Support NeoGAF

[MrHicks]

Adobe wants people to pirate Photoshop so that it will be ubiquitous and when those people get jobs involving image editing their company has to shell out for a corporate license which is where they make all of their money.

bill gates said that he rather people ran a pirated windows then use a competitor OS too lol

 

[TouchMyBox]

bill gates said that he rather people ran a pirated windows then use a competitor OS too lol

Of course, it's better to have more potential customers pirating your shit than to have nobody give a shit about you.

Unless you're stardock and pirated copies flood your authentication servers...

 

[charlequin]

When was this period in time where CD's were 20 bucks?

Throughout the 1990s, the MSRP for all major label discs was $16 or above. As a direct result of localized promotions like the one in question (where stores like Best Buy would advertise a selection of new releases at $10-14), the record labels colluded to introduce Minimum Advertised Price rules, which shut retailers out from selling music CDs unless they agreed to never advertise prices above the threshold set by the record labels -- an illegal action which later resulted in a successful class-action suit against said labels. And even when this discounting was going on, it was a limited selection listed in a big box store's circular -- the rest of their selection, and generally all the titles at locally-owned music stores, would be full price.

I mean, it's certainly true that one could purchase many individual CDs for less than full price, or shop at fledgling online retailers to get better deals and avoid sales tax, but $16-18 prices were the reality for the vast majority of titles at major retail. The ASP for an album is far lower now than it was at the time.

 

[DatBreh]

Throughout the 1990s, the MSRP for all major label discs was $16 or above. As a direct result of localized promotions like the one in question (where stores like Best Buy would advertise a selection of new releases at $10-14), the record labels colluded to introduce Minimum Advertised Price rules, which shut retailers out from selling music CDs unless they agreed to never advertise prices above the threshold set by the record labels -- an illegal action which later resulted in a successful class-action suit against said labels. And even when this discounting was going on, it was a limited selection listed in a big box store's circular -- the rest of their selection, and generally all the titles at locally-owned music stores, would be full price.

I mean, it's certainly true that one could purchase many individual CDs for less than full price, or shop at fledgling online retailers to get better deals and avoid sales tax, but $16-18 prices were the reality for the vast majority of titles at major retail. The ASP for an album is far lower now than it was at the time.

Like i said, maybe my area was just a good one but our stores generally had albums for 15 bucks and under, unless it was something old, then the price would shoot up to 16 and 17 bucks.

 

[Lonely1]

Of course, if there was 0 piracy sales would increase. It's only logical? But are the current methods really effective? They only hurt legitimate consumers. I'm not against all DRM, Steam for one is DRM well done. It actually enhances the product. Secu-ROM? Ugh... Delaying the game? If I waited 6 months I can wait 6+ more until it hits rock bottoms price in Steam. Want me to opt for the console SKu instead? Well, maybe if they weren't $1k+ MXN...

But again, my main point here is that some pirates would buy if they had no other choice. How you arrive at that situation as a publisher is the hard part.

On the other hand, I'm a lot less likely to buy a game (specially at full price) if it has Secu-ROM or similar DRM schemes. Or if its severely delayed. Or if its only released on consoles and you aren't at the Uncharted 2 or SMG level.

My overall solution is a move towards free to play.

Well, If that's the future I can see myself spending a lot less money on the industry.

 

[Sealda]

The problem is that a lot of people who pirate have completely set their moral values that they should not pay for games. Its like with 90 % of the people and music. Pay and play does not compute for them. No matter how much they like a game etc. their budget will never ever devote any amount of money towards gaming anymore.

 

[Mario]

On the other hand, I'm a lot less likely to buy a game (specially at full price) if it has Secu-ROM or similar DRM schemes. Or if its severely delayed. Or if its only released on consoles and you aren't at the Uncharted 2 or SMG level.

Sure, I understand and stated that there are down sides of DRM. I'm not advocating DRM. Just making the point there is an opportunity to convert pirates to customers. If publishers could do that and not lose legitimate customers, that would be great.

