The State of Piracy and DRM In PC Gaming

VideoGamer sat down with Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, to talk about the state of piracy and DRM in today's gaming industry. He suggests that many game studios have themselves to blame for leaks and pre-launch piracy by not integrating their protection measures earlier in the development process. He mentions that some companies, such as Blizzard and Valve, have worked out anti-piracy schemes that generate much less of a backlash than occurred for Spore . Stude also has harsh words for companies who decline to create PC versions of their games, LucasArts in particular, saying, "LucasArts hasn't made a good PC game in a long time. That's my opinion. ... It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game ... and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response." Finally, Stude discusses what the PCGA would like to see out of Vista and the next version of Windows.

Comments

Insert New Business Model Here

[crowtc]

If the publishers would spend more time pushing out innovative games (not the most recent installment of the flavor of the month) and provide a reason to purchase a genuine copy, then maybe they wouldn't need to be in the business of criminalizing their own customers.

Spore is at least innovative and provides some value to the original owner of the game, in spite of the stupid DRM. IMO, it would be nice if they could transfer those rights to the secondary market though.

Re:Insert New Business Model Here

[daver00]

The way I see it there is one genuine and absolute way to give a reason to purchase a game: Online play. Xbox live and err PS3 online something are basically the ONLY reason why people seem to have stopped mod chipping and pirating. Time was PS2 and Xbox games were pirated so fiercely that the PC pirate industry would blush, thats just not the case anymore.

Hell I'll fess up: I've started buying PC games again (or just started). I'm fairly old for a gamer at 26 and I'll be honest, the last thing I bought before this year was the Warcraft 2 expansion pack. Yes thats right (to be honest I didn't buy WC2 either, I used my mates disk to install it then the expansion pack disk was a cheap alternative to legitimate play). The only reason things have changed is that I want online play. Now the thing is that this feature has built in online verification and it doesn't get in your way!

All this limiting installs business, Securom rootkits, internet requirements and so on blows my mind it is so morally corrupt. The whole notion fundamentally defies market principles, any other industry would belaughed out of the room if they suggested to government they needed this kind of regulation. And most of all it DOESNT WORK. Hear this game developers, none of your methods, none of them, ever have ever worked and never will. Not even on consoles! Barring one: Online play.

Its criminal how utterly STUPID these people are that they do not realise this and do something about it, something other than swimming against the tide.

Re:Insert New Business Model Here

[GFree678]

Innovation is overrated. I prefer playing games that are fun. It is possible to create a game that's innovative and yet not that much fun, Spore being a good example. It is also possible to make a game that's innovative AND fun, Portal being a good example.

Innovation is a nice concept, but all in all, I'd prefer a game that's just plain fun, innovative or not. Believe it or not, some formulas aren't "tired" and can be done again and again with a few changes between iterations. The GTA and Civilization games come to mind.

Re:Insert New Business Model Here

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm fairly old for a gamer at 26

No, you're fairly young for a gamer at 26, unless you're British. The average American gamer is 7 years older than you.

http://www.theaveragegamer.com/averagegamers/

Why developers don't like making games for PC

[isBandGeek()]

Not because there isn't an audience, but because the audience is too diverse. From the $4000 liquid cooled (or even oil cooled) systems to the Pentium IVs, it's hard to find settings that work across the board, or scale well.

Console games all play on machines with roughly the same processing power. That makes things a lot easier.

Re:Why developers don't like making games for PC

[poetmatt]

Or there's that "minimum specs" idea, or using common sense to program for the lowest common denominator in a similar fashion to a console, no?

Isn't that how blizzard, warhammer, all sorts of games do well? By programming for the lowest common denominator as a console does?

Sounds like sales has their hands steering way too much of the developer pot, in general.

Re:Why developers don't like making games for PC

[n dot l]

Or there's that "minimum specs" idea, or using common sense to program for the lowest common denominator in a similar fashion to a console, no?

