Slashdot Mirror
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.
If a game is good, charge a nominal fee which includes patches, etc and ability to play online. Those who dont want to pay can play the local version (and may get hooked and end up paying)
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.
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.
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.
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.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.
Indeed. I'm a habitual software pirate. I know it's wrong, but I simply don't want to pay more for less.
Games with significant online content (MP mostly) I buy or skip entirely. I have bought, and not even at a discount, the entire Guild Wars series, as well as a great number of the optional addon content (extra character slots, skill unlock packs). I have spent more on GW than any one other game series in PC history. Why? It's good, it's fairly priced, has effectively no copy protection, and I can freely download the client. I have several times set it down for months and then picked up again. A subscription MMO would have lapsed, and I would likely have lost my characters or their gear.
This is why I don't play WoW. GW is better in all the ways I care about. Steam is also a leader in the Right Way to do things. I have probably bought more titles on Steam than via physical purchase over the last 4 or 5 years. Physical media is dying.
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.
...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!
Even games that don't charge still can make money this way. For example, Neverwinter Nights 1 patched out its CD copy protection, but piracy remained low on the game because a big part of the game was automatic updates (which requires unique serial numbers), online persistent worlds, and the sheer numbers of player made modules available which equaled or surpassed the single player campaign of the game.
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.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
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/
"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.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
The democratic nature of FOSS is its main weakness, and in the context of games, makes FOSS nearly impossible to pull off.
Unlike most FOSS projects I've seen, which is basically a core developed by a handful of developers, consistently added on and improved by additions and fixes from the community at large. This works great for enterprise software and web apps, where iterative development on top of ever-changing demands demands this sort of development - whatever features are most needed tend to make it into the next release, etc etc.
Games don't work like this. Games do not have evolving feature sets. They have a spec'ed scope, and the development team executes it, end of story. They also require vision and centralized leadership - something FOSS projects find very difficult, since the voluntary nature of the whole thing makes it such that "unsexy" features never get worked on. In a game, unsexy features that don't get coded = game that never ships.
Oh, and games require extensive amounts of art. I would argue that for most games, more artists are needed than coders, by at least a 2:1 margin. I don't see that many capable artists in the FOSS scene, do you?
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?
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.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
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 :)
which is totally what she said