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Zombie James · Mar 7, 2008

http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=1558

1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product
2. Get closer to the community
3. Offer a demo
4. Entice them with valuable updates
5. Clean House

Your wonderful DRM scheme for which you paid so much money is going to be outlived by the average Drosophilidae. Your (legit) users are going to be faced with online activation, CD checks, and typing in serial numbers the size of nuclear launch codes. A pirate is going to click install and get on with the gaming, already.

I realize what a profound bore it is to hammer away at this appallingly obvious fact, but its less of a bore than that thrice-cursed dialog that gets in my face telling me to type in a huge string of mixed letters and numbers like some kind of king-hell CAPTCHA before Im allowed to play. Knock it off already.

Where are all of these pre-release versions coming from? When a game shows up on BitTorrent days or weeks before hitting the shelves, you cant blame the internet. These people are pirates, not ninjas. Theyre not sneaking in and swiping your gold master from amidst the laser tripwires, robotic sentry guns, and teams of heavily-armed roaming guards you no doubt have protecting the thing. Someone who works for you or with whom you have a business relationship is out there putting your goods on the internet. How is it youre willing to make your customers bend over backwards to use your product via invasive DRM, but you cant seem to take a few basic steps to find the person or organization who is stabbing you in the back?

Cheeto · Mar 7, 2008

1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product
1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product
1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product
1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product
1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product
1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product

.

avatar299 · Mar 7, 2008

you can't fight it. Stop using it as a scapegoat.

jakershaker · Mar 7, 2008

avatar299 said:
you can't fight it. Stop using it as a scapegoat.

Someone who works for you or with whom you have a business relationship is out there putting your goods on the internet. How is it youre willing to make your customers bend over backwards to use your product via invasive DRM, but you cant seem to take a few basic steps to find the person or organization who is stabbing you in the back?

Lol sometimes I wonder if people know how many persons are involved in releasing a game until its on the shelves. Pretty much impossible to prevent it leaking if someone wants it to leak.

And did we need another piracy thread btw?

Ghost · Mar 7, 2008

jakershaker said:
Lol sometimes I wonder if people know how many persons are involved in releasing a game until its on the shelves. Pretty much impossible to prevent it leaking if someone wants it to leak.

And did we need another piracy thread btw?

Yeah but it shouldn't be impossible to work out who did it and fire their asses.

stuminus3 · Mar 7, 2008

_leech_ said:
1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product

QFT

Davidion · Mar 7, 2008

Very good list.

Ghost said:
Yeah but it shouldn't be impossible to work out who did it and fire their asses.

You'd be surprised. Investigations like this cost time and resources, something that devs, particularly smaller ones, don't necessarily have.

AstroLad · Mar 7, 2008

Litigation.

TheGreatDave · Mar 7, 2008

They need to make it easy to buy games. If I can't buy a game on Steam I'm not buying it. Simple as that. I will never buy a PC game in a box. I don't pirate games, I just ignore them.

I've bought more PC games on Steam than all my games for other consoles combined this year. Don't ignore me man!

jakershaker · Mar 7, 2008

Ghost said:
Yeah but it shouldn't be impossible to work out who did it and fire their asses.

Well near impossible. You've got:

- Publishing (if you've got a problem here then you really have a problem, lots of people in lower positions or disgruntled workers who do it for revenge)
- Publishings marketing (sending out advance copies to all sorts of people)
- Gamecompany (giving away build to 'friends', people stealing shit in the office, people in lower positions that don't care)
- DVD making company (with LOTS of staff which changes often)
- Packaging company (with LOTS of staff which changes often)
- Deliveries (you want to control all those who work with the trucks/boats/airplanes who deliver the stuff?)
- Distribution (salespeople, bosses etc)
- Distributions marketing (have advance copies for media etc)
- Sub Distributors (always some companies buying stuff and shipping to smaller customers)
- Media (online, paper, tv note: these guys need retail in advance if you want reviews)
- Retailchains (Promos to offices & stores etc, retail copy if early delivery)

And probably more, those are some of the weak spots I could think of on short notice.

BigDug13 · Mar 7, 2008

I totally agree with the superior product thing.

Back when Half Life 2 first came out, even if you bought the hard copy of it, you still had to log onto the internet to use it, even though it's a single player game. Well, I did that and attempted to leave STEAM in offline mode so that I wouldn't have to continue to connect.