Well, If that's the future I can see myself spending a lot less money on the industry.

Some platforms and markets are moving that way slower than others, but it is moving that way.

However, I'd also say it doesn't necessarily mean the creative experience nor the pricing you have in games you currently enjoy will be meaningfully different (if anything there will be continuing downward pressure on prices). Content will be available less and less in physical form though.

 

[DGRE]

Throughout the 1990s, the MSRP for all major label discs was $16 or above. As a direct result of localized promotions like the one in question (where stores like Best Buy would advertise a selection of new releases at $10-14), the record labels colluded to introduce Minimum Advertised Price rules, which shut retailers out from selling music CDs unless they agreed to never advertise prices above the threshold set by the record labels -- an illegal action which later resulted in a successful class-action suit against said labels. And even when this discounting was going on, it was a limited selection listed in a big box store's circular -- the rest of their selection, and generally all the titles at locally-owned music stores, would be full price.

I mean, it's certainly true that one could purchase many individual CDs for less than full price, or shop at fledgling online retailers to get better deals and avoid sales tax, but $16-18 prices were the reality for the vast majority of titles at major retail. The ASP for an album is far lower now than it was at the time.

I know this isn't the topic at hand, but you say this like $16-18 is too much to pay for an album. I understand the issue here was price-fixing, but as a musician, I personally hate that iTunes has permanently devalued songs to a 0.99 pricepoint and albums to a $10.00 (or less) pricepoint. Music is arguably one of the most durable forms of art, and also the one out of which one can get repeated usage and never tire of it.

 

[Zaraki_Kenpachi]

I know this isn't the topic at hand, but you say this like $16-18 is too much to pay for an album. I understand the issue here was price-fixing, but as a musician, I personally hate that iTunes has permanently devalued songs to a 0.99 pricepoint and albums to a $10.00 (or less) pricepoint. Music is arguably one of the most durable forms of art, and also the one out of which one can get repeated usage and never tire of it.

I don't think he's said anything about whether it's good or not he was just commenting on the graph showing sales in dollars. When you're measuring in dollars and not units and you decrease the price over that period you will without a doubt have lower dollar amount in sales.

 

[Kelthink]

I know this isn't the topic at hand, but you say this like $16-18 is too much to pay for an album. I understand the issue here was price-fixing, but as a musician, I personally hate that iTunes has permanently devalued songs to a 0.99 pricepoint and albums to a $10.00 (or less) pricepoint. Music is arguably one of the most durable forms of art, and also the one out of which one can get repeated usage and never tire of it.

Music has become incredibly throwaway though. There's more stuff coming out than ever before, it's a lot easier for people to make music these days and it's unbelievably easy to find 'that album you want' for free (easier than being able to purchase it, arf). The $16-18 price point is stupid in this age. I know it's just one person but Rob Dickins, former head of Warner Music (for 15 years) says "albums should be £1". Which makes a lot of sense in this day and age.

 

[alstein]

Of course, if there was 0 piracy sales would increase. It's only logical? But are the current methods really effective? They only hurt legitimate consumers. I'm not against all DRM, Steam for one is DRM well done. It actually enhances the product. Secu-ROM? Ugh... Delaying the game? If I waited 6 months I can wait 6+ more until it hits rock bottoms price in Steam. Want me to opt for the console SKu instead? Well, maybe if they weren't $1k+ MXN...

I think if PC piracy was eliminated, sales would increase in the short term, decrease in the long term, as pirates would find something else to pirate- they'd just stop playing games.

Often, as pirates increase their income, they switch to legitimate customers.

Also, you can have the benefits of Steam without Steamworks DRM. There are games on Steam which can be run without Steamworks DRM (Mount and Blade series, Dredmor)
So the benefits of Steam, and the drawbacks of Steamworks I consider to be separate.

I'm ok with DRM that doesn't keep me from using what I purchased the way I intended it- I think DRM on installs/updates is fine, but I dislike DRM then runs on just running the game.


