CD Projekt RED: Game Industry Should Use "Carrot Not the Stick" With Piracy

[ThriKreen]

Pirates eventually crack most DRM, this is true. But the "eventually" is a critical point when you're attempting to sell your game in physical stores. Stores will eventually decide it's no longer worth it to give prominent shelf space to your product. If the eventually it takes for pirates to crack it is longer than the eventually it takes for store to move your item off of the "hot new product" area, the DRM did it's job.

Ding... I'm surprised everyone else seems to have forgotten the impact retailers have in this equation.

Trace the flow of money to product (and who has to deal with returns) and you'll see who's the most invested in DRM solutions.

 

[Paradoxrifts]

Isn't CDPR the company that tried to sue a couple million people for illegally downloading the Witcher 2?

http://www.complex.com/video-games/2012/01/the-witcher-2-devs-are-no-longer-pursuing-damaging-anti-piracy-lawsuits

Yea. They are. They condemn DRM, but then tried to sue people. Granted that is entirely within their rights, and pirates are doing something illegal, and yes CDPR stopped doing it, but really.I am not going to really listen to CDPR when it comes to how to "entice" people to pay for a game rather than pirate it, especially when their previous method was to ruin someone's life over a 50-60 dollar game.

Fuck 'em.

So long as CDProjekt continues to do the right thing by their paying customers, I don't really give a right fuck how many deadbeats their lawyers nail to the wall.

 

[Skeleon]

Pirates eventually crack most DRM, this is true. But the "eventually" is a critical point when you're attempting to sell your game in physical stores. Stores will eventually decide it's no longer worth it to give prominent shelf space to your product. If the eventually it takes for pirates to crack it is longer than the eventually it takes for store to move your item off of the "hot new product" area, the DRM did it's job.

Ding... I'm surprised everyone else seems to have forgotten the impact retailers have in this equation.

Trace the flow of money to product (and who has to deal with returns) and you'll see who's the most invested in DRM solutions.

I have to say, I'd be more okay with DRM if patching it out of the game at a later stage was a more common practice after a couple of months/one year of sales or something. Some developers do that/publishers allow it, but in terms of overall numbers it's very rare.

 

[ThunderCavalier]

This honestly makes a lot of sense if you think about it. DRM usually brings a negative stigma on any game that ends up with it, and gamers have caused a huge uproar about its inclusion ever since its... well... inclusion, up until now. However, people like investors and whatnot tend to have a rather tenuous, if even nonexistent knowledge of the industry besides the whole "X game gets Y amount of dollars," so they would assume stuff like DRM that says "Protects Z people from stealing X game" would be a good inclusion, even if it spits in the face of logic, reason, or general common sense.

Ignorance. Of course it's the problem.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Some developers do that/publishers allow it, but in terms of overall numbers it's very rare.

And some developers do it and one of their distributors goes apeshit and attempt to sue them.

It's one of the lessons CDPR learned in their dabbling with DRM.

 

[Airon]

Thumbs up.

Between Steam/GoG/etc sales, used console games and Humble Bundles, one of the few reasons I can think of these days for using cracks is to play an uncensored version of a game.

I have to stop myself from digging in to too many sales. Almost grabbed Gunpoint, but I have too many unplayed games in my library, and I ain't rich.

 

[Strazdas]

Offering the Carrot doesn't do much good when the other guy can offer as many Carrots as you want for free

In theory, that makes the most sense.
In practice, it means that CD Projekt should have went bankrupt after their first game, which obviously didn't happen.

Actually, it almost did: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129462-The-Witcher-2-Was-Almost-Never-Developed
But polish investors stepped in.

Pirates eventually crack all DRM, this is true.

fixe this for you.

But the "eventually" is a critical point when you're attempting to sell your game in physical stores. Stores will eventually decide it's no longer worth it to give prominent shelf space to your product. If the eventually it takes for pirates to crack it is longer than the eventually it takes for store to move your item off of the "hot new product" area, the DRM did it's job.

The longest DRM cracking that i know off was GTA 4, which took a whole, wait for it, 1 week!
Though the current version of AC4 crack does not let you save progress i hear so we may jsut see this one overshoot it soon?

Spoken as anyone who has only consumed the intellectual property of others as opposed to creating intellectual property . DRM has been around for ever. Originally it was the medium itself. See you probably don't remember when computers actually didn't have HD's heck when computers were considered a luxury item. My earliest machine had a 66 meg hd...and that was actually considered to be decent at the time. Which meant you ran games off the disks more often than not.

Its nice that your whole theroy stands on you knowing my past and crunbles when faced reality. Next time try to make your point without needing for me to be someone i am not.

