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GOG: How an Indie Game Store Took On the Pirates and Won
An anonymous reader writes "As if we needed further proof that DRM really is more trouble for publishers and consumers than it's worth, Good Old Games, the DRM-free download store that specializes in retro games, has yet more damning evidence. In an interview this week, the store's managing director says that its first venture into day one releases earlier this year with Witcher 2 was a storming success — and the version that hit the torrent sites was a cracked DRM version bought from a shop. The very definition of irony."
Releasing the source code under a free GPLv3 license would however be much more preferred.
Found a lot of my lost collection and favorites there. Love em.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
DRM may not stop piracy, but there are many people out there who aren't outright looking to pirate things. These are casual users like my mother who has tons of silly little puzzle and mind type games that she buys for a few bucks. Her friend comes over and wants a copy and she gives it to them thinking nothing of it. Low and behind it doesn't work. It's a $5 game so nobody really cares. DRM isn't about the hard core pirating community in a fully electronic world. It's about discouraging the casual user who primarily passes around physical media around.
How exactly is this a win for them? Maybe it's a notch to put in your anti-DRM belt but I don't see how they won against the pirates.
Had the DRM version not have existed it would still have been just as pirated. Had the version on disc been DRM free than it wouldn't have made a difference either way.
There's some kind of twisted logic here to make anyone think that DRM had anything to do with the rate of piracy or the cause of piracy.
Someone clarify for me - if a game doesn't have DRM, does that mean you can copy the folder to another HD, and the game will still work?
Is password protection a weak form of DRM, or not DRM at all?
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
That's not ironic, it's coincidental.
"The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention." Now THAT is irony!
I only hope they're from desperate a$$h0les... GOG's prices are more than appropriate, given their volume of bonus material they make available for every game download.
We're all waiting for it.
you seem to use the words "morals" and "ethics" as though they were interchangeable
What about all the authors/publishers who tossed in a CD with a full content PDF attached to the inside cover of their books, only to get burned when their PDFs starting turning up on page one or two of google searches of the topic. (I know this happens because I turn up those PDFs in google searches all the time).
People are addicted to getting free stuff, past the point of what they can reasonably consume.
I would like the DRM Cracking Challenge.
It's no fun to just push out something someone else is already DRM-Free'ing... and why hurt their cause since it is probably the same that drives me?
The article gives the example of Witcher 2. It says it's ironic that the most leaked version of the game was the DRM version. But is that really ironic? Witcher 2 sold 1.1 M copies for the PC in its first 7 months. It only sold 40 k DRM-free copies through GOG, which would the crackers most likely find to crack?
Besides, if there were no DRM for a big title like that, it stands to reason that there would be just as many if not more leaked copies available on torrent sites. What they really need to do to prove their case is get a publisher to release their AAA title on nothing but GOG, then they would be able to see the true effects of DRM-free games on piracy.
You mean not pissing off the customer / making them jump through loopholes to do what they want can be profitable?
But what about "the precious"? We wants it, we needs it!
I am John Hurt.
Trying to pretend piracy isn't still rampant on the PC is laughable. Yeah someone got the DRM version first and made their pirated copy out of that. Removing the DRM just means he needs less effort to share it. DRM probably doesn't do a whole deal to protect companies but if everyone went with the GOG model, there'd be no improvement. The problem is there are too many self-entitled little kids who think paying for their ISP is payment enough for content. We should remove DRM and any other restrictions from media but the freetards still need to be punished.
I've paid more to GoG than Activision and EA combined.
Wow. What a great game.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
"the store's managing director says that its first venture into day one releases earlier this year with Witcher 2 was a storming success"
Methinks that could have been made more clear with multiple sentences.
Offer a quality product at a reasonable price and don't include things that PISS PEOPLE OFF...
And you'll do well and make money...
Oh wait. Just about all the pirates already imagined that. And the lack of that is what drove many of them to pirate. Screw me once. Shame on you. Screw me twice... well i was a fool to give you money again before finding out what a pile of shit your game was.
