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How Piracy Affected the Launch of Demigod
Demigod is an RTS/RPG hybrid developed by Gas Powered Games and published by Stardock, a company notable for their progressive and lenient stance on DRM. The game was set to be released on April 14th, and shipped without any form of copy protection. Unfortunately, retailer Gamestop broke the street date and released it earlier in the week. A day after pointing this out, Gas Powered Games posted some numbers about the players hitting their servers. Roughly 18,000 connections were made from legitimately purchased copies; over 100,000 were made from pirated copies. Meanwhile, the servers, which were not yet ready for that level of traffic, buckled under the strain, resulting in poor experiences for people trying to participate in multiplayer. While some reviews were positive, others criticized the game for the connectivity issues. After another day, they were able to stabilize the servers to the point they'd planned on for the original launch.
There goes the argument that games are only pirated because companies insist on draconian DRM.
No problem! Just use bittorrent!
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
Anybody still doubting, that piracy is a real threat to content-producers?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Authentication, it works!
1. Register user
2. Sell Game
??? == Authenticate
4. Profit!!!
Steam figured this out. you can too.
And they could not have the server respond with a message built into the game.
This would not be DRM. Just sense.
1. Game asks server for connection.
2. Server responds. game not released, kindly piss off. (and this could not be interfered with since they server knows the time and then closes connection with failure message)
3. Customer goes back to doing something else for a week and returns when server is working and it mildly mad at retailer for selling game early.
+----------------- | What is the question!
This is so typical.
The same thing happened to the game Titan Quest. I've never seen a game so stable and masterfully crafted before. The devs listened to the community and actually added features and tweaks to the game just for them.
Yet all the reviews I saw were negative. "Yet another Diablo II rehash", "plagued with crash problems - can't even get past the cave in the starting area". Well, it's a rehash in the way WoW is a rehash of EQ or UO, I suppose.
Unfortunately for them, the guy cracking their DRM failed and didn't care, so every torrented copy crashed 5 mins in. Also, he released it 1 month before TQ went on sale, giving time for thousands of people to download it (millions if it hadn't crashed 5 mins in :P )
Ever since I bought three games that wouldn't run because of DRM, I've been a bigger supporter of Piracy - but seeing my favourite companies go down because of it makes me less happy. :/
If one person who could crack the game had gotten it a week early, would DRM have helped prevent this?
One store sells early, and then there are a bunch of downloads.
One person breaks the DRM, and then there are a bunch of downloads.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
In this case does having a copy of the game entitle you to use the servers? Maybe they should charge for the service and use the revenue to expand their server farm.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
the trailer is awesome, while the game itself is so-so in the graphics department. Also the trailer makes the game look exciting and cool, while the tutorial shows it is a sucky(IMNSHO) hybrid with all the fail of both RPG and RTS. That is probably a bigger reason for piracy than free as beer type excuses. My money is tight, and I have been ripped off too many times by great reviews and stellar gameplay articles. Until I try the game, there is no buying it from my perspective.
To be frankfully bold, it is their own game design fault! Why you may ask if it was intended to be pirated in the first place. A case of how to legimate draconian drm. What they should have done is this: - release without any form of copy protection. - make registration of your copy with a key code mandatory, issue a login name with password - to play the game login with your name and password So this is the way RIAA tries to prove their right. Too bad greedy cheapasses took the bait.
Bach says it all.
Forget ... the William Shatner jokes.
Star Trek nailed it right on the money here.
"Oh, we don't work directly for material things. The Replicators can make almost anything. So we live for other values".
So, we have a Replicator for Books/Music/Movies/Games/Software.
Give it 20 more years for the 3-D form printers.
IANAE (I am not an economist) but Trek portrayed a kind of Location Meritocracy. You worked to get good, and earned the right to be on the group that could make you better. (Enterprise). All the niceities became De Minimis Fringes.
Dr. Who aside, *physical premises* are not replicatable, so that became the new equation.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Were probably caused by the game type - basically DotA with a new graphics engine. Multiplayer/skirmish only, no story, no campaign, hell, the game didn't have a tutorial!
Having skirmish multiplayer as the only play type makes people less willing to throw down $50. Sure, if you like that game type it's awesome, but if you don't you're out you $50 and you have another game for the shelf.
Never underestimate the stupidity inherent in all human beings.
Actually, it's not that weird that people want to try a game at the earliest possible moment.
The problem here was that the game was leaked.
A leaked copy will naturally spread, people are interested in new games they can't get their hands on.
The sad part is that some will se this as proof that DRM is necessary, nevermind the fact that this would've happened even if they had DRM.
Not using DRM is a good ideological standpoint.
Going so fanatic about it to not require a valid serial number activated account to play on your server (like battle.net or steam) is good idiotic standpoint.
You can't play multiplayer without a valid one. Just like most other online games these days. The problem with Demigod is that it runs some other http requests (checking for updates, querying system info, etc.). This is why the launch was borked. Not because there are tons of players with pirated copies trying to play on legit servers, but because their servers were effectively getting DDoS'ed by a level of traffic that they were not expecting or ready to serve.
This is GPG's own fault, I've read the post and the comments, and having the game connect to the servers on launch was a mistake. War3 doesn't check for updates until I get signed on to battlenet, and that's how it should have been here. The pirate/customer ratio does indeed suck, and they have my condolences, but this problem isn't entirely of the pirate's making.
This situation reminds me of the 9/11 blood donation issue. For a few months after the attack, people were extremely willing to donate blood, more than the Red Cross even needed. But after the initial passionate feelings faded away, the Red Cross found itself having severe shortage issues once again. People claim that they only pirate because of DRM, and when a company like Stardock makes a big PR splash by releasing a DRM-free game they encounter a great deal of initial success. But once the feverish anti-DRM banter dies down people return to their ever inconsiderate, selfish, and pirating ways. IIRC, when Bethesda released Oblivion, over 1/3 of the people who called customer support for help had pirated the game and thus had no registration to account for. People are greedy. Not just the rich, but the poor, the middle-class, the sick, the paraplegic, they're *all* opportunistically greedy. Life in a nutshell folks.
This art is kindly piss off, it doesn't come with any valuable information.
Ugh, another one of these idiotic comments.
It's not a made up lost sales number. It's a server connection count. It's an absolute, easy to measure metric. You're REALLY going to sit here and say that Stardock isn't capable of counting connections to their own servers, or that they made up a bunch of connection numbers randomly, while spending the entire Easter Weekend working overtime to try and get things working due to Gamestop breaking the street date?
Why don't you show me your numbers showing how his numbers are wrong? Oh wait, thats right. You're just making shit up to fit your little preconceived world view.
From arstechnica: Correction: Stardock contacted us to say that the 18,000 number referred to concurrent users, not sales. We have corrected the sentence accordingly. Brad Wardell also released some new information that clarifies the issue. On Day 0 there were around 140,000 concurrent users, with 18,000 validated users. The pirates couldn't update their game or play online, but they could still "touch the servers." "So over the first 24 hours, we had to essentially scrap together a doppleganger of the infrastructure dedicated to Demigod's multiplayer network needs, release an update to legitimate users to point them to it..." he wrote. "Now today, day 3, it's pretty much taken care of. Users are connecting in multiplayer, the servers are pretty responsive and we're adding more in preparation for the weekend."
Yes.
In more words: it's funny how more people on slashdot seem to be suddenly anti-piracy after the pirate bay verdict. I can't help wondering if these people would be against eating, if the media told them it was bad.
Pirate Mr. T says: Stop usin' the word "piracy" fo' somethin' that is not piracy, ya foolish landlubbers!
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Err, easy to measure by whom, exactly? Certainly not us, the audience of these proclamations. Why, by the same token, my toilet-bowl-based Cold Fusion reactor produces easy to measure 2MW of electricity ... except it seems to stop working as soon as someone else than me or my employee researchers get into close proximity ... but because it is easy to measure you will just have trust me on that one!
Or perhaps they fucked up something and are now covering their butts by pointing fingers at their business partners and "pirates". There are other motivations possible here other then the one you are asked to sheepishly believe, you know...
The stupidity of this statement can only be demonstrated by a demand for you to disclose your "numbers" showing that my "numbers" of UFO spaceships infecting my dog's anus are wrong ... oh wait, that's right, you cannot ...
Thanks for that insight, "Merlin".
So how did that happen exactly? No DRM I can understand. No control over who connects to your servers is just dumb.
