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id CEO Claims PC Hardware Manufacturers Love Piracy
arcticstoat sends a link to an interview with the CEO of id Software, Todd Hollenshead, in which he suggests that hardware manufacturers count on piracy to help drive profits, rather than doing something to prevent it. Quoting:
"...I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content — even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs — is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games. ...And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit."
That's business as usual, not a "dirty little secret".
years ago Piracy give windows and office a big boost to where they are now.
Ditch perpetual copyrights. I say give corps 3-5 years to turn a profit and then it becomes public domain. For individuals a bit longer, but if you still can't make money, well, time to go back to plumber school I guess.
What's next? We keep paying doctors every few years for prior services rendered? Or how about the contractor that built your house you continue to live in?
No sig for you!!
ISPs are not much better with blatant advertising.
"Download movies at top speed!"
Q: It's the barrier-for-entry thing isn't it? It's really easy to pirate PC games whereas console games are much harder to pirate so the returns are better. What can PC hardware manufacturers do to make it harder for pirates?
Todd Hollenshead: There's lots of things that they could do but [...]
The next question should have been:
Such as what? What exactly are you proposing hardware manufacturers do about software piracy and peer-to-peer networking? You've said there's lots they can do but provided no examples. Give some.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Since when is it the hardware manufacturer's duty to prevent piracy? Who exactly? Is AMD supposed to stop pirated code from running? Is NVidia supposed to stop the graphics from rendering on a pirated game? My hard drive? My RAM?
When was the last time your company released quality software?
----- You know you have ego issues when you register a domain in your name.
old school id, 3d realms and apogee folk must be cringing at this kind of comment for it was the shareware "revolution" that created the major games industries we see today. if TH starts anti-piracy trolling, someone might have to remind him of his roots: episodic gaming is just the connect equivalent.
Really? No kidding.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
If the claim in TFA were true, wouldn't we see lots of manufacturers pushing Linux? If they see pirated software as having a significant effect on demand for their product, they should see free software as having the same effect?
I suspect that they are just indifferent.
It is complete and utter nonsense that hardware makers should be somehow held accountable for the dissatisfaction of software makers.
Software was free to begin with. The idea that software is a product is the notion that doesn't quite work. Hardware makers follow industry standard specs for the most part and add benefits here and there and ultimately strive to lower costs. It's a classical capitalistic market. Supply and demand rules fit neatly here.
Software, on the other hand, does not. The supply is LIMITLESS and the demand is limited. Software-as-a-product people are attempting to create a market where none naturally exists. But this is generally the case of all products that have a limitless capacity for production.
One fact is known by all players -- lower costs bring more buyers. Software people know this too. Unfortunately, they believe their "product" is worth more than is actually is. The "demand" side of the equation demonstrates that demand levels at the prices they set does not always yield the sale numbers that suppliers would like to see.
In some extreme cases, software people seem to believe that the use of software should determine its value. Ultimately, software people are intending to leverage their software to get a piece of your labor pie. Just look at the cost of CAD or other design and engineering software. The prices are utterly ridiculous! Their expectation is that people who use this software will probably make a lot of money and as such, they want a lot of the users' money. Could you imagine what would happen to the price of other tools simply because they might be used to create some very expensive product or end result? My god, those would be some expensive hammers and nails! It is unrealistic for software makers to demand such exorbitant prices.
Meanwhile, real product makers will go on doing what they do -- give the consumer what they want for the lowest price they can so that consumers will buy more of it.
"Please give us a hardware-based lockdown solution for software authorization."
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
It's not the hardware manufacturers' job to police for pirated software. Most of them--Apple being the notable exception--couldn't care less about the software running their hardware. The drivers and whatnot are a means to an end, a necessary bother in order to actually make their hardware usable.
In some cases, they don't even have to do anything to get their hardware working in certain operating systems--the users do it for them!
To say that hardware manufacturers love piracy is a misstatement. Hollenshead's point is moot. Hardware folks just want to sell hardware, just like ISPs just want to sell bandwidth: they don't care what you do with it once you purchase it because they don't need to.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984) (emphasis added)
Create games that run perfectly on 3 year old computers and people won't spend money on new hardware, and instead (maybe) spend it on software.
The simpler explanation is that the hardware manufacturers don't want to increase the complexity and cost of their product in such a way that would decrease their product's usability and their customer's satisfaction with the product. Crippled hardware and unhappy customers would likely lead to lower market share, which would equal lower profits. And the hardware manufacturers are in business to make money, not to protect the failures of other company's business models.
