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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.
> Her friend comes over and wants a copy and she gives it to them thinking nothing of it.
In our company, we call that "lead gen" and seek to encourage it. In the attention economy, trading marginal costs (literally zero, in your example) in exchange for a referral is good business. Many of those referrals won't become customers. But for the ones who do, the cost-to-acquire-customer is again literally zero. It helps to have good branding and more than one product. But this isn't rocket science.
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?
Yes, or at least the installer can be copied and used without restrictions.
Is password protection a weak form of DRM, or not DRM at all?
Passwords are not DRM.
DRM is not intended to stop piracy. It's intended to stop legal resales and gifting of products.
It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
Take the Hulu example, (or CD's), Hulu seemed great, until people realized the piratebay was still better. It was too late for Hulu, and a lot of potential customers permanently lost.
With games we have an entire generation of gamers coming up who will probably expect to be able to pirate. So what's happening? Apple App store, the PSN, XBL, the Microsoft App store, Steam etc. Putting right in peoples faces that this is where you pay for the product, and on the gaming side of things, if we catch you pirating we can just lock down your account. But of course we should have had those online stores in 2001, 2002 era. Young kids now expect to have to pay, 30+ year olds expect to pay and pirated when they were poor, but the 15-25 year old crowd is a lost decade of potential customers. Fortunately they'll have the next set of app stores in their faces enough that they might come around, but who knows.
A bit like the lock on your front door isn't actually an impediment to criminals. But the person who got past the lock has no defence of 'oh but I thought I was just free to walk in and take things'. No. No you aren't. Hopefully eventually we can turn pirates into paying customers. Because you can't run an industry where the accepted norm is not paying for the thing you produce.
DRM doesn't only fail to stop piracy, it can encourage it...
Last weekend my girlfriend rented a blu-ray from Redbox. The largest TV in my house happens to be my monitor, and the only blu-ray player I own is a drive on my PC. I attempted to start it, but instead got a message from my player software that I needed to update my software to play the movie. I checked for an update to my player software, and it said it was up to date.
Then, I looked on the drive manufacturer site looking for a firmware update for the drive, thinking that might help. My drive model was not listed on the manufacturer site. I found another support site, but they also did not list my drive. I searched for a while and eventually found out that it was only available on a support site for a European division. I updated the firmware and tried again... no luck.
By this point, I had spent 30 or 45 minutes trying to get this to work. I got fed up, and said, "Screw it, I'll just pirate it."
It took me less than a minute to find a pirated source. It took maybe 15 minutes to download it. I spent much more time than that trying to get it working legitimately, without even counting the time to drive and get the movie.
I don't pirate stuff because I'm not willing to pay it, it's because they make it a pain in the ass to be legit.
If I know ahead of time I'll have problems with DRM for either games or movie, I usually skip them entirely.
That's not ironic, it's coincidental.
"The use of words expressing something other than their literal intention." Now THAT is irony!
2.Happening in the opposite way to what is expected, thus typically causing wry amusement.
I would guess that if most people were asked if the DRM-included version or the DRM-free version would be the most pirated, they would have said the DRM-free. That is the expectation. The opposite happened.
DRM is not intended to stop piracy. It's intended to stop legal resales and gifting of products.
Its also a FUD product for sellers of DRM software and licensors of DRM tech (patents etc).
"If you don't pay us $250K for magicdrm(tm) then pirates will steal your stuff, so pay up, dweeb"
The correct response is:
"They'll steal it anyway, and we'll be out a quarter mil, and our legit customers will be angry"
"grrr.... well on to the sales meeting with the next batch of suckers"
The wrong/popular response is:
"OK here's the money and I'll check this off on my performance review"
"Thanks and heres some baseball season tickets"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
I see your point, but I would suggest it's not so much a 'took on the pirates and won' situation so much as it is a 'remove some of the incentive for piracy and discovered it worked' situation.
DRM does provide some incentive for piracy when it reduces the usability for their legitimate customers. When a publisher is releasing software that installs a rootkit or has limited installations that counts down every time you perform a hardware change, finding a copy of the same software without all that crap on it becomes much more attractive.
