189: Rob from the Rich, Steal from the Poor

Jordan Deam

New member
Jan 11, 2008
697
0
0
Rob from the Rich, Steal from the Poor

How can a company survive when 92 percent of its "customers" don't pay for its product? That's the question facing indie PC game developers in the age of BitTorrent. Jordan Deam speaks with four prominent indie game developers about the wholesale theft of their games - and how it might not be as terrible as it sounds.

Read Full Article
 

Sampler

He who is not known
May 5, 2008
650
0
0
What about a move to ingame advertising? I know this is something EA are playing with and I'll probably get a heap of scorn thrown at me for mentioning it but if they give the game away and then have it contact a central server to play ads back you can keep a track of impressions and probably end up making more money than the cover charge of the game.

Take Fallout3 for example (as it's a good one) - plenty of billboards and ingame own make brands advertised, how hard would it be to link in to real-life adverts - the amount of hours I've spent on that game would surely mean if they had ads in it the revenue from so many I would've seen would be far greater than the £30 it costs.

It would also be an incentive for game houses to make games that last a bit and have a good replayability so you keep coming back and see more ads - better than some of the disposable crap pinched out of late.
 

Clemenstation

New member
Dec 9, 2008
414
0
0
Sampler said:
What about a move to ingame advertising? I know this is something EA are playing with and I'll probably get a heap of scorn thrown at me for mentioning it but if they give the game away and then have it contact a central server to play ads back you can keep a track of impressions and probably end up making more money than the cover charge of the game.

Take Fallout3 for example (as it's a good one) - plenty of billboards and ingame own make brands advertised, how hard would it be to link in to real-life adverts - the amount of hours I've spent on that game would surely mean if they had ads in it the revenue from so many I would've seen would be far greater than the £30 it costs.

It would also be an incentive for game houses to make games that last a bit and have a good replayability so you keep coming back and see more ads - better than some of the disposable crap pinched out of late.
This is a hideous idea, although I can appreciate the motives. The last thing I want when playing a game is to have my escapism ripped away by an ill-fitting Mountain Dew billboard.

Fallout, as per your example, would be ruined by ads for contemporary products, especially when so much of the game's style is wrapped up in knock-off send-ups of these companies (Nuka-Cola / Coca-Cola, etc.). Think Grand Theft Auto IV's sartorial mockery of... well... American life in general. The theme wouldn't work nearly as well if the products referenced were REAL products; think any actual company could stand to have their stuff used in such a negative, critical context? In-game advertising cheapens play experiences at best, and at worst completely eclipses them.

Also: mandatory linking-in to a central server for the express purpose of tracking advertising would not go over very well with most consumers.
 

cyrus_zuo

New member
Jul 18, 2006
2
0
0
Reflexive was shocked by how large the number was, but I think the phrase "shocked into action" isn't quite accurate. Since Reflexive has its own DRM that protects many games from many developers, we've been continually changing it to make it work better, we'd done so before getting that number and continue to do so. The main goal, as was mentioned in the original Gamasutra article was to combat casual piracy. A snip-it from that article:

"...for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale. [...] Though that doesn?t make a 92% piracy rate of one of our banner products any less distressing, knowing that eliminating 50,000 pirated copies might only produce 50 additional legal copies does help put things in perspective."

There have been many interesting ways to work around the piracy issue through micro-transactions and advertisements. All may bear some fruit. Additionally, as was mentioned in a follow-up article on Ricochet Infinity (http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17408), we found that many people who pirated the game were creating level sets and trading them online (Ricochet Infinity has an in-game system to create, trade, rate and try new level sets). That fact seemed rather interesting.
 

StartRunning

New member
Dec 14, 2007
38
0
0
I don't have a solution, but it seems to me if the ways of distributing software are changing, the whole businessmodel they employ might need to change. Instead, the distributors desperately try to reinforce the old methods. I probably would too, as it just as easily might mean less money for them. But it seems kind of .. pointless.
 

caross73

New member
Oct 31, 2006
145
0
0
No matter how much piracy there is, I think that there will always be artists who develop games, and there will always be people who manage to make a living off writing them. Of course will there be big-budget, 40 million dollars in development games if piracy is allowed to be too convenient? No. And honestly I don't care, because my best game experiences have all been in garage games without the huge cinematic, voice-over budgets.

I think I got more entertainment value out of a shareware copy of Scorched Earth that we played for months in the dorms in college than in my $60 copy of Oblivion which now sits on the shelf, having been drained of every bit of interest it once had over a couple weekend.
 