No. Programming for the lowest common denominator means making a game that looks five years old. Publishers will publish those games, but they will not market and sell them along with all the other big name titles. Blizzard gets away with low (though ever rising) min-specs on WoW because the game's art is cartoonish - it doesn't look like it should be ultra-realistic or anything. Most games, however, won't have art direction that allows similarly low min specs without giving the impression that the game belongs in the $10 bin. The only way to support a low min spec while pleasing publishers is to make content that scales, and that opens a whole new set of problems (unless you're huge and can throw your weight around like Blizzard). Now the physics engine needs to work in "low end" and "high end" mode (tons of testing and hunting for subtle bugs - who remembers the little bugs in Quake3's movement code that only show up when the server runs at certain multiples of some frequency?), and the graphics code ends up with separate code paths for "Intel Integrated", "old NVIDIA", "not-so-old NVIDIA", "recent NVIDIA", "bleeding-edge NVIDIA", "old ATI", the list goes on - all which the artists and designers then have to work around. The fact that all you see is a neat little "Graphics Quality" slider is a testament to some graphics programmer's hard work and his company's amazing QA team.

And it's never as simple as typing if( uber_shadows_supported ) here and there, as most of the "this game doesn't do much, it should run on my machine, this developer sucks for not supporting my machine!" crowd likes to scream. The available set of GL extensions and D3D capability flags varies hugely and in unpredictable ways across hardware, and even driver revisions, leading to many subtle bugs where features are half-implemented (*cough* ATI *cough*) or missing for no good reason (*cough* Apple) or implemented three times in three ways because the vendors couldn't agree on what to call a function (most any recent GL extension), and all sorts of crap like that. The amount of testing and bug-fixing even a single "enable shadows" option adds is massive. Also, once you have a moving target you lose the ability to fine-tune the art for the system. Suddenly you have to add things like low/medium/high-detail texture support (because you don't know what the target resolution is so you have no idea of knowing what resolution the game will ultimately run at), which means the artists have to do tons of extra work, which must be tested and reviewed, etc. Oh yes, resolution and aspect ratio. Because those can now be anything and the HUD has to do something intelligent about it instead of just throwing up the perfectly hand-tweaked 4:3 or the lovingly crafted 16:9 version, as you can do with a console.

And then, on top of that, every now and then the hardware companies will ship a driver that has a bug in it, or some malware will eat a critical file, or some other small catastrophe will befall one of your customers, and you'll have to hire a support department to tell people "upgrade your drivers", or "downgrade your drivers", and the all-time favorite, "You can get the latest drivers from your video card manufacturer's web site. What do you mean, 'What's a video card?'".

Gah. It's late and I'm ranting. I'll stop.

With a console, on the other hand, you know you have X CPU cycles, a GPU that can push Y triangles and shade Z pixels, and a memory buss that will transfer W bytes each frame. You decide what effects you want to see, you tell the artists "you have X triangles and Y MB of texture space - textures should have such and such dimensions per game unit", you tell the designers "X square meters of destructible wall, Y throwable objects, no more than Z players at a time", and then spend the time you used to spend dealing with o

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[JazzyMusicMan]

I don't know why the parent was modded -1. Creative business models around video games like this have succeeded. If I remember correctly, Guild Wars charged for the game and subsequent upgrades but online play was free, which often negated the cost of the game as many would attest to after months and years of playing other games such as WoW (look up the guy that plays 36 characters and spends ~$5700 yearly on subscriptions). Forcing game companies to become more competitive and creative is a good thing.

Gee.

[Anonymous Coward]

I went out and bought Sins of a Solar Empire recently.

First game purchase in years. I'll be honest, it's mostly because the market has degenerated into crap of late. But it's at least partially because - get this - I can play Sins without needing the disc. Without shitware being installed on my system. Without a company that knows better treating me like a goddamned thief.

There's no excuse for DRM, unless you put out crap games.

Re:Gee.

[p0tat03]

Sadly, the model that has worked for Stardock won't work for mainstream games. Sins is a success, and Stardock's lack of DRM is working because they appeal to a hardcore gamer niche market that is keenly aware of the issues around piracy; mostly, anyways.

Move this model out into the mainstream market, where little kids with Pokemon, boozed up frat boys with Halo, or just immature idiots with too much bandwidth, and that whole thing falls apart.

If your market is small, has a traditionally tight-knit community that has existing rapport with the major developers in that field (Stardock is one), keeping people honest is a lot easier than if you're dealing with a market with a much lower moral standard. Expecting the average Joe to go by the honor system is a little much.

Re:Gee.

[Morkano]

But they don't really have a choice. PC games are already on the honour system. If you don't want to pay for a game, it's already been cracked and you can just download it for free, regardless of DRM.

The only difference is the paying customers aren't treated like crooks.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[Skrapion]

The problem is that it's encouraging "creativity" in the wrong places. If the industry abandoned traditional business models, we'd never have Portal or Ico. These games would not have been improved with online-play.