As for the rise of freemium gaming, I suspect that has more to do with max-monetizing diehards who will spend $300+ on games then anything to do with DRM. I intend to avoid such games mostly on principle, as I think if they're as good as what I play now- for me to truly enjoy them I will have to spend too much money, so I just won't give them a a chance. Right now though the PC market is glutted- the supply of games outpaces demand. Great for us, bad for the indie PC industry. I do suspect that the indies will not be able to move in the freemium direction, so I expect indies to be my future.

Of course, it's better to have more potential customers pirating your shit than to have nobody give a shit about you.

Unless you're stardock and pirated copies flood your authentication servers...

They fixed that real quick over a holiday weekend- but it did lasting damage to the game. Yet, despite all that, Stardock keeps very friendly DRM policies because Brad Wardell believes it makes business sense to not treat your customers like criminals.
However, he did say a few years back that he makes games where a majority of the fans tend to be buyers and not pirates (TBS gamers tend to be more affluent then your average Dudebro game player)

 

[Noshino]

Music has become incredibly throwaway though. There's more stuff coming out than ever before, it's a lot easier for people to make music these days and it's unbelievably easy to find 'that album you want' for free (easier than being able to purchase it, arf). The $16-18 price point is stupid in this age. I know it's just one person but Rob Dickins, former head of Warner Music (for 15 years) says "albums should be £1". Which makes a lot of sense in this day and age.

I don't recall the albums from his own label being £1

 

[Marco1]

I remember when batman:AA was released for PC and if the game was copied then the ability to use the cape was disabled.
Guess what the biggest complaint on the official forums was?
Pirates will copy as they see nothing wrong with it other than more money in their pocket.
I can remember a friend who bought pirate commodore amiga games when we were young and at high school, he bought them for £1 each and every Friday he purchased 4-5 games. But he received zero value from those games as he very rarely completed any due to the pound to value equation and this was even playing games such as speedball 2 and shadow of the beast. I saved up and bought speedball 2 from a store and played that games for months.
I don't know what I'm trying to prove here but I just thought I would throw this in here.

 

[iNvid02]

I remember when batman:AA was released for PC and if the game was copied then the ability to use the cape was disabled.

if they can do this then why not fuck up the game properly for people who copy it, like make the enemies superhuman, give bats no detective mode etc

make it so embedded into the game that a bunch of crackers wont be able to do anything unless they spend a good amount of time

 

[Marco1]

if they can do this then why not fuck up the game properly for people who copy it, like make the enemies superhuman, give bats no detective mode etc

make it so embedded into the game that a bunch of crackers wont be able to do anything unless they spend a good amount of time

Don't know iNvidious but it sure was funny to see the forums that week. There were a lot of solutions to the problem but no replies.
Maybe the devs put it there as a testing ground.

 

[Mario]

if they can do this then why not fuck up the game properly for people who copy it, like make the enemies superhuman, give bats no detective mode etc

make it so embedded into the game that a bunch of crackers wont be able to do anything unless they spend a good amount of time

We did this for several of our games, where essentially specific modes or progress was locked off. We got lots of support requests about this and saw a lot of forum posts on our official forums as well as elsewhere with people wondering how to progress because they were "stuck".

It is a great technique, in that it isn't immediately obvious to crackers that they haven't produced a working crack and normally they are rushing to get a release out the door. It also forms a demo of sorts.

You need to be really careful though because if you degrade the game experience then you can actually get a lot of bad word of mouth about the game. Titan Quest I believe even went so far as to crash randomly when it detected a cracked version and it severely hampered the reputation of the game.

 

[Guileless]

The pirates I knew in college spent a lot of time playing pirated games. Now if piracy were to somehow magically disappear, I can't imagine they would just go to the library and start reading Thomas Hardy novels instead. I would bet on them scraping enough money together to buy games because otherwise they would have had to completely alter their behavior.

 

[iNvid02]

We did this for several of our games, where essentially specific modes or progress was locked off. We got lots of support requests about this and saw a lot of forum posts on our official forums as well as elsewhere with people wondering how to progress because they were "stuck".

