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."

Comments

Not really accurate

[dreamchaser]

He isn't gloating. He isn't saying they've beaten the pirates. He's saying the game is selling well despite them, and it is. There's a big difference.

Re:Not really accurate

[laparel]

They do it because they think some games are not worth paying fifty bucks to get eight hours of gameplay.

I'd rather think that more often than not the people that pirates games do so because it's free, convenient, and consequent-free.

Think of it from the point of view of kids. All they'll need is a computer and a broadband connection and they'll be able to play all the latest games(movies, music, applications, books, comics, etc.) that they want.

The only incentive to buy games is for multiplayer and new updates. Stardock understands this, and thus controls their patch distribution to the ones that have legitimate copies for Galactic Civilizations II.

And the kids who do pirate now, will eventually grow up and get jobs and more importantly, money. Hopefully by then, with all the years of guilt of screwing good developers, they would buy the games that brought hours of fun to their lives.

At least, that's what I did. Doesn't make up for all of my past actions but it did remove the guilt of screwing the really good game makers out there. And for the other hundreds of buggy/DRM-ed games & software out there, I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for them and will now avoid them. :)

Bottom line, I bet it's all about money. A small percentage of pirates might be pirates because of their ideologies on DRM and whatnot, but that's just a handful of souls.

Developers/distributors thinking that every pirated copy is a lost sale is idiotic and hopeless. There will always be piracy, better to just not think about them and concentrate on making a good product. It could be a marketing tool even if the game is well made: All things being fair, the more people playing the game the more mods, custom content, and vibrant communities will form.

Re:Not really accurate

[Carik]

There is a difference, though. I'm not saying copyright infringement isn't bad, or that it doesn't harm the company, but there is a difference.

If someone steals a car off a dealer's lot, the dealer doesn't have that car to sell anymore, and thus can't make any money at all off it. If someone steals a comic off the shelf at a comic book store, the store doesn't have that comic book to sell anymore, and can't make money off it. If the person wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't steal it, the store has still lost money in either case: whatever they paid for the item, car or comic, is gone forever with no return. If the person would have bought it if they couldn't steal it, the store has lost whatever they paid for it, plus whatever profit they would have made.

If someone downloads a song, or a game, or a copy of some piece of proprietary software, the company still has it to sell to other people. If the person would have bought a copy if they couldn't download it, the company has lost the value of exactly one sale. If the person would not otherwise have bought it, the company has lost nothing.

Again, I'm not saying downloading software or music illegally is morally or ethically right -- in general, I think it's not, but that's irrelevant to the discussion at hand -- but there is certainly a difference between downloading cracked software and stealing a physical item.

Re:Not really accurate

[Anonymous Coward]

You can sit and twist and contort it however you want, but people pirating games costs other people money. Making a bit-for-bit copy of someone's software is not a consequence-free act no matter how much some people here want to believe otherwise.

Neither side can prove that money would or wouldn't have changed hands. It's all a moot point from a legal perspective, anyway.

However we can talk about things from a moral and ethical perspective. Here's my take:

Corporations own the majority of IP in the world. Corporations lobby for what is effectively becoming an unlimited copyright term, violating the spirit in which copyright was enacted. They aren't respecting the people. Why should the people respect them?

Re:One should never gloat

[BikeHelmet]

Hey, come on now - he's a visionary standing up for our rights!

I don't care about the personality of the CEO, as long as he's providing me with DRM-free games I can play on any computer any time, without fighting with SecuCrap, ShitForce, or requiring a DVD.

The only thing I care about (as a gamer) is whether the game plays (excluding obvious stuff like the game should be fun :P ), and lately a lot of games just don't run. :/ I can't tell you how aggravating it is to buy a game, install it, and find out it crashes instantly with some error code related to the DRM.

Damn you EA. You suck.

Metcalfe's law

[RiotingPacifist]

Won't something like Metcalfe's law also apply to games. The more people that play the game the higher the worth of the game. So while losing customers to pirated versions is bad (but I'd argue not too common and entirely unstoppable by DRM), gaining non-customers to pirated versions is actually good (not very good as you don't get any money) as it adds value to your game. In the case of multiplayer games this value is obvious (even if they can't play against legit version, they will help augment the community) and for single player games they may tell friends and eventually somebody they know who likes the game may pay for it.