Piracy issue overstated

[syousef]

For the most part games are HARDER to pirate on a console almost always requiring hardware mods, so if piracy were such a primary motivator, people would never buy consoles. They don't put draconian anti-piracy measures into most console games (yet) so by doing so on the PC they're pushing people further away. Consoles are fine for shoot them ups - platformers, FPS and the like, and they're even good for some interesting additions with peripherals like eyetoy, guitar sims, golf sims, fishing sims etc. but for certain games they're awful.

Any serious flight simulation for instance is best done on a PC, with a keyboard and multiple screens. I'm not talking about flight games, I'm talking about realistic simulation. Flight simulation isn't a potential mass market so any peripheral made for it tends to be pricy...and people do go to extremes. Flight sims also tend to need more power than consoles provide.

So what we're missing by going to the consoles is the flexibility. The other thing we're missing is the ability for a hobbiest to dive in and write their own software, although the games are complex enough now that there are only a handful of open games without a proprietary heritage. That's what the push is about - shutting out any remaining competition and innovation by hobby projects. The less competition and the harder it is for people to pirate, the more they can charge for 3rd rate games.

Advocating More DRM?

[cyberpear]

It sounds like this Randy Stude guy is strongly advocating more and better DRM on games to me. It will always end up broken, and will only truly inconvenience those who have obtained the game legally.

Astute observations of a (mostly) sober reader

[darkvizier]

With such stunning insights as:

...don't leave anything to chance and keep it protected all the way through the production pipeline.

I can't see why those idiots in the video game industry aren't listening to Randy Stude. Obviously we're dealing with someone who's seen the issues and thought out detailed solutions to them. And when confronted with this biting criticism from the interviewer:

VideoGamer.com: It doesn't sound like rocket science to me. I don't understand why publishers don't shore up the production line.

Randy fires back a steadfast conclusion:

Yeah. And that doesn't even mean that at the end of the day someone's not going to hack the game and put it up on a torrent network ... We in the PCGA believe than an industry group such as ours and others out there should be the ones that tackle it from a standards perspective, provide guidance ... We don't have the answer yet today but we would invite anyone who believes piracy is a problem to join our organisation ...

Amazing! This nearly tops the genius and wisdom of a self referential slashdot post. Hats off to you, Randy! I'm going to join the PC Gaming Alliance right now!

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[jlarocco]

You're not really explaining why you're entitled to other people's work. Video games don't just write themselves. If I spend hours and hours writing a game, why should I just give you a copy for free?

That's cool if people want to volunteer their time and do that, but I really don't see why you think you're entitled to it.

Valve doesn't want you

[Scott Kevill]

I don't know about anyone else, but I will NEVER be buying a call-home-during-install game again. I can't play Half-Life 2 because I can't make the updates over a modem, and I can't just play the damned game (even from my Steam backups!) Valve, pay attention - I will NOT be paying for Half-Life 3 if you keep this shit up, and I know you will.

Sadly, your threats don't carry any weight -- Valve doesn't want you as a customer. They would ideally like to get out of retail and move entirely to digital distribution. They cut out the middlemen and have far greater margins that way.

As dialup user, you don't fit with their plans.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[poetmatt]

On the flip side, why are you magically entitled to anyone's money just because you spent effort on anything (let alone programming a game)? Trade for something, sure. Reality of the currency barter is that setting a specific price is not respective of people's perception of value. What you think is worth 500$ and maybe is to one or two people, might be worth 0$ to the rest of the world. This is why letting people pick their own prices works. However, the simple answer is that you're not entitled to other people's money.

Console issue overstated

[Ostracus]

"Consoles are fine for shoot them ups - platformers, FPS and the like, and they're even good for some interesting additions with peripherals like eyetoy, guitar sims, golf sims, fishing sims etc. but for certain games they're awful."

So basically the difference between one kind of computer vs another is external devices.

"The other thing we're missing is the ability for a hobbiest to dive in and write their own software, although the games are complex enough now that there are only a handful of open games without a proprietary heritage. "

XNA,Xbox live.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[jlarocco]

This is why letting people pick their own prices works.

But it's not your decision to make. If I build a car and decide to sell it for $5000, your only options are to buy it for $5000 or not buy it for $5000. You can't just steal it from me and give me $1000 because that's all you think it's worth. That's just not how trading works. If it were, I could kick you out of your house, toss you a $5 bill and claim I bought it from you.

However, the simple answer is that you're not entitled to other people's money.

And where did I say that I was?