It's not exactly difficult to have a serial number inside each copy of the game, and register that to the user account. It's even possible to build that mechanism in a way that allows resales.
Voila! No DRM, and no pirates on your servers either.
Because this wholly disinterested, neutral, completely uninvolved party has announced that their unverifiable "data" is a wholesome and complete "justification" for the change in their DRM policy.
Companies have a financial incentive to follow the facts where they lead. If piracy helps them or harms them - they benefit by accurately perceiving the situation. Pirates, on the other hand, are always biased towards legitimizing piracy.
For server based games, you can simply deny access for pirated copies.
Yes, this is clearly the right thing to do. Frankly, it's amazing that they didn't do it, and furthermore, that their servers collapsed under the load.
It sounds to me like shoddy preparation for the launch. Blaming the pirates is just a convenient way to ignore that.
It was widely recognised that this game was going to be pirated heavily since they decided to release it in the US an entire 6 weeks before the EU release. Madness.
You're not too far off the mark here. Most MMO game servers are very restricted, and deliberately so, in order to force players to pay over and over again for a subscription. Third parties have attempted to write their own servers. This would allow more freedom, creativity in world design/rules/etc., and would reduce or even eliminate the need for game companies to run their own servers. But the game companies don't like that, and CHOOSE to force people to use their (often relatively limited) servers instead, eventually phasing them out, and the game's existence along with it.
It's the same old problem: greedy companies trying to control something, and making a mess out of it.
during beta, many reported the same connection issues.
was that because of piracy as well?
Err, easy to measure by whom, exactly? Certainly not us, the audience of these proclamations. Why, by the same token, my toilet-bowl-based Cold Fusion reactor produces easy to measure 2MW of electricity ... except it seems to stop working as soon as someone else than me or my employee researchers get into close proximity ... but because it is easy to measure you will just have trust me on that one!
It's funny how when Google says they have a few million Gwhatever users, we don't get a bunch of posts in here saying they're making the numbers up.
You're trying to tell me that the CEO of Stardock is making up the number of connections to Stardock's servers, which is easy for them to measure.
Sorry, but I'm going to need more then "he said it, it must be wrong!" to buy that. He's the only one in this conversation with the actual data to count.
Or perhaps they fucked up something and are now covering their butts by pointing fingers at their business partners and "pirates". There are other motivations possible here other then the one you are asked to sheepishly believe, you know...
They did, and he outlined all that quite nicely in his journal entries on the subject.
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/346815
What they did wrong is put a version check in on game startup. So all those pirate copies were hitting the servers. They're pretty open that they screwed that up. But it also wouldn't have been a real problem without the pirate traffic being five times more then the legitimate traffic.
The stupidity of this statement can only be demonstrated by a demand for you to disclose your "numbers" showing that my "numbers" of UFO spaceships infecting my dog's anus are wrong ... oh wait, that's right, you cannot ...
I also don't really care about spaceships in your dogs anus. If you're going to say that someone elses numbers are wrong when they're the only ones in a position to have the actual numbers, you need to back that up.
Or at least, in an intelligent discussion you would. Here on the Internet it's a lot of "well piracy is okay because I'm a cheapskate, so I'm sure the person who knows the real count is lying!"
Hahahahahahah! Snort!
Follow what?! Facts?! Wherever they lead?! Whatever it is you are smoking, it must be really strong!
But back here in the non-pharmaceutically-altered-reality however companies follow profits to wherever it takes to get more profits ... but then again it is the sole purpose of companies. If lying, cheating and thieving will get you more profits, many, if not most, companies would perform a quick risk-to-profit computation and then if it came positive, engage in whatever the activity with no second thought whatsoever. For more information, see also under: Enron, WorldCom, AIG, etc etc etc.
While I'm somewhat disappointed by the staggering number of pirated copies vs. legit copies of Demigod, I'm not at all surprised. I fully support their stance on DRM and while I do admit to pirating some video games, I went out and bought Sins of the Solar Empire. It's a terrific game.
Now, I have a friend who I was trying to coax into buying Sins. He didn't have the money at the time, so he downloaded the full game. We were able to play online together with no problems. Did he eventually buy the game? No. Why not? Like the rampant movie and music piracy that we see online, I think the answer is simple:
People, in general, have no moral issues with not paying for something that is readily available for free. After all, if you've already received the full product and "gotten away with it", why should you pay for it?
Now, Stardock has smartened up regarding Sins. You can no longer receive updates and play on the legit servers unless you register a legit CD key. In this way, most online games are safer from piracy in that they require a valid cd-key to play on legitimate multiplayer servers.
But here's my question to developers... whatever happened to releasing a partial shareware demo of your games before retail release? This is the business model that seems to have worked so way back in the day and got me to buy games like Doom, Quake, and the like. When did it become so important to get the game out the door that a game demo became a crippled, afterthought that might be released several months after launch?
Game developers really need to rethink their strategy on this one. Stardock has the right idea and should be applauded for their efforts to cater to the gaming community, but more can be done. Bring back shareware before release. Allow users to trying a full episode or 2 of your game, or maybe even grant temporary cd-keys to everyone at launch and let people play the full game for a few days and then lock them out. I want to buy your games. But show me that they are good and worth buying first.
Side note: I'm still goading said friend into buying the game so that we can play the new Entrenchment expansion online. We'll see how that goes.
My post above was 100% on topic. Moderators, don't be assholes.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
... you should know a lot of people are freeloading scavengers as soon as they don't think their actions have any consequences.
... and the really irritating part of it is not so much the fact that they are ripping off stuff you poured a lot of sweat and money into creating, it's hearing them justify the act by citing the most outrageous examples of RIAA, MPAA, etc... abuse or hiding behind some false ideals about wanting to fight for peoples right to free exchange of information. I'm all for free exchange of information but when that means that products are being widely distributed free of charge on P2P networks even before you have had time to get them to market properly then something is wrong. Mind you big studios and software houses have the moolah and political clout to protect them selves against this to some extent. Piracy tends to hurt most badly people like small independent Music/Movie producers and small software companies particularly and trust me those people have very little stake in mafias like RIAA, and MPAA and analogous groups for the software industry.
I read this from a developer's perspective and I see something different than most of you: Piracy helped them!
(I can hear the collective 'What!?', so you can save those replies.)
They were only prepared for dismal sales. They said the server initially ran 'less well' with 10s of thousands of people online at once. They sold 18,000 copies. All of those people will want to be online at once at the start, so they weren't even really prepared for the real sales they got.
Then they got 5x that amount because of the piracy. This let them see exactly where the system needed to be improved to handle the load.
They managed this improvement -in a single day-.
In my world, anything that can help me make that kind of improvement is a massive help.
And lastly, I'm a -very- avid gamer and I had never heard of this game. Now it's on Slashdot's front page. You cannot -buy- that kind of advertising.
Last note: Anyone that publishes an online game without a serial code is a fscking moron. Most crackers will not write a keygen for an online game specifically because it costs the developers money when they do so. They only write keygens for offline games.
And 1 more: Note that there are only 6,000 players on the rankings for the tournament. http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/rankings/tournament/8/page/182 Are we really supposed to believe that only 6% of the people playing an online strategy game are interested in its first tournament? Or maybe that 100,000 was pulled out of their ass.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
I've talked about this topic quite a lot and it comes down to strategy. It's bad to degrade the quality of your product with DRM, but it's equally bad to degrade the quality of your service by making it completely open.
The solution?
Implement an account login for servers run by the company, or certified companies associated with them. This way you're giving away the game, at LANs it can be plaid for free, give away the server client as well, so if you want to play it somewhere else for free you can. But have a quality service (perhaps a monthly fee?) for use on the servers, then track stats, etc.
Differentiate between paid for clients and un-paid clients.
Your goal is to provide a valuable product, connect with your audience, and value add to the product for money.
That's the name of the game and it's simple.
It's the Linux model, hell even Microsoft uses this model (to some extent).
This was bad strategy on their behalf, since this is somewhat easy thought.
In other news, I'm a business strategist if this company or any other gaming company wants someone to analyze strategies and develop ideas like this, get in contact with me. :-)
This is my footer. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There are no such posts because these numbers are meaningless to anyone but possibly some shareholders of Google, who by the way would be idiots to believe them without verification.
No, what I am saying is that we have no way to tell if he is full of it. And so we should view his statements through the lens of that inability. Then if you add to this his previous statements and other possible explanations ...