I dont like drm. I dont like spyware and rootkits. I don't like always on connection required to play. I don't like stupid ass activation stuff that fails hard on day one.
I dont like social club. I dont like twitterfacebookothershit stuck onto my game. And i don't like having to find the maybe functional cd whenever i want to play.
Do it right and we will give you money. Do it wrong and we're just going to pirate it. Remove the shit we didnt like. And not pay you a cent.
Game developers and publishers...
You guys need to start making games more of a value to your customers. Instead of releasing a game for 60 bucks and immeditately start shitting out DLC and basically just nickle and diming your customers to death give them the entire game out of the gate and stop it with the DLC.
You also need to stop bad mouthing your customers, when gamers dont like something dont do like bioware did and tell gamers they are wrong. You think because we dont make games we cant actually decide if we like one or not. I may not make movies but I can still decide for myself which I like to watch and which I dont and I dont need the people who make movies to tell me what I should like. You should lay off people who buy used games as well because well, they PAID FOR THEM so surely you could understand that when you pay for something it belongs to you to do with what you want. Not to mention when a game is 60 dollars its hard for a lot of people to buy multiple games new when they can afford many more used.
You also need to beta test your games more, optimize them more and trouble shoot them more instead of doing the old "Well we release it now and fix it later. If we decide to fix it that is". Bethesda Im looking at you mainly. Games arent new anymore folks and there is no excuse why so damn many buggy and glitchy games hit the market now a days. You all should understand the basics of making a game.
Stop shitting out the same old thing, nintendo youre the biggest whore in the whole game industry. Try doing something new instead of the same old thing. Try shocking people, try thinking outside the box, try to be offensive, try to be creative because even indie developers basically just copy eachother.
Stop rising prices. You charge more and more and more money for games and guess what? People will pay less and less and go more towards piracy. I loved lollipop chainsaw but 60 bucks at launch for a 5 hour game? F that. If you stop gouging customers more of them will be willing to take chances on new games they havent played, they will be able to afford to buy more games and it wont the wallet as much so youll get overall increased sales because more people will buy games.
Get rid of DRM. DRM only confuses, annoys and causes your paying customers problems. Thats right, your DRM drives away paying customers because they dont like it. Pirates can and will defeat your DRM, it will not stop or even slow them. Even games like world of wacraft are pirated and people download it and play it free on private servers. All games are pirated and you cant stop them, all your DRM is doing is punishing the people who purchase your games new.
Do those things then go check out this and what neil gaiman has to say about piracy http://www.comicsalliance.com/2011/02/10/neil-gaiman-piracy-lending-books/
Piracy is mostly due to bad customer service. You cant get rid of it completely but if you make your customers feel valued, they feel like they are being treated well and like the product your selling they will come back and in greater numbers because they will bring friends with them. But if you gouge them and treat them like shit they will steal your stuff instead of paying for it.
That is besides the point. There are two points here:
1) The DRM version was widely pirated despite the DRM, and, therefore DRM served nothing but to irritate the people who really bought the game and make some DRM company richier.
2) The non-DRM version sold by GOG sold very well even without any DRM and being a year old game.
The lesson here is: If you do something people judge worthy they will pay for it, at least enough of them to make the endeavor profitable. And no, it doesn't really matter how much you could make if the whole humankind decided to pay you for it, and you are not entitled to become a billionary just because you created something.
Uh, no. I bought Witcher 2 from GOG in May of 2011, when it was released. It's one of the few games I've bought on release recently, because it was available DRM-free from GOG.
Sorry for interrupting your FUD with facts, but a simple google search would give you the GOG release date in ten seconds.
"pirates went to the trouble of buying the game in a shop, taking it home and breaking the DRM instead"
Who knows if the the downloaded version has some sort of hidden tracking mechanism? With a store bought copy, the pirate can more easily remain anonymous.
It's a stretch perhaps, but that might bring light to why it worked out this way.
Pirates just pirate. "beating" pirates by no DRM or DRM or whatever doesn't matter...
it's the ease of getting the product to the costumer that matters.