It would be interesting if somebody could put a monetary value on pirated version (other than stupidly assuming every pirated copy is a lost sale)

Response to piracy

[mcrbids]

Games are easy to make. Gpogle for 'flash games' and you'll find 100,000 crappy little card games and Tetris clones. Good games are HARD to make. It costs real time from people with real talent who need to be paid in real money. The problem is that the costs of developing a game are not connected to the cost of replicating the game. The first copy of the game costs 5 million dollars. the second copy costs 4 cents.

Piracy isn't an issue until it's so rampant that those with the money choose to pirate anyway.

Would you pay 4 dollars to see a matinee? Would you buy a scifi novel for 6 bucks? Try comparing the time you spend enjoying each of these to the time you spend on a video game, and you'll find that the 40-50 dollars spent on a good game is surprisingly cheap!

I bought GTA San Andreas a long time ago. (years?) I picked it up again this last weekend and got another afternoon of fun out of it!

Don't be at all hesitant to buy a good game, even if you have a playable pirate copy - it's insurance for more fun in the future!

If you like what he's done....

[phantomfive]

If you like what he's done, you ought to contact the company and let them know how you feel. We complain enough here on slashdot, sometime it's nice to be positive for a bit as well. We ought to encourage those who do cool things.

Which has long been his position

[Sycraft-fu]

His argument for a long time has been that copyright infringement sucks, but it happens protections or not. However protections piss off your legit customers. Thus, since they don't stop copying and do piss off the people that pay, don't do them.

I think this is quite a good attitude. I mean yes, people copied the shit out of Demigod. People copy the shit out of most anticipated new releases so that shows nothing other than people are interested in the game. The interesting title to compare it to would be Spore. Spore was much more highly anticipated, however it had real whiz bang copyprotection: SecuROM 7 including online activation. To hear the talk on it, you'd think this was your 100% anti-copying solution. All sorts of nifty encryption and obfuscation and you have to connect to an online server! Ha, beat that shit pirates!

The result? A torrent with 5 digits worth of peers active on it on the Piratebay when it came out. Ya THAT was real effective.

So Demigod got copied all over, but still sells well and they spent $0 on copyprotection and didn't piss off legit customers with it. Spore got copied all over, and they spent a non-trivial amount on protection and pissed off customers.

I don't know how it'll all play out in the end. What I know is that I do own Demigod, and I do not own Spore. SecuROM 7 games can get fucked IMO. I don't play the limited activations thing. I like to be able to upgrade and reinstall my system, and I like to be able to play my games 10, 15, 20 years later (I still play Xcom).

Try and buy or try and ditch

[Aceticon]

As I see it, pirating a game is only excusable if you're doing it to try it, after which you either buy it or stop playing.

Just recently I did this with Galactic Civilizations II - I downloaded it, played it for a while, liked it, went out and purposefully bought the game: Stardock got another sale when, had I not had a chance to check the game, they would have gotten nothing (I don't trust the industry - been burned once too many by some of the over-hyped turds they put out)

Way too many games out there come out not working well or not at all. The game reviews press is no help at all - they'll give glaring reviews to games which are pretty enormous turds, and conveniently forget about the bugs and lack of long term playability.

In my view, it's not at all morally reprehensible to pirate a game for testing - as long as you buy it if you keep playing it.

Re:Try and buy or try and ditch

[Sycraft-fu]

The hardware thing is a real problem because there is no standard for what counts as "minimum" and "recommended". I mean sure every game lists though, but what they actually mean by it varies wildly. Some games are nice and realistic. Their "minimum" means "The minimum hardware you'll need to enjoy playing the game." You find that if you meet the minimum spec, no problem, you gameplay is good. You can't crank everything up, but you still have no play problems. Doom was a game I remember like that. My computer was right at the minimum spec, but it still ran well.

Well other games are very unrealistic. "Minimum" means "Minimum to get the game to execute, but don't bother trying to play it'll suck." Sometimes even the "recommended" means "Recommended to be even somewhat playable but you are still going to have lots of problems." Ultima 9 was one I remember like this. When my roommate at the time got it he had just about the highest end system money could buy, which met or exceeded the recommended specs, and it still ran like shit.

So I do sympathize with people because it's a real problem. We really do need some kind of standard in the game industry so that you can look at the required specs and get a feel for how your system will actually do with a game. If a game needs top notch hardware there's nothing wrong with that, however it needs to be clear. People need to be able to have some confidence that a game will work well on their system.

You = RMS

[Sycraft-fu]

Seriously, this stance on DRM is like the RMS stance on openness "Unless everything is 100% my way, no compromise it is WRONG!"

No, Demigod isn't DRM'd. The DVD is a standards compliant DVD with no trickey shit. The game installs and runs with no checks of any kind.