I never said that he is wrong, I only said that we have no way to tell and that others with similar motivations were caught making implausible statements very much along the line of his. For example, some believe, with a good reason, that 100k "pirates" is not a plausible number given the popularity of these games. Very similar to the implausible multi-billion dollar "losses" of the music industry, of which we too have no method of verification.
Or some malicious ex-employee used a bot-net to bring them down or .... etc and so on. Look, "piracy" (even if we take the numbers at face value) is not the only, not even the most likely explanation.
You got it precisely backwards. The onus of proof is on the person proclaiming their "numbers" as accurate, not on the skeptic that challenges them. My example illustrated that quite nicely, although it seems to have went over your head at orbital altitude.
See above. What I demanded is precisely what any empiricist would do. I used logic and an established procedure for verification of data. What you demand is that we apply the "arguments" of the Creationists to everything, which goes something like "There are 27 and a half Angels on the end of a pin and it is up to you to prove me wrong! You cannot? Hah! It's only right that you Heathens would be so powerless against the Glory of my Divine Knowledge!!!" ...
Just because the wrong word has been used wrong for a long time doesn't make it right.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Piracy in copyright is COMMERCIAL infringement of copyright.
Not noncommercial.
That's why there's the statutory damages and they are so high: an empty warehouse where once were CDs doesn't let you know how many were sold before you caught them.
Strange how people who rail against people calling piracy "theft on the high seas" don't actually correct their own mistakes on what piracy is.
Just like the ones saying it's not piracy, you lie about what it means because that lie supports your preconcieved notion.
Why is everything obscenely black and white in any topic about piracy?
People who are pro P2P claim that the company is evil, or that the people who obtained it illegally aren't real sales numbers.
People who are pro company claim that the pirates would have bought it, and that the company's nose is 100% clean.
Can't we just agree that -some- of those people would have bought it, and that -no- company is pure?
Although, if it was an early release not truly intended to happen, I imagine bittorrent browsers would have found out about the torrent before the official release...
And you can wildly guarantee that no one knows the true sales numbers of -any- company if no one torrented it. Why? That's (let's just say) 100,000 people who didn't buy it. Can you assume that every single one of those people only stole it because they could? What if the reason they didn't buy it was because the shit was too expensive? If bittorrent didn't exist, what would companies complain about this time?
Keep in mind that the gaming industry was one of the few industries to make a profit last year. If bittorrent didn't exist, would they even -notice- the lost sales?
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347467
Well, what a dramatic week it's been. The teams at Stardock and GPG have been burning the midnight oil this week.
As those of you who have the game can already see, the server issues are gone. We've recreated a duplicate of the server infrastructure we had but dedicated to users who have the most recent version of the game and a valid CD key (serial #).
Based on the logs, we are seeing lots of games being played on-line now. Yay. Average game has approximately 4.7 humans in it which is a good sign.
Some clarifications
I've seen a lot of news articles this week and a lot of confusion about what occurred this week. The issue isn't terribly complicated.
Ars Technica had a good article that describes what happened. But still, a lot of people seem to think warez users are able to play multiplayer games. No, they can't. Even the retail box has a serial # in it that users have to use and be validated to play online. What brought down servers was a lot more benign than that. It was the HTTPS requests to inform users if there was a new version along with checking the community features for info (friends lists, chat channels, etc.) and things like that. Things like that are pretty piddly. It's only when you get a ton of users doing that at the same time that it becomes a problem as we saw.
But here's the thing: While piracy is annoying, you can't blame piracy for this problem. Let's face it, there's plenty of data out there about how many pirated games are being played. We should have looked at that. We assumed since Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations, both of which sold extremely well and got great reviews, that the # of pirated copies of Demigod in use would probably be in the same ballpark, maybe twice as much. But had we looked at what other publishers have said, we would have known that it's not unusual for there to be hundreds of thousands of warez copies in use. And if we had, we could have simply had the retail version not have any HTTP calls in it and instead just had an update button on the main menu to check for updates and voila, problem solved.
The second misconception is the argument that because Demigod's retail version is heavily pirated that it costs massive sales. But that, again, puts the blame on the wrong parties. If you want to talk about the horrible multiplayer experience on launch day, well, that's our fault because of what I said above. If you want to say that the horrible day 1 multiplayer experience resulted in negative game reviews which will seriously damage the game's sales then I say again, that's our fault too because of what I said above OR we could have just sent out the review copies on release day (Tuesday) and reviewers wouldn't have had it until Thursday by which point the problem had largely been resolved and the review scores would have been fine. But in either case, it's still our fault.
So now what?
Now that the servers are working fine we're moving away from the "#$R@#@# Demigod sux!" posts and into the regular new game release issues.
So what issues are we seeing and working on? Here are a few at the top of our lists:
1. Players getting disconnected during games. Demigod's lag tolerance is fairly low resulting in disconnects if a player lags out a bit. This is fairly easy to fix. You get a player in Australia playing a user in Europe and there will be times when there's a hicup in their connection and POW, disconnect and it's extremely frustrating. I played all day today and it happened to me. This is a very high priority.
2. NAT negotiation. For users outside the United States in particular using DSL, this is a problem. This is a case where player A can't see player B and thus they can't play together. This is something we will be aggressively looking at next week. If we hadn't had the server overload, we likely would have this addressed already.
3. Panthe
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
These folks do seem relatively enlightened about their stance on DRM; and having been bitten by the downsides, seem to be spinning their plight and position rather positively in the internet press for the last few days.
They certainly seem realistic, and willing to adapt. I'm going to pay attention to them now. I don't game much at all, but I'd consider being their customer for sure, just because they are interesting.
You can't be ahead of the curve, if you're stuck in a loop.
Millions of predicatable comments on Pirates vs DRM and nobody comments on whether the game is any good.
Figures.
What benefit is it to basically advertise to gamers that their game is piss easy to download?
Requiring a server for matchmaking, statistics tracking, player rankings, etc is not DRM. It's building a way to get all the data they require and allow people to find to play with and it's not an excuse to be a complete pikey and steal the game.
We have two part system: a client and a server. The client is just a program. I think it's ok to pirate that. But the server is not just a program. It needs hardware to run it and the company is providing that. So by connecting with a pirated client you use a service you didn't pay for.
I think the company should give away client software or sell without DRM or whatever, but there should be subscription fee on company servers. That'd be fair. I don't know why they didn't think of that in the first place.
You cannot -buy- that kind of advertising.
Oh, are you sure? There's been many "articles" on Slashdot that are so obvious ads you couldn't even call them "veiled ads" anymore, simply because they aren't veiled.
It's usually blamed on the incompetence of editors who don't even read stories, but who knows - how do you know e.g. timothy or kdawson don't approve stories occasionally because they got some extra jink in their paypal accounts? How do you know the rest don't?
I'm not saying it's the case; I'm just saying that I'd be careful with statements like "you cannot".
Yes it does. That's how the English language has evolved. You may have a point about French, where the language is governed by L'Académie franÃaise (Slashdot will no doubt mangle those accents), but English has no such guiding authority. English is governed entirely by how it is used. The only case you may have against a particular use is if it harms comprehension, for example the recent American use of 'I could care less' instead of the more accepted 'I couldn't care less.' In the case of a term that has been used for three hundred years, and which is unlikely to cause any confusion, the only people who complain are those who dislike English for the exact reason that has made it so popular; its ability to evolve and adopt neologisms.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Speaking from knowledge with people I've worked with -- It proved to not have much of a significance when sales was concerned.
Doom and Quake were the exception, not the rule.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.
That has to be the most masterful and gentle re-phrasing of the "them darkies don't want freedom, they enjoy slavery" argument I've ever read.
But it's still bullshit.
Shareware games were how stuff like Wolfenstein/Doom and others pretty much built the PC game industry as we know it in the 90s. So I ask whatever happened to shareware? You'd download what was pretty much the full game without significant limitations (for example the shareware version would have only the first episode of several) and you paid a comparatively small fee to get the full version. If you didn't like the shareware game you were neither likely to pirate the full version nor end up with a regrettable purchasing decision. It was a great business model and it grew the market.
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Piracy is unstoppable. Not trying to troll here, I just feel like people are beating themselves up over an unsolvable problem. This is just the end of an era and people are reluctant to admit that their entire industry needs to change.
Either accept the fact that far more people will use your product illegally and be happy with the few sales you get, or be a free, as in beer, developer. It's what it is.
