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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?"
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.
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.
EVE's performance in Linux is abysmal. Wine is fine for apps that you need to run occasionally, but if you need performance or reliability it's right out. I love it when they make Linux games, but this wasn't nearly good enough.
<xml><I><am><so><damn>Web 2.0</damn></so></am></I></xml>
EVE is an MMO and they make their money on the account that you log in to. Gving the client away is common with indie MMOs.
I've found that I can find relatively reliable reviews of games on penny-arcade.
to claim that DRM is a reason to steal the whole game?
Y'know, I attended a talk by RMS in New Zealand about copyright law last night (13th), and he put forward the view that anyone should be allowed to make unmodified copies of a product (for non-commercial use). Also, he mentioned people should only have files protected by "Digital Restrictions Management" if they had the facilities available to bypass that protection using free software.
My interpretation of what he said was that software piracy is a fallacy. Making copies of things is human nature and should not be restricted.
Ask me about repetitive DNA
The reason why people like Steam is that despite the fact that steam has DRM features, those features largely stay out of the way of a legitimate end user.
(This post will be a long list of positive steam attributes, followed by some of its problems).
First of all, note that steam lets you download the game at any time, and there is no maximum number of times one can do this. Many other electronic game delivery systems have a limited time window for re-downloads.
Any steam member can log into his opr her account on any computer with steam, and may download any or all of his games on that computer to play. There is no limit to the number of computers one can download the game on.
Unless you specifically tell steam otherwise, it will keep all your games up to date, so you never have to check the game maker's site for patches.
Obviously, Steam does not require a CD to be inserted to play the game.
When buying the Steam games online no CD keys must be entered by the user.
Steam does have a few flaws:
First of all retail cd-keys can only be used to activate a steam license for Valve games and a few (far from all) third party games.
If you bought a Valve game retail and somebody had already guessed the CD key, the process of proving that you are the legitimate owner is a royal pain. This can be avoided if buying the game online is a viable option for you. (Obviously that is not a viable option for many dial-up users).
Before a game can be played offline after it is downloaded or updated, the user account must be authenticated. This is done by simply starting the game at least once once while in online mode.
Games cannot be transferred or sold. This is the only part of the Steam DRM system that any legitimate user is likely to see. This is arguably Steams largest disadvantage.
As for the event that Steam goes under, if the files for the game are fully downloaded when this happens ("100% - Ready" is what steam would say) then the existing Steam Cracking tools could be used with minimal effort (the tools act almost exactly like Steam, except that they do not check that a user is authorized before launching a Game, as long as the game is already installed). In the event that Steams goes under, these tools will become widely available. They install easily enough and just work. The only issues of note would be that servers would needed to be cracked (and if steam goes under, all remaining servers would have the cracks applies), new updates obviously would not be download-able via Steam, and one would lose the ability to download and install new copies of the game on new machines without resorting to piracy measures.
So overall Steam is not bad. It works well, and what little DRM it has is specially designed to minimize the possibly of it causing any problems for legitimate customers. (Unless those customers wish to sell or transfer a game.)
Future features are planned, including Steam's servers holding a copy of your saved games, so you can continue a game you started on one computer on another. (This feature requires the game to support it. Valve's games will be updated, (possibly even the old GoldSource games) and third party games using the Steamwerks API can add this feature if the developer desires.)
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
serial number to go along with it.
It's your credit card.
Debunking Wine Myths
for those applications that do work and from a purely subjective point of view, performance is good. There is no obvious performance loss
http://www.winehq.org/site/myths#slow
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
i was in school, i had no money, and i needed these programs for assignments (art school-video, photography, sound, etc...these apps aren't cheep)
i have no problem using cracked goods as a student. but im not a students anymore. they day i graduated, i formatted the hard drive and went for a fresh start. but now im a poor college grad.
The funny things is, as a college student, you could have gotten most of that $10k in software at a serious discount, if not for free. Companies know that you're a poor, starving, college student and they want you to use their software.
Colleges practically hand out software like it is candy.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
So you're basically saying that people who buy on Steam are idiots and deserve what they get if Steam goes away?
Yes, people who buy anything that is protected by DRM, in a world where breaking the DRM is illegal, even if the company that made it is out of business and cant authenticate your purchase anymore is an idiot.
I'm not saying they deserve to be screwed. They deserve better.
Fuck you.
Seriously, its not =me= that's going to be responsible for your purchases not working one day.
If Valve goes away they are obligated to their consumers to provide them the products they bought. All of them, for free and forever. If that means a noCD crack, too damn bad for the creditors.
