about 3 years ago.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
hey no need to get all emotional, its teh interwebs, no offense taken
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Basically, that's over simplified and incorrect.
I'm not promoting the idea that "if you can't afford something, it's ok to steal it".
1. That statement makes the popular leap in logic that distributing a COPY of "intellectual property" is "stealing", when it's simply NOT. Stealing, by definition, means you removed a physical asset without permission. (Of course, I think you already KNOW this, but like hiding behind calling it "theft" since it makes your case much stronger if people go along with that.)
2. Ask yourself why musicians are willing to sign contracts with recording companies in the first place. What's really "in it" for them, giving up the rights to their creative works like that, and allowing someone else to sell them on their behalf, taking a huge cut of the profits? Surely, the ability to get their music recorded is no longer much of a reason. Anyone can wander down to the local "Guitar Center" store and buy a very capable digital recording studio, centered around a standard Apple Mac or Windows PC and mix/master their own music - starting at under $3000. (Even a broke musician who can't afford THAT can probably find a buddy who will help them get their stuff recorded for free or dirt cheap.) The ONLY valid reason they still agree to these crappy record deals is because they want the EXPOSURE. They know a company like Sony or Warner will invest the money and has the connections to get their name and work out there, where it can be heard (radio, etc.). Yet these SAME artists should be "upset" to the point of filing criminal CHARGES against people helping do essentially the SAME THING for them for FREE??
I'm not promoting the idea that "if you can't afford something, it's ok to steal it".
No, you are, you just don't like it being worded that way because it's too confrontational. Better to use weasel words, and do your best to make it seem like you're the good guy here. Only problem is, your logic doesn't apply universally. Hell, it's failing just to apply properly to the narrow-viewed context in which you need to limit it.
1) And the moral difference is WHAT exactly? Infringing copyright is stealing in that both result in innocent people being deprived of income. And you screw up the ideas of value, economy, supply & demand, and succumb to prisoner's dilemma. If your argument is that they're not the same, because a pirate wasn't necessarily going to buy the product anyway, you can easily apply that to physical theft too - the store wasn't necessarily going to sell the product anyway. So yeah, it's theft. Of course, I think you already know this, you're just deliberately being ignorant as a result of your cognitive dissonance trying to justify you being a criminal.
2) Promotion, internationalisation, start up costs, (quality) equipment costs, legal protection, insurance, steady income, obtaining rights, production, distribution. A common claim of the pirate in denial is that you can support an artist by attending a live performance. I'm wondering who's going to pay to plan, implement and promote that performance.
Pirates don't give free promotion, that's ridiculous. They succumb to greed, and take take take as much as they can. This helps nobody but the pirate. Of course, you don't see pirates shouting on the streets promoting their favourite bands. They don't pay for TV or radio spots, cover the cost of concerts, place newspaper/magazine advertisements. I doubt very much they even word-of-mouth it to their own little cliques. The only thing pirates are good for, is helping others pirate by redistribution. And, big surprise, none of those pirates are going to go out of their way to promote the bands either.
But naturally, I don't expect any of this to sink in for you. I really don't see a pirate like yourself admitting that, yes, you ARE an immoral asshole and a criminal. You probably couldn't even if you wanted to, but that's ok, I'm willing to accept that you're simply not capable of doing so. You criminals seem to waste an awful lot of time trying to convince people you're morally superior to regular, law-abiding citizens. Frankly, your state of denial and altruistic views would be laughable, if it weren't such a depressing indication of the state of today's culture.
The POINT is, people only have so much disposable income to spend on things like music. They spend what their budget allows them to spend, and after that, they can either follow copyright law "to the letter", owning, listening to and promoting by word of mouth the few albums they paid for. OR, they can take the approach of "pirating" whatever strikes their fancy, broadening their musical horizons in the process and giving all those additional artists a better shot at being on their "short list" to spend their limited income on down the road.
Ugh, I don't understand how people get to this point. To quote goldspider above, "I'm not willing to pay $1000 for Adobe Creative Suite. By what reasoning am I, therefore, entitled to a copy of the software? I have yet to hear a rational answer to that question."