In the early games it was also built in by the devs; the key phrases you had to hunt in the manual for or games that had to run from the disks that used some quirky proprietary format trickery. Then when games went to CD's the medium itself was a form of DRM since it was not practical in those days to copy 600 megs to your hd (heck becak then a 2 gig hard drive was considered massive) and the burners hadn't hit the market yet. Once burners became standard issue then you had things like securom and etc. So you see DRM isn't some 'new thing' it's been there for as long as the industry. Like cars and tires. Point is there has always been DRM in games and there has always been piracy and the piracy has always hurt the devs more than the publishers.

Because noone could have, you know, written down the manual. Claiming that you remmeber these days of gaming you would also remmeber that games did not take 600 megs, and by the time they did, hard drives were counting in tens of gigabytes. I had a 1.2 gigabyte drive when the games would be taking 100 meg of space installed and that was "big" game. the only game i had problem with being 300 megs was already lagging because my machine was outdated by then. Back then, we saw people with 1 Cd installing it to all of their friends here so that really really didnt work at all as a form of DRM. people were pirating things before computers existed (computers as we know them now, technically computers exist for over 100 years). It has never destroyed the industry or did the industry ever managed to slow it down.
Remmeber Cossacs: European wars? a game that was famous for being on a disc that cannot be copied? i had that one, on a copied disc. (god, feels so long ago now). the protection was always just a hindrence for legal people.
securom, ah, the thing that has overloaded technical support help becuase it would not work for legal costumers when pirates didnt use them. i still got the mail somewhere where a tech support from game publisher (if i remember correctly activision) have given me a link to a no-cd crack as a solution to securom bring broken.
DRM isnt a new thing, i never claimed it is. what i said, which is true, that it only has ever hurt the legal costumer and never worked as intended.

And you also assume everyone that pirates has common sense... news flash... they don't.

Same can be applied to every single group of humans. this point is irrelevant. if a idiot does something idiotic does not mean everyone is doing something idiotic.

Also sure... no one buys stuff they don't want but... dammit steam always sells stuff i want!

Thats the thing. it always sells stuff YOU want. not everyone. In fact lately i found more stuff i want on GOG of all places.

SHareholders know the DRM thing is broken but it's an issue of legal accountability. In short the publishers must take reasonable steps to deter piracy protect the shareholder's investment and that's DRM. I mean everyone knows a locked door never kept anyone out of a house but you still lock your door at night or when you leave.

CDp.pl (which is the current legal name of CD Projekt) also has shareholders, yet it somehow are capable of having no DRM on witcher 3. DRM has never detered piracy or protected anything. it has only deterred legal costumers. Locked door however have stopped people. im sure you can think of plenty examples yourself where somone failed to break into the locked door.

As said, your opinion of drm changes after youv'e sunk upwards of 500 hours into coding, bug testing, recoding, optimizing, designing, tweaking, recoding, debugging. Your opinion of DRM changes when you're not counting of the proceeds of those 500 hours to upgrade you living quarters to something that doesn't have you technically paying the roaches and rats tribute to not crawl over you while you sleep.

Not sure why amount spent on coding should change somones opinion on such things as broken systems in futile attempt to secure you product from piracy. you would have to provide evidence of mind altering coding experience here.

DRM is a good thing for the industry... if done properly. Id doesn't stop piracy no...you can never stop a truly determined thief. You can only test their determination. If the DRM is unobtrusive and provides some benefit to the consumer ...ala steam, and the cost is deemed reasonable (seriously who pays 60 for a game?) then piracy is reduced simply because the hassle isn't worth the savings.

Done properly? yes, im not agaisnt it done properly. DOne as it is done right now? nope not buying that kind of crap. Closest thing would probably be steam to doing it properly, though not completely, as you dont actually own the games nor can you carry them without steam installed.
The determination theroy woudl work if everyone had to crack DRM themselves. just like every thief has to break the door himself. however DRM cracking would be akin to one strong guy breaking the door and it would remain open all the time. and there always going to be one strong guy out there.

You are correct about benefits to consumer, thats the only way to defeat piracy - make being legal costumer actually worth it. However companies seems to be more interested in making life more miserable for legal costumers because.... stupidity i guess.

and you helped legitimize EA and Ubisofts goon tactics, great work stupid.

If anything torrenting it would prove that such tactics are infective actually.

Some of the Paradox Interactive developers said something similar. The basic statement being that the best way to combat piracy is to actually make a game worth buying, then continually improve it with a combination of free and paid for content that people actually want, as opposed to whatever the developers couldn't force in to the initial release/deliberately excluded.

as much as i LOVE paradox, they would have been lying. you know, i had to legally register with their own verification system in order to even be able to post tech support question on their forums? not to mention their tactic of selling thier new games in parts.