Perhaps you should look into the ugly world of failed businesses and see just what happens to their customers. Their intellectual property. I assure its VERY VERY VERY RARELY a happy ending for anyone. Hell, try these on for size:
How much longer do you think "Plays for sure" music is going to be usable, now that Microsoft has discontinued it?
"Microsoft announced that as of August 31, 2008, PlaysForSure content from their retired MSN Music store would need to be licensed to play before this date or burned permanently to CD."
Fortunately consumers were given permission to burn songs to CD, so if they act fast, they can burn it, and then rip it back in an unprotected format. What happens next month? Poof? Oh, sure there are tools to crack the files out there... but their legality in the face of the DMCA is pretty questionable.
How about another example? Major League Baseball changes DRM, and old content no longer viewable.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20071107-major-league-baseballs-drm-change-strikes-out-with-fans.html
And these are both corporations that are doing well, that have said fuck-you to the consumer. You really think Valve is going to honour what you think their obligtation to you is in a bankruptcy scenario? HA. Seriously. Read the fine print of the terms of service. They have virtually no obligation to you at all.
If Ford goes out of business, you want them to steal your truck? I think not.
Isn't that cute, you think you -bought- Valve software. No. You just 'subscribe to it' (read the fine print, your a subscriber not a customer, you pay one time fees to subscribe to their games, you don't buy them). And when they go under, your 'subscription' ends.
Finally, this is the same Valve that today when its doing just fine, won't allow you to transfer something you claim you own to someone else. You can't move a title from your account to someone else. You can't transfer your entire account to someone else. Per the terms you can't have two people using your account.
Think about this: you can't even have two different people use two different online titles on one account at the same time. So, here you've bought 2 different games, and you can't use both of them online at the same time? Yeah, Valve really is honoring their obligations to your purchases NOW. Your on crack if you think they are going to suddenly honor them in their death throes.
Microsoft hated the site license agreement my university had with them when I was an undergrad (it has since changed).
We could get pretty much any software that they made (the pro versions included) for about $10-20. If you didn't want the media, you could borrow a copy from the library for 24 hours free of charge.
Needless to say, we abused the heck out of that. It was rather nice being able to have the latest versions of everything that you wanted to use without having to pay out of the rear for all of it.
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
See: Fair use.
Is it different than pirating a game? Perhaps. "Pirating" a game to play it for a half-hour to see if it's any good: probably not. Pirating a game and playing it forever: quite different.
Sloppy and ethically challenged, perhaps.
EVE is a pay-per-month MMO. In this case, DRM is not needed because you are already tied to their game servers and their locally stored account information. Instead of breaking the DRM on those games you have people trying to create 3rd party game servers. In those cases they lack the community which is a large part of the value of the MMO.
No, they really won't. You will be unable to restore those backups until you've installed and logged into Steam (just try it, I did).
So, yes, you save yourself the download, but if Valve is out of business you're still screwed and have to rely on cracked copies.
Fair use?
"...in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification..."
to be honest that ad is there partly because otherwise the page looked horribly bleak and colorless. I know it still looks a bit grim.
The original question wasn't a big attempt at a crusade, in fact it was deliberately targeted just at people pirating *my* games. I could get a general view of piracy of photoshop and mp3s anywhere, I wanted more focused replies than that. A lot of general piracy arguments aren't applicable to me (lack of demos, CD checks etc), so I needed to find out more specific answers than that.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
"devalue assets by giving them away for free"? What a straw man.
No, speaking as a lay expert on company law, vux984 is right. A company in bankruptcy (or which can reasonably foresee bankruptcy in its future) is obliged to trade in the way that is in the best interests of its creditors.
In Valve's case, this would clearly be to keep steam running in the hope that it could be sold as a going concern to another company to raise funds to pay off those creditors. Any action otherwise could expose valve's directors to personal liability for the company's losses.
Feels like fair use to me.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use:
1. the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Noncommercial discourse, clearly satisfied. (arguably, you can say that he has commercial interest in this subject, but the conversation itself is noncommercial in nature.)
2. the nature of the copyrighted work;
This, I'm not sure about, and is the weak point of a fair use claim. The movie is a work of fiction.
3. the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
He's using a tiny portion of the copyrighted work, and has a significant amount of his own work. The copyrighted work is largely inconsequential to the total work. I'd say this part is satisfied.
4. the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Nobody is going to look at those two stills instead of watching the movie. (or even read whole article instead of watching the movie, if you want to get technical.) This part is clearly satisfied.
With that said, I think copyright terms should be much more limited in order to enrich the public domain and our culture in general, so I'm not the best judge of these things.