Just because the wrong word has been used wrong for a long time doesn't make it right.
Uh, that's *exactly* what makes it right. I am old enough to remember when "hacker" used to mean "computer enthusiast," and did not have any pejorative connotations. I am even so old as to remember when "hacker" meant "a bad golfer," before the word was co-opted by computer use entirely.
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Like it or not, media influences language, and it's completely legit. If you want a fascinating and telling lesson in the process, look up the history of the word "geek."
Piracy will just drive GAS (Games as a Service)more prevalant.
You will get games structured as a monthly service with the game itself free. WoW seems to be doing just fine.
Then someone after about 2 years will figure out how to write an emulator (ArcEMU for instance) and people will set up their own hacked servers. Then the emu host can listen to 100+ players complain and after 6 months of screwing around with emu servers come right back, plop down $15 a month for quality service.
As we see a lot on slashdot, the idea for paying for imaginary property is idiocy. You cannot STEAL if there is no loss. A copy is a copy. If someone makes a clay pot and I make a copy who in their right mind would.. oh wait... knock off purses... Copyright law is the fantasy of the greedy. Period. I DO NOT BELIEVE IN IMAGINARY PROPERTY!
Even more so Copyright law was to protect an author from having a company publish his works and sell them. There was never a witch hunt against someone transcribing the book by hand and giving it away... Copying the information wasn't an issue, it was profiting from it was the issue...
MY God Gutenberg would have been arrested in todays... err.. wait...
Service is future of gaming. Online accounts you pay $5 a month to maintain and $5 each game you want to play that month, or a $40 a month unlimited subscription. It will come to that... Gaming will turn to Cable TV's model. Once they start storing save data, etc in the digital distribution channels that will signal the start if this... err wait what is Steam doing now?
Although these were exceptional circumstances, if we imagine that the ratios they experienced were true 18000/118000 is about 15% are payers... If they reduced the price to 15% of $40 = $6 ...Would that ratio change by much?
Would more people buy the game overall?
If they knew when pirated copy of game was trying to connect (like Blizzard does?), they should have blocked that connection and perhaps temp_ban that IP.
This looks like "We are stupid, but we blame for our problems our no-DRM policy and would like to switch. See how bad no-DRM is?".
Wonder who they gonna blame after they switch.
What would be of Microsoft, if piracy was completely eliminated?
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
It's not exactly difficult to have a serial number inside each copy of the game, and register that to the user account. It's even possible to build that mechanism in a way that allows resales.
But it is difficult to keep your authentication server from getting slashdotted by copyright infringers' repeated failures to authenticate.
... does not take into account the fact that the people that want information will find a way to get it for free, you do not have a business model.
This doesn't mean freeloading is a good thing, just that we're passed the "don't copy that floppy" stage and piracy happens regardless of how much or how little DRM you put in your product.
This is for all the 'piracy is good/bad' people..
I like to think of myself as a reformed pirate. Back in the day I used to download everything I could get my hands on and I rarely paid for a game. I mean why should I when I can just download them?
Then I got a well paying job and I thought to myself, I can actually afford these games now, I should give my money to the people that have worked hard on these games so they they can continue to make them.
Then something interesting happened. As the games were now woth actual money to me, I started to get picky about what I was going to buy. Read reviews, didn't get things on day 1, played demos. The end result is now I don't download games OR buy them. I have a few games that I bought that I am still interested in, and I pay a subscription on an MMO, but I pretty much no longer pay or play any other games.
You can steal something non-physical. Just try to steal cell-phone air time or cable tv service. Theft of service is still theft, that's what the law calls it, and that's how the courts treat it.
Or how about identity theft. You still have your original (though now much tarnished) identity, don't you?
It's theft when you appropriate something (a good or service or anything else) for your own or some others' use, without the person's permission. Give it up already.
An argument mainly put forth by people who don't know how to use It.
The important point that SmallFurryCreature makes is that language is political, and has often been used as tool of tyrants. Notice the use of the language of the American Right: "The Patriot Act" for a set of laws that run counter to the Constitution. "Right to Life" for people who would deny the rights of women. "Defense of Marriage Act" which would deny the rights of a significant portion of the population to marry.
Calling someone who downloads a copy of Skip Spence's Oar from 1969 using a TPB torrent a "pirate" at a time when there are real pirates doing violence and holding human hostages is purely propaganda and a misuse of La Lingua. It was thus in Daniel Defoe's day and it is thus today. If the RIAA wants to use the term "pirate" that's fine, because they are engaged in a propaganda campaign. We don't have to accept their usage however, and we certainly don't have to adopt it.
BTW, there may also be examples of the American Left using English in a way that bends meaning, but since I'm one of them, I'm not going to go out of my way to cite examples, although George Bush was Hitler.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I am sick to death of hearing the incessant whining from anti-DRM "copyfighters." Sick sick sick.
Okay, are you happy now? A bunch of people worked really hard on a product that was extremely expensive to make, they trusted people, and people did what people do: Act like miserable, selfish shits. And the people who did the work had to foot the bill, not only in lost sales, but in bandwidth and bad reviews. It's shameful.
Same thing happened when Trent Reznor helped Saul Williams make their first foray into online distribution. No one paid. Piracy doesn't hurt MS (helps it, actually), it doesn't actually hurt NIN (too big--if only a small percentage of NIN fans buy, that's still a lot of money, and most of us are in our 30s and 40s now and have the money), but someone like Saul Williams or this game company I've never heard of? Kills them.
A blowhard like Cory Doctorow can go on all he wants about how he succeeded because everyone got his horrible high-school-level science fiction for free, but the truth is that he got a blogging gig with the most popular English-language blog in the world and hijacked it into an endless stream of self-promotion and vilification of the evil idea that if people aren't paid for what they do, they won't do it. There is a 1-person-sized niche market for writers who advocate robbing content creators blind, and he's filled it. But that doesn't stop him from telling every other creator to join in, regardless of their craft, ignoring entirely the fact that his could be done with a pad of legal paper and a stubby pencil.
DRM sucks. I hate it. But unfortunately, I understand exactly why it exists.
Stardock are not "progressive and lenient" on DRM. I cannot sell on a game I purchase from them. Likewise, I cannot download updates / fixes from Stardock for a 2nd hand game of theirs I bought from ebay. When they introduce a system such that you can pass on ownership of a game through their drm system (hell they can take a small cut if they like!) then I'll start buying their games again. Of course, if things have changed recently pardon me and put me right.
Piracy will never be stopped. Every possible security measure companies take will 100% be broken. They might as well save their money they'd use for implementing some nasty DRM and spend it on making a better game. The only way to make sure this doesn't happen is to do something like an MMO where you have to log in to a server with a legitimate account. Also, any heavy multiplayer game people will more than likely buy anyways so they can actually experience the fun of how the game is meant to be played.
The pirates can't play in the tournament, since it requires a serial number. So those 6000 are paying customers.
The sales number is also wrong. It wasn't 18000 sales, it was 18000 online users at the time the number was taken. Actual sales numbers haven't been given out, but are higher then that.
It's kind of sad how a comment gets +5 insightful with this much wrong information in it.
Someone please mod this reply up...
Is it a user's fault that software is poorly developed
A pirate, is a user, and as a software developer, it is their responsibility to ensure that their product is suitable for many kinds of use, including use by pirates.
However they choose to do this is up to them, if they want to tie up their product with DRM, then they deserve to be criticized for it, it hampers usability. Stardock has the right idea here. Sure they made a few misguided development choices, but at least they have the integrity to lay blame where it belongs, with themselves.
Maybe you could let everyone know what you develop - maybe you can send out a few keys if its protected, let the internet masses test your application, sure your employer will be very grateful :)
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Ah, but if language could change once it can change again, and once the number of people who think "piracy" is a silly term for copyright infringement crosses some magic threshold, it will lose that meaning.
Of course, for this to happen one shall have to find some more convincing argument than "but it didn't have this meaning three centuries ago".
sigs are hazardous to your health
Calling someone who downloads a copy of Skip Spence's Oar from 1969 using a TPB torrent a "pirate" at a time when there are real pirates doing violence and holding human hostages is purely propaganda and a misuse of La Lingua. It was thus in Daniel Defoe's day and it is thus today.