Probably detected a break in the HDCP chain. The Anydvd driver is essential for HTPCs even when you own the bluray disc.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
the 15-25 year old crowd is a lost decade of potential customers
Thanks for the blanket statement, but I'm 24 and pay for all of my media (games, music, books, movies, etc.), at least that which is not freely distributed by the creators. With only maybe one or two exceptions, all of my friends and associates do the same. Crappy people are crappy people; age makes no difference except that in previous generations, one had to be technically inclined to even know how to pirate media, whereas now it's common knowledge.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
ahh, a moralist, my favorite enemy. i would say the same, except i would switch how you use the terms.
i feel that ethics is a simple concept, given lip service by many religions around the world. the golden rule is a very easy version of ethics. you simply cannot hurt people. Morality, however, can also include things that are unethical like the persecution of people with alternative lifestyles, ethnicity, or ideology. Morality uses aspects of ethics to lend itself credence, but in actuality, american "Family Values" is a thinly veiled Neo-Fascist (or neo-nazi, supremacist) agenda.
I am a Libertarian Socialist, and i will always oppose the Moralists, the Capitalist Rationalists, and and other form of fascism.
> It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users
> aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to
> thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
Even the problem is wrongheaded, because its based on the assumption that the choice is between pirating game X and buying game X in the store.
While this may be true for some subset of what pirates pirate, its demonstrably not true for the majority. Both studies and every bit of anecdotal evidence I have seen says that the divide between pirates and non-pirates is money. People who can't afford to be aquiring media in the first place are the ones who pirate it.
Honestly, the most prolific pirates I have known, are the same people that, if they told me they were going to buy a couple of DVDs, I would probably chastise them for wasting money they need to feed their kids.... or are kids themselves. They also seem to consume a lot more media than people who pay for it.... and also seem to have a lot of free time with which to watch movies, play games etc, often on account of not having steady employment or being disabled, or again, being a kid.
So.... stop piracy, maybe sales go up a LITTLE. However, the choice for pirates is typically not "have it all free or buy it all". Its "have it all free or buy a small fraction of it". My estimate is, stop piracy entirely, you can expect MAYBE a few percent increase in overall sales.... and most of those will be bargain bin purchases or used product purchases.
"I opened my eyes, and everything went dark again"
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.
"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.
Morals are not about doing the right thing. They are about defining the ought-ness of something. Put another way, they tell us what is right or wrong, but they aren't necessarily about doing those things. "I ought not to steal." They're prescriptive in nature and speak towards an ideal.
Ethics define what actions are acceptable by providing rules to stay within those confines. "Don't steal." They're descriptive of what actions are considered acceptable within the culture and speak towards a societal norm, which oftentimes will have nothing to do with appearances, as you claim, though it may, depending on the culture.
Etiquette is something quite a bit lower down this totem pole we are descending, and it has far more to inherently do with appearances than ethics does.
Tangentially, this explains why sites like GOG succeed, and why I'm happy to patronize them. They treat customers fairly and charge fair prices. Would I pirate a game that GOG sells? Not a chance. I'll buy it from them without thinking twice.
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?
"...past the point of what they can reasonably consume."
And that's why a lot of the "stolen" content has no actual value. If I download a book, and then never read it, have I really consumed the content or taken away a potential sale? Highly unlikely.
I will tell you this - there is nothing more frustrating that buying a digital copy of a reference, and then finding out that (a) it can't be read on one of my devices or (b) I can print or extract excerpts where they are (necessary) appropriate references or (c) I just plain can't get into them because I lost the password or I had to move the original file and the license key is no longer valid and there's nobody on the publishers end to fix it for hours or days. I bought the God damned work, I don't want to wait until you get around to letting me read it so I can get my work done.
Most of what I've bought as digital references I've either cracked, converted and stripped of DRM, or "pirated" (if you can call it pirated when I already paid full price for it). There are some I will simply pirate in the future, because it's too much work to make the product usable. Others (one of which is about $750 for the PDF) I will most likely purchase again when the next update is available (they update it every 3-5 years, I usually get every other cycle), simply because the last version was both unencrypted and fully and meticulously hyperlinked - the absolute model of how a reference should be done. The time savings using that reference is worth the money, imho, and I plan on supporting them.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
The real problem is that this mischaracterisation is so ingrained that you can be modded up for saying it even on Slashdot where people should know better.
Users not paying for your product is not the problem. Or, rather, the fact that they are using it is not the problem. The goal is to maximise profit, which means making sure as many people who might pay for your product actually do. A person who pirates it but would never have bought it is not a problem. A person who might have bought it but doesn't is, whether they pirate it or not. A person who doesn't buy your game because you've priced it too high or because they don't like the distribution system is a problem, but one that's relatively easy to fix.
The problem is an industry that is devoting its attention to eliminating piracy, not to maximising sales. They'd rather have 100 sales and 100 pirates than 10,000 sales and 100,000 pirates. Yes, pirates suck, but it's a stupid business model to chase them at the expense of your customers.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Probably detected a break in the HDCP chain. The Anydvd driver is essential for HTPCs even when you own the bluray disc.