The guy's a Brit (or at least it's a UK company), and we don't have a "fair use" clause in our copyright law. We do have a similar concept, so I doubt that he's going to be sued any time soon, but never forget that while slashdot may be US-centric, not all stories are actually about the US.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
Oh, well, hey, if they say so on their own site, it must be true!
Of course, my own objective tests showed me that WINE was getting around 55-65% of the framerate that I'd get when running the same game under Windows... and that was even with wine not rendering some of the advanced effects (because it was unable to do so).
In my objective point of view, WINE, while an incredible technical achievement, is a piss-poor substitute for platform-native games. I would not pay for a game being sold as a "Linux" if it runs under WINE. In fact, I wouldn't even bother to pirate it.
As we're talking about games here let's just say that
for those applications that do work and from a purely subjective point of view, performance is good. There is no obvious performance loss
is total bullshit.
Yes I know it's a wonder and everything that I can play selected DirectX games under Linux at all. But those people claiming they run Half-Life 2 (or any source based game) through wine and it runs "the same as in Windows" kinda piss me off.
Personally if I run Team Fortress 2 in wine I see a huge performance loss. I play with DX9, FSAA and full details in Vista and get about 80-100 frames average. Using wine the game will only allow DX8.1, medium detail levels and using FSAA is right out...and it still runs with less than 60 frames most of the time. All this at 1680x1050 with an 8800GTS and a Q6600.
If we're talking about apps then yes, performance loss is minimal. Or at least performance loss is not apparent since modern machines are overpowered for most applications anyway...
But games still run like shit a good deal of the time.
Actually, he heard outdated news. At one time they were kicking people off for using wine. They've since reversed that decision.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
There's OpenGL, but from what I've heard it's a bit of a pain to use,
Try it - the only people I've heard this from are people who have spent so long with DirectX that a simple C API confuses them.
and what are you going to do for audio?
Use OpenAL. It's supported on Windows, Mac OS X and most *NIX flavours. The API is very similar to OpenGL.
How about controller input other than mouse and keyboard?
SDL has a nice clean abstraction layer for various input sources, including joysticks and similar.
Even networking code needs some tweaking between OSes.
Not really. Berkely sockets work in most places. Winsock is more or less a superset of Berkely sockets. As long as you remember to call htons and htonl you won't have issues when you port to a big-endian platform, and don't use any privileged ports (numbers 1024) for your game. If you want a higher-level abstraction there's OpenPlay, but considering how few people use DirectPlay I'm not sure if anyone feels the need for this.
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Curiously enough EvE is Direct X based, they used an integrated cedega on the linux port and cider for the mac.
Developers are so fixating in using DRM to force pirates to buy their games that they ignore the number of paying customers who don't buy their games *because* of the DRM.
I'm a game developer; this is partially correct.
While some developers may want to use DRM, it's more commonly a publisher that forces a team to utilize the DRM solution they bought into. On a previous AAA project we had to utilize the DRM the publisher utilized
We hated it, my friends who bought the game hated it, but our hands were tied.
On top of that, a patch was recently released which appears to mainly have tightened the DRM. The result: my friends are extermely upset as their Daemon tools ISO solution no longer works; they now have to keep the CD/DVD in their computer to play the game, another DRM annoyance pushed on customers who paid for the game. Personally this is making the game more trouble than it's worth; if my friends didn't play this at LAN parties I'd uninstall the game.
I wonder how die hard fans feel.
But in the end this is what the publisher wanted. Our team didn't agree with it, but while they paid our checks our hands were tied by what their marketing team dictated was good to protect their IP and ensure no lost profits, "due to pirating".
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).
Do you do this with other products as well?
Yes. I also watch movies (cinema, TV, or pirated) before I decide to buy them on DvD/BlueRay. Sometimes I buy books after I have read a copy borrowed from a friend. Sometimes I buy books/comics unseen because I know of the author/artist.
Do you go to the car lot and take a car, drive it around until you get where you need to be or get bored driving it and then ditch it for a different one?
Only in GTA. Which I incidentally bought unseen for the PS2, then later I pirated the PC version becuse I wanted to play it again and my TV was broken.
If I pirate a game and I enjoy it I buy it, if I pirate it and don't enjoy it I ditch it. Had there been options to test a proper Demo I would do that instead, but most demos are pretty bad. My monthly entertainment budget is limited and I just can't buy all the games I want to try; especially when I know most of them are going to suck.
Coming back to your car analogy; yes I would expect to test drive before buying. I would also read reviews, tests, user experience, basically do my research before investing that kind of money. Not doing that would make it a lot more likely that I would be ripped off.
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