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Game Industry Vets On DRM
An anonymous reader points out an article at SavyGamer in which several game industry veterans were polled for their opinions on DRM. Cliff Harris of Positech Games said he didn't think his decision to stop using DRM significantly affected piracy of his games, accepting it as an unavoidable fact. "Maybe a few of the more honest people now buy the game rather than pirate it, but this sort of thing is impossible to measure. You can see how many people are cracking and uploading your game, but tracking downloads is harder. It seems any game, even if it's $0.99 has a five hour demo and is DRM-free and done by a nobel-peace prize winning game design legend, will be cracked and distributed on day one by some self righteous teenager anyway. People who crack and upload games don't give a damn what you've done to placate gamers, they crack it anyway." Nihal de Silva of Direct2Drive UK said his company hasn't noticed any sales patterns indicating customers are avoiding games with DRM. Richard Wilson of TIGA feels that customers should be adequately warned before buying a game that uses DRM, but makes no bones about the opinion that the resale of used games is not something publishers should worry about.
I think piracy is unavoidable in a non-subscription based model like most standalone games. The target audience (teenagers) sees themselves as poor, or actually is poor, and is thus unwilling to pay for something they can get for free. Others undoubtedly resent the fact they are being asked to actually pay for a game, and so are willing to crack them. :P
I would like to see the demographics on who *does* pay for games and see if I am write, or if people of all ages are cheap bastards
Now the MMO world has it much better off, since you need a subscription to actually play the game at all. Of course that undoubtedly leads to a lot of problems with stolen CC numbers and the like, so perhaps you are no further ahead. By requiring a CC number to even register, they of course limit their potential sales massively as well.
Sadly I think this is going to lead to games which are free to play, but contain targeted in-game advertising down the road. I don't want to see how badly that warps the game designs we see as a result.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
even if it's $0.99 has a five hour demo and is DRM-free and done by a nobel-peace prize winning game design legend, will be cracked and distributed on day one by some self righteous teenager anyway.
Huh? What's to crack if there is no DRM?
Pirate the whole game, I can see that happening, but that's cracker-lackin!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Then just see it as a 'service' for the people that do buy your game to not use digital restrictions. Those are your customers, not the ones downloading it. They probably wouldn't have bought it even if it was impossible to download anyway.
"The security measures used to restrict the unauthorized use of this software may cause your computer to experience partial or total loss of functionality, and may conflict with other software or hardware you may have installed on this machine"
It's true enough, and worse is that they are not going to be responsible for restoring your system if it does in fact get hosed.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
DRM, nowadays at least, isn't so much about piracy but more about killing the used games market. Of course they'll tell you it's about piracy, but it really isn't
Yeah I've followed a weird arc. When I was younger I downloaded any game I could find just to try them out. I didn't have any money for games so I certainly wasn't a lost sale. Then after I got more settled and hit my mid 20s I started buying all my games. I had the money to spend at that point and I figured it only made sense to support developers who made the kind of stuff I like so there would be more to come. But now I'm swinging back the other way. I bought a retail copy of Bioshock even though I'd heard about the DRM problems with it. Bioshock 2 I was going to buy on Steam as that's how I purchase most games these days but after seeing the install limits and securom stuff I've just decided to pirate it. If I'm going to be treated like a criminal I may as well act like one.
There is only one "healthy level of DRM". Hint: Steam exceeds it.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
well my internet was down yesturday, tryed to launch one of my games on steam (the game didn't even have multiplayer), guess what, it didn't let me load steam because i wasn't connected to the internet, net result, couldn't play any of my games off steam...
The trend is that the average age of gamers is now in the 30s.
What this has to do with DRM is the fact that, at our age (yes, I am in my 30s) what we have the least is time - at the point in your life where you do have a decent income, money is much less of an issue than when you're a teen - if all I have is 1 or 2 hours a day for gaming I don't want to have to jump through extra hoops to play a game and I sure don't want to see my gaming time wasted because my Internet connection is down or the gaming servers are down and the games requires remote authentication (something that adds no value for me).
The second point is that, when you actually work for a living you can relate the true value of money to the time it takes you to earn it. The cost of a game is then more than a mathematical figure, it's measure in how long do you have to work to pay for it.
The third point is the increased awareness of the value of things that comes with age. To put it simply, a game fulfils one's need for entertainment and escapism and bad games cost twice as much as good movies and 3 times as much as good books and yet have less entertainment value.
That said I still pirate games, and in the end it boils down to 1 reason: ...
- There is no more try-before-you-buy for most games anymore - the age of Game Demos is gone. I don't want to waste my hard earned money (and I do know how hard it was to earn that money) in a game just to take it home and discover that it sucks, it has too many bugs or it refuses to run in my system due to DRM. I've had plenty of situations where I would buy a game and it would either not work properly, turn out to be little fun or exceptionally short even though gaming sites had been hyping it to no end. At this point (after 20! years of gaming) the gaming industry and the gaming press have shown me again and again that they are not to be trusted
So what I do nowadays is I download the game, try it and if it works ok and I like it, I buy it. Just recently I got X3:TC and bought it as soon as I found out that the game maker had removed DRM in the latest patch (in fact I even got the Gold edition since I trully believe they deserve the money).
this is all well and good till they turn the god damn server off- I loved ravenshield but can't now play the iron wrath expansion over lan because the server has been turned off. Ubisoft thereofre will never receive another dime off me as i cannot trust them to keep my access to games on, if i pay i want to be able to play when and how i want not some snotty jumped up non game playing executive who is probably sleeping with his PA.
From summary:
Cliff Harris of Positech Games said he didn't think his decision to stop using DRM significantly affected piracy of his games, accepting it as an unavoidable fact.