ID CEO claims may carry some truths, but, for the least, it is as unbalanced as only enlightining the bright side of file sharing.
As a loyal ID Software customer, having baught every one of their games I play, all I can reply to them, is: Please dear brillant market aware ID CEO. Your wording hurt customers like me. Why do you spend time and money dealing with your non-customers, having such twisted juvenile words thrown as FUD in the wild?
It is sad I will have these awkward words in mind , the next time I plan on buying one of your upcomming games.
Léa Gris
1) I would LOVE to see where he's getting that "99% of peer-to-peer is piracy" number. Sounds like something he came up with off the top of his head that we're just supposed to accept as common knowledge.
2) Even if that were true (and I doubt it... I'll give him that most peer-to-peer is probably illegal, but 99%...? Really?), is it still fair to punish the 1% of us that use Bittorrent for Linux ISO's, free software, or the odd WoW patch?
3) Even if ISPs did do away with / block bittorrent or other P2P traffic, you really think the geek thinktank that is the Internet wouldn't come up with something else? Hell, you really want to stop piracy, we oughtta do away with this "Interweb" thingy!
Give it up, gang. No matter what you do, somebody's gonna find a way to steal your crap. Deal with it, and move on. Quit punishing the rest of us for it.
And again, why should they care? Piracy is not their problem, and it's not worth their R&D time to bolt 'trusted computing' modules onto their products. Suggesting that they have an obligation to act is like suggesting that firearm manufacturers have an obligation to prevent gun-related crimes.
HW manufacturers don't understand why they should cripple their products and lose a buck so Mr. Hollenshead can make a buck.
If he really believes what he says then he should simply stop releasing PC games and go console only. Of course there's a another whole set of problems when you go that route. Sounds to me more like a big case of WOW envy.
DRM in the hands for the consumer will always be cracked. It is pointless to try and chase it.
U.S. law is based on the fact that it is better that ten guilty men go free than one goe to jail for a crime that he didn't commit. Clearly, the government loves murderers!
(caveat: in theory; in practice District Attorneys, and other prosecutors, are more than happy to convict people of crimes they know damn well the defendant didn't commit to further their own agenda(s). In theory, theory always works. In practice it often doesn't.)
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Your first paragraph is 100% wrong. I don't know what time period you're talking about, but it's clearly NOT when Microsoft gained their dominance back in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Windows 3.1 and WFW 3.11 came on something like 11-13 floppy disks and there was NO copy protection of any kind. NONE. People were used to DOS but could now have this fancy GUI-driven "operating system" for the cost of a box of 3.5" floppies. NO ONE that I knew in the PC world ever had to buy a copy of Windows 3.1 because they always had either a friend or someone at work who had the floppies.
The availability of Windows 3.1 through piracy "sneakernet" made it the de facto standard on all PCs once it was clear that the world was leaving DOS and going to Windows. That laid down almost the entire user base for Windows 95, who then moved to 98, etc.
The dominance of most of the major software out there ESPECIALLY Windows is due to piracy, and the software companies know it.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
Back when PCs came preloaded, there wasn't Lotus Symphony, Paint.NET, GIMP, Thunderbird etc. There was Lotus 1-2-3, Photoship, WinFax and Eudora - all pay-to-use, and later on crippled versions for "free". If you couldn't pay, the only alternative was piracy.
Open Source gives the freedom NOT to use pirated material.
PC's are by and large, open platform general purpose machines. They were not even initially designed to play games. id can just release their titles on the console but they probably would not be able to run thier latest stuff and id would have to share the profits with Sony/MS/and Nintendo since those are closed platforms.
Kind of stupid to bitch about the very traits of a platform that makes your content viable. Hardware vendors should not be the software police.
"There is nothing to do it. But to do it." -Floyd Pepper
Game companies create new games all the time that demand new hardware and the hardware industry then promotes them. Even if those games could run on older hardware and look almost if not just as nice. So Quake was never given away with new graphic hardware? And how about that "the way it's meant to be played"?
...pirating id's stuff.
That's how Id got big, remember? Doom was pirated a lot, and that made it a big hit.
The hardware companies are greedy companies who are perfectly content to screw anyone or look the other way so long as it will improve profits...
Software companies are just the same...
The difference is that hardware companies have more competitors, and much smaller margins, while copyright infringement is much easier than duplicating hardware.