Indeed, but that is not particularly relevant. What is relevant is that the use of "piracy" for copyright infringement has gained widespread pulic support and so has become part of the modern language. The use of e.g. "right to life" for anti-abortionism at present only has rather narrow support and has not become part of the language's vocabulary. Maybe it will some day, but it has not happened yet.
sigs are hazardous to your health
If Stardock was able to identify which connections were from illegitimately acquired copies, why didn't they just shut them out ?
The argument for piracy is that file sharing brings no extra cost to the developer/producer, but when a central multiplayer server is involved, that is considered an extra service and thus is NOT cost-free.
What they could have done in this case, is what many others have done for over a decade: have the user create a multiplayer account that is tied to their CD key, only one account per key. That shuts out the pirated copies, avoids the use of intrusive DRM, and keeps the game servers uncluttered for the benefit of paid users.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
And lastly, I'm a -very- avid gamer and I had never heard of this game. Now it's on Slashdot's front page. You cannot -buy- that kind of advertising.
advertising saying "look at this free, easily copyable-for-free game"?!
I don't think anyone would say piracy isn't an issue, especially when someone breaks a street date and pirates are getting their copies a week early.
The question is if DRM would have prevented that in the least. My opinion is that 98% of that piracy would of happened no matter how draconian the DRM was. Even the best DRM really only stops casual piracy, which IMO doesn't explain 100k copies in the 1st week.
With that said though, they are especially complaining about pirates hitting their online servers in multiplayer....isn't that one area where drm-like methods (i.e. registered & verified accounts) are effective?
I read this story, then read about half a paragraph of the game description on their website, and bought it immediately.
I use Windows... like a two dollar wh.. why don't I just go ahead and not finish that sentence.
"Right to Life" for people who would deny the rights of women.
I actually think their name is right on. They care about a right to live, not about gender rights or suffrage. They view the growing organism as separate and living, though dependent on its host it is not part of its host. There is nothing in the name "Right to Life" that suggests they support women's rights any more than gun rights.
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
GS broke the street date, it has no DRM, and yet it has a completely average piracy rate (approx 12:1 in this case.) compared to titles with DRM.
One couldn't ask for better proof that DRM wastes everyone's time and money and gains no one anything.
That's how the English language has devolved.
There. Fixed that for ya... ^^
And "I couldn't care less" is sarcasm.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
You've just invoked a vision of the most well-paid slaves EVER! Gucci manacles... priceless.
Your analogy is stretched so thin as to be transparent. Try harder next time.
In the case of a term that has been used for three hundred years, and which is unlikely to cause any confusion, the only people who complain are those who dislike English for the exact reason that has made it so popular; its ability to evolve and adopt neologisms.
English: the Original Open Source Programming Language.
If a word means two things, then it means two things. Just because something terrible happens, it doesn't mean that it suddenly has lost one set of definitions...
Xaotik Designs
well, you don't have to like it, but it's a valuable lesson nevertheless. I respect these guys because they admitted their design could have been better and they would easily avoid the problem. They weren't running around screaming 'omg, pirates are melting our serverz!!'
Even WoW servers sucked balls at the release. They got hit hard with traffic and people had to wait for minutes/hours to log into the game.
"and they wouldn't now be getting so many negative reviews "
Nobody has even heard of the game save a small fraction of the world.
Old age has hit. Silly old fart, games are for kidz !!
What are you talking about? 'I couldn't care less' means 'I don't care about that at all'. 'I could care less' is a mangling of that phrase. If you think about it, it almost means the opposite. Taken at face value it means 'I care about this a tiny bit'. No one in the UK says 'I could care less', so I assume it is an American phenomenon.
Don't forget, we have 4 types of english. British English, Canadian English, East Indian English and Australian English.
Americans don't speak english. They mangle it beyond believe and people *hate* it.
Your comments give me one word - see: bigotry. Yes, it applies for peoples' opinions on companies too.
Man, you didn't read ANYTHING, did you? Your entire post seems to be conjecture to support your own pre-conceived notions.
1) Having to increase server capacity to support non-paying "customers" is not a bonus.
2) Terrible reviews due to connectivity issues caused by piracy is not good advertising.
3) This has nothing to do with a serial code - the pirates couldn't log into the servers, but they would still communicate, resulting in a sort of DDoS.
4) "Most crackers will not write a keygen for an online game specifically because it costs the developers money when they do so." Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
5) Yes, you should believe only 6,000 people are in the tournament. Pirates can't join, because they can't log into the servers.
Hmm... why do people get the impression that DRM makes any difference. The deal isn't about condoning piracy or ignoring the problem. The deal is that piracy will happen no matter what, and no DRM will save a game from it, only make customers irate for actually paying for a game that doesn't work or that fiddles with their computer without their permition. Stardock isn't being naive, they're just trying to not piss off their customers. What happened with Demigod's launch was just bad luck and assholish behavior from the retail stores.
The best proof I can think of is Spore. It had one of the most Draconian DRM ever conceived, and, yet, the game was pirated even before the release date. A lot of people bought the legitimate game game and still prefered to take a pirated copy afterwards for being fed up with the DRM.
Either way, it was just poor judgement to launch the game without a free demo for download. Odd because both Supreme Commander and Sins of a Solar Empire had demos (and both these demos convinced me to buy these Stardock games). I only took Demigod because I already had an idea of what I'd get because of DotA.
DRM doesn't hurt pirates, it hurts legit users. I mean really, you think Demigod was pirated because it has no DRM? You are real naive then. Go search TPB sometime. It is chock full of DRM software. Hell, there's stuff for DRM'd systems like the PS3 and Xbox 360 on there. The warez groups have no problems cracking DRM. Goes double for games these days since they all use off the shelf DRM packages. Thus the crackers know what to look for and have a much easier time removing it.
But DRM can and does hurt legit users. When Civ 4 Beyond the Sword came out, I headed over to Target and bought it. Installed it, it refused to run, said my CD was invalid. Well I took it back in case I had a damaged disc (that happens sometimes) but no, the version of SafeDisc 4 it used was incompatible with my drive. Pissed me off, of course, and I debated what to do since the store won't let you get a refund on open games. I mean I could force the issue, leave it in the store and block the CC charge, but they could then ban me from shopping there. I eventually settled on just downloading a crack.
In terms of Demigod, well I preordered this game. Why? A number of reasons but the lack of DRM was one. I like Gas Powered Games and in particular their RTS titles. So I figured it'd probably be fun. I like Stardock games. Given that there was no DRM, and thus no problems, I said "The hell with it," and preordered it. Now funny enough, I'm kind of the opposite of the pirates in that I have it legit, and haven't played it. I've installed it and fired it up, but haven't played really at all because I'm busy with other things.
So I personally feel that DRM sucks because it makes life more difficult for me, and I am extremely unconvinced it prevents copying. Look at Spore. That thing was protected by the new SecuROM, supposedly the bestest DRM EVAR, and when it came out there were tens of thousands of people in the torrent on TPB. So wht the hell is the DRM doing for you, other than pissing off the people who paid for it?
And "I couldn't care less" is sarcasm.
You're an idiot
Interestingly, I would never have found and bought the game if it weren't for the piracy inspired headline on Slashdot. To the extent that word of mouth is a fairly effective way of promoting legit copies (online multiplayer with friends on vent is very fun for me), I like Stardock more and more with each of these stories.
Signatures are the new names.
"L'Académie franÃaise"
C'mon, Slashdot. This is the 21st century, and you're stuck on ASCII. What is this, a monocolor terminal? Catch up to the fucking present already.
Just another "DOJ fascist authoritarian totalitarian bootlicker" -- Zeio
I would say I agree with you. However, there is the little case of actual pirates. What do we call them?
Is people need to eat. They need to pay the rent. They need to buy electronics. So people have to get money somehow. If you take the idea of "All information is zero cost, you can't charge for it," well then nobody can have a job creating information. While some OSS heads think that'd be great, they forget that this causes a situation where all information will be hobby generated only. There's some problems with that:
1) People can't spend as much time on it. I work for 8 hours a day, I sleep for 8 hours a day. That leaves 8 hours for everything else. That includes eating, cleaning, home maintenance, etc. Thus the amount of time I can spend on something that's a hobby is MUCH less than what I can spend on something that's a job. If you are paying me I can spend 8 hours a day, maybe more depending on, working on it. If it is a hobby I probably have 4 hours max that I even could spend on it and I'm not likely to since I want to spend time goofing off on other things.