Nurb

Cynical bastard
Dec 9, 2008
3,078
0
0
most people hate the big publishers, but yea, it really does hurt the indie developers quite a bit. The smaller developer comeback like we had in the 90's can't happen again at this rate, it'll still be the age of bland, crappy, corporate sequels
 

Mariena

New member
Sep 25, 2008
930
0
0
Sampler said:
What about a move to ingame advertising? I know this is something EA are playing with and I'll probably get a heap of scorn thrown at me for mentioning it but if they give the game away and then have it contact a central server to play ads back you can keep a track of impressions and probably end up making more money than the cover charge of the game.

Take Fallout3 for example (as it's a good one) - plenty of billboards and ingame own make brands advertised, how hard would it be to link in to real-life adverts - the amount of hours I've spent on that game would surely mean if they had ads in it the revenue from so many I would've seen would be far greater than the £30 it costs.

It would also be an incentive for game houses to make games that last a bit and have a good replayability so you keep coming back and see more ads - better than some of the disposable crap pinched out of late.
The ads in Rainbow Six Vegas 2 were okay, if you ask me. It took place around 2008 (2005/2010), and some scenarios involved casinos and convention center type areas. I'd expect a lot of ads there, and they were actually appropriate.

But seeing ads for Dodge or BMW, or Siemens in a Fallout game, or basically anything that isn't set in our 2009.. that'd really kill the setting.
 

Halbyrd

New member
Feb 17, 2009
11
0
0
The point raised about affordability brings to mind a related issue that's been bugging me for a while: what the heck happened to PC game demos? I've long ago resigned myself to the fact that PC games have zero resale value, due to CD keys and the ease of copying. That said, why the heck would I want to put down $60+ on a game when I have no idea if I'll even enjoy playing it? Most of the games I've purchased in the past few years have been bought on the basis of personal experience with the game, either through demos, playing on a friend's PC, or when those weren't available, torrenting. Game reviews are all fine and good for weeding out the obvious crap, but with most games, no reviewer is going to be able to tell me whether I'll enjoy a game or not. Only personal experience can give me that answer, and if I can't get that experience, I'm more apt to skip over that game entirely.

"Demos are fine and good," you say, "but making them takes time away from making the real game, and some things have to be cut when the budget gets tight, and blah blah blah..." I get that. But even if you don't have the time to make a demo, there's a solution that works well for many games, and adds minimal time to the project: the time-limited full-size demo. What this is, is a full, working copy of the game wrapped in a container that limits playtime, and has hooks to send you to the company website to purchase an unlock key. What this allows gamers to do is grab the full game, try it out, and if they like it, go punch in their CC#, get the code, and keep playing. Some companies have tried this already, and it works far more effectively than any amount of ads at convincing people to buy.

"But wait," you say, "that just makes it easy for the pirates to crack the game and distribute it over the net!" Yeah, but realistically speaking, nothing you do is going to significantly slow them down. Cory Doctorow and others have already explained this in regards to other DRM-ed media: Keeping a message secret is impossible when the receiver and the attacker are the same person. If your end goal is to get the game into the hands of gamers, then any attempts to lock it are going to fail, simply because you must provide the key in order to make the game playable.

There's been a lot of noise about how DRM is just the logical extension of CD keys, but it's just that--noise. The real purpose of CD keys is to serve as a reminder to the gamer that the game they're playing cost the devs a lot of blood, sweat, tears and cash to make, and if you like the game, you really ought to give them something for their efforts.

DRM, by contrast, says to the consumer: "You're a thief, you dirty thief. If you want to play our supremely awesome game, you have to prove you're not a thief, thief. And you have to keep proving it at whatever interval we deem necessary. Having trouble because our sh*t 3rd-party DRM breaks your computer? Tough! Don't want us phoning home, sending the-gods-know-what kind of information back to the mother server? Too bad, thieves have no rights!" It's a back-handed slap to the face of every person who loves gaming, and wants to express that love with their purchases.

Stardock, and companies like them, have realized something important: People respect you if you respect them. They release their games free of any DRM encumbrances, and focus their support on the paying customers. Your purchase gets you access to materials beyond the game itself, and plenty of help if something goes wrong with the game. They choose not to look at illicit copies as lost sales, because they rightly recognize that many people who torrent games would not have bought them in the first place. If a game doesn't do well, they don't whine and moan and blame "teh pirates", they recognize that it was a flop, and do what they can to keep their future games from flopping. The respect, and income, this has generated from the gamer community speaks volumes.

Make no mistake: real, dishonest-to-badness piracy is criminal behavior, and needs to be punished; but at the same time, the sheer amount of it speaks to a need that the official channels aren't filling. Illicit torrenting, though nowhere near as horrible, still speaks to a larger problem. The industry as a whole needs to step back and ask themselves: Why is there so much of this going around? An honest assessment of this just might lead to some surprising solutions.
 