Is there any such thing as a "stick" where hackers are concerned? It seems to me that the only people the stick comes down on are the consumers. So the premise that they can use a stick at all is silly. But I guess that's their point.

you are correct. in this alegory it would be usign a stick to force legal costumers to buy the game "Their way".

Hell there are approximately 12 million pirates at last count world wide, and most of those happen to be in eastern europe where game companies dont have much retail distribution if I recall.

12 million? hah, more like 120 million.
And beign from eastern europe id rather say they got no presence of retail distribution. yeah, biggest stuff like gta gets sold on electronic appliacne stores here, btu try finding a 3 year old game and its either non-existent, they never heard about it or it costs like a brand new copy since they ordered 1 and still havent sold it.

The growing problem of piracy in the video game industry (and the movie industry, and software, books, music, etc...) is a reflection of our receding moral standards as a culture.

First of all, id like to call bullshit on anything stating there is "moral standards culture". morals are personal, ONLY personal and that's the end of it. Then again, most people dont even know difference between morality and social standarts.
secondly id like to point out that piracy is not growing. its always been around. nor is the problem growing, as it does not impose any actual real problem. people who pirate would not buy it anyway, and those that would, do anyway if they like the game.

A lot of people don't even think piracy is wrong anymore - illegal, yes, but morally wrong? They'd tell you you're living in the past with outdated senses of right and wrong. Similarly, most people don't even know what the concept of absolute morality is all about. Modern philosophy tells us that all morality is subjective and relative and blah blah blah... And where has that left us?

With a generation of pirates.

Thats because piracy isnt actually morally wrong. just illegal. There IS NO aboslute morality.
let me quote a guy who said it much better than i could:

I think it's morally wrong on the same level that jaywalking is morally wrong. As in, not very.

The problem with talking about piracy as a moral question is that it opens up a whole bag of moral quandaries that you don't really need to address. Let's say copyright infringement is morally wrong in the basis that you are deriving the benefit of a creator's work without paying for it. Under that framework, I can think of a number of equally wrong but socially acceptable activities, such as;

- borrowing a book from a friend
- buying a used video game
- accepting a hand-me-down iPhone from a sibling
- reading a comic book or a magazine in the store
- watching a DVD of the Avengers at a friend's house
- listening to music played on your friend's music player
- watching a clip of a comedian's stand-up routine on Youtube

You can keep going. Under the moral framework for copyright infringement, literally any scenario where you obtain the benefit of a work - reading it, watching it, listening to it - without paying money to the artist is morally wrong. That's unworkable. There isn't a single human being in the first world who hasn't done one of those items on the list at some point in their lives. They're all about as malicious as eating the last slice of cake, or telling your girlfriend she doesn't look fat in those jeans.

Add that to the fact that, as I said, if you take a moral view of copyright law it's morally wrong to pay anyone other than the creator. How much of the money made from music and films goes to the creators and how much goes to the lobbyists and industry powerbrokers behind the MPAA and the RIAA? How much of the money made by sales of Batman comics goes to Bill Finger? If I buy a copy of the Hobbit, does the deceased Tolkien get the money? His descendants get the money - people who are passively deriving a benefit from their grandfather's achievements.

Once you apply a classical moral framework to copyright law, the whole structure collapses. If the point of copyright is to benefit the author, why does it persist past the author's death? Why is it possible to sell your copyright in a work?

So how do you answer those questions? You don't. Copyright infringement isn't illegal because it's morally wrong - it's illegal because the law says so. This might seem unjust, but it's what happens when powerful lobbyists use a shallow appeal to morality to justify expanding the scope and length of copyright far past the point of absurdity. Better to think of it as a legal question concerning legal rights and governed by legal principles. That way, at least it makes sense.

When you get down to it, the only time anyone is going to care about copyright infringement is when you're being sued for it. And when you get put in front of a judge, talking about morality isn't going to get you very far. The judge is sitting in front of a big book called The Law, and he wants to find out if what you did was illegal, not if it was wrong.

 

[legendp]

I would agree offering up drm free experaince is better. I know people who have not only refused to use origin, but pirated ea games because they don't want origin on there system. additionally when your using a laptop out in the middle of no where for a month, drm can be a real pain, while pirates can not only play there games, but they can do a full backup and reinstall all there games without internet. most the people I know torrent out of convenience over simply just the money. not to say money isn't a factor but nasty drm does not entice said people

 

[Atmos Duality]

Actually, it almost did: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129462-The-Witcher-2-Was-Almost-Never-Developed
But polish investors stepped in.