It is a great technique, in that it isn't immediately obvious to crackers that they haven't produced a working crack and normally they are rushing to get a release out the door. It also forms a demo of sorts.

You need to be really careful though because if you degrade the game experience then you can actually get a lot of bad word of mouth about the game. Titan Quest I believe even went so far as to crash randomly when it detected a cracked version and it severely hampered the reputation of the game.

you gotta find the right balance, it would probably add a bit of time to development but it would be worth it in the end if it makes pirates think twice.

the random crashing seems a bit over the top, i think taking out a large sections of the story, limiting progress, and making the game difficulty hard to impossible should have the right effect.

also, if your able to detect the game as copied then why not throw up a message saying you pirated our game and this and it will not function.

as for support requests and forum threads, set up an auto response that tells them they are playing a pirated copy, of course you'd need to make sure its fault proof otherwise legit consumers could be caught in the middle

 

[bobnowhere]

I remember when batman:AA was released for PC and if the game was copied then the ability to use the cape was disabled.
Guess what the biggest complaint on the official forums was?

I remember one of the Football Manager games from a few years back had a 'feature' that if the game was pirated all transfers would cost twice as much as the agreed amount. For example if you bought Player X for $3mil your in game finances would show a $6mill loss, I think they may have done the same for wages as well.

Guess what the official forums were full of threads reporting the bug with angry people demanding that sigames fix the bugs or they won't by buying any further releases!

 

[Vinci]

Why don't we visit the quote from the most successful of the quoted individuals in the interview, an actual software creator - you know the one that is easily the most successful of the bunch, and not ironically the only one who champions the complete lack of DRM. Rewarding legitimate customers has time and time and time again proven to be far more successful than punishing everyone because of piracy (which has time and time and time again proven to reward the pirates as people inevitably and invariably find ways to beat and disable cumbersome DRM).

Pretty much all that needs to be said on this issue.

 

[charlequin]

I know this isn't the topic at hand, but you say this like $16-18 is too much to pay for an album.

$16-18 is too much to pay for an album. This price was only ever in place as an unsustainable aberration driven by illegal collusion, and the profits from this excessive pricing were kept almost entirely by labels that engaged in rampant contractual theft from their artists. There are many opportunities for an artist to make as much off one $10 album today as 5+ record store sales at that $18 price, so I'm not going to mourn the market moving to a more sustainable and equitable price.

 

[charlequin]

Guess what the official forums were full of threads reporting the bug with angry people demanding that sigames fix the bugs or they won't by buying any further releases!

This sort of thing is always hilarious, but it's also worth noting that more than one game has shipped with "anti-piracy" features of this sort that actually triggered on some legit installs -- which is a problem not just because it introduces game-ruining bugs where none would otherwise exist, but because legit players who experience the problem are unlikely to be taken seriously and therefore are more likely to dismiss your game (and your company) as a POS than to actually have their problem solved.

 

[aeolist]

This sort of thing is always hilarious, but it's also worth noting that more than one game has shipped with "anti-piracy" features of this sort that actually triggered on some legit installs -- which is a problem not just because it introduces game-ruining bugs where none would otherwise exist, but because legit players who experience the problem are unlikely to be taken seriously and therefore are more likely to dismiss your game (and your company) as a POS than to actually have their problem solved.

Yeah, this. There was apparently something like this in Dead Space 2 and a friend of mine with a legit copy couldn't get support when it triggered for him.

 

[charlequin]

Yeah, this. There was apparently something like this in Dead Space 2 and a friend of mine with a legit copy couldn't get support when it triggered for him.

Yeah, EA specifically actually have a long history of this. In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, all your units would blow up a short while into a match, if you were playing a pirated copy... or were unlucky enough to be one of many legit customers whose system somehow triggered the piracy protection accidentally.

 

[crimsonheadGCN]

Wasn't Crysis the one that had the chicken shooter for those who pirated the game?