During my naval deployment, where I'm not allowed to connect my computer to the internet, somehow STEAM reverted to a state where it wanted me to log into their system on the internet in order to play my single player game. So needless to say, I could no longer play my $50 game.

When I got to Malaysia, I saw that they had a copy of Half Life 2 for a few bucks that obviously didn't need to connect to the internet to play. I bought it and happily enjoyed the game I wanted on my original purchase by buying a second pirated purchase.

So why should I pay money to not have access to my product? Why wouldn't I just download a problem-free version next time?

The 360 DRM scares me too. What happens to the 100+ songs that I will eventually own for Rock Band if my system dies? I know I'll be able to use them ONLINE ONLY on the new system they send me. So once again on a naval deployment, I would be out of luck. I'll have to sit on the phone with customer service and hope that they refund me the points and clear my account of the "already bought" info so that I can redownload them and play them OFFLINE.

TheExodu5 · Mar 7, 2008

DRM or CD-Keys do work in some cases: online games. First off, I don't want to have to play with a bunch of pirates who don't need a CD-Key to play the game online. Also, if a CD-Key isn't needed to play online, then hackers have no reprocussions to using hacks and getting banned.

Steam's setup is perfect for me.

Xrenity · Mar 7, 2008

What's up with the truckloads of piracy news this week?

neptunes · Mar 7, 2008

Remember when Valve was hacked and a half-life 2 build was leaked a year early?

I believe the game was originally slated to be released the following month, the build showed the game was nowhere close to complete.

jetjevons · Mar 7, 2008

I love all these recent piracy analysis threads. It's about better product. It's about community. etc. etc.

It's about the fact that pirates will never pay any money for games. They will always steal if they can. That's all there is to it.

Here's how you fight piracy:

1. Give your product away for free.
2. The end.

Evlar · Mar 7, 2008

TheGreatDave said:
They need to make it easy to buy games. If I can't buy a game on Steam I'm not buying it. Simple as that. I will never buy a PC game in a box. I don't pirate games, I just ignore them.

I've bought more PC games on Steam than all my games for other consoles combined this year. Don't ignore me man!

You won't buy StarCraft 2? So sorry, man.

I think point #2 "Get closer to the community" is nearly as important as #1.

cicerone · Mar 7, 2008

_leech_ said:
1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product
2. Get closer to the community
3. Offer a demo
4. Entice them with valuable updates
5. Clean House
6. Invade China

Fixed

Fuu · Mar 7, 2008

Xrenity said:
What's up with the truckloads of piracy news this week?

And yesterday there were many threads about "Japan's tastes in gaming". It looks like GAF is getting thematic.

BigDug13 · Mar 7, 2008

jetjevons said:
I love all these recent piracy analysis threads. It's about better product. It's about community. etc. etc.

It's about the fact that pirates will never pay any money for games. They will always steal if they can. That's all there is to it.

Here's how you fight piracy:

1. Give your product away for free.
2. The end.

For most of piracy, this is true. But like I said earlier, I wouldn't have bought the bootleg copy of HL2 if Valve allowed me to play my official copy of HL2 during my deployment.

It has been proven that DRM and similar measures do NOTHING to stop piracy, and only makes life harder on legal users. So why do it? So that it looks like you're trying to stop piracy, even though the measures do not? So that your customers continue to jump through hoops and the uninformed think that the same product isn't available for free without the DRM hassle?

You will NEVER stop piracy, but I'm willing to bet that offering a HASSLE-FREE product will make more people pull the trigger on the purchase.

QVT · Mar 7, 2008

They need to do more to keep up. If the pirates can release a game, then so can the companies. I imagine it'd have to be incredibly difficult to wait sometimes a month for a game to be termed "okay" for you to buy, but you can have it for free right now.

I like to think that if my computer could run games I wouldn't fall prey to piracy but who can say?

Taker666 · Mar 7, 2008

Force all ISPs to ban torrent sites who provide illegal content.

WoWcraft · Mar 7, 2008

6. Offer them the way of the ninja instead.

wetowel · Mar 7, 2008

pc gaming is dead anyway....:lol

Durante · Mar 7, 2008

Great list.

Taker666 said:
Force all ISPs to ban torrent sites who provide illegal content.

Yeah, that worked perfectly for the music and movie industry, I'm sure it would help out here as well!