Customer will buy a product when:
Value * DifficultyInObtainingLegally + Respect > DifficultyInObtainingIllegally - Morality
Where:
Value is what the customer believes is the right price based on his/her level of desire to own the product
Morality is how much the user considers the moral and ethical implications of his actions
Respect represents how how esteem the customer holds the product, producing company, etc.
I say it's a tiny moral compass walking the path of least resistance.
If you believe people are inherently good, if you make the product easy to download and pay for, you'll get plenty of paying customers.
If you make it such a pain in the neck to buy legally or you price it ridiculously, you'll get more pirates.
Some pirates will always be pirates. You never had those sales in the first place.
I purchased my copy of Witcher 2 from GOG on 10 May 2011
That is besides the point.
No, it's just plain not true: GOG was selling the game at almost the same time as the DVD release (AFAIR it was released on DVD a few days early in some markets). See my other post above.
Perhaps it is worth noting that the original GOG release, if I remember correctly, required registration with a game key after install, though it's now completely DRM-free.
Witcher 2 was sold on GOG on it's release day you idjit. If you're going to start with the self-fellatio, get your information correct first.
Hey, you're not a local get out of here.
As I said, you are right about that statement not being true, but which version would be more pirated if the DRM and the Non-DRM were launched at the same time for the same price is still irrelevant as an argument for or against DRM.
GOG had an opportunity to support Linux, and failed to do so even when every other store has done so. The only irony here is GOG due to its size is more vulnerable than its better know competitors [Desura; Steam] and a whole host of smaller ones , even though by the nature of its store it has suitable software already available as source ports or sells them with DOSBox anyway.
I'll personally not feel any sympathy when Microsoft kill then off. Although I'm sure those that bought from them will be able to derive some comfort from getting the games DRM free...While the option was available.
and the version that hit the torrent sites was a cracked DRM version bought from a shop
Isn't that the point of release groups to "crack" stuff as some kind of trophy ? There isn't a lot of pride in it otherwise.
The Witcher 2 was originally released in May of 2011, not this past year when GOG finally started selling the game.
The game was available on GOG from release day. Why do you claim otherwise?
So, of course the most pirated version of the game would be one of the DRM variants, since the DRM version was available for a longer period and typically more in demand closer to the original release date.
Since the DRM-free version was available from the beginning, your argument is invalid.
But no mention of either date (original release of the game) or GOG's release are mentioned in the article
They are the same - May 17, 2011.
Anyway, sorry for interrupting the anti-DRM circle jerk with facts and logic.
Don't you have a bridge to go hide under?
"GOG finally started selling the game"? You mean day 1. Not sure what information you think you know but CD Projeckt Red and GOG are part of the same company and they pushed GOG heavily as their primary distribution platform.
Perhaps you're looking at the release date of the Enhanced Edition?
What? No. Utterly false.
In fact, the parent company of GOG is the company that developed the game in the first place, so of course they made it available on GOG. It was available on launch day from GOG back in May 2011. In fact, it was available from them for pre-order before it was available anywhere else. The reason you're probably confused is because GOG replaced the regular edition of the game with the enhanced edition in April 2012, hence why it shows as having a release date of April 2012 on GOG's site.
Sorry to rain on your ill-researched drivel with some actual facts.
You only need a friend with another copy and the ability to run md5sum to know if there's a hidden tracking mechanism.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Those who pirate because it's more convenient, and those who pirate to save money. Most of the latter do it because they don't have the money to spend on the media.
Also, it should be noted that no torrent uploader would think of uploading a crippled DRM version. Meaning everything you get is free and clear, (or as free and clear as they can make it).
Of course, everyone who has torrented has ended up with the Chinese version, or the German Version subtitled in Yiddish, or something along those lines. All they have to do is guarantee it's of the desired language, AND THAT IT WILL WORK, to guarantee sales.
I know with CD's the crippleware essentially stopped me from buying them altogether, (I would say I'll have to go home and check to make sure I can use it on my computer... almost always forget, and eventually just stopped buying them at all).
