Indie RPG Veteran: "Being Nice" Prevents Piracy Better Than Draconian DRM

[Doctor Glocktor]

I might like this better if World of Goo wasn't one of the most pirated games.

 

[archvile93]

It's really too bad no companies will listen to this sage advice. Isn't that right Epic? Are you hearing this? It wasn't piracy that made GoW PC sell bad, it's that you made a bad port that no one sane wanted to buy. The same goes for you MS, but I suspect you want PC gaming to die, so in that case just keep doing what you're doing.

 

[plugav]

I dare say the main benefit of DRM is the amount of satisfaction it brings cracking teams to work around it, because I've yet to see a game that hasn't been cracked.

However, it'll take more than Spiderweb's example to convince the big publishers, because niche indie games are both less expensive to publish and less prone to piracy.

 

[Electric Alpaca]

Don't pirate. There's no excuse for it.

That said- when companies come off as friendly and helpful, it makes people feel even less justified about piracy than they were otherwise.

I disagree. When I purchase a game at retail and am denied access to said game due to issues spawned by DRM and poor system set up - I am quite within my rights to obtain a copy that does work.

To be honest - all I see overbearing DRM doing is introducing honest customers to pirating, discovering how easy it is, and never paying for a game again.

People will pirate your product if it has any digital element. Any protection you build will be destroyed within hours of it being released. Any patch you construct will be circumvented minutes after it is released.

Corporations should just accept it as a fact of life, stop pouring countless funds into putting out fires with fires and actually see the higher profit margin they so covet by not squandering cash.

 

[Scars Unseen]

It's such an old principle. People respond better to rewards than punishment.

Flies and honey and all that.

Although it's not really a reward, but it's the same idea.

Well in vinegar's defense...

 

[The Nix]

Nice indie developers is actually what made me stop pirating in my teen years. When I was like 16-17 I started to get into the indie scene and I saw so many hardworking, good people that were working on these games and i felt really bad. I basically stopped pirating overnight and I started making a conscious effort to support the developers (including buying most games i had pirated in the past).

I am sure I am not the only one who have experienced something like this so I really think there is some merit to what he is saying

 

[Kenjitsuka]

"Crackers and hackers will crack and hack your game no matter what you do, so why make things harder for paying customers?"

Vogel, you are making so much sense that a bit more would explode my brain!
Too bad Ubisoft and consorts will ignore this golden nugget of pure wisdom in favour of being stuck up their own *** so deep they can't distinguish a good thing from a flaming turd :'(

 

[redisforever]

This is very true. This is why I bought Minecraft. I support Notch, and I like him. I like Valve, because they seem to care about their customers, and don't need to respond to stockholders. So, I bought almost every game they made. Except L4D (no interest) TF2 (not a fan of online games) and Portal 2 (broke, unfortunately)

 

[infinity_turtles]

Happy he's realized his mistakes, but I kind of wished he'd have done so sooner. I love Geneforge, but two of the games I had to pirate because I couldn't get the versions I bought to accept it's serial. Gonna go buy Avadon since I don't have to worry about that anymore.

 

[McMullen]

Itll be interesting to see how that turns out in the future.

With a shit-ton of luck, maybe EA and Capcom will pick up that DRM is not always a good thing.

If EA didn't learn from Spore being the most pirated game of 2008, they won't learn. Reality simply does not mean anything to them.

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

Perhaps those hardcore DRM schemes we've seen elsewhere aren't such a good idea after all?

Perhaps indeed. If you're spending huge amounts on the DRM, why not just spend it to reward honest customers? A couple of little tricks can identify pirates quite nicely unless they know what exactly they're looking for.

Just keep that secret and you're sound. Slam a DRM in there and you're waving a flag to a bull.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

*Completely disregards piracy discussion* There's a new Spiderweb game?

 

[Direwolf750]

I am so happy that someone in the industry agrees with me! I have actually not bought games specifically because of the DRM. It really makes me smile to see someone who makes sense.

 

[sheic99]

This is what CD Projeckt Red believes, and from what I've read on /v/, who seem to hate games by the way, most of them are going to buy it instead of pirating it, which is something special.

From what I heard CD Project's Witcher 2 will have DRM. That is, if you won't buy it from GOG.

I agree that there is no point in adding DRM to the games, pirates will pirate the game anyways. Waste of money and time.

It's sort of there, but not really. They've said that the DRM is a date check, to make sure the game is not played before the release date. After that, it's worthless.

 

[Zaik]

I was not expecting this out of someone who so strongly supported Ubisoft's DRM disaster with AC2 that still got cracked reasonably quickly and ended up being much more stable than the actual release due to not needing an internet connection to play anymore.

Neat, I guess. Maybe one of these days I'll go look into his games and see if they'd be interesting or not. Not going to jump at buying them just because he doesn't like DRM anymore a year later though.

 

[dfphetteplace]

All DRM does is piss off the people who bought the game since pirates just remove it anyways. Reward those that pay, don't fail at trying to punish those that do not.

 

[WilliamRLBaker]

so thats why World of goo had a 90% piracy rate its draconian drm...wait...it didn't have any...
someone mentioned about people saying they wouldn't pirate witcher 2...but didn't its source files already get released with an EXE being release or written so those files could be played?

But keep up the excuses where the majority of people pirate cause they are trying to stick it to the man, want a demo...etc instead of pirating cause they dont wanna pay out money...

 

[Eumersian]

I love Spiderweb Software! Yay!

And yes, that was one of the cool things about them. I bought some of their Geneforge games, and then switched my OS from Mac OS9 to Mac OSX. The games I bought became unregistered, so I sent them an email explaining that these three games all became unregistered and I don't want to have to buy them again simply because I switched my OS.

The gave me the registration keys, no questions asked.

<3 Spiderweb ^^