Slashdot Mirror
DRM vs. Unfinished Games
Rod Cousens is the CEO of Codemasters, and he recently spoke with CVG about how he thinks DRM is the wrong way to fight piracy. Instead, he suggests that the games industry increase its reliance on downloadable content and microtransactions. Quoting:
"The video games industry has to learn to operate in a different way. My answer is for us as publishers to actually sell unfinished games — and to offer the consumer multiple micro-payments to buy elements of the full experience. That would create an offering that is affordable at retail — but over a period of time may also generate more revenue for the publishers to reinvest in our games. If these games are pirated, those who get their hands on them won't be able to complete the experience. There will be technology, coding aspects, that will come to bear that will unlock some aspects. Some people will want them and some won't. When it comes to piracy, I think you have to make the experience the answer to the issue — rather than respond the other way round and risk damaging that experience for the user."
That was how the shareware market did it, back in the day. I know Doom was fairly successful that way, though I don't think a lot of other games really succeeded that way.
Maybe I'm naieve or not understanding, but what will stop the pirates from unlocking/breaking/pirating the downloadable content? Aren't you just moving DRM from the front end to the back end?
No no no no no no no. Microtransactions are NOT the way to go.
There really isn't any solid, fool-proof way to fight piracy. Most DRM schemes make things bad for paying customers, while pirates just play cracked copies that have less problems than the legit versions.
That being said, a $10 drop across the board for new console games would go a long way. $60 is WAY too much for a console game. Sadly, the Humble Indie Bundle proved that on the PC, there isn't much you can do to fight it...offering non-DRM games for a single cent don't even necessarily work.
Standard "only my opinion, no guarantees to work, etc." apply.
Living With a Nerd
Companies are considering officially releasing *worse* and *less finished* products?? They call them MMOGs, bub.
I've always hated that, whether through DLC or episodes or... well I put up with DOW and Civ4 releasing expansions but...
Please, god, will someone release a finished game? When's the last time that happened?
8-PP
Yep, totally worked for Dragon Age, for example. You can't get the DLC if you have a pirated copy of the game, so you definitely can't download giant bundles of all the DLC that can be decrypted and plugged into the game. Said DLC isn't up on torrent sites 2 days after the release.
If you're going to release DLC with micro-payments, don't "punish" pirates by forcing them to also not pay for your DLC.
Only way to really combat piracy is to have an online element that only works with a valid CD key. That won't stop piracy, though; it'll just make it less useful.
Why is it that none of these solutions involve making a product that people are happy/willing to pay for to begin with?
It's always about crippling something then fixing it later.
Folks have been telling you this for years, but many of you still don't seem to get it, so I'm going to repeat it yet again. People who don't want to pay to play your games are never going to pay to play your games. Either they'll find a way to play it for free, or they'll go find something else to spend their time on.
The average age of the gamer has been continuously increasing, and a bunch of us who grew up playing games are adults now and still playing. We're out of school, we work for a living, we have some disposable income, and we're willing to spend a portion of it on games. There are more people able, willing, and interested in spending money on video games than ever before. Worry about us more than you worry about the people who aren't interested in paying for your product. You'll never make any money off of them.
Now if the industry has grown itself too fast, or you've let development costs get too high, or whatever you've done to make your businesses unprofitable...well that's your problem, not mine. Blaming it on people who don't want to pay for your product will not get you any sympathy or extra profits. Sorry.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
When I buy a game, I buy the game. I don't buy a license to play the game. I don't buy a piece of the game. I buy the game. This is why I avoid all games that involve microtransactions, limited activations, etc. There is a reason I chose to save my money to purchase my first game console 20 years ago, rather than drop quarters into machines at the arcade down the street. It's also why arcades are dead, despite the video game industry ballooning into what it is today.
Gamer: This game is crappy.
Game maker: Just give us five more bucks, and it won't be so crappy.
Gamer: That's a little better, but it's still pretty crappy.
Game maker: Oh! We fixed that. Five more dollars, please?
Gamer: WTF?!?!? There's DRM on this download.
Game maker: Oh yeah. Pirates figured out how to pirate our DLC. Sorry about that. Five more buck and all the female NPCs will be topless.
Gamer: Sweet! Keep the change!
This is simply "Demo that costs money, and still has other DRM". When you buy a game, you're buying a demo in which you have to buy the real game after. And in order to tie the download content to the demo you just bought, you need an authentication system. Likely online activation.
The only thing Rod is saying is that game companies should double-dip to ease the DRM impression.
with the insane costs of internet
with the caps
with the throttling
YOU want me to be online for a game to be played.....
NO
NO
NO
and i suggest you do it anyway so you can go right out of business and we can be done with twits like this.
