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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 dunno, I'm still annoyed. I bought GalCiv and all the expansion packs because 1) they are great games and 2) because they were not copyprotected.
Later on they snuck online-hardware authentication into the game. So if they go out of business, and I upgrade to a new computer, I lose the games I bought.
That pisses me off to no end since this exactly the reason why I've still not played games like BioShock (due to the DRM).
So StarDock is in no way the champion that they were in earlier days.
Most $40-50 dollar games give me significantly less enjoyment than a good scifi novel. A good novel might take me 10-40 hours to read. Most $40-50 dollar games cease to be interesting in less than ten hours, making then ten times worse value in terms of entertainment hours per dollar. Only MMOs make sense in the entertainment hours per dollar--even if you just play an hour a day they're damn cheap.
Obviously games vary a lot in this. Morrowind and the later Oblivion absorbed, minimum, a combined 1000 hours from my life over several years (and possibly as much as double that). Damn good values, damn good games, and I was damn willing to pay. World of Warcraft similarly has probably consumed around 2,000 hours of my life over the last four years.
But for every Counter-Strike, there's been Fable I-II, Spore, Black&White 1&2(Molyneux games have especially burned me, and I will not pay for them on principle anymore), Force Unleashed (ten hours play time and it was a glorified coaster.). These are just the ones I can think of recently. Too Human, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space (I was so excited that a survival horror game was being made, and so disappointed with the results), Every 3D Sonic Game, Every racing game made post-SNES...... .....the list goes on, and on and vastly outnumbers those games that were worthy of their price tag.
Most games are not good, and are not worth $40-50, no matter how shiny the graphics. You could run Spore on the fastest supercomputer ever built, past present or future, by any civilization in the galaxy and it would still be a pretty boring game. No matter how much the texture artists got paid.
...the horribly broken multiplayer in Demigod is an example of exactly why many people choose to pirate games rather than pay upwards of $90 (in Australia, equivalent in your local currency) for broken software.
Stardock recommended GameRanger precisely because of the major multiplayer problems with Demigod's built-in matchmaking. The game's multiplayer itself played just fine through GameRanger. It's safe to say there would have been a lot more refund requests otherwise, and it took some of the heat off Stardock while they tried to address the problems.
They even added a download button for GameRanger on their Demigod page right next to the Impulse one.
GameRanger - multiplayer gaming service for PC and Mac games
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.
Maybe...I know that I've downloaded some games in the past to get a feel for them...Most of them have ended up in purchases after I was impressed - Starcraft, Diablo & II, CS, Civ 4, DemiGod...but there's also a few games that I have not bought because I felt they were horrid.
This being said, now that I actually have a job, I do end up spending money on games more than I have in the past. However, being just a little idealistic, I am leery of paying for DRM. I've been burned myself in recent years and have no desire to experience that again (sorry EA, you can't have my money).
While I can't rationalize much downloading anymore to myself, I certainly understand where a number of those that I do know that download stuff come from and can't condemn them for it. I can't really honestly say that any of them feel that they are screwing the companies out of money. For them, buying twenty copies of UT2004 to play over LAN for one day is ridiculous (and a serious rip-off). But, buying UT3 or CS-Source over steam to play people around the world is 100% ok!
Maybe the real issue IS money - if UT2004 cost $2 (GOG games was about a year too late), maybe the LAN issue wouldn't have been there...seriously... when are more hardcore game publishers gonna realize that unless their game has some serious replay value (think Blizzard or Valve), they can't sell games for full price 10 years after they come out?!? Even EA and Ubisoft (or was it Eidos...didn't Ubisoft purchase the rights to UT recently...?) with titles like Command & Conquer and Unreal Tournament and other somewhat popular hardcore gamer games can't do that...the mainstream games like Guitar Hero at least reduce their prices or have "specials"...
Seems to me that this is all about market placement. On one hand, you have the game publishers trying to fix prices instead of allowing market forces to drive down prices and increase the competition and value of games in general, so on the other hand, piracy comes in to fill in the market void and compete. Of course, the whole gaming industry, after being spoiled in the United States by pro-business legislation, decide that they can just snuff out competition by complaining and trying to eliminate piracy rather than actually providing a better product that actually provides something that piracy can't (No, not everything can be WoW and force users to log in to a server. But I don't get paid to come up with ways to provide a better product. How about those guys with million dollar salaries?). Now, we have "rampant" piracy. Seems to me that those CEO's and everyone else involved in their business are just making stupid business decisions. THAT seems to be the REAL problem - as Stardock has shown.
However, it may take more than Stardock to shift the balance. Since people have been pushed so far as to pirate, they may not want to come back without incentive. That's the actual job of those CEO's and business execs. It's time they actually EARN their pay.
For them, buying twenty copies of UT2004 to play over LAN for one day is ridiculous (and a serious rip-off). But, buying UT3 or CS-Source over steam to play people around the world is 100% ok!
Exactly. To take it further, the best "investment" I ever made was buying half-life. I played it for 8 years! Not because it had the best single player (I haven't even finished it, one day I will!) or multiplayer experience, but because of all the amazing mods it had. I suddenly found that the game was really 15 different games.
It's the same with Starcraft & Broodwar, I had played it for a couple of years straight, and yet every so often I would install it and waste a good hour or two on tower defense maps (the original).
Looking more at the games that I own, it seems multiplayer games are the only games that would sell. But then there's also Civilizations 4 and Galactic Civilizations II, which I never played online but still play extensively today, and it tells me that probably majority of gamers only buy games that offers high replay value or unlimited hours of gaming.
And I remember Portal (2-6 hours), The Monkey Island III, and Final Fantasy 7 which are all relatively quick games but I still bought and thoroughly enjoyed, even if I only played them once or twice.
And though there are plenty of copies out there for the said games I mentioned... most of my friends, cousins, and I still bought legit copies (even when we were teens back then and had no jobs).
Maybe it is a money issue... but maybe more importantly, it's the value of these games. If developers/distributors want to convert these 'pirates' into customers, they should polish their games and show some passion to their customers/communities.
E.A. for example, and in my own experiences pirating their games, are notorious in releasing unfinished games. Their games don't make it easy for modders and don't bother listening to community complaints. Suffice to say, I even stopped downloading their games off of torrents.
A pirate, paying for nothing, refusing to even look at their products.
I used to 'infringe copyrights' because I didn't have the money to entertain myself otherwise. I could afford to pay 40 bucks for an internet connection, sometimes, but not 15 for this and this album and 35 for this and this game.
What I didn't download I usually picked up second-hand or borrowed from someone.
It wasn't merely convenience or a lack of consequence, those hardly played a part at all. The real motivation was jealousy, others had much more than I did, better lives than I could establish. I wanted fun things too, and it's effortless to copy bits than it is physical objects.
Life's been much different to me for the past few years, I've really picked up and put myself together and I finally do have the money to spend on more frivolous things. I used to never think I would buy a DVD but now I'm getting them all the time. I couldn't possibly afford to replace all my music with legal purchases at the time, but I can begin to start.
I don't regret any of the stuff I've downloaded, I even appreciate having the chance to see what games I looked forward to were garbage and not buy as soon as they came out.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"