So DRM doesn't stop piracy... what do you think developers should do instead?

[Tarrou]

Some principles for developers:

1: DRM should never intrude on legitimate players more than it intrudes on pirates.

2: Understand that you are selling intellectual property more than a physical product. With more and mroe games being downloaded, the actual physical game is an afterthought. You have manifestly no overhead after development costs, so adjust your models accordingly.

3: Get your incentives in order. You won't win over a customer base by treating them poorly (unless you're Sony).

I like the idea of having a centrally linked clearinghouse like Steam, it provides the opportunity to use this for regular game validation (though Ubi can suck a dick for their AC2 BS). I don't mind if my games are validated every time an update or patch comes out, and that would ensure that pirates are stuck every time a game is updated. Sure, they can hack around it, but thats a lot of effort, especially with an often-updated game liek MW2. That puts the incentive on the user to buy, just to avoid the hassle of having to troll the intarwubs after every patch for a new crack. Some will do it, of course, but a combination of reasonable DRM and reasonable pricing will bring profit margins back to a good place, IMO. Rule 1 should NEVER be violated.

 

[JuryNelson]

Just not bother with the DRM.

If it doesn't work, it should be discarded. With the money saved from not pirate-proofing, the publishers can give it to the devs to make the game better or longer.

Plus Joe Public won't have to put up with all this DRM gubbins which slows down their PCs.

They can't be seen to do nothing. Most DRM is a token effort to keep bakers happy. THey have to keep producing new systems (backer arent completely stupid) to show that they are continuing to fight back.

Say what? Are you saying that watching developers build a complicated DRM system which costs thousands to create and then seeing it fail when pirates crack it on day one of release, possibly even earlier, instills confidence in investors? No, that's still a horrible excuse for alienating the people who are legitimate customers.

It's not just investors. It's potential pirates who are not fully swayed by bumper stickers. They have to create and maintain an environment where piracy is wrong and punishable.

Otherwise, the answer to the now-hypothetical question "What's to stop me from just stealing it?" becomes "nothing."

 

[The Night Shade]

Do nothing because you cannot stop piracy,you have to accept that,so the developers should stop trying to fight it because the DRM sucks and it doesnt work

 

[CabbageSnake]

They should keep a basic drm like Blizzard did with Diablo 2 and such, where if they have online game play, they have to connect with a code you input at the beginning. That and have some sort of good extra bonus for having the legit copy. Like Mass Effect, but not like mass effect where you can buy the thing and they don't give you that many things...

And oh yes.. make teh game good. There are so many games that utterly suck and aren't even worth half of what they try to make you pay. And don't bother telling me not to play them, because, for the most part, I don't.

 

[Korzack]

I'd say instead of making games tougher to pirate, make buying them a better option, as a lot of folks before have said. I remember been quite disappointed when games changed from the old boxes full of random stuff (like Baldur's Gate that came with maps, spell-lists and all sorts, or Fallout compilations that had a pen-and-paper version of the game included) to today's DVD cases (a disk, a health warning, and a lottery of CD-key to secuROM to Ubisoft's new thingy). It's just discouraging to be treated like a small child for buying something, whilst pirated copies are free of all unpleasant-ness. Budget games I can understand not coming with anything special, but a new release should be an Event that people get excited about, not just some toy you forget about after a month. Whilst it was initially Very unpopular, Steam's hit a few good ideas (I just got reminded today there's more DLC coming for L4D, looking forward to that, specially after the passing)
Edit: Better demos would be nice, too - Ya know, a bit more than just a damned tutorial, please. Anyone remember Half-Life: Uplink, for example?

 

[Gunner 51]

DRM goes in cycles, for every new one that annoys people, another one has a similar effect on the bakers confidence, without pissing people off.

People only tend to remember the systems that annoy them (hence the common but false belief that game DRM only exists on the PC).

Publishers and developers know they are unlikely to ever beat the pirates, they arent really trying to (no matter what they say, as admitting this would lose their finantial backers). They do have a tendancy to miss judge how much people will put up with, and how much something may affct someones experience.

That said I've yet to find a DRM system thats caused me half as much faf and effort per game as alot of DOS games did, or the tranistions to win 95, or to XP ever did.