Well, you know what they say: Close (almost) only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear warfare.
After the Witcher 2 it looks like their ideology is slowly rolling. Though I wonder how long it will last..

 

[Aeshi]

But in order to get those carrots you have to do a funny dance naked during the full moon and there is a chance that the carrots are either rotten or possessed, suddenly the single nice carrot with the promise of more to come seems a much better option.

One word: FREE.

Piracy is by definition infinitely better value because of that alone. To further your analogy is the carrots are rotten or possessed, then you simply do the dance again, and if it fails again you simply do it once more. There is no situation where this can end badly because you can do it as many times as you want, and the penalties for a "bad roll" (in this analogy, eating the carrots) are so minute and easily avoidable as to be non-existent.

Yep, thats why sweden made downloading for personal use legal. Pirates dont really hurt the bottom line all that much, if it did government studies would have pointed in that direction.

Which "government" are you referring to here, pray tell? Because if it's a Swedish study I call BS. A country where Piracy is legal releasing a study that says "Piracy isn't that bad" is as trustworthy as say, America releasing a study that says "PIRACY IS EVIL!"

 

[Scorpid]

and you helped legitimize EA and Ubisofts goon tactics, great work stupid.

If anything torrenting it would prove that such tactics are infective actually.

You are torrenting a consumer friendly companies game, justifying the people that use DRM to beat on their actual customers because they'll be like "well these people tried to be reasonable about it and they got the shaft harder then our games did. Clearly the only future is one that involves obtrusive DRM." Just think before you respond jeez, I wasn't saying DRM works.

 

[Skeleon]

And some developers do it and one of their distributors goes apeshit and attempt to sue them.

It's one of the lessons CDPR learned in their dabbling with DRM.

Is that why they went into distribitung themselves digitally? Makes sense...
To be fair to those distributors, perhaps CDPR tried to do so without making their intentions clear to them beforehand, so suing seemed "reasonable". But if CDPR told distributors that they will have DRM that they will patch out of their game at X point in time before entering into an agreement, I don't think they'd have any grounds for a lawsuit.
Not that I don't prefer CDPR's approach of "no DRM at the start or later", anyway, just saying that I could be okay with such a setup. It's definitely better without DRM from the start, though.

 

[Strazdas]

Actually, it almost did: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129462-The-Witcher-2-Was-Almost-Never-Developed
But polish investors stepped in.

Well, you know what they say: Close (almost) only counts in horseshoes, hand grenades and nuclear warfare.
After the Witcher 2 it looks like their ideology is slowly rolling. Though I wonder how long it will last..

True, however they did have huge financial problems and were at the bring of bancrupcy if "greedy capitalists" didnt step in. Its just that the argument of "the method worked great for them" doesnt really reflect reality. However as they do seem to udnerstand it better now you see massive support from fans, though i still sometimes read comments that actually think DRM is a godo thing. ugh.

Pirates eventually crack all DRM, this is true.

fixed this for you.

No. You broke it.

There are DRM schemes that are simply impossible for pirates to crack without recreating a majority of the game code as that code is never distributed to the end user. They're generally not used, however, because they don't work well with when you distribute via a physical distribution channel, and most people don't want the constant connection they require, or the have the bandwidth to use it. Those three factors are slowly changing, however, so I expect we'll start to see a rise of these type of server based games.

Given that type, pirates are left hacking legitimate user accounts, but that's a different kettle of fish.

Oh, and as a side note: "Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, released on 28 March 2005, utilizes the StarForce protection method. As unpopular as this protection method was, it worked to protect the game from any piracy for over a year (422 days) before a working crack was released. No doubt at least some of the people who had wanted to illegally download the game couldn't wait an entire year for the crack to show up, and eventually bought the game regardless. Of course this level of protection came at a cost in terms of negative publicity, and some known compatibility issues. However as we'll see shortly, the fear campaign against StarForce was fuelled by deliberate and unproven misinformation."