2) People won't do things they don't like. You discover that often people are skilled at doing something that they don't particularly enjoy doing. Well, if you pay them, they'll be willing to do it. If you want it for free, they probably won't. For example I'm skilled in desktop Windows support. I am good at figuring out why there's a problem, hardware or software, and fixing it. However I don't really enjoy doing it. So for my employer, who pays me, I'll do it, even if there's other thigns I'd rather do. As a hobby, I won't.
3) You won't get things that have big physical costs. For example you won't get movies that have special effects that require expensive items in the real world. Since people aren't getting any money, they can't afford to throw a lot of money at it. While people certianly do throw money at their hobbies, it is never as much as a business can throw at their product.
So if you want the "No info costs anything," model, you have to be prepared for a lot of things to simply stop existing, and a lot of others to take way longer to come to life. Anyone who is currently employed doing something creative like that will have to find new employment doing something else and only work on their creative stuff as a hobby. Unless you have a way to get them all the material things they need and want, they've got to have a job that will.
You forgot some fairly widely spoken varients.
Singlish, easily the most incomprehensible dialect, which is an unholy meld of Mandarin and English.
Nigerian English is quite tricky too, though I believe it's technically a pidgin instead of a dialect, most people call it a dialect.
There's Indian English, which when spoken correctly is more elegant than British English, albeit often hidden in an impenetrable accent.
Finally, British English hides a range of confusing and difficult dialects, such as (the nearly-extinct) Cockney, Scouse, Geordie and Scots dialects.
Because English is a non-centralised language, all of these dialects are equal and legitimate uses of English.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
He can continue to fight it if he wants, it may help to push the term "piracy" meaning "copyright infringement" into uncommon usage. The english language does drop words periodically.
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1198841&cid=27622135 take a look there and see who the stupid one is (you).
"There goes the argument that games are only pirated because companies insist on draconian DRM."
Except nobody says that only you - so by inventing a bullshit postulate you got some idiot to mod you up.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
Occam's razor isn't the one true measure of truth. If it were, then Quantum mechanics and General Relativity would never have been accepted.
But in this case, Occam's razor doesn't apply because prepositionally, your statement is equivalent (or even more complex) to the grandparent post.
Compare:
. "People Pirate" Because "Try before buy"
. "People Pirate" Because ("People want free" or "People are lazy")
WRT disasters, it's a different phenomenon. It's more an example of the tragedy of the commons (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons). You need food and supplies, and if you don't get it first, someone else will. If you believe others will steal to get it, and you'll only follow the rules if other people will (i.e. you're more concerned about fairness than morality), then you will steal whatever you need and feel justified. This is basic game theory.
Given that open source works, and given that music sales actually increased when Napster and their successors came on the scene, I think that the grandparent's hypothesis is likely correct for a large number of cases.
But it's easy to test out -- follow the DOOM model. Provide a fully functional version that includes a "typical" game for free and encourage copying, then provide advanced levels that are worth purchasing and ask people not to pirate because a good enough free version exists.
Will there be piracy in this model? Sure, but I'd be surprised if it were anywhere near as big as it is now.
I know that in this age, cynicism is considered more wise than realistic optimism, but the movers and shakers in any age are not the cynics, they're the realistic optimists like RMS, who can see objectively why something is not working and find a way to make it work the way it should.
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement."
That's so last year, gramps.
Brb, gonna go pirate myself a sandwich from the fridge.
Yes, yes, and it was us the deniers of Corporate Divinity, unbeliever heathen "bigots" who caused the banking meltdown too, whereby hundreds of the wealthiest and most respected corporations engaged in gambling on credit to the tune of trillions ... but we are just dumb and "do not understand" the "sophistication of CEOs"! Surely!
I mean if billion dollar corporations with tens of thousands of employees and 100 floor sky-scrapers in Manhattan could engage in all kinds of such fun, a rinky-dinky game company just must be Angelically Pure As Driven Snow .... no?
Yes, I know, seriously off topic:
Anyway, Right-to-Lifers do support the woman's Right-to-Choose. The thing is, they made their choice already.
If you don't want the baby, don't murder it, give it up for adoption. There are plenty of women who desire to be mothers and can't have babies the "normal" way.
Hey big mouth, take a look here http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1198841&cid=27622135 and see how stupid you are.
So, to sum up, you're saying:
Piracy is good, because their QA was so shitty they never bothered to stress-test their multiplayer servers, and now the pirates have forced them to do it?
Uh. Yah.
Comment of the year
From what I've gathered, Stardock and GPG made some goofs that they're paying the price for.
Piracy is expected, and that's not really their primary concern. The pirates are not their customers. The lack of DRM shenanigans is applaudable, but a good number of them probably just want to demo the game before buying, so releasing a demo much later (supposedly in a month or so) inflates these numbers.
The retail shipments to GameStop purportedly did not have release dates included, so they were sold early. If that's the case then Stardock shares the blame here, otherwise chalk it up to GS being evil and backstabbing their online competition.
The unexpected early player volume (retail and pirates) bombed their servers because only enough for beta players were online. They expected that volume the next week and spent the weekend ramping up in response.
Launching the game executable immediately checked online for updates, even for pirated copies that cannot get them, since they cannot log in to Stardock's Impulse service! This furthered the multiplayer connectivity problems by severely choking up the NAT-handshaking servers, which should have been restricted to multiplayer matchmaking only, and not hit with every connection.
In this case, they probably should release a tiny patch for the pirates (presumably any unpatched retail copy), because it's the only way to cut down on those connections. They can't otherwise ID the pirates because the default retail versions behave the same way.
Here's how to avoid this in the future:
1) No release/street dates. When it's done and the servers are all online, then you ship.
2) Games that focus on multiplayer shouldn't attempt an update without being logged in.
3) Demo builds should be a proper subset of the full game, so there's no extra work to do when you ship except make one more release for the demo.
I don't know what the sales look like, but paying gamers everywhere wish Stardock the best. Demigod is currently $40 download-only and $50 for a download + boxed copy (collectors edition maybe?) on Impulse from Stardock. Retail copies are already $35 with free shipping on both Amazon and Newegg.
18,000 legitimate copies @ US$40.00 each = US$720,000.00
118,000 copies @ $US40.00 each if they had all be legal copies = US$4,720,000.00
Only 15% of copies are legal copies.
Direct revenue lost due to illegal copies: $4,000,000 plus revenue lost due to bad reviews and bad player experience caused by the illegal copies.
There goes the argument that illegal copies are harmless and don't cost anyone anything.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
"I could care less" is Irony (a very good example of it too).
Which is why I say that all companies and CEOs whos companies use DRM should start being called 'child molestors' for molesting our internal child. Once that has been done for a little while, then it will be entirely legitimate to call the heads of most software companies child molesters.
It is too bad we can't rewind history and release the game again, all conditions being equal, but this time, strong DRM in place.
I would guess we'd see less than 18,000 legit copies connecting, and some number less than 100,000 pirated copies connecting.
Net loss for the company most likely.
If you read the blog post they say it's their own dumb fault for not expecting so many pirates.
In other words it is still sort of the pirate's fault. But they're taking responsibility for not planning adequately for the level of illegal behavior.
Both sides I would say are on a pretty safe footing. 1) Cause was Piracy 2) Cause was Stardock not planning for piracy.
Still that's a bit like blaming the victim. "Oh my we should have planned to get robbed and put better locks on our doors on opening day. Our bad."
Never heard of this game either. It might be a huge publicity stunt. A better question is, how many "pirates" are from outside the US?
But... the future refused to change.
The problem is that now that high seas piracy is on the rise it is getting a little confusing. I couldn't figure out how those kinds of pirates interrupted the release of a downloadable game. Unless they hijacked a container ship full of dump trucks going across the undersea tubes?
Saying they were only prepared for "dismal sales" is a bit misleading. They expected that the initial launch wouldn't have a huge number of people—it is an independently published game in a niche market with almost no advertising budget, after all—but that the numbers would continue to grow as word-of-mouth spread. This would've given them plenty of time to worry about scaling issues as they started to appear.
It's true that this scaling would've needed to happen eventually if the game took off, but there's no disputing that the launch has suffered a bit from the unexpected popularity. If they were all paying customers, that would be one thing; however, as it stands, the developers had to go out of their way to support a bunch of freeloaders and deal with criticism saying they're unprepared for a launch. It's a pretty rotten way to treat a company that's been very customer-friendly and supportive in the past.