Most games these days pratically install themselves comapred to Dos days, set themselves up, and even tell you your current drivers are out of date and may not work. In the DOS days half the games required you to make a disk to boot your PC into a state where you could even begin to do any of that, pre universal internet unless you had a mate to do it for you, or with an almost identical set up to you yo had to do that yourslef.

It is true that people remember the most intrusive of DRM. But it has steadily gotten worse over the past 15-20 years. Back then, you didn't have digital distribution, which made things a lot simpler for the publishers.

I think the financial backers are jumping at nothing and their fear of piracy is over-inflated somewhat. If they aren't willing to invest in a game developer, then that is sad but it wouldn't be my place to tell someone how to spend their money.

Mind you, I've heard tales of DRM installing spyware with the game. Though back in the days of DOS based games, I don't think publishers had the gall or expertise to install intrusive spyware on their games.

Though I must ask what games do you refer of when you speak of these old DOS based games? Are we talking about games from era of Rise of the Triad? (which is about the time I started PC gaming.)

Before those days I was pottering about with an Amiga 500 which was given to me from my Uncle "Dodgy" Darren. (Complete with a large selection of pirated games with it - though I should add that all the games I bought after getting it were all legitimate ones.)

 

[Delusibeta]

I am so depressed that when I google a game name, like Morrowind, one of the search suggestions is "Morrowind torrent". Right up there with mods, cheats, wiki, walkthrough, and the other major suggestions.

Why would you buy morrowind? Its not like bethesda is still selling that game. Buying copies of it anywhere wouldn't give a penny to bethesda.

I find that statement [http://store.steampowered.com/app/22320/] hard to believe[footnote]It's right at the bottom of the list.[/footnote] [https://orders.bethsoft.com/store/index.php]

 

[bz316]

The developers need to accept the fact that piracy is here to stay and that there will always be some less-than-scrupulous people who will turn to it. They also need to accept that their increasingly irritating DRM methods only hurts legitimate players and increases the risk that some of those legitimate players will throw up their hands, yell "fuck it," and turn to the less inconvenient option of piracy.

 

[Asehujiko]

Piracy is easy. Make it harder and most pirates lose interest.

Attack the centers of distribution with methods that match the means of distribution. Legal threats are irrelevant, as it just prompts migration. Instead, try something along the lines of modifying a bittorrent client to write all data to $null and stick a couple thousand copies on a couple thousand virtual machines on a few absurd corporate lines (oc-57) with dynamic IP addresses and simply drain the bandwidth pools of popular trackers. Then once all trackers go private, infiltrate private trackers with the same bots.

Doing such would force most people to choose between not pirating and sucking on the teet of file hosting services like rapidshare. We'd also see a second resurgence of usenet, but usenet is so filled with spam and viruses and malware, the average p2p user would simply cause their computer to explode after a couple downloads.

2 downsides to this idea:
1, without word of mouth advertising from the pirates, stuff sells for less. For further reference: Titan Quest.
2, people use torrents for non-piracy purposes too and your plan will harm them as well. This [http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5140002/ubuntu-9.10-desktop-i386.iso] is NOT an acceptable casualty in your fight to turn "suspected lost revenue from piracy" into "actual lost revenue from boycotts".

 

[Petromir]

DRM goes in cycles, for every new one that annoys people, another one has a similar effect on the bakers confidence, without pissing people off.

People only tend to remember the systems that annoy them (hence the common but false belief that game DRM only exists on the PC).

Publishers and developers know they are unlikely to ever beat the pirates, they arent really trying to (no matter what they say, as admitting this would lose their finantial backers). They do have a tendancy to miss judge how much people will put up with, and how much something may affct someones experience.

That said I've yet to find a DRM system thats caused me half as much faf and effort per game as alot of DOS games did, or the tranistions to win 95, or to XP ever did.

Most games these days pratically install themselves comapred to Dos days, set themselves up, and even tell you your current drivers are out of date and may not work. In the DOS days half the games required you to make a disk to boot your PC into a state where you could even begin to do any of that, pre universal internet unless you had a mate to do it for you, or with an almost identical set up to you yo had to do that yourslef.

It is true that people remember the most intrusive of DRM. But it has steadily gotten worse over the past 15-20 years. Back then, you didn't have digital distribution, which made things a lot simpler for the publishers.