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what we need is a "Win9X Box" that will simulate say a 733MHz P3 with 384Mb of RAM and a Geforce 4 that will fake all the quirks that devs would use back then.
So in other words, specs similar to those of an Xbox with more RAM. Even Microsoft can't get Xbox emulation perfect; each Xbox game emulated on Xbox 360 needs its own set of emulator hacks.
If you avoid Blu-ray entirely, what do you plan on doing once movies stop coming out on DVD? Some studios are already trying this: for example, Ishtar went straight to Blu-ray. If you plan to stop watching movies, what do you plan to do to fill that time instead?
I, for one, am pleased by this. Now I can purchase non-DRM games, and piracy apologists lose one of their rationalizations for their actions.
Here is how to get me to buy your game instead of pirating it or devoting my time to some other game:
1.Do not pull BS with international release dates or limited-time-platform-exclusivity (thinking here of the recent Ghostbusters FPS and the fact that Aussies like me had to put up with the limited-time-PS3-exclusivity crap or pirate/grey-market import the PC or 360 version)
2.Where it makes sense for the genre and style of game, embrace modding. The mod tools don't generally need to be fancy, these days they can usually be much the same tools used to build the game in the first place and there is no reason it needs to take 6-12 months after release to get the mod tools out there. Where it makes sense for the specific game/engine, releasing source code to game-specific parts should also be done (e.g. what Valve does with the Source engine stuff where parts of it are released)
3.Do more to make the games as bug-free as possible when they launch. Listen to your player base when they talk about what bugs (and features) they consider most important.
4.Do not have annoying DRM solutions that get in everyone's way. Make sure that games with single player features can be played offline without any internet connection.
5.Release demos of your games (and release them either before or concurrent with the release of the actual game not months later). If people like me can't get a demo of the game to see if its worth paying for, they are more likely to just pirate the thing.
6.Price the games reasonably (and stop making Aussies pay twice as much as the rest of the world)
Take the new "C&C Ultimate Collection" (which has all the C&C games in one pack). I purchased that product because:
1.It has DRM but the DRM is unobtrusive and doesn't get in the way. No need to have disks in the drive or otherwise mess with stuff, I just click on the game in Origin and it works like magic.
2.It gives me all the games in a form that works on Windows 7 without the need to mess with stuff
3.It was good value (the fact that Aussies didn't get the usual rip-off markup helped too)
and 4.It gives me the games that I didn't own and the ones I owned but dont know where the disks are)
I don't see what the value is in pretending that you have a product worth $60 that sells 300K copies and gets install on 1000K machines, when you could sell 900K copies at $20 and still get installed on about 1000K machines.
Perhaps the game is based on an underlying work, such as a movie, a book, pieces of recorded music, or a set of puzzle pieces, and the publisher has to pay a royalty per copy to the owner of copyright in this underlying work. So despite a conjectured unit-elastic demand curve with zero marginal revenue per unit, the cost to the publisher per unit is greater than zero, and the publisher will prefer the higher price because its cost per unit is less.
and the version that hit the torrent sites was a cracked DRM version bought from a shop
Isn't that the point of release groups to "crack" stuff as some kind of trophy ? There isn't a lot of pride in it otherwise.
Yes, the whole point of releasing a cracked game is usually not to make the game available to the whole world for free, that is just a side-effect. The groups want to be a.) the first to defeat the DRM and b.) the one who releases the "best" crack (i.e. game is actually working correctly after removing the DRM). How many people then download the game is irrelevant, it's all about "oh, group xyz was the first to release a working cracked version of that game !"
So it is not THAT surprising that the version of "the witcher" which appeared on the torrent side was based on a DRM'd version of the game, the release groups are not interested in the non-DRM version, because there's no fame to be found in offering a non-DRM game - and why would anybody who bought the non-DRM game upload it somewhere.
There's no reason to ever take a game off the market.
I can think of three.