Really, if you want to know some facts and numbers about piracy, backed up with research, rather than half-truths backed up by people who don't want to feel like dicks for being dicks, you'd do well to check out this article: http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html

Such games are called online multiplayer games, or as many for convienience call them - MMOs. the whole purpose of such game is to play online. Only such games are not cracked, and even then Diablo 3, SimCity - is. You know, pirates have found a way to emulate Ubisoft server locally and were playing AC2 on day 1, while legitiamte users couldnt due to server overload?
Yes, if you emit part of the game and keep it online, then you make it much harder for pirates to do it. Esspentially then they have to create something akin to private MMO server (yeah, like that never happened, almost every MMO has them now).
Sadly, i have to agree that the pattern is server based games, and even if i am constantly connected nowadays, i still want my singleplayer games to be, well, singleplayer.
Pirates dont hack legitimate accounts. if they hack into system they create a bogus account. scammers and hackers hack into accounts. Actually ive seen pirates actually buy the game legitimatelly then make it so that the syustem wouldnt know that same legal user is conencted on 100 machines at once.
Now, i really dont know how long it took to crack this particular game, as i am not a pirate myself nor ei ever played this game, so my knowledge comes from talking to pirates every day (i use one of thier forums, for forums, because forums are great thing. and obviuosly they got all the releases at the side. actually i know a game has launched when i see it cracked there and dont need to look up launch dates)
so i went and looked for it on the site.
The oldest release that isnt a demo or beta i can find are the following:
March 29 for Xbox
April 5 for PC
July 5 for gamecube
That is not to say of whether gamecube was just released later or older files were removed or many other factors. none of these original uploads are seeded so you couldnt downlaod them even if you wanted to, but i found no negative comments or down-votes so i assume they worked.
Actually, i checked on multiple sites just to make sure, and they all have similar date versions give or take a few days. This sites policy does not allow me to link to them so you will have to take my word for it.
7 days is not 422 days.
i skimmed though the link you posted and was appalled by low quality of usually good articles on TweakGuides. It seems to run more half-truths and misconceptions than actual facts, and also lacks numerical data. Then again i guess they have to push some DRM propaganda.
Anyway, another example they give is Bioshock. I know personally a guy that played bioshock pirated version the day it released. so cone again false statement.
The article also claims that people buy only new, AAA titles. so yeah.....

Secondly it claims that Spore got poor reviews due to DRM controversy when in reality everyone was talking jsut how much of a shit game it was and nowhere close to what was promised. I got burned there and learnt to be more cautiuos about my game buys as well.

Which "government" are you referring to here, pray tell? Because if it's a Swedish study I call BS. A country where Piracy is legal releasing a study that says "Piracy isn't that bad" is as trustworthy as say, America releasing a study that says "PIRACY IS EVIL!"

So because a country has done studies, realized it is not damaging and made it legal, its automatically a bad study? How about Switzerland where priacy is also legal? they are also wrong. america is the only one that says what other countries should do because obviuosly any other research is bogus?
or is it that research that does not agree with your viewpoint is bogus?
How about Latvia, is its research reliable? piracy is illegal there, and yet study done in there shown clear benefits from current pirates. Granted, that was 3 years ago now so maybe things changed.

You are torrenting a consumer friendly companies game, justifying the people that use DRM to beat on their actual customers because they'll be like "well these people tried to be reasonable about it and they got the shaft harder then our games did. Clearly the only future is one that involves obtrusive DRM." Just think before you respond jeez, I wasn't saying DRM works.

IF a person torrents a game and plays it, obviuosly DRM has not worked as intended. If said DRM has caused problems for legitimate users, and not pirates, that said DRM is not working as intended at all as in fact harmful. People torrenting games with said DRM is part of the proof.
Pirating a consumer friendly companies game however does not justify creation of DRM when said DRM will do nothing to hinder piracy but instead turn the companies reputation around.
If the thinking that you quited persists we will be looking at a very bleak future where no consumer rights exist, becuase obviuosly all consumer rights "Shaft" companies.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

And some developers do it and one of their distributors goes apeshit and attempt to sue them.

It's one of the lessons CDPR learned in their dabbling with DRM.

Is that why they went into distribitung themselves digitally? Makes sense...

]

Nah, this was Bandai-Namco being tossers about CDP/CDPR removing the DRM from The Witcher 2, and TW2 was already available through gog.com... Although Bandai-Namco threatening legal action over certain prices gog.com were charging for TW2 in various regions was a the cause for gog.com to drop regional pricing... Just one of the many legal threats Bandai-Namco threw at CDP/CDPR.

To be fair to those distributors, perhaps CDPR tried to do so without making their intentions clear to them beforehand, so suing seemed "reasonable". But if CDPR told distributors that they will have DRM that they will patch out of their game at X point in time before entering into an agreement, I don't think they'd have any grounds for a lawsuit.

That's entirely possible. However, considering Bandai-Namco's other legal shitfuckery, I'm not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Not that I don't prefer CDPR's approach of "no DRM at the start or later", anyway, just saying that I could be okay with such a setup. It's definitely better without DRM from the start, though.

Well yeah, CDP/CDPR's point at the time was that they only ever intended the DRM to be in-place to cover the supposedly critical sales period of the first month after launch (or something like that) and only because their distributors demanded it.