Do you really think that if it was possible to download hardware for free, the software companies wouldn't be doing exactly the same thing trying to get more sales?
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
When Doom 2, and Quake was released John Carmach was happy that everyone was pirating the game. He felt joy in the fact that EVERYONE wanted to play HIS game. Not to mention the mad cash that they made after the fact. A lot of people would pay after trying it out. Not to mention some chip manufactures might have tried to include some form of DRM. I think that utimatly if that happened every one would just simply move to something else.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
The only real difference between a software product and a hardware product like a car is that the "manufacturing plant" for software product usually costs about $1000 operable by a single person, whereas the one for car costs $1,000,000,000 and must be operated by a team of people.
I'm always amused by the level of altruism of people in the software field -- to the point of idiotic -- no professionals in other fields are so eager to eliminate their competitive barriers.
...pirating id's stuff.
That's how Id got big, remember? Doom was pirated a lot, and that made it a big hit.
To some extent, sure. However, Doom had a demo, and as I recall, that's what made it popular. Quake had the first quarter of the game as a demo, and I know a lot of people who routinely copied things from friends who each bought themselves copies of Quake.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
I'm sure more than a few /.ers remember the old PC role playing games, with their code wheels and the occasional prompting for "word 4 of paragraph 3 of page 8 of the manual." and whatnot. They were the cheap equivalent of a hardware dongle and while slightly more difficult to duplicate than the 3.5 disks (or CDs) the games came on, in my opinion they gave a great "value added" feel to the experience. Hell, even Metal Gear Solid had something like this - one of the access codes you needed to proceed with the game was printed on the back of the game case. Bugger if you were playing a burned copy!
These methods are ultimately better than a CD check or similar, as they actually engage the player and give them a reason to keep the game packaging around. Unfortunately these days, game packaging is disgustingly minimal - the days of the latest Square RPG coming with giant fold-out maps and equally large fold-outs of bestiary stats and item lists (anyone remember the original Final Fantasy NES packaging? That bigass poster Dragon Warrior came with?) are long gone... ultimately leaving the gamer with "less hassle" as the only reason to buy the game or software instead of downloading it.
I'm not into multiplayer online gaming or mods, custom models, etceteras (probably due to my roots as a console gamer) - I don't want forty multiplayer modes as the "value added" bit for a few hours of single player - I want a keychain fob or a tchotchkey for my tower or something I can hang on my wall. In the box, not available from the company's online store for even more money, thank you.
As long as bits have to be read, piracy will always be an issue. I say stop whinging about it and put in a little extra effort to reward the people that want to give you their money!
Because they are mostly kids who have never created anything of value.
The main problem comes from the fact that while, as you report, creating something of value is the most difficult part, currently what is charged by the economic model is the propagation of said creations, something that the average kid can do for free as easily as a finger snap.
And that's why the current model used by the media industry is as obsolete as the horse/buggy metaphor. It's not that they have been replaced by something better, it's just that they have become irrelevant.
The media market needs to come up with a new solution to compensate the artist, because the current one is attached to a step of the distribution chain that - although it made a lot of sense in the beginning (getting copies of music reach the consumer's home used to be as difficult as the production it self, but was a much more convenient point where to ask for money) - has become trivial now a day.
Producing music still costs money, but the point where the paying was done isn't a blocker that people can't get around anymore.
The current situation requires honor and honesty from people, so that they continue giving money even if technology would permit them to get it for free. (Pay to get a copy on CD so musician receive some fraction of it, even if getting a copy can be done effortlessly for free)
The current business model doesn't work anymore. But instead of trying to come up with a new one which works better in the modern world, industries are wasting resource on flawed system that try to prolong the current model - unsuccessfully (like DRM), introducing legal mean to make it mandatory (DMCA) and suing the hell out of average Janes and Joes.
And the problem is that finding a new working model is a complex task, difficult to achieve if not enough resources are thrown at it.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nope. Apple won't poof. Microsoft's day in the sun was due to the cheapness of their products. Now that everyone has a computer they would like to get a GOOD one. Thats where Apple's Mac OS X comes in. Its been gaining in marketshare over both Windows AND Linux. Thats not an anomaly.