First, the upstream licensor of the game may offer only a time-limited license. The DVD releases of Daria and WKRP in Cincinnati were delayed for a long time because they had to figure out how to replace all the music that was licensed only for the original broadcast, not for home videos to be produced later. There's a reason Nintendo couldn't just start selling GoldenEye 007 on Virtual Console on day 1 of the Wii Shop Channel: it'd need a new contract with EON. And by the time that was negotiated, they ended up doing an enhanced remake instead. Likewise, Tetris DS was discontinued two years after release because The Tetris Company didn't want to flood the market with Tetris products.
That ties into the second reason: cannibalization. If you have too many of your own older products on the market, they compete with your newer products. If you just released Mario Party 7, would you want Mario Party 4, Mario Party 5, and Mario Party 6 to be on shelves? Worse, studies such as one done with clock widgets in GNOME show that where there are too many choices, a lot of people choose "none of the above" and walk out with nothing.
Third, I'd be interested to see how video games are substantially different from movies and TV series in this respect. The film Song of the South (1946) was briefly available on LaserDisc in some markets. It has not since been rereleased on DVD or Blu-ray anywhere, allegedly because of a change in prevailing moral values among viewers.
In practice, the software industry tends to use the term "Open Source" to refer to OSI Certified open source software, which is distributed under licenses that conform to an Open Source Definition nearly identical to the Debian Free Software Guidelines.
You wrote it in Python. What in the hell is wrong with you?
As an aside, I found a simple trick for DOSbox games (Obvious in hindsight, but I'm damned if I can find it posted anywhere I didn't post it) from GoG. .conf file and mark it executable, you can doubleclick the file to run. Drop it in '~/bin' and you can run it from the commandline or a shortcut. '.conf' extension not required. Though if you have spaces in the name you'll need to quote "file name" on the command line or any shortcut. moo2 is fine "Master of Orion II" (with quotes) is fine, but Master of Orion II (no quotes) will fail.
If you stick "#!/usr/bin/dosbox -conf" (Debian -- Use "whereis dosbox" to verify) as first line of the
For such a simple stupid trick, I was ridiculously pleased with myself - I've actually been trying to get GOG to package DOS games to take advantage of that - I really think they ought to be putting these games in apt directories, but so far they're highly unconvinced, but then I can't convince them to expand into other platforms either - I'd love to get Neuromancer and a C64 emulator packaged, and they are obviously just not into that.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
I'm guessing that's why the store-bought, DRM-laden version was the one to appear on a torrent site - they cracked it *because* it was DRM'd. There's no challenge in just downloading someone's unprotected game and then putting it up on a torrent site.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Yeah, the kind of folks disassembling a game's DRM isn't going to be able to figure out a hidden tracker inside the GOG version. Good call.
but you're still full of it. Money is a representation of work and physical resources. You can Counterfeiting money all day long and not hurt a soul. It's when you pass the bill, exchanging something of value for something worthless, that you've now committed fraud. The same goes for counterfeiting art. Again, you're not copying, you're committing fraud, because there's the (implicit and unsaid) understanding that you are now going to pass that art off as the real thing.
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1. GOG is not an indie game store. It started out as a classic game store and is now a full-blooded game store.
2. GOG doesn't mean Good Old Games anymore, they changed their name to "only" GOG when they started selling new games as well as the classics.
If anyone STILL has not learned, the cracking / pirate groups are more interested in showing off than they are in "stealing" games. If you made a game that made no attempt to stop it from being copied but was also practically uneditable to the point where they couldn't edit a brag / advertisement to their group in the bootup, they'd be more likely to leave it alone.
However, just because Mr Ford says you can only have black doesn't mean that cars can only come in black colours.
D3 is only an online game because they made it require an internet connection to a server.
The single player game, however, DOES NOT need a server on a remote machine.
Hence D3 SP is an offline game made dependent on being online. It can be played offline (if you get the pirated version). Ergo, it's an offline game.
The only Irony here is the the OP think he know what the word means but in reality has no idea what it actually means.
