Slashdot Mirror
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."
I disagree. While I am an open source advocate (and use it extensively). I do not see why everything "has" to be open source. Open source is a philosophy, DRM is pure idiocy disguised as philosophy!
> 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.
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.
When talking about games, the "assets" are 3d models, textures, scripting and dialog.
Source code isn't playable without data
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
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.
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