TheExodu5 · Mar 7, 2008

BigDug13 said:
It has been proven that DRM and similar measures do NOTHING to stop piracy, and only makes life harder on legal users. So why do it? So that it looks like you're trying to stop piracy, even though the measures do not? So that your customers continue to jump through hoops and the uninformed think that the same product isn't available for free without the DRM hassle?

No it hasn't. Do you think a online games like Diablo 2 and StarCraft would have sold nearly as well if you could simply pirate a copy and play online for free? Not a chance.

Games like Titan Quest have no DRM'ed closed online servers, and look where that has gotten them.

Monroeski · Mar 7, 2008

jetjevons said:
Here's how you fight piracy:

1. Give your product away for free.
2. The end.

That's not just fighting piracy, that's ending it altogether, which is not what the article is about -

TFA said:
So the goal here should not be eliminating piracy, which is absurd and impossible. Instead, work on converting as many of those pirates into customers.

The article is about ways to reduce it and convert some pirates into purchasers, which is entirely realistic. I knew several people in the dorms in college that only pirated 1. to avoid the hassle of DRM protection, and went out and bought on day one games they knew didn't have all the garbage attached, and 2. because demos weren't available, after which they would purchase any games they enjoyed.

There are, of course, the pirates out there that will always steal no matter what, but the population that is willing to buy if the process was easier is larger than many people think.

Danj · Mar 7, 2008

There's an important item missing from that list, and it's "don't charge stupid huge amounts of money" - for example, Sins of a Solar Empire is 50 bucks, which seems like a reasonable price, but if I wanted to buy, say, Call of Duty 4 off of Steam I'd have to pay somewhere in the area of 80 bucks. That's just silly.

TheExodu5 · Mar 7, 2008

Taker666 said:
Force all ISPs to ban torrent sites who provide illegal content.

Unconstitutional. Torrent sites also do provide many legal services. You'd be hurting people and many developers who cannot afford online hosting for their files.

Also, underground torrent sites would pop up.

On top of that, you have newsgroups. Want ISPs to ban them too?

65536 · Mar 7, 2008

dacuk · Mar 7, 2008

1- Establish an scaleable price structure for the games. Do not charge first-world prices for games sold on third world countries.
2- Offer promotions, freebies and other advantages that cannot be downloaded from a torrent.
3- Do not protect the games with stupid, hassle-full of spyware DRM systems (StarForce comes to mind)
4- Internet validation could be an alternative, IF all the world had the network infrastructure of South Korea. Until then, it is just an elitist measure.
5- Make the game free or really cheap and charge for extra content (the way they do with FIFA on China or S. Korea)

There are more suggestions for the topic, but I think GAFers already know them.

RJT · Mar 7, 2008

jetjevons said:
It's about the fact that pirates will never pay any money for games. They will always steal if they can. That's all there is to it.

Honestly, if there is something I don't like in GAF, it's this attitude towards piracy. I used to pirate a lot, but now I don't because it hurts developers. I learned my lesson.

You people must think "pirates" are some mutant alien zombies trying to bankrupt developers and end gaming. You're playing way too much video games. Most downloaders are just students without a budget for gaming trying to do something they like without paying. It's wrong, but people doing it aren't evil.

rollingstart · Mar 7, 2008

what is the pirate situation with Steam?

Couldent they do something where games could only be played on steam if you have a valid account and the game recognizes you have bought the game in some way?

the other way is for devs to leak a fake version of their game online that contains a verison of the game which has a file that alerts which IP or users are playing those games pirated, then they could swarm them.

Evlar · Mar 7, 2008

andrewfee said:
1. Stop all development for platforms that are not the Playstation 3.
2. Use as little compression as possible when creating games.
3. Repeat data on the disc as much as possible to fill up the Blu-Ray disc as much as you can. (eg store assets on a level-by-level basis, rather than storing them once and only accessing that one in later levels)
4. ???
5. Profit.

Random Troll of The Day Award

WoWcraft · Mar 7, 2008

andrewfee said:
1. Stop all development for platforms that are not the Playstation 3.
2. Use as little compression as possible when creating games.
3. Repeat data on the disc as much as possible to fill up the Blu-Ray disc as much as you can. (eg store assets on a level-by-level basis, rather than storing them once and only accessing that one in later levels)
4. ???
5. Profit.

Bu-bu-but Xbox 360 development is cheaper.

And pirateable

AstroLad · Mar 7, 2008

What's wrong with the old PC-game model of making you reference a specific word in the manual before you could play? Do that but increase the security considering how prevalent piracy has become. Just ask players to type in the line on Page 32, Line 8, etc. (something random) every hour or so (not too much). Would effectively kill a great deal of piracy imo.

