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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."
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.
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)
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
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.
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.
Qxe4
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).
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.
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."