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Stardock Declares Victory Over Demigod Piracy
We recently got a look at some hard numbers related to the piracy of Demigod , a new game from Stardock and Gas Powered Games. Now, two weeks later, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has essentially declared the game a success in spite of the piracy, and reaffirmed the company's stance that intrusive DRM is a bad thing. The game's sales figures seem to bear him out. Quoting:
"Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you're playing a pirated copy right now, if you're one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you're a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way. The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don't buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary — our customers."
I'm not sure how this company can say they sell plenty of copys despite DRM, and that they don't use DRM. I personally bought demigod and they use Impulse (Steam basically) which I was forced to install on my pc and authenticate by phoning home to play online not to mention I have to keep this 3rd party app open if I wish to ever play. Demigod is really only a multiplayer game. your options for single player are playing against bots. The pirates playing on hamachi are probably minimal for the same reason few people play dota on hamachi to get around a wc3 cd key. Also I should add that when I bought this game I couldnt even logon for 3 days, because the cdkey in my package was in use (This seemed to be an issue for MANY people) and I had to send about 7 emails to tech support and take pictures of my friggen case and cd to prove I wasn't a "Pirate"
The problem is the word "appropriate". Appropriate means (m-w.com):
1. to take exclusive possession of
But you cannot take exclusive possession of "intellectual property", because it's not really property at all. In a world without scarcity, the concept of property has no meaning.
The third definition is extremely broad - winning the lottery is clearly not theft, but it clearly happens "by chance" and therefore meets the definition. So does buying a gift in secret.
I'm not here to argue that copyright infringement is acceptable. But the reality is that the rights granted to copyright holders are much more limited than the rights granted to property owners. Copyrighted works are not "property" because you can't own an intangible work. You can be granted a limited monopoly on the reproduction, exhibition/performance, and distribution of that work for a limited period of time.
Way too many games out there come out not working well or not at all.
Yep, and how many of those games don't work well because of DRM? Possibly a lot. I HATE DRM (I am agreeing with you, by the way, I think).
Why? Do I pirate games? No. I have a whole shelf full of legally purchased games. Some of these games I can only install a set number of times (I am looking at Far Cry 2 as an example, I had to reinstall XP because I felt like but didn't remember I had to first "revoke" my FC2 activation... there goes one install straight away). Now, continuing with the example, I don't particularly like FC2 and I doubt I will want to reinstall it in 5 years. But, that is MY CHOICE to make. It shouldn't be the publishers choice.
DRM takes my (legal) choices away from me, and the publishers are using piracy as an excuse. Do I want to sell my copy of CoD World at War? Not at the moment, but I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO. Thanks.
Maybe this is flamebait because Brad Wardell has been posting a lot of information about the networking problems they had, how they didn't found them during beta and what they are doing about it.
In the first week, there was an update at least once a day, and even now he's still keeping the players updated about how far along they are, answering questions on the forum and helping players with connection problems.
The UK legal definition of "theft" is: A person shall be guilty of theft if he dishonestly appropriates property belonging to another with the intention of permanently depriving the other of it.
I would be very suprised to find the US definition was not much the same.
That 'permanently depriving' bit though, means copyright infringment can never be theft.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1968/pdf/ukpga_19680060_en.pdf
Nothing wrong with it but he's so inconsistent it's funny. A couple of months ago he was on his usual hobby horse about Steam not being the only service with great weekend deals, because Stardock had a decent offer on at the time. Since then their weekend deals have been non-existent and Steam has had some beauties, like the L4D half off sale or the Orange Box at 66% off. When Steam announced COG (I think), their "non-DRM" DRM solution, Stardock announced GOO which was the same idea. I actually thought that was an April fools joke but apparently not.
This current story is about Demigod hitting no. 3 in the retail sales charts on its first week of release. If it drops off the top ten next week will he post? Of course not. Being at No. 3 means being beaten by a couple of expansion packs for admittedly huge games, but if Demigod from Gas Powered Games was a real splash at launch why wasn't it number one? Pre-orders alone for a successful game should guarantee that.
You can't really say that Spore's DRM either inflated or had no effect on Piracy. It was always going to be massively torrented because of the immense hype.
What? For me it was
"Hey I got this brand spankin' new game, This is great! Let's try it out"
5 alert windows pop up saying "This program is attempting to do things to your computer that you may not want it to do"
"... wha?" Checked online and found all the DRM, Got pissed, and torrented it.
Yes, Logically I trusted a torrent, by some guy I never knew, more then the official product.
The numbers being quoted are from NPD, which is retail only. Stardock pushes their digital versions a lot more heavily then the retail ones.
Hell, around here *finding* a PC game that isn't WoW or The Sims in a store is an accomplishment in itself.
Nobody will know how it's really selling until they release the digital distribution numbers.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Way to troll. First off, how about a citation. I don't have any evidence to the contrary but I wouldn't through allegations around like that without being able to back them up.
Secondly, I am a privately-educated (in high school) American and am doing just fine with an electrical engineering and computer science degree from a well known university, thank you very much. I don't know if that qualifies me as literate but I sure fucking hope so.
Failure formatting five FAQs of financial facts.
No, taking someone's tea is worse because you have deprived them of that tea.
The type of DRM limits his play, and the update basically made it impossible to play the game,e ven with a new install of the original media.
Either it was download electronically(steam?) or there is online play you must ahve the DRM for.
The company added a limitation AFTER the purchase. At the very least people who don't like it should get there money back if they so choose.
It isn't a fix, it's adding a limitation to being able to play the game.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on