Not only that, they also have to put up with these absurd justifications. "The website didn't tell me enough, I don't trust reviews, and there's no demo—piracy is my only option!" "The pirates helped them identify their scaling issues!" "If only they'd had a serial code then we would've respected their rights!"
I don't mean to single you out—the first quote there isn't even something you said—but we really don't need more people trying to spin piracy as "not so bad" or whatever. 100,000 people are assholes who probably weren't customers anyways, and there is no romantic "sticking it to the man" tale to be had here. I hope that this doesn't discourage Stardock and Gas Powered Games from making PC games in the future.
Schlock Mercenary
I bet part of it is because the MSRP is the price for most new games. Period.
You either pay, $40, $50, or $60 for a game.
There's no negotiation, no discussion with the market with respect to what is a reasonable price due to a natural monopoly.
I would buy more games if they weren't so expensive.
Why don't they offer differing versions of multiplayer games with a pricing scheme? Not something that gives players an advantage over others in combat or against NPCs. That way combat of the moment is level no matter how much you paid. But maybe something that makes you progress faster, or gives you more inventory space or something.
Make it so you can upgrade to these higher priced version later if you want.
Get freaking creative with your business model instead of this stone stupid scheme of:
It's $40 to get in, and $14.95 a month thereafter, period.
You have the power to make more money and make your customers happier with something like I mentioned above.
For example I just today learned that there's an item that makes you level faster, but the only way to get it is to recruit four friends into becoming subscribers. And I'm considering setting up 4 new accounts temporarily just to get it. Lucky for me I'm gainfully employed and not living in my parents' basement or something, so the cost doesn't amount to much compared to my existing expenditures on eating out.
Question everything
Most of us, if we can get something for free, we probably will, if we don't like it we'll throw it away. Throwing something away, something that didn't cost anything, is no sweat off our backs.
To claim that all those that got something for free and like it would have bought it is quite wrong.
Would there be more people buying? seems likely, would it be all these 80% 90%+ figures? doubtful.
The "lost revenue" argument has some ground, but the revenues lost would be quite small. If I'm a cheapskate, I would not part with my money to buy some 3 out of 5 stars game, no way. So really, what would entice me? an awesome game! who decides what an awesome game is? me!
Would that make me biased towards myself? could it be that if I get tons of games for free, and thus have a wide selection of decent games I would only think the very best are worth money?
I think so.
So really, IF I get that 3 out of 5 star game, play it for a couple of days and say "Eh, it's so so, not worth my money" I'm not being fair.
On the other hand, I could have gotten the demo, right?
How many demos convinced me the game is worth money only to change my mind after I bought the game? PLENTY!
You see the trailer, the trailer looks amazing, you play the demo, game seems cool, you buy it, turns out to be a flop. Heard this story before?
So, let's ASSUME I'm really a potential buyer, because well, everyone is. I use a product which I got for free, a product that I would not have bought PRIOR to using it. Now it's about my subjective, biased judgement.
Or maybe, let's ASSUME I'm not a potential buyer, just a free-loader, because well, there is a free-loader in all of us. Maybe you, whoever you are do not free-load games, maybe it's beer? maybe you're always bumming off someone else's smokes? ARE YOU THE A-HOLE THAT ALWAYS TAKES MY GREEN TEA IN THE OFFICE?? (nevermind)
So I'm a free-loader (allegedly), I get stuff for free and I do not pay for it, would I buy it if I would not get it for free? OF COURSE NOT, I'M A FREE LOADER, GEDDIT? (Play it at a friends house, god some people are cheap)
So really, the argument is valid for the in betweens, the people who USUALLY, or PARTIALLY download games & do not pay for them. Because they pay for some, why not pay for all? Cause some people pay for none, and they would never consider changing that. And there are those that always buy, the zealots. They get the worst of both worlds, they get DRM, they get the crap games that are not worth money etc etc...
So, back to the start, are companies LOSING MONEY>? yes. Is that 90% of what they should be getting>? no. Does that make it right? no, it doesn't. Is justice an ideal or a reality? (DUH)
There is good and bad in everything. If you couldn't download fully working copied of games, would there be a sales increase? yes, would people get ripped off? yes. Do these facts negate each other? not really.
Everyone wants to have it their way...this is a complex problem. There is no clear answer on who's "fault" it is...because really, both sides are not always playing fair.
I have a middle ground, personally. Is my middle ground fair? no, is it just? no, can anyone do anything about it? no.
I play games, LOTS and LOTS of games. I probably play an average of 7 games a month. Most of the games I play, I dislike, and that does not get money. You can tell about how much time it took to develop and how much this and that and the other, if I don't like it I'm not paying.
Do I own games? do I regularly pay for them? yes.
I own the total war series. (Empire, Medieval 2, Rome, Medieval 1, Shogun), I own the GTA series (Didn't buy 4 because it SUCKED). I own guitar hero, starcraft, pax imperia, ascendency, Spliter cell series, hitman series (Except hitman 2, which was WAY TOO BUGGY), Fallout 3 + Anchorage DLC (The pitt SUCKED), Mass Effect, Knights of the old republic (Please god, make a KoTR 3!!)
Well... the list does go on quite a bit... I have HUNDREDS of PURCHASED games. (Been gaming for a while now). So, game company, you want my money? would you like me to not be a lost sale? make a game that I deem worthy. These days, the PC game consumer is almighty. IS IT UNFAIR? YES, IT IS!
"I don't have a gamestop store anywhere near me, i don't even think they operate any stores whatsoever in this country, my only way to play this game would have been by downloading it. "
Or, as you've been told repeatedly, stop whining like a fucking brat and wait til the actual release sate, or download it from the developers who PUT IT ON LINE AS SOON AS THEY BECAME AWARE THE RELEASE DATE WAS BREACHED.
Get it?
EVERY SINGLE FUCKING POINT YOU MAKE IS WRONG.
Patently, undeniably, inavoidably WRONG.
And the sad part is, you're so fucking stupid, you make the same retarded argument several times. It's not enough for you to look like a fucking child once, no, you have to spread your stupidity far and wide, reiterating that not only are you a blathering moron, but that you don't even bother to follow up, so you understand how fucking idiotic your "point" is.
Kill yourself. No one who says "I HAD to pirate it, I had no other choice (but wait for the release date, or pay and download it online from the developers, but who's counting...).
God you're a fucking loser.
Regarding demos at this point in time I believe we have a bit of a vicious circle going on. Why bother with the effort of producing a crippled version of your software as a demo version when anyone with a broadband internet connection is going to just download the cracked version if they want a taste. At this point everyone (with the possible exception of the obscenely clueless publishers) realizes that every game will be cracked and made available for download within the first few days of release. So why waste even more money making a demo version? Including all the bandwidth for people to download the crippled version from your servers. It's sort of like all software nowadays is essentially shareware. You can always try the game first before you buy it. Of course, due to bizarrely restrictive DRM, publishers like EA are trying to just rent copies of their games instead of selling them. Not a very smart thing to do when your product is easily available for free. Frankly I think it's time that game developers starting asking for donations from fans. Or maybe trying a ransom method for releasing new titles. You can't crack something that hasn't been released yet.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
based on what they are saying, the issue was not the pirated copies, but more so the fact that gamestop decided to release the game before they were entirely ready for the traffic. had gamestop not released the game before the intended date, many more valid connections could have been counted on release date and no paying customers would have had a poor experience as a result of overloaded servers. the pirated copies and the lack of DRM seems to be a secondary item to this story, but being written as the core of all evil.
its possible the poor performance as a result of the game being released early, could result in less paying customers as a result.
Interestingly enough,
If I could return software I had purchased,
which I found unappealing after buying.
Then,
I would not need to
"copyright infringe" it first
to get the same effect.
However,
It is pretty nice
to just be able to download a game,
rather than go to a store.
Especially if you end up "returning" it
Uh, that's *exactly* what makes it right. I am old enough to remember when "hacker" used to mean "computer enthusiast," and did not have any pejorative connotations. I am even so old as to remember when "hacker" meant "a bad golfer," before the word was co-opted by computer use entirely.
Ok, fess up... who let grampa on the PC again? He's always like this until he's had his pills.
This shit never sold even 18000. Its a publicity stunt.
Do remember the time when shareware was big, while the Internet was small and physical distribution was big ...
I remember packaged shareware cd's costing an arm and a leg (atleast 200 euro) to just get the SHAREWARE - non registered; while seperate packages could be bought for about 12-15 euro as single package...