The installers run fine under Wine, so not having a Linux-friendly package is really not a problem unless you have a problem that prevents you from installing wine. (For some reason on my Ubuntu 12.04 amd64 system Wine conflicted with LSB-base, which was a depedency of something I needed to run most 32 bit programs or something...)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I was commenting on the information given in the article and comments made by GOG, which I stand by as saying is misleading.
After further research after making the comment, I've discovered they were comparing the DRM version from the FIRST release to the Enhanced Edition release, which was available from download free from CD Project Red and GOG never had DRM in any form.
So, again, not a fair comparison between the two and there was no reason to torrent a file that was freely available to download from two well known sites.
But thanks for copy/pasting wiki trivia without even bothering to address the argument. I didn't know GOG had their own Wiki.
the "limited time" clause
What "limited time" clause? If you're referring to "for limited Times" in the U.S. Constitution, then one plausible reading of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Eldred v. Ashcroft is that the estimated remaining life of our Sun is a constitutionally acceptable "limited time".
the fact that I don't want to sell you my car doesn't then entitle you to come steal it
But why doesn't it entitle me to make an exact duplicate of it, leaving your abandoned car there?
since [Windows 98] was a 16/32bit hybrid that gave devs practically bare metal access to the OS they were able to do hacks that they couldn't even do under DOS.
Then why can't they run in something like VirtualBox that allows userland code to run at full speed but emulates the "bare metal access"? Even Windows 7 Pro came with a coupon for a copy of Windows XP to run in Virtual PC at no extra charge. The historical problem with VirtualBox has been with games requiring 3D acceleration, but by the Quake III era when 3D cards were popular, Windows 2000 was coming out.
You can't have an argument without a foundation to stand on, so of course I didn't address the points you were raising. That's like asking why someone doesn't bother discussing numbers that were arrived at through faulty math.
As for what you've said now, you're still wrong, both factually and conceptually. First off, it was never "freely available to download from two well known sites". You've always had to pay for it to get it. It's a product. They sell it. That hasn't changed. It currently costs $30 at gog.com, though it was on sale on Steam last week. Just because something is DRM-free does not mean it's free to download. That's like saying that before the days of DRM it was perfectly acceptable to just walk into a retail location and take a piece of software off the shelf without paying for it. Simply untrue.
Second, they were not comparing just the two versions you specified. They compared every single version that was pirated, period. And based on that, they determined that the most-pirated version was from a DRM'd copy of the game. Where you got this idea that they're only comparing it against the Enhanced Edition is beyond me. As we already pointed out, it was available from GOG without DRM on launch day. More than that, it was available from everywhere a week later without DRM, since they issued a patch to remove the DRM. And yet, despite that, the DRM'd copy was still the most-pirated overall.
So, yes, it is a fair comparison. The DRM'd copy was the most-pirated, despite them offering it DRM-free for the entirety of the product's life. And contrary to what you said, it was never freely available from a legitimate site, meaning that free downloads never curbed piracy or some such nonsense like that.
As for what I said in my last post, I already knew most of that off the top of my head, since the game was widely discussed around here and elsewhere at the time for being a high-profile title that was DRM-free and being sold at GOG, which was their first launch day release. I merely tossed in some quick links and a few specific dates so that you'd have an easier time finding information if you wanted to (I didn't know GOG had a wiki either, incidentally, until Google turned it up), but since you seem to have some scorn for wiki links, I tried to use links to sites that are more familiar to you in this post.
I've been gaming since the mid 80's and I've got to say, a lot of people seem to forget that DRM didn't just coalesce out of evilness; it was instituted because a lot of people over a lot of years never bought games, they just pirated them. If you want to argue that nowadays some situation has changed that makes DRM unnecessary, fine, but don't pretend that piracy hasn't been a problem for a long time; a lot of smaller developers back in the day went out of business because of it.
Still, efforts against cannibalization are intended to allow each product to make back its own development cost, especially when a retailer charges per year for shelf space. Even some download sellers charge per year for online shelf space. Microsoft, for instance, did this with a submission limit per $99/yr developer account in the Windows Phone Store to discourage developers from filling up the store with throwaway soundboard apps like iFart Mobile.
what's the difference?