I understand that argument by analogy doesn't fully work when you're talking about tangible vs. intangible goods, but follow me: the point is, people only have so much disposable income to spend on things like prime rib. So they can follow the law to the letter and only buy the food they can actually afford, like Ramen or condensed tomato soup. OR, they can take the approach of just shoplifting whatever strikes their fancy, broadening their palate in the process and perhaps introducing their friends to whole new food groups.
Doesn't work, does it? Now, does it not work because I'm committing a fallacy of relevance/weak analogy, or is it really because as dirtyfly said, you don't want to pay for it and it's easy to steal?
Where do we have an ethical or legal right to consume an unlimited amount of art and/or entertainment without paying for it? How about this: if a game publisher is charging $50 and doesn't offer a sufficient demo to let you know whether you want to part with your funds, just do without it entirely? If a music artist doesn't have enough free or cheap stuff for me to decide whether to part with the $10 to $20 for their CD or the $10 to $50 for their concert ticket, how about *doing without it*? How about not giving any of the above any of my recreational/entertainment time except perhaps to drop them a note that says, "If you'd had more try-before-you-buy content I was going to check you out, but you don't, so you lose until you change your business model."
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
Agreed. You have to get into the definition of "pirating" there. Sort of like the tree falling in the forest, if you buy a game and install a crack to run it off of your hard drive instead of the CD for whatever reason (convenience, conserving laptop battery from spinning up the CD), and you do this for your own personal use, are you actually "pirating?"
Are you depriving the publisher of anything at all, or does this fall under Fair Use?
Some of you already have those cute little shirts on that say disco sucks, right? That's not all that sucks.-Frank Zappa
I normally would have just left a discussion like this alone, since it is Slashdot, after all, and nobody follows thread replies for more than maybe 2 days, tops, after the original article is posted.
But you're such the epitome of the stance I'm trying to take a stand against, I'm compelled to continue this debate.
First and foremost, you have this MAJOR flaw in your "logic" when you start speaking of "pirates" as though they're some kind of sub-culture that exists independently of the consumers who pay for music, computer software and other "intangibles".
In reality, almost *everyone* I run across is at least the occasional, casual "pirate", in the sense that they don't see a moral problem with making copies of material for personal use and enjoyment, on occasion. In fact, this has been LEGALLY backed in court rulings such as the one allowing people to record television shows on VHS tapes and keep them around for personal use. (It even made clear the fact that inviting your friends over to watch the recording was NOT illegal either, since it wasn't considered the same thing as charging for tickets to see a viewing of the program.)
This is VERY much a ruling in the "spirit" of copyright law, as opposed to more recent legislation (DMCA, etc.) that adheres to a strict "letter of the law" interpretation - in a clear attempt to maximize profits for content creators by strong-arming the consumer.
IMHO, it's quite a stretch to label a person a CRIMINAL for merely exchanging copies of some content, without commercial gain being a factor. The person who starts a big counterfeiting ring in his basement, running off perfect duplicates of Microsoft software with fake holograms and realistic looking boxes? That's clearly a copyright violation worthy of prosecution! People intending to pay for a copy of said product are instead receiving a fake that diverted those funds away from the intended recipient.
Infringing copyright, in the sense that someone obtained a COPY of some content without agreeing to BUY it under the terms and agreements specified in the shrink-wrapped contract is HARDLY the same thing as "stealing"! In the case of physical theft, by someone taking the item without paying for it, they're directly causing a LOSS for the store owner who had to BUY the product in the first place to put it on the shelf! If I give away 2 copies of a movie I purchased, I dare you to show me a store anyplace that is automatically out 2 copies of that movie!
The root of this whole problem lies with the "law of the land" being unreasonably strict. It makes law-abiding citizens INTO criminals when they're doing nothing that really should be illegal in the first place. That's why I spend time trying to explain the problem. Has nothing to do with me trying to feel "morally superior" to anyone.
Oh, and "greed" is a very common human emotion. I'd say YOU must be trying to fool yourself into think you're morally superior, if you claim to be exempt from it? Ayn Rand was probably quite correct in her many comments to the effect that "greed" can be a good, positive thing. Just because you're looking out for yourself and what happens to benefit YOU the most, doesn't mean those actions don't also have beneficial consequences for others. The desire to have "more" is what motivates most of us in this world to get up and go to work every day, or to take a chance on opening one's own business, or ??