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[shmlco]

"However, the simple answer is that you're not entitled to other people's money."

And you're not entitled to the game. See how easy that was? But the simple answer is that he's not entitled to your money, and you're not entitled to his work.

He created a product and set a price for it. You get to determine if that product has sufficient value to you and, if so, to pay the price. Quid pro quo. If, however, you DON'T think it has value, then you're free not to pay, and he is not "magically entitled" to anything. He invested his time and money, rolled the dice, and lost.

"...setting a specific price is not respective of people's perception of value."

Actually it is. As said, you're free to make the judgement call on your own.

"What you think is worth 500$ and maybe is to one or two people, might be worth 0$ to the rest of the world."

Again, don't pay. If enough people fail to do so, maybe he'll adjust his price accordingly. Or maybe he's happy with one or two $500 sales. His creation, his choice.

The problem with letting you decide what, if anything, you're willing to pay is that it always devolves into people not paying their share, or what game theorists call the "free rider" problem.

Me, I just call 'em parasites.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[vitalyb]

I find it quite curious how people that stand firm against DRM are so positive about Steam.

Doesn't Steam suffer from everything DRM does? It isn't portable, you need Steam to be ON to play and worse of all, what happens when Steam goes offline one day? Wouldn't all our games just stop playing?

I buy quite a lot of titles on Steam, however, I can't say I feel too good about it. I merely do it because it is comfortable, but it still doesn't seem to me like the Right Way to do things.

What do you guys think?

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[Ihmhi]

I find it quite curious how people that stand firm against DRM are so positive about Steam.

Because despite all of the errors you can (and will eventually) get with Steam, they don't make it annoying.

Doesn't Steam suffer from everything DRM does?

Not really? One of the core tenets of anti-DRM is that it just screws over the user who paid for stuff. I don't think Steam really does for the most part IMO.

It isn't portable, you need Steam to be ON to play and worse of all, what happens when Steam goes offline one day? Wouldn't all our games just stop playing?

It depends on your definition of "portable". To me, Steam is actually highly portable.

Let's say I go to a buddy's house and I want to show him what Portal is like. I can download Steam, log into my account, and show him the game. Installing on a new format is easy as pie. Hell, even backing up files is easy - just copy and paste. It always works. Steam keeps 99.9% of their files in the Steam folder, so backing it up just consists of copying it elsewhere.

You don't need Steam to be ON to play, just to play online. If you want to play only single player games, you just need to verify the games *once* on the current install of Windows (which happens automatically in the background - you just load it up, I believe). Then you can set the games to "Offline Mode" and play without having to log into Steam.

As for playing online, well... it's a compromise worth making. You're going to be online anyway, and the conveniences (able to pull down my games from their servers at 1.7 MB/s, anywhere, anytime, the friends network, easy to backup, etc.) are more than worth it.

If Steam ever went down, I believe that someone at Valve (I think it was Gabe Newell) stated that it wouldn't be too hard for them to write up a "killswitch" patch. Considering that there already are shadow Steam networks running for people who pirate the games, somebody else would write up a patch on the off chance Valve *didn't* write such a patch themselves.

I buy quite a lot of titles on Steam, however, I can't say I feel too good about it. I merely do it because it is comfortable, but it still doesn't seem to me like the Right Way to do things.

So you're saying you keep building up this collection of games that could disappear at any moment - you're aware of this, but you do it anyway? I don't know whether it's subconscious or conscious, but it's because Steam is probably the best compromise when it comes to DRM out there. That's a Hell of a statement for me to make, yes, but it wouldn't be so successful if it weren't so damned convenient.

I do have my gripes, though. One of my mates lost his Steam account. Why? Someone re-registered his original Hotmail account that expired and used password recovery to get his account. Nevermind the fact that he bought many games under a credit card in his name - they tie the account to the e-mail. He was basically shit outta luck.

The Steam API is also a huge resource hog. Playing Steam on a low-end system with in-game friends enabled will *hurt* your system - some games will flat-out just not run, and many will run slow. It's coded very sloppily and is in need of many efficiency improvements.

I'd like to be able to "sell" games, using Steam as a payment system. While you can sell your account (which is against the TOS), you can't really sell one game off of it because it is tied to your account. However, the Steam Store lets you buy games as a "gift" that you can give to another account. I don't see why it would be so hard to say "transfer X game to this account when I receive the money over Steam". Hell, use the money as credit in the Steam store or something - even that would be better than not being able to sell it at all.

