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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.
> 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.
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.
As did I, and have quite a few older favorite titles from my younger years sitting in my GoG shelf.
Another thing I love is how they repackage older games to support newer OS/hardware setups.
I have a 10k text file of directions I wrote up to remind myself all the convoluted steps to install Planescape Torment from the original CDs to my Windows XP/7 systems, all the settings to change just to get it to run, not to mention bypassing the disc changing handlers.
I recently repurchased the game from GoG, which consists of clicking download, double-clicking the setup, hitting next twice, and that is is. A start menu entry ready to run without having to mutz about with ini files or messing with the games directory structure.
The extras are a nice touch too, as it's packaged with the hint guide and walkthrough. All for ten bucks. Well worth the money to me, despite already owning the original release of the game.
I also purchased Fallout 1 and 2 after the original release, and at some point lost my original media.
GoG was running a special at the time selling both games together for $6, which I also picked up.
I could have easily torrented the games and felt little guilt, as I've already bought them both, but would have had to deal with the same installation issues and problems. Buying them this way was a no brainer.
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
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.
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.
What I love is there is no jumping through hoops or messing with cracks. i want a game on my netbook which doesn't have a DVD drive? no problem, just drag the .exe over and run it.
But I'm about to get serious hate for pointing this out but fuck it, it needs to be said...they really really REALLY need to more testing on their games! Case in point i76, that game uses the CPU clock as a timer for several in game events so this game does NOT like modern multicores, yet there is zero warning that this game is gonna require hacks and tinkering to get to run. I went through every trick on the forums before giving up and while its only $10 its still not looking good on GOG when they are selling a game with serious issues. you go to their forum page for i76 and you'll see the thing is full of people having similar issues with not being able to progress in the game. And this is far from the only one, there are several games on their forums where people are having to use my hacks because I'd run into a game and just have to keep trying different things until I found a way around the problem which i would promptly post.
So while i love and will keep buying from GOG I really wish they'd do a little more testing or at least give you a heads up if there are serious issues. But this is something I've been pointing out for awhile now folks, its not the DOS games that are gonna end up lost, DOSBox has that down pat, its the Win9X era games because so many of them used hacks to squeeze more performance out, 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.
Oh and one final nit to pick....why is the GOG guys getting screwed on prices? When you see a game like Grimloack that both GOG and Steam has Steam nearly always has it cheaper, and of course on the sales its not even close, the last sale where i saw they both had it GOG was selling the game for $7, steam for $3. WTH devs, you punishing GOG for not having DRM? Because i find it hard to believe Valve is gonna be taking a loss on a game, sale or not. So if valve is getting the same cut all I can figure is either the GOG guys are taking a bigger slice (thus making the devs charge more to come out with the same profit on their end) or you are giving Valve better prices than you are giving GOG.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The crackers would be more likely to crack the one with DRM, because there's nothing to crack on the DRM free copy. Cracking is a game to these people, with nothing to crack there's no fun.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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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.
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.