Mariena

New member
Sep 25, 2008
930
0
0
Halbyrd said:
The point raised about affordability brings to mind a related issue that's been bugging me for a while: what the heck happened to PC game demos? I've long ago resigned myself to the fact that PC games have zero resale value, due to CD keys and the ease of copying. That said, why the heck would I want to put down $60+ on a game when I have no idea if I'll even enjoy playing it? Most of the games I've purchased in the past few years have been bought on the basis of personal experience with the game, either through demos, playing on a friend's PC, or when those weren't available, torrenting. Game reviews are all fine and good for weeding out the obvious crap, but with most games, no reviewer is going to be able to tell me whether I'll enjoy a game or not. Only personal experience can give me that answer, and if I can't get that experience, I'm more apt to skip over that game entirely.

"Demos are fine and good," you say, "but making them takes time away from making the real game, and some things have to be cut when the budget gets tight, and blah blah blah..." I get that. But even if you don't have the time to make a demo, there's a solution that works well for many games, and adds minimal time to the project: the time-limited full-size demo. What this is, is a full, working copy of the game wrapped in a container that limits playtime, and has hooks to send you to the company website to purchase an unlock key. What this allows gamers to do is grab the full game, try it out, and if they like it, go punch in their CC#, get the code, and keep playing. Some companies have tried this already, and it works far more effectively than any amount of ads at convincing people to buy.

"But wait," you say, "that just makes it easy for the pirates to crack the game and distribute it over the net!" Yeah, but realistically speaking, nothing you do is going to significantly slow them down. Cory Doctorow and others have already explained this in regards to other DRM-ed media: Keeping a message secret is impossible when the receiver and the attacker are the same person. If your end goal is to get the game into the hands of gamers, then any attempts to lock it are going to fail, simply because you must provide the key in order to make the game playable.

There's been a lot of noise about how DRM is just the logical extension of CD keys, but it's just that--noise. The real purpose of CD keys is to serve as a reminder to the gamer that the game they're playing cost the devs a lot of blood, sweat, tears and cash to make, and if you like the game, you really ought to give them something for their efforts.

DRM, by contrast, says to the consumer: "You're a thief, you dirty thief. If you want to play our supremely awesome game, you have to prove you're not a thief, thief. And you have to keep proving it at whatever interval we deem necessary. Having trouble because our sh*t 3rd-party DRM breaks your computer? Tough! Don't want us phoning home, sending the-gods-know-what kind of information back to the mother server? Too bad, thieves have no rights!" It's a back-handed slap to the face of every person who loves gaming, and wants to express that love with their purchases.

Stardock, and companies like them, have realized something important: People respect you if you respect them. They release their games free of any DRM encumbrances, and focus their support on the paying customers. Your purchase gets you access to materials beyond the game itself, and plenty of help if something goes wrong with the game. They choose not to look at illicit copies as lost sales, because they rightly recognize that many people who torrent games would not have bought them in the first place. If a game doesn't do well, they don't whine and moan and blame "teh pirates", they recognize that it was a flop, and do what they can to keep their future games from flopping. The respect, and income, this has generated from the gamer community speaks volumes.

Make no mistake: real, dishonest-to-badness piracy is criminal behavior, and needs to be punished; but at the same time, the sheer amount of it speaks to a need that the official channels aren't filling. Illicit torrenting, though nowhere near as horrible, still speaks to a larger problem. The industry as a whole needs to step back and ask themselves: Why is there so much of this going around? An honest assessment of this just might lead to some surprising solutions.
I could not have said it better myself, and congrats on your first post which is of excellent quality. I'd say you have a bright future on the Escapist ahead of you =P
 

Doug

New member
Apr 23, 2008
5,205
0
0
I can understand people pirating from EA when their DRM can be crippling and effectively rips the rights away from the customer, but this is ridiculous. 2D Boy and these folks don't deserve to have there small scale, and very cheap games pirated like this.

Although 2D boy never used DRM in World of Goo but ended up with about the same piracy rate.
 

mikiurban

New member
Feb 18, 2009
1
0
0
90% Piracy may not be so profitable after all: "World of Goo Publisher Brighter Minds Media Goes Bankrupt"
 

Doug

New member
Apr 23, 2008
5,205
0
0
mikiurban said:
90% Piracy may not be so profitable after all: "World of Goo Publisher Brighter Minds Media Goes Bankrupt"
Hmm, maybe so. But that's the hard-copy publisher, not the digital publisher (2D Boy themselves publish there). Add to that, Brighter Minds Media seem to have more products in their range than World of Goo, and the current global recession, to pin it directly on piracy is somewhat easy. Maybe it is directly piracy, but it seems to lack detailed info on the where's and why's.
 