All that other stuff you listed is SO irrelevant to the non-engineer/geek customer. No one but such folks cares that Apple requires people to go through the "commisar" to develop for the iPhone. And no developing for the iPhone and OS X is not expensive in the least unless you're a seriously broke person who can't afford a used Intel Mac. Paternalistic and pushy? What are you a Montana mountain militia man? This is software we're talking about. Don't let the philosophies of free software and open source trick you into thinking that such things are actually important to non-geeks.
Your long screed about computing history's past also fails to note the current times. We all know there's more programs available for Windows. Whats really news is ever since Apple switched to Intel processors allowing virtualization of Windows and more importantly the video games that run on it Apple's Mac market share has been taking off like gangbusters.
As for developers being at the end of Apple's barrel... thats ridiculous. Drama queen/free software fanatic developers don't like Apple's iPhone SDK policies but other, more mature, developers are getting along just fine. So fine that they're already making money from the iPhone AppStore. There's a friggin stampede towards iPhone app development. When someone can make $2,000 a day people sit up and take notice. http://www.appleiphoneapps.com/2008/08/part-time-iphone-developer-makes-2000-a-day/
LOTS of developers are making good money on the iPhone right now even though only a few million have the device. Can the same be said for Windows Mobile developers? Palm OS developers? Symbian, Blackberry or Linux mobile developers? Apple's gearing up to manufacture 45 million more iPhones in 2009. If developers are earning $2,000 a day now thats going to explode in the years to come. So the iPhone is doing just fine on the developer front, and seeing as how Apple gives out free programming tools for Mac OS X and you need an Intel Mac to develop for the iPhone and how the two programming environments are so similar its also raising Mac OS X development too.
You are suffering from what I like to call P.D.D. Perspective Deficit Disorder. You are looking at the technology industry from the viewpoint of a geek and are assuming everyone else on the planet does as well. Thats simply not true. If it were then GUIs would never had been developed. Regular people value good products that work well. They don't care about the GPL, they don't care about open standards, they don't care about copyleft or 'sharing with your neighbor'. As for Windows Mobile Apple couldn't be LESS worried about that platform. RIM's Blackberry in the US and Nokia's Symbian worldwide are the big titans. Windows Mobile has been on the market for over 7 years already and in ALL that time has failed to take the #1 or #2 spot. Its a non-event.
Rest easy though. For the small percentage of people on the planet who value 'independence' over practicality there will always be companies that cater to you. Looks like Google's Android will be picking up that mantle.
Have fun with it.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The Doom 3 engine, which is what everything since then has been based on, really fails to impress me. Several problems:
1) It doesn't look as good as it should for the hardware requirements. I remember when Doom 3 came out, my PC struggled with it despite being decent. Had to run it at 800x600. No big deal... Except that it really didn't back that up with beauty. For example if you got close to a surface, you started to see pixelization of textures, even with it set on ultra detail. The game just used pretty low rez textures, and had nothing like the detail textures that the Unreal Engine uses to deal with close up viewing.
2) It was too concerned about being "realistic" not enough about looking good. The lighting model is a great example. They wanted 100% dynamic lighting, meaning there was no magic global lights, all lights had a source. Great... Except their lights didn't reflect or refract. Light would hit a surface and bounce only once. If it went to the camera, ok you saw it. Anywhere else, it went away. This lead to the hard shadows and the extremely dark corners. You could have a corner with two bright lights right by it, but if neither shined directly back in there, the corner would be pitch black because there isn't any reflected light. While that may be more "correct" than models used by some games, I don't care, it doesn't look as good and that's what matters.
3) The games had little replay value. Doom 3 in particular was all about shock value. I've gotta say, it was a scary game to play the first time through. However, it lost all that after the first run. When you know the imp is standing behind the door to ambush you, it's not so scary anymore. With the scare factor gone, it was really a fairly mediocre shooter in my opinion.
4) Poor backward scaling. While the Doom 3 engine now runs on what is quite old hardware, when it came out it was very much a Crysis. It needed first flight hardware to run. It wasn't just that you had to have it to look good, you needed it to run at all. DX8 or better hardware was mandatory. All the peopel with DX7 hardware were SOL. Well, many other games scaled much better. They had to give up shiny features on older hardware, but they still ran.
Over all I think iD has really dropped the ball recently and I think it shows in engine sales. Unreal Engine has been vastly outselling the iD Tech engine. Their problems with sales don't come from piracy, but from lack of quality. Their games, as you said, are not great. I gave Quake 4 a pass, and same for Enemy Territory. Decided to get Unreal Tournament 3 instead. Their engine is also getting almost no licenses. People are buying the Unreal Engine instead. No surprise there either. UE 3 looks fantastic, and scales quite well. It may not be as technologically "correct" as Id's engine in terms of lighting and such, but who care? Ultimately it looks awesome and that is what you are paying for.