Steam customer service leaves a lot to be desired and there's still a good lot of bugs, but it's a big improvement over previous DRM schemes and previous iterations of Steam.

People are used to the Piracy Culture

[MikeDirnt69]

Since ever in the computer history, people are used to copy softwares from each other. It became a habit to do such thing, and it doesn't fell like that you're stealing something. We may be on the 3rd generation of 'copiers', and we keep doing it. The same thing explain the illegal mp3 downloads and creation.

I started buying games when I met Steam, and HAD to buy the game or I wouldn't be able to play online (with good, fast servers); last year I bought WoW, and since that 'I keep buying it', if I can say that.

The answer is: change the games or change the gamers. I bet they will keep picking the 3rd and bad choice.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[Lodragandraoidh]

What if I don't own a console -- or don't want to own a console?

The wonderful thing about computers is they can simulate anything else -- including a game console, or better yet, a more complex interface (such as a flight sim) - while also allowing me to concurrently search the web, write in my blog, podcast, record my music, and write software...a console can't do that.

The more we move away from the general purpose computer, the more we will be constrained by the limitations imposed on us by the console makers - and each will have their own standards and OS - creating walled gardens, instead of standards based architectures. Furthermore, if consoles are opened up to be as general purpose as a computer --- why bother having a console in the first place?

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[meringuoid]

If I build a car and decide to sell it for $5000, your only options are to buy it for $5000 or not buy it for $5000. You can't just steal it from me and give me $1000 because that's all you think it's worth.

But if I build my own car to the same design as yours, and I feel generous enough to give you $1000 in thanks for coming up with such a cool design, I think you should be grateful.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[somersault]

Considering Portal is based on Narbacular Drop which was actually University project, we already got the creativity without going through the standard games industry business model. Narbacular Drop was free and apparently had a decent community creating maps for it (I never tried it myself). Admittedly Portal has shinier graphics and a story, but IMO the current business models pushed by publishers are more likely to stifle innovation than encourage it - which is why Bungie left Microsoft for example. They were fed up churning out sequels to Halo, because they know they are capable of much more.

I don't mind publishers and developers releasing sequels - as long as the original game was good and the sequel is just as good or better, of course - but using recent business models it is difficult for developers with original ideas to get their foot in the door. We still get original games occasionally, but there is pressure from the publishers to produce more of the same recipes rather than try out new concepts - see DeathSpank for another example. Ron Gilbert tried pushing the ideas to publishers for years before he found one that was willing to take the risk on it, even though he's got some great games under his belt. We will always have developers/designers with interesting ideas, it's currently up to the publishers who gets through though.

I have no idea why nobody is still making good ol' point and click adventures. We have plenty of point and click cruft like the Sims and WoW, but for some reason point and click adventures are 'outdated'. I'd choose playing a Ron Gilbert Monkey Island sequel over the Sims any day (though if you said Half-Life 3 I'd have to think about it)! I'm definitely getting DeathSpank when it comes out anyway.

The current generation of consoles are starting to have channels for homebrew type games, and things like Steam on the PC are good ways for developers to be able to release their games without going via the traditional publisher route. I'd never heard of Ico - apparently it was a bit of a flop - but if it was released as a cheap WiiWare game or PS3 store download right now it would do very well. I'd buy it now that I've heard about it. Of course if you threw in every other PS2 game ever, I probably wouldn't notice it at all. It all comes down to marketing and a bit of luck in the end as to which games get noticed - but then that's just life (and damn statistics).

PS - I actually thought Portal would be rather spectacular with online multiplayer. It would be pretty cool playing in a deathmatch arena with traps everywhere, trying to drop objects on people's heads, send them into a spiky pit/whatever. Or perhaps they could have some kind of capture the flag variant. It would be a bit messy and hectic, but could be good fun. As it is, it's "just" a puzzle game to me and I probably will never play it again. I hope they include portals and multiplayer in Episode 3 anyway :)

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[jedidiah]

In the real world, MOST people already didn't think that a
Radiohead album was worth paying for and they never would
have bought one. This fact is not altered by computing
technology. The easy ability to download and copy things
just give content creators a false impression of the value
of their work.

Pirates create a false impression of value. All of those
zero dollar value transactions are much like the funny
business that was going on with junk bonds, energy trading
or the recent mortgage resale shenanigans.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

[Hatta]

But it's not your decision to make.

Except that it is. You may not like it, but all the lawsuits and czars in the world can't change that.