Doug

New member
Apr 23, 2008
5,205
0
0
Halbyrd said:
DRM, by contrast, says to the consumer: "You're a thief, you dirty thief. If you want to play our supremely awesome game, you have to prove you're not a thief, thief. And you have to keep proving it at whatever interval we deem necessary. Having trouble because our sh*t 3rd-party DRM breaks your computer? Tough! Don't want us phoning home, sending the-gods-know-what kind of information back to the mother server? Too bad, thieves have no rights!" It's a back-handed slap to the face of every person who loves gaming, and wants to express that love with their purchases.

Stardock, and companies like them, have realized something important: People respect you if you respect them. They release their games free of any DRM encumbrances, and focus their support on the paying customers. Your purchase gets you access to materials beyond the game itself, and plenty of help if something goes wrong with the game. They choose not to look at illicit copies as lost sales, because they rightly recognize that many people who torrent games would not have bought them in the first place. If a game doesn't do well, they don't whine and moan and blame "teh pirates", they recognize that it was a flop, and do what they can to keep their future games from flopping. The respect, and income, this has generated from the gamer community speaks volumes.

Make no mistake: real, dishonest-to-badness piracy is criminal behavior, and needs to be punished; but at the same time, the sheer amount of it speaks to a need that the official channels aren't filling. Illicit torrenting, though nowhere near as horrible, still speaks to a larger problem. The industry as a whole needs to step back and ask themselves: Why is there so much of this going around? An honest assessment of this just might lead to some surprising solutions.
At last, another person who's read the Stardock philosophy post! Agree with you, and them, 100% in most respects. Piracy is bad, but as these guys found out, only 1 in 1000 pirates will buy a game if all piracy is stopped.

In percentage terms, that's about 100.9% of the original sales. A .9% increase that, realistically, won't cover the cost of developing DRM-tools, nor the loss of sales because paying customers don't want DRM.

Ok, its a pain that so few people pay, and it annoyed me a great deal that most others are pirating the game, but I'd be much more annoyed if the developer turned to me, punched me in the face, and said "Thats what you get for being a pirate" when I'd just paid him for a game. This is what DRM is. A punch to the face.
 

Lovesfool

New member
Jan 28, 2009
183
0
0
They said it all.

"I've had really bad experiences with DRM in the past, and no DRM was also the most practical way to go about it," Purho says. "I don't want to spend my time working on it, because it screws over legitimate customers and someone will crack it anyhow."

Than and the comment about people that wouldn't buy the game anyway unless it was on torrent speak volumes. A percentage of gamers playing a pirated game doesn't mean they represent lost sales.
 

Doug

New member
Apr 23, 2008
5,205
0
0
avidabey said:
Halbyrd said:
There's been a lot of noise about how DRM is just the logical extension of CD keys, but it's just that--noise. The real purpose of CD keys is to serve as a reminder to the gamer that the game they're playing cost the devs a lot of blood, sweat, tears and cash to make, and if you like the game, you really ought to give them something for their efforts.

DRM, by contrast, says to the consumer: "You're a thief, you dirty thief. If you want to play our supremely awesome game, you have to prove you're not a thief, thief. And you have to keep proving it at whatever interval we deem necessary. Having trouble because our sh*t 3rd-party DRM breaks your computer? Tough! Don't want us phoning home, sending the-gods-know-what kind of information back to the mother server? Too bad, thieves have no rights!" It's a back-handed slap to the face of every person who loves gaming, and wants to express that love with their purchases.
Yeah! It's like at stores, and those detectors that go off when you leave carrying something you shouldn't. I never shop at those retailers, because those stupid security measures are basically saying to me that I'm a thief!...

Whereas, of course, signs simply advising me not to steal are just really reminding people all the blood, sweat, and capitalist tears that went into building the store.
Erm, no. If the detectors went off even when you had nothing on you that you hadn't paid for, followed you home, and sat to watch you as you used your product, that'd be a fair comparasion.

Or if you were never allowed to remove a security tag from a product, and the tag often interfered with the operation of the product.
 

L.B. Jeffries

New member
Nov 29, 2007
2,175
0
0
Great read. I'm not a fan of DRM and I don't bother to yell at people for pirating games. But when they start arguing that they aren't really hurting the people who make games or that it isn't stealing it crosses the line into delusional. Do whatever you're going to do, no one is arguing that, but don't lie to yourself about the consequences of your actions.

Articles like this remind them about who ultimately gets burned when you steal these games.