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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.
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!
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
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.
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 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.
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.
When you buy a game you're not buying a game, you're buying the fun you'll have playing it, and the price you pay for a game is more than the dollar amount on the sticker, it includes all the games of the same class you bought which didn't provide the requisite entertainment.
If every game were fantastic then people would probably be perfectly willing to pay $60(or $100 in my neck of the woods, which with today's exchange rates is criminal) for it, because you'd be getting good value for entertainment.
However since even with proper research it seems these days that best case scenario only 1 in 3 games really provides you with value on the entertainment front, from an entertainment perspective that game actually costs at least $180[$AU300] because for every good game you manage to buy and which provides value for money, you generally bought two which got dull after the first level, didn't offer what they promised, or were generally crap. This markup shall hereafter be referred to as the dud factor.
The problem with Braid, and for that matter probably with this guys games, is that the class of game they exist in(small studio amateur) has a much higher incidence of crap(or at least games which while good didn't provide value for money) compared even to most commercial games these days. This means that even if your game provides as much entertainment as a commercial title, the dud factor makes your game seem, at half the price, to be even more expensive. The hotdog and novelty t-shirt in the penny-arcade comic are both known quantities and so don't have this dud factor markup. If you get a bad hotdog you can usually complain and get another one, and you can see everything that the t-shirt is when you hold it in your hands.
This kind of sucks for small development shop games, as even if they're the most incredible thing in the world very few people will buy it at a higher price, but in other ways it's a good thing, because it means that if you're clever and you build up a good reputation so that people can feel confident in your product you can reduce the dud factor and therefor increase the price you can charge for your games.
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.
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 CD-ROM checks, etc. A legally purchased game continues to require these things, and over the long run, is more annoying than a cracked copy. This has been a problem with music, too, because an MP3 with no DRM will play on any device (which is a lot more than an encrypted AAC file).
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
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
I do too, and there are a lot I wish I didn't pay for = (
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.
DRM causes issues in legit copies a LOT. I have a lot of games that worked when I bought them but don't work on my new hardware.
My solution wasn't to pirate... my solution was to stop buying PC games altogether. I have no hidden agenda when I say DRM prevents me from buying software.
I now have dozens of 360 and Wii games.. all paid for. I'm never going back to PC gaming.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
Well, he's an indie developer, so some of his games are only $10 to begin with. That would probably be the minimal I'd give anyone as a donation. If you aren't worth $10, you aren't worth a donation at all. Plus you'd get a game, you'd be able to try it out, and you might even like it. If there is a donation box, you could still use that, but at the prices of these games, I'd just recommend buying one if you really want to support him.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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