Online play requires authentication and use of an online server? Oh well stop the presses I mean that hasn't happened with except, well, maybe every online game ever. As to if something like that is DRM is rather a semantic argument. Sure it does require a legit copy, but then the anti-DRM stance was never supposed to be about being allowed to illegally copy things, now was it? Needing to log in to a central server to play is a feature many games have simply for player convenience. Heck I remember when Gamespy first got started it was because the whole decentralized server thing with games like Quake was a problem. How did you find people to play with? So there was a 3rd party "central server" created that all the distributed servers talked to. Newer games are just having their own central service.

Finally no, you needn't run Impulse to run the game. Impulse has it's little "Impulse now" thing that it likes to run, but all that does is check for patches. Shut it down if you like (there's an option to tell it not to load on startup). You can run the game without Impulse, or without a net connection for that matter.

The point here is that if you are going to cast things like having a CD key and using a central matching service in the same category as SecuROM and such, then you are effectively making you definition of DRM meaningless and running off in to zealot territory. The reason you should, as a gamer, be anti-DRM is because it makes games not work. Like you take these recent games with SecuROM that you can only install 3 times, ever. After that, you are done. THAT is DRM and that is a problem. Wanting you to have an account on their online play service to play online is not DRM.

Gamers need to be a little reasonable here because remember, as with all things, there is a balance of rights. Yes, you should have the right to buy a game and play that game for as long as you want in the way you want. You shouldn't have some DRM program getting mad because you installed it too many times or because it doesn't like your CD drive. However the developers have rights too. They have a right to try and make sure people aren't illegally copying their game, and they certianly have a right 0ot make sure those people who do illegally copy it can't make use of the services the company provides for it. It shouldn't be an all or nothing situation on either side.

I'd liken it to freedom of speech. Yes, you have the right to freedom of speech, however your right to freedom of speech can't interfere with my right to freedom of association. What that means if you are free to speak your mind, but not in my living room if I don't want you to. I am free to ignore what you say. Yes, that does limit your rights in a small way. You don't have the right to force me to listen to your views, however that is a necessary limit on your rights to preserve mine and one I think we can all agree is reasonable.

So you need a balance in games rights too. Demanding no DRM is fine when DRM means "Shit that interferes with rights I should have." Demanding no DRM is not fine when DRM means "Anything you do that I don't approve of."

Re:You = RMS

[brkello]

The guy lays out a logical/rational argument and you just zip right past his point because either you didn't actually read or didn't understand. Whining about DRM in general is just a good way to be ignored. Talking about what is reasonable from a company (CD key/authenticated online play) and unreasonable (install limits, rootkits, etc) can actually be productive for both the companies and the consumer. But this immature Slashdot stance that all DRM in any form is bad isn't based on reason. It is either a justification for not paying people for their work or zealotry.

You have to be kidding.

[Shivetya]

Because a feature of a game is broken justifies pirating it?

You did exactly what he stated, you used whatever inane reason you could find to justify being a thief.

In other words, you declared yourself a victim and decided upon restitution you deemed appropriate, which apparently is that stealing other people's property is ok if it has a bug. What's next ? Unacceptable box art?

Game companies, actually any software company, do not have to attain a defensible position in regards to not wanting to have their products pirated.

What it really comes down to is that thieves will always find some justification. As soon as the their condition is met they will invent a new offense and thereby justify their continued thievery.

sorry, but your post sucks and that it was rated insightful is a disgrace to those of us who do programming for a living. I can't meet your high standards because they don't exist in any form that can be quantified thereby meaning anything I produce you want you will just take.

Re:You have to be kidding.

[Captain Hook]

Shivetya Said

Because a feature of a game is broken justifies pirating it? You did exactly what he stated, you used whatever inane reason you could find to justify being a thief.

But Brad Wardell is quoted as saying...

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

sounds to me like Brad accepts at least some of the downloads are people trying out the game to check fun factor and playability. I guess it depends on your definition of pirate, downing to try out for a limited time is not in my opinion pirating, find you like the game, conituing to play but not paying for it is.

::bolded quote text my emphasis.

Re:As a programmer...

[etymxris]

I don't infringe copyright, I just don't believe that copyright should exist. It's silly to suppose that one must fully believe and internalize all laws of the current society. Social change in such case would be impossible.

Even if I was inclined to risk the consequences of copyright infringement, it would still be fairly silly to abandon society due to such a minor thing. Your "accept every single law or GTFO" attitude is fairly unrealistic.