The cat is out of the bag, we cannot stop the growth of Internet Distribution, it's 2009 and we need to follow ...
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Did work great for Wolvenstein, Commander Keen, Duke Nukem and others ...
Of'course, we are still waiting for that one delayed edition of forever to come out ;)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
Hacker.
Games are way overpriced. When you take that and put it against the fact that the ratio of quality games versus horrible games is probably something like 1:300, paying $50 per title is a bit much to swallow. Game reviews are fairly terrible, so it's hard to use any of them as a basis for whether I should, or should not, purchase something. I've played many games after reading horrible reviews that I enjoyed quite a bit, and vice versa. Anyone remember that data Valve released maybe a month back where they showed that by lowering the price 50% they actually increased sales of Left 4 Dead by about 400%, or whatever. And that's for a game that had already been out for a few months. If a game was only, say, $25 or so, I'd be much more willing to take a chance on it and just buy the stupid thing. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Games are too expensive. Period. I'm not trying to legitimize piracy, but it'd be nice if someone would actually look at the problem from a perspective that's not "zomg people are thieves!!"
Now it's on Slashdot's front page. You cannot -buy- that kind of advertising.
Actually..... http://slashdot.org/faq/advertising.shtml
You have a company willing to listen to the crazies on Slashdot and not put any DRM in their games. And what do people do? They go out and pirate the game in numbers that interfere with legitimate customers. And then you have the nerve to question the numbers they put out? Seriously, what is wrong with you? I am so sick of hearing the piracy deniers on here. You finally have a game company giving you what you want and you all still act like juvenile little pricks.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
Give me a break. You are stretching so hard to make piracy seem like a good thing. These guys had servers prepared to handle the initial load. But Gamestop and the pirates forced them to work a weekend to scrap together a solution. This caused many legitimate users to have a degraded experience. How is upsetting your legitimate customers a good thing? How many aren't going to buy the game because a friend said they couldn't log in? How many customers won't bother buying another game because of this? This is a perfect example of how piracy is bad for a company and yet there are still so many people on here arguing that it is a good thing. These guys have no DRM and you are still screwing them over. What do you guys want? Obviously you just don't want to pay for software.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
I've been playing beta since it was out. It's a good game that's likely to become niche, I suspect the sheer weird factor of it lead to the piracy levels. It's a lot like the Warcraft 3 mod, Defense of the Ancients (DotA).
Many pirates are going to pirate, end of story. I always make sure Stardock games that are published w/o DRM get my money. This game uses Impulse for multiplayer, so in that way it's like steam and I am somewhat ambivalent about that, luckily they saw fit to include LAN play and, iirc, you can host a over the net game, so if Impulse ever poofs, you merely loose rated matches.
The main problem was that people were banging on the main servers for multiplayer, if you are going to have a game where the multiplayer is more or less channeled through these central severs, then you're going to have to lease capacity for the initial hammering you're going to get from pirates and new players that will play it a couple times and not come back.
I'm sorry this happened to this game, but it's actually brought on by iffy menu design and decisions about how to work with multiplayer.
It's also worth noting, without a valid key, I'm not sure the pirates could do anything other than try and create an account, not play. If that was bringing the servers down, then they vastly underprepared.
If pirates spent half as much time earning money as they spent justifying their actions they would be able to afford to buy the content they are stealing.
All they had to do was publish "product keys" with the CDs. No need to use invasive DRM to ensure that a particular CD is associated with a particular product key, just make sure the product key is associated with a particular online account. That way, if you find several online accounts associated with a particular product key, you can just ban all of those accounts at once without having to interfere with legitimate players, and without having to install a rootkit on the computers of legitimate paying customers.
Ah, but if language could change once it can change again, and once the number of people who think "piracy" is a silly term for copyright infringement crosses some magic threshold, it will lose that meaning.
Don't hold your breath.
Example situation: a college student torrents a Stardock game and finds that he's playing it a lot. He decides to buy a license/serial so he can play on the official servers. He pays via CC and gets his serial. That serial is tied to his CC info in a secure database (to allow for recovery in case of theft, much like what Steam permits), and the serials are generated in the "allowed serials" database for servers at the same time they are sold (so keygens wouldn't work).
This is already how Stardock's digital distribution works (at least for their other games). The only thing they don't do is outright let you download it for free - but with no DRM you get a fully "official" game client just by going the torrent route.
You can install and play the game without entering a key.
You can buy it for digital download, which gives you a key that you can enter into the game and it will be activated and "legit" as far as Impulse (Stardock's version of Steam) is concerned. You can go directly from the "pirate" version to fully licensed legitimate version without even reinstalling.
You can also then use your stardock account to re-download the game at any time and update it at any time.
The unactivated versions have a much harder time updating (if they can update at all) and patches for games are frequent and include additional content as well (the "service")
The "selling a service" line has actually been used explicitly by Stardock.
The future is now :-)
Why, yes I have been touched by His noodly appendage. And I plan to sue.
*headslam* The phrase "I could care less" is a sarcastic version of "I couldn't care less". Implicit in the former is the second part of the sentence which is "but I'm not sure how."
All sarcasm, taken at face value, pretty much means the EXACT opposite if it's intended meaning.
Because by not having a demo, you're forcing them into downloading the torrent edition or skipping the game completely (won't buy something they haven't tried). And once they have the cracked full version, you are no longer able to provide any incentive for buying the full version.
In short, you are relying on the "but I'll buy it if I like it" crowd. Are they honest? It doesn't matter. If they're not, they would get the cracked copy anyway. And if they are, you don't need to care about selling to them. So, either way, they don't matter. Relying on a group that doesn't matter is just bad business.
For everyone else, you want to give them a chance to try the game without wasting money on a game they don't like, and you need to give them an incentive to buy the game, when they found out that they do like it. A demo or shareware game does both. Having no demo, gives them the choice between avoiding the game (won't buy something they haven't tried), or getting the torrent edition.
Intellectual Property: a legalized monopoly for exploiting creative people [reference "Intellectual Property Owners" vs. "Creators"]
They were asking for it to be honest... No unique client key to confirm with the game server, just a huge free-for-all. If you are not going to secure multiplayer for legit players only in a game like this, well... I wouldn't need a second guess to tell you what's going to happen.
Given the choise between Hitler and RIAA/MPAA I'd go for the first one - at least he knew when to shoot himself.
"Attacking someone as such only indicates that you're unwilling to convey your point in a civil manner."
FTFY
And of you weren't such a blathering retard, you'd realize he made the same points several times, and was refuted, with quite a bit of civility, SEVERAL TIMES.
Yet he continued to drone on moronically, then YOU chimed in with your idiotic intro, which, sadly for you, is TOTALLY REFUTED by the ACTUAL CONTENT of my post.
See, asshole, I ATTACKED AND REFUTED HIM. You see that whole line of text talking about "waiting" or "downloading"? Yeah? You can read that?
Yeah, exactly, it DIRECTLY ADDRESSES HIS POINTS AND DESTROYS THEM.
And your imbecil ass COMPLETLEY IGNORES IT so you can trot out the oh so tired and wrong "Attacking someone as such only indicates that you're unable to convey your point in a civil manner."
"I have the game on pre-order with a store here, but they won't have it for a few more weeks.
I've put my money down, I'm supporting the developer, and I want to play the game now."
You purchase and DOWNLOAD IT, so YOUR idiotic points are also moot.
It must be very difficult for you to be such a fucking idiot.
One has nothing to do with the other. One can put all the DRM on the planet in a game and then fib about the "piracy" rates to justify the costs to investors. One can decide to shift the whole business to online-delivered, phone-home activated "non DRM" as Stardock have done and then one can proceed to fabricate an "example" to "justify" such an unpopular change which is vehemently opposed by some customers. So the fact that one has DRM in the first place or is just on his way to put it in, or have none at all, bears no relationship on the desire to fabricate the piracy "numbers". In all cases there exist some motivations to do so.
Err, Stardock was on its way to online-activated DRM "non DRM" solution long before this. Which was vocally opposed by some of its customers. Whom this "example" is possibly meant to "shut up". If being skeptical of corporate PR mumbo-jumbo, irrespective of what company it comes from or how genial and "hip" the CEO is, if demanding objective analysis and an ability to verify bold pronouncements of businessmen means to be "juvenile pricks" then many of us will wear the badge proudly.