I get tired of companies that release poor quality products blaming poor sales on piracy. This is especially true for companies that release shit that requires the highest end, most badass computer. Crytek was whining about that with Crysis. "Oh we only sold a million copies, those evil pirates are killing us!" Hmmm, you think maybe instead the reason you only sold a million copies is because you need, as Yahtzee put it, a hypothetical future computer from space to play it well? I gave Crysis a miss because looking at benchmarks, it wouldn't have run well on my system. When I came out, I had an 8800 GTS, not the top of the line, but damn near it in terms of video cards. Reason I had it is I have a large LCD. I want games to run nice and fast on that large LCD. They do to. However the Crysis benchmarks showed it didn't. Maybe if I had 2 8800 GTXes it would have, but my lowly GTS (a $400 card I might add) wasn't enough. Ok, well I didn't need that, so I passed on it.
Well same shit with Doom 3. I did actually pick that one up but it really ran pathetic. I wasn't rocking top of the line graphics hardware, but
My wife and I, when we combined our CD collection, realised that we had over 300 CDs, with only a handful of duplicates. Our DVD collection is perhaps only 100 or so.
We easily have > 500GB (depending on encoding quality) of media, and I can point to physical discs we've encoded from.
Now maybe it did cost $6000, although I'd say it was far less, but over 20 years of collecting music and stuff, I'd be surprised if by age 35 anyone buying an iPod could *not* fill it with their own stuff. Before we combined I had 30GB of music from my CD collection.
Don't buy into Steve Ballmer's line about iPods being full of pirated material.
I'm a developer, who actually analyses & writes code for a living. Code that actually has to work (actually I'm a consultant, currently developing for a bank, the current instance of the database that my code has to work against was, I'm not kidding, started before I was born. And it's still running. How do you query it ? You take a terminal change "a part of the 80x25 screen" (I'm not kidding), then write "+SAM" and it executes everything above the current cursor and changes the text into the response. Now imagine doing that from C++ code. That's what "it needs to work" means. Oh btw, this method of working is, I kid you not, called "EASY". And apparently, compared to it's predecessor, it is easy).
Let's say I want to start apple programming, let's evaluate what I need :
-> an apple desktop or laptop. The bottom end or second-hand simply won't run os X (or won't run it acceptably or for very long), we're talking at least $1300 to $1800. I can only buy this directly from apple, no competition or alternatives exist here
-> a membership of apple's "development club" : $99 (a month I believe)
-> I need to get my software into the apple stores and into shop.apple.com, because there is no other channel. And if it doesn't follow apple's interpretation of the "user interface guidelines" (which quicktime violates rougly in the manner a fat pakistani violates a goat) it's just not going to happen
-> I need to learn & develop my software in objective C. Again, there is no (useable) alternative with support from apple. To add insult to injury, nobody else uses objC (well I believe there is a linux desktop environment in the language).
On windows ... buy myself a $499 laptop (which will more than do, and come with windows). I pick whatever company I want (one that's close for example) to sell it to me. I get a beer the next time I see the guy selling it to me in a cafe. I download visual studio express (which knocks the socks of xcode, but I will fully admit xcode is useable), which let's me develop, fully supported (and even free) in C#, C++, Basic, F#, Python (after a few downloads from microsoft reasearch). I download another dev environment, eclipse (by ibm) or one by sun, and I develop in java. I download another and develop in pascal. Support is available, even from microsoft, for all of these languages, and they're open and widely used, including used by microsoft.
I go to the nearest company, and they have 10 programs they're willing to pay me to develop. I go to the nearest shop, even did this with a supermarket once, and they're willing to sell boxed versions of software I wrote. There are thousands of places like that within a kilometer of where I live.
And you're seriously wondering why microsoft wins ?
You are suffering from PDD, in that you're a user, and you're blaming me for not going to 10x more trouble to develop for mac os x for half the price, because "it looks better".
But we all know the real deal : you want me to jump through 10 times more hoops to sell applications to you, and I will ask you 10 times the price of a windows application.
Of course, you consider this unfair.
To that, I will respond with a fully meant, eloquently put and most satisfying "fuck you". Then you do not buy, I cut my losses and go back to windows. Cya !