 

[Snuggles]

Wasn't Crysis the one that had the chicken shooter for those who pirated the game?

Just looked this up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIXgi9qWzu8

What the hell man, that's awesome. I want a chicken gun...

 

[crimsonheadGCN]

Just looked this up.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIXgi9qWzu8

What the hell man, that's awesome. I want a chicken gun...

Once again the pirates have the superior experience.

 

[DatBreh]

you gotta find the right balance, it would probably add a bit of time to development but it would be worth it in the end if it makes pirates think twice.

the random crashing seems a bit over the top, i think taking out a large sections of the story, limiting progress, and making the game difficulty hard to impossible should have the right effect.

also, if your able to detect the game as copied then why not throw up a message saying you pirated our game and this and it will not function.

as for support requests and forum threads, set up an auto response that tells them they are playing a pirated copy, of course you'd need to make sure its fault proof otherwise legit consumers could be caught in the middle

Because that gives an immediate flag for the crackers to recognize that the game isnt completely cracked. You want them to release the jacked up cracked game.

 

[Pre]

Saying things like "Well, I wouldn't have bought it anyway" does not justify stealing something. If I walk into a record store and steal five CDs, it wouldn't matter if I would have been willing to purchase them or not - I'm going to be arrested. The mindset among many pirates that it's their existential right to steal somebody else's product is highly disturbing.

 

[Emitan]

Yeah, EA specifically actually have a long history of this. In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, all your units would blow up a short while into a match, if you were playing a pirated copy... or were unlucky enough to be one of many legit customers whose system somehow triggered the piracy protection accidentally.

This is the reason I gave up on PC gaming years ago and only recently returned. My computer triggered every form of anti piracy. RA2? All my units explode no matter what. Even cracked exes wouldn't fix it. KotOR? Game wouldn't even pass the disk check. Fuck DRM that's not Steam. It doesn't work.

 

[crimsonheadGCN]

Sports Interactive had an interview with Eurogamer discussing piracy:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-10-si-discusses-football-manager-piracy

Eurogamer: Which of the Football Manager titles suffered most from piracy? And do you know why that was?

Miles Jacobson: The only reasons for differences is speed of cracks becoming available. Therefore FM11, which has little protection on it, is deemed to have been the most pirated from the stats available to us.

The last time we had properly accurate stats was with FM2009, when the game wasn't cracked properly until late March. After that point, whilst we still had stats for those who downloaded the not properly cracked version, the piracy would have increased exponentially to levels we cannot calculate.

Eurogamer: Roughly how many sales are lost to PC piracy with each FM release?

Miles Jacobson: That's a question that is impossible to answer without speaking to every single person who has pirated the game! We know that for every one person who bought FM09 there were at least four pirated copies, not including the fact mentioned above regarding how we couldn't track all of them from April that year and beyond.

We also know that the numbers of people downloading torrents from public sites rose massively for both FM10 and FM11, despite shutting down torrents as quickly as they went up for the first few months of release.

We also know that being cracked ahead of release leads to people to cancel, or not pick up, pre-orders, and lower first weekend sales.

But one pirated copy does not equal a lost sale. Not everyone who pirates games would buy them if they couldn't pirate them - they'd just do without it. But there are a small percentage who would go out and buy it if they couldn't get it for free.

Eurogamer: How effective is Steam at cutting out piracy? How many sales are saved?

Miles Jacobson: Again, you can't talk about saved sales. It's an impossible stat to track. Steam is effective at cutting at day-zero, and pre-launch piracy. Time will tell whether in FM12's case, it can stay protected beyond that.

Eurogamer: What do you think about having no DRM?

Miles Jacobson: I would love to have no DRM on our games. I'd also love to not have to have locks on my home, or a burglar alarm, or locks on my car. How good would a life without keys be? I'd also love to have no insurance, either at home, or at the studio. Or a security guard at the office. The unfortunate reality is that as long as there are dishonest people in the world, you will need locks, and you'll need insurance. As long as there are people out there who want to pirate, there will be a need for DRM.