Ah yes, the end to end authentication and encryption of all devices involved in the video signal.
Funny how I can't get end to end authentication and encryption for my god damned credit card to prevent skimming and such.
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!
That reminds me of an interview I read a while back with the CEO of the Ernie Ball guitar string company. Someone in his IT department, unbeknownst to the owner, had been installing Microsoft software on more computers than they had licenses for. Rather than giving them the opportunity to fix the situation, Microsoft immediately jumped into legal action. The result is that the owner had his IT department move all of their workstations to Linux and only use open source software so that it could never happen again.
Found the link.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
DVD video actually has plenty of DRM (both content scrambling to prevent unlicensed playback and region coding to prevent geographic redistribution). The "problem" is that they're both trivial to bypass. DeCSS doesn't bother to pretend to be legit; it simply brute-forces the scramble. Region unlocking has existed for over a decade.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
I've paid more to GoG than Activision and EA combined.
Yes, I really bought TONS of stuff from them. They have many old games which I want to re-play, but I cannot find my old CDs anymore (or, in the case of Baldur's Gate 2, they they were already barely readable when I bought the original years ago). Especially their bundles are great, whole Baldur's Gate series or whole Neverwinter Nights collection with easy installation - great! Ultima Underworld 1+2 -awesome!
And, like many others already mentioned, even if you can find the old installation media and it is readable, some games might not really work anymore these days on your Windows 7 PC, because they are DOS games. The GoG games come preconfigured with a working DOSBox-Setup. I like fiddling around with stuff on my computer, but when I just want to play that game, I'll gladly fork over some $ for an easy setup.
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.
Because there were a LOT of games that came out between 95-2001 that were Win9X exclusives that HAVE to have some sort of hardware acceleration that simply won't run on WinNT?
You see that period was the first real boom when it came to 3D graphics, you had GLIDE and early DirectX and a LOT of truly great games came out back then...problem is a lot of those companies no longer exist, or the programmers are gone and having to do a full rewrite would cost more than the software is worth to the company, and the simple fact that winNT and Win9X are truly too completely different beasts.
While those that wrote their games well, like the NOLF series? those games can be run even on 64bit win 7 with no problem. But for every game like that you have a Mechwarrior 3 or i76 or Final Fantasy VII that used OS specific hacks to get more speed out of what was pretty weak hardware then and those games simply won't run native on anything WinNT based (hell it takes a miracle just to get MW 3 to run on XP, much less Win 7/8) and I have yet to see an emulator like VB do Win9X with enough speed and graphics prowess to make the games look like more than a slideshow. I mean you may laugh at them today but games like i76 and MW 3 were really pushing the hell out of the hardware back then, with MW 3 you had these huge landscapes with a half a dozen tanks and small vehicles PLUS as many as 4 mechs and ALL were just letting fly the missiles and lasers, which when you are talking about a 400Mhz CPU with GPUs with as little as 16Mb of RAM? Well they had to use every trick in the book to get decent framerates out of the hardware that was popular then.
Things were evolving so rapidly then that often a PC that was barely a year old would already be strating to struggle with the graphics for the latest games so naturally designers used every trick in the book so their games would play on the widest variety of systems. Smart move then but sucks now as its such a PITA to get going. And the problem with your idea is two fold, one they would pretty much have to write the VM around Win9X because of its quirky 16/32bit hybrid nature and two the emulation would have to be VERY low level because as i said they used some pretty fucked up methods back then, such as i76 using the board clock to time in game events, so if you did high level emulation the clock on the board is still gonna be so fast that the game just won't run.
So believe me friend while I wish someone could do your idea the only way I could see it working is if someone were to build a clone of Win9X ala DOSBox so you could basically tailor the VM to the OS and release it as a package, which will most likely never happen simply because of how much work it would take to clone all the Win9X underpinnings, or for MSFT to release Win9X under some sort of freeware license so devs could simply bundle win9X with the emulator and of course it'll be a cold day i hell before THAT happens.
But the reason that was doable with XP on win 7 is you were just running a 32bit NT on top of a 32 or 64bit NT, compare this to Win9X which was basically 3 OSes slammed together, you had DOS as a bootloader and for some low level access, you had the 16bit subsystems for backwards compatibility with win 3.x and you had the 32bit Win9x with support for more modern features like long file names and DirectX. It would frankly be a nightmare to program and most of us simply don't have the room to pick up some Win9X tower on CL just to run those games.
Its a damned shame but I have a feeling a LOT of those games from that era that weren't popular enough to warrant a rebuild so they can sell it on Steam or GOG will simply be lost to time, its just too hard to emulate an OS as weird as Win9X.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.