RJT · Mar 7, 2008

AstroLad said:
What's wrong with the old PC-game model of making you reference a specific word in the manual before you could play? Do that but increase the security considering how prevalent piracy has become. Just ask players to type in the line on Page 32, Line 8, etc. (something random) every hour or so (not too much). Would effectively kill a great deal of piracy imo.

Dude, you can download manuals too. That method became obsolete with the Internet.

Zombie James · Mar 7, 2008

AstroLad said:
What's wrong with the old PC-game model of making you reference a specific word in the manual before you could play? Do that but increase the security considering how prevalent piracy has become. Just ask players to type in the line on Page 32, Line 8, etc. (something random) every hour or so (not too much). Would effectively kill a great deal of piracy imo.

And how are they going to copy protect manuals?

Skellig Gra · Mar 7, 2008

_leech_ said:
And how are they going to copy protect manuals?

It will slow down piracy for sure. It won't eliminate it though.

RJT · Mar 7, 2008

Hollywood Duo said:
It will slow down piracy for sure. It won't eliminate it though.

It will slow down the sales of whoever does it. I refuse to play a game that asks me for a code every hour. That is not acceptable.

Skellig Gra · Mar 7, 2008

RJT said:
It will slow down the sales of whoever does it. I refuse to play a game that asks me for a code every hour. That is not acceptable.

Well, you might not have a choice to even refuse playing copy protected games when PC gaming dies as a result of 0 profit.

AstroLad · Mar 7, 2008

RJT said:
It will slow down the sales of whoever does it. I refuse to play a game that asks me for a code every hour. That is not acceptable.

But you sympathize with pirates anyway, so your stance pretty much confirms my point as to the effectiveness of this method more than contradicts it.

jetjevons · Mar 7, 2008

RJT said:
You people must think "pirates" are some mutant alien zombies trying to bankrupt developers and end gaming.

Nope. Just thieves.

venne · Mar 7, 2008

The first rule of fighting piracy is you do not talk about fighting piracy.

aeolist · Mar 7, 2008

The demo thing is huge. It's ridiculous how many PC devs release $50 games without any kind of demo to let me know how it plays.

I don't pirate but that makes me want to sometimes.

Durante · Mar 7, 2008

AstroLad said:
What's wrong with the old PC-game model of making you reference a specific word in the manual before you could play? Do that but increase the security considering how prevalent piracy has become. Just ask players to type in the line on Page 32, Line 8, etc. (something random) every hour or so (not too much). Would effectively kill a great deal of piracy imo.

That's the exact opposite of rule #1.
"1. Make sure the pirates cant offer a superior product"
Because someone will make an app (a week before the game is released) that spits out the right word when you enter the page/line numbers. So pirates will use that and legitimate customers will have to search the manual.

Elbrain · Mar 7, 2008

It is true shit damn CD keys that are as long as nuclear launch codes just make the fucking games activate with and online component through servers. Shit at least that way it will be a bitch to hack.

AstroLad · Mar 7, 2008

I'm guessing some of you guys didn't PC game very much in the 80s and 90s. The manual method is not that bad. And in a way it can almost be a "tutorial" of sorts in making you look at the manual and learn things about the game you probably wouldn't learn otherwise. Just have the manual at the ready and you're good to go.

hclflow · Mar 7, 2008

Jesus, these threads sure are getting old. You just talk yourselves in circles and the majority of the posters never seem to realize there is no practical "solution". If I see another piracy thread in the next week, my head is going to explode.

What the fuck is wrong with you people.

Monroeski · Mar 7, 2008

Danj said:
There's an important item missing from that list, and it's "don't charge stupid huge amounts of money" - for example, Sins of a Solar Empire is 50 bucks, which seems like a reasonable price, but if I wanted to buy, say, Call of Duty 4 off of Steam I'd have to pay somewhere in the area of 80 bucks. That's just silly.

Why does it cost 80 on Steam?

Stumpokapow · Mar 7, 2008

AstroLad said:
I'm guessing some of you guys didn't PC game very much in the 80s and 90s. The manual method is not that bad. And in a way it can almost be a "tutorial" of sorts in making you look at the manual and learn things about the game you probably wouldn't learn otherwise. Just have the manual at the ready and you're good to go.

manual.txt

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