How about I buy a game. I install to my home computer, and to my laptop. I have an experience I can complete, and don't have to connect to some server to verify so if I bring my laptop somewhere, lets say to New York City for an extended business trip where the Hotel internet is intermittent at best and my air card won't work because I sandwiched between two high rise buildings, I can still play a game that I bought.
Ok, maybe my circumstances are a bit extraordinary, but I want what I pay for.
It was refreshing to actually buy a game recently (Dragon Age: Origins) and have a complete game to play without having to worry about authenticating to outside servers. I also appreciate that there are expansions that are optional, but there is no wall I will hit leaving me unsatisfied with the original game.
I do play EVE-Online also, and I don't mind the subscription, but I don't just play MMORPG's. There are just certain games that I want that I feel I can put back on the shelf someday with the satisfaction of completing it, and also the option to play the game no matter what my circumstances are. Am I asking too much for my $50?
I guess as an 80's generation gamer, I have different expectations. I still like going to the store (gasp!) to buy games. Hell, if there were still arcades around me, I might even go and drop a few dollars there.
Oh, I'd say it's working out quit well for at least one company.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Don't you usually pay $60 for an unfinished game anyways? What's the last game you purchased that didn't require at least 1 or 2 updates to fix things that were broken from the start?
My thoughts were exactly this when i read the headline. 60 Bucks for an incomplete game is absolutely asinine. And what about those poor souls who don't have the Web? how are they supposed to get the "rest of the game"
Stupidity only gets you so far, then you've gotta try
This is not about getting rid or DRM, this is about the games industry figuring out how they can get more money by double-dipping. We all know that the price of games won't drop even though you now also need to pay residuals to get the full functionality.
Blizzard already trail-blazed that model with WOW and demonstrated that many people are stupid enough to pay full price up-front for a game that also requires monthly subscriptions.
Assuming the game is not fundamentally tied to playing on-line, such as an MMORPG, whats to stop pirates just extracting and distributing the extra downloadable content too (after they've got it once)?.
assuming this works, what would it mean when you want to play the game 5 or 10 years down the line, and can't find or access the content anymore?
They're already doing this, in the wrong way that they can only be expected to implement it: selling half-finished buggy crap at full price then charging for patches + content that they took out from the original game and calling it "DLC". I'm not against DLC in principle, it has excellent potential IMHO, but rather how it is often being implemented in practice.
Also, I'm not going to buy half a singleplayer game unless I can get the second half as soon as I've completed the first. Just like I don't watch half a movie or read half a book. I get "into" a game and play it a lot, then drop it and maybe have a run around a year or two later. The games that I'll pick up for long sessions with long breaks are few and far between (only one I can think of is Civ).
Multiplayer games however, this could work. I find:
- MP games often come out with too much content for people to get properly into, resulting in a long lead time of people being inexperienced with the levels.
- related to above, many people tend to pick a few favourites and just ignore other maps, even if they're still quite good. These maps may offer more value if introduced when they are adding freshness as the old favourites are getting a bit tired.
- the high initial price puts people off because MP games are "high risk" - good balance is hard to achieve.
- related to above, enjoyment of a MP game isn't only related to the quality of the game itself, but the quantity (and quality) of other players.
Most of the MP games I've got really into have stagnated from lack of fresh content as the game gets "old". Often these games go on for years longer thanks to some good modding, though fan made maps rarely fare so well.
Make a good game and sell it at a reasonable price and people will buy it. Don't worry about those "lost" sales from people pirating the game, most of them wouldn't have bought the game anyways.
They're already pulling this shit. The new Price of Persia game doesn't really end and it is painfully obvious it's that way to sell you the "DLC", which is essentially the ending of the game. I got the game for 14, I would have murdered someone if I paid 60 and had to pay another 10 to witness the climax. For the PC version you can't even buy "Epilogue".
Fucking whores.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Downloadable content is definitly the way to go. By breaking a game into chapters and giving it to users a piece at a time you could help deter pirating. By having the game broken apart into episodes you force pirates to do a lot more work. Each episode has to be cracked, uploaded to pirate area, then distributed to users. A user will then have to install it on their system, hope then it won't bring a long any unwanted nonsense and won't have any conflicts or overwrite their saved games. where is a user getting it from a place like Steam would have it downloaded automatically as soon as its available. I think that this convenience factor could do to games what iTunes did for music. On another note I also think that having a game in chapters might make it more enjoyable. I know that when I get a new game that I savagely jump into to it for hours on end until I finish it. This leads to me not really get the most out of the game. I don't take the time to fully enjoy it. Usually some where around hour 18 I really start to hate it (because no one can enjoy doing anything for 18 hours straight) and my only goal becomes to beat it as soon as possible. Having it spread out will give it to me in nice size doses that I am able to savor.