That was an argument FOR using DRM?
"I have a rock that keeps away shoplifters, it only cost me $ton_of_money annually, and I use it to knock customers on their head every time they buy something. Now, the rate of shoplifting is the same both with and without the rock, so I see no reason to stop using it."
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Well no shit. Last time i check the population is growing, not at a standstill or decline. So us older folks who grew up in a non DRM gaming environment to what we have now are the ones that avoid that shit with a plague unlike our younger counter parts who most of which probably have no clue what DRM is. If they do, they don't give a shit, they're having fun playing their game one way or another. It wasn't their money if they bought it and they become a "rebel" once they hack it and have bragging rights to their friends to sound uber cool!
However, this doesn't justify DRM's methods of preventing piracy. I think this guy has it right: http://www.metacafe.com/watch/yt-mt4BpnfAN-o/how_anti_piracy_screws_over_people_who_buy_pc_games/ :D
Enjoy!
Sometimes, the answer is to just destroy it all.
It didn't offer to start in offline mode?
What game was it? If I have it I'll test that particular one.
Steam has also gotten "less bad" over time, and as a result the nostalgia effect has kicked in. It's a shame I remember how terrible it was when it came out, and few other people do. I still boycott it, simply because of the horrible way it was established in the first place.
I buy (and play) so few modern games these days. Mandatory online activation of any sort is the day I stop gaming. The old ones I have are numerous and plenty good enough.
... along with a widely publicised promise to unlock all content should Steam be discontinued / Valve go under.
When companies go under, there is a priority order to who gets what, and guess what... customers are at the end of a very long list. That being the case, do you really believe that they'll be allowed to continue developing for long enough to do right by the customers when that is going to directly translate into further losses for the creditors? That's just not the way these things work, it's not even like the management there would be in charge if they were in liquidation, even if their promise is genuine. Maybe if the solution is already written and they literally just have to flick a switch to deploy it it'll happen, otherwise it's just a marketing tool to assure us everything will be okay (disclaimer: I really like Valve's games and have a few on Steam, I don't object to the service but I'm under no illusion of what will likely happen if they fail - people who still want to play games they bought will have to go find a cracked version somewhere).
Steam is the worst possible DRM.
You have to ask permission to play.
You have to agree to a legally binding contract that gives Steam the right to revoke your "purchase" at any time.
Would you buy a car if the dealer had an option to come into your garage and take it back at their whim. Even if you'd paid for it in cash up front?
Fairplay, Impulse, disc in drive, CSS are all examples of good DRM.
I find being offended by me offensive.
As I've done dozens of times with never a single result:
This claim is not in the legally binding contract you agree to when you purchase a Steam game.
Please provide some documentation of this claim.
I find being offended by me offensive.
Here's the thing: annoying "anti-piracy" measures NEVER work. They only interrupt the pirates momentarily - do you honestly believe there won't be 20 groups of hackers racing to see who can crack this protection first, from the moment it exists the pressing plant (and maybe before)?
Older anti-piracy techniques have included: special floppy formatting (that messed with anyone who had slightly misaligned read heads), dongles (more for app software, but still an existing measure), getting the player to enter something from the manual or code wheel, keeping the CD in the drive, installing special DLLs or drivers, special background processes, online activation.
All of these initiatives have not only failed but placed an expiry date on the games "protected". Modern OS doesn't support the anti-piracy files? You can never play it again. Don't have the manual, dongle or code wheel any more? Activation server taken offline? You're screwed. Want to install games on your laptop but don't want to carry 30 CDs everywhere you go? Tough shiat (unless you can locate a crack, of course).
Meanwhile, the people who pirated the game and never had any intention of ever buying it? They might have needed to wait an extra day for the game to be cracked, but other than that it's nothing to them. The people who are affected are the people who bought the game - and they're getting pissed off. Pissed off people don't pay you money for your products. It's like those stupid anti-piracy ads on DVDs. People who buy the DVD get pissed off because they can't skip the "stop being a dirty pirate" ads. The people who download the rips will NEVER see the ads in the first place!
Piracy has been the boogeyman of software ever since I got my first computer in 1983 (ZX Spectrum FTW!). Since then, the games industry has grown from a small, hobbyist industry into a multi-billion dollar industry where new releases can outsell Hollywood movies.
If the PC market has problems compared to the consoles, the industry should try removing some of the barriers they place in front of their legitimate customers (DRM, incomplete games that need patches to become playable, unnecessary DX10 requirements, stupidly high minimum specs, etc.) instead of whining about people downloading a few copies. Especially when some people only turn to the pirate copies after having major problems with the legit version.
DRM, CD/DVD-checks, password tests etc only affect the paying customer and as seen in past games it even can do harm to the game itself. The guy who uses the cracked version will never be annoyed by DRM, will never have to search for the CD/DVD and will never need to look up a password.
Also: Illegal downloads don't equal missed sales. Those downloads are for free, and the kid who downloaded it probably never would have had the money to buy those 100 pirated games on his HD anyway. He maybe would have been able to buy one or two, and perhaps he even did!
NOTE TO GAME PUBLISHERS: This line should keep you up at night and give you nightmares. If it doesn't make you question every 'security' decision you've ever made, you're a fool.
The next Slashdot story will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and slashdot the links early!
If it's being cracked then it wasn't DRM-free now was it?
But once several casinos have banned a player for skill, another business becomes lucrative: teaching poker school.
Casino's don't ban winning poker players. Poker players don't take any money from the house. They are gambling against each other, with the house taking a cut (rake) every hand. What players are winning or losing is irrelevant to them; the profits in a poker room come from being a service provider.