Huh. I don't think you're seeing a representative sample of the gaming community. I think the majority of gamers, even on the PC, are willing to fork over cash for DLC. (Slashdot is not a representative sample, and neither are the modding forums I frequent. Visit some Steam forums, or Fileshack, or pretty much any non-technical gaming forum, and you'll see that the overwhelming opinion is that people are willing to pay for DLC, as long as it's more elaborate than horse armor.
Oh, you'd probably like a source for this. Go here, click on top sellers. That's right, the best-selling game at the moment is the one where Activision charges suckers $15 for 5 maps. Factor in the cost of bandwidth, and that works out to be, oh, a pretty freaking good deal for Activision.
P.S. I wish you were right.
Obligatory Soundbite Catchphrase
"A few minutes running from place to place" is the worst description of the game you could have ever devised
No, it's a very accurate description of the game.
You start the game, and have to sit through thirty-second animations just to get into the character creation. You create a character and have to sit through about ten minutes of poorly-acted, poorly rendered unskippable cut-scene in order to get to a point where you can actually control your character and make any kind of decision about what's going on. You go to a planet where you spend a minute or so running around before the game goes into another cutscene where you're forced to watch one of your Artificial Stupidiy squad-mates (who was obviously going to die from his laughable dialog on the ship) do something really stupid that you'd never have let them do. You get another couple of minutes of walking from that place to another place and shooting a couple of things with horribly consolised combat system (why do I have to press a special key to use cover when I could just, like hide behind the cover) while your AS squad-mates happily stand out in the open while the bad guys are shooting at you. Then you have to sit through another long, tedious, unskippable cut-scene before you shoot a few more guys. Then you have to watch another long, unskippable cut-scene where your character does something stupid that you would never do before you get sent back to the ship to sit through another long, unskippable cut-scene. Then you get to spend a couple of minutes walking around the ship before you're subjected to the next long, unskippable cut-scene.
A couple of minutes walking around between each tedious cut-scene is not a game in any sense that I understand; if I wanted to watch a bad SF B-movie I could buy one for $3 from the bargain bin and it would be over much faster without the tediously bad shooting sequences and, unless Tim Hines directed it, with far less walking.
My answer is for us as publishers to actually sell unfinished games
I'm pretty sure that's what most of them are doing now. Things certainly are nothing like they were in the 8-, 16-, and even 32-bit days; back then, it was a little hard to find a truly shitty game and even the mediocre games were worth at least one play-through. Nowadays, they are so focused on fighting these different wars ("piracy", second-hand market, etc.), making games look good, and turning an easy profit that I actually think they forgot what goes into making a good game. There are still some truly great games here and there, but overall the bar has been lowered.
Personally, I don't think people really started pirating until after getting burned too many times by greedy publishers looking to milk their cash cows. So, instead of being smart and going back to making games that are actually worth paying money for, they waste all this money on stupid shit. As a result, people are a lot more careful with their money when considering purchasing a game and a lot of them don't see a problem with trying before buying, even if it is technically illegal, because they no longer have good reason to trust these publishers..
Long story short... MAKE BETTER GAMES!
As usual, he should look at what Valve is doing. They are doing it (mostly) right, and always have.
Ironically enough, when my internet went out last week, I was unable to play Half Life 2, because it couldn't connect via steam. But I bought the game on cd and installed it from that. I shouldn't have to have a steam check. So if that's "good" drm, I don't want to see bad drm.
Dear game companies, when you make a game worth paying for, people will stop pirating it.
=
That's just stupid. The playability of a game is dictated by its cost? A game is more or less fun depending on if it costs $60 or $30?
You'd play a pirated version of a $60 game that wasn't worth paying for? If it wasn't worth paying for, then why would you waste your time playing it in the first place???
Well, Gamers don't care about what might happen. Fact is, most games with DLC haven't been cheaper. DLC couldn't be resold. These two already make DLC very unattractive, but all the hassle with installing it and such that may occur and being nagged to buy more inside the game world (as some games with DLC do) also reduce enjoyment of the actual game.
So, plain and simple, we haven't come close to any sane form of DLC so far and you'd first have to show that it has significant advantages for the players, before you can label people "alarmist". At the moment, it is just an undesirable thing from the perspective of a consumer.
I think I heard a similar idea some years ago.
It would include a physical device that would detect insertion of actual coins,
and only offer restricted gameplay in exchange for those;
further extension of the game would require additional coins.
The game would also sometimes promote itself by displaying encouraging messages, like
*** INSERT COIN ***