I think the financial backers are jumping at nothing and their fear of piracy is over-inflated somewhat. If they aren't willing to invest in a game developer, then that is sad but it wouldn't be my place to tell someone how to spend their money.

Mind you, I've heard tales of DRM installing spyware with the game. Though back in the days of DOS based games, I don't think publishers had the gall or expertise to install intrusive spyware on their games.

Though I must ask what games do you refer of when you speak of these old DOS based games? Are we talking about games from era of Rise of the Triad? (which is about the time I started PC gaming.)

Before those days I was pottering about with an Amiga 500 which was given to me from my Uncle "Dodgy" Darren. (Complete with a large selection of pirated games with it - though I should add that all the games I bought after getting it were all legitimate ones.)

Tornado and Seawolf both required boot floppies on my PC, though as CD games they were erltitvely late on in my early pc career. I cant remeber all of them.

I started gaming on the BBC micro (which makes me sound older than I really am). And games back then came on floppy (and the big 5 and a bit ones that were actually floppy), tape, and in books where you had to type out the game if you wanted to play it.

 

[Peta Michalek]

Typing in the seventh word of third line at page ten of the manual was rad as hell.

 

[CD-R]

Make the game come with a really cool sticker that says "I paid for game x because I support the developers." Or "Game x is so awesome, I paid for it."

If a game is good enough, pirates will be ridiculed by their friends who recognised the greatness and bought the game because of their lack of anti theft sticker. Seriously, think about the peer pressure.

Imagine a LAN:
Gamer 1 "Hey guys lets play our new LAN game."
Gamer 2 "yeah, I bought my copy a while ago."
Gamer 1 "Did you see what was in the case?"
Gamer 2 "You mean THE AWESOME STICKER OF AWESOME?"
Gamer 1 "HELL YEAH MAN"
Gamer 3 "Well I got the game but I don't have the sticker"
Gamer 2 "That's cos you didn't buy it."
Gamer 1 "Stop being a fag and go buy the game, its got a god damn awesome sticker."

Think about it.

No key chains. If you pre-ordered Fallout 3 from Game Crazy they gave you this really awesome pipboy key chain. It was the best key chain I ever owned. You could collect them they'd be like a status symbol of how awesome your game collection is. Including a free key chain might increase costs slightly but I think it would be offset pretty easily by increased retail sales.

People buy the game through digital downloads could also get a key chain. Just give them a special code to put on an order form or something.

 

[Leyvin]

There is nothing that can be done to prevent piracy, with the current generation of Anti-Piracy methods actually causing legitimate users to be unable to play a title that pirates are capable of playing; DRM is actually becoming a counter-productive methodology.

Something for many to bare in mind is that Piracy is killing the gaming industry like a cancer, alright so the major developers (Valve, Bethesda, Bioware, etc..) aren't really affected by this as much because they're capable of making a comfortable profit margin ... something that is actually more down to brandname than overall product quality.

However there are a number of other development companies that have shut down due to piracy.
One of the more recent that springs to mind is Ritual Entertainment, as well as Ensemble Studios. Both companies were able to track the number of pirates but were powerless to do anything about it, in-fact I would recommend anyone to checkout the Ritual website as there are a number of blog posts from the company about it.

Really I think the time and energy that is going in to DRM would probably be better spent in finding out the reasons as to why people pirate. Personally I think Microsoft Games for Windows Live has the best concept right now, with multiplayer (Live) requiring a "CD-Key" to be input and linked to your account... meaning you're not buying the software but the key.

In-fact honestly I reckon if they want to really harm piracy, they should release titles in ALL territories regardless of if they're localised or not at the same time. Digital releases should be fully downloadable with demonstration (demo) versions part of the main game as default. A key is used to unlock the game via an account server, and when logged in to that account the game unlocks.

Just what I believe would probably greatly help with piracy.

 

[Skarvig]

Make good games again or make games affordable.
For example:
The first Gothic was a huge success in germany it had none copy protection. You didn't have to have the cd in to play it. This is how I got the game. A friend came over installed it on my pc and I could play it. I bought it because it was so much fun to play.
I like to spend money on good games. Then I just know I have spend my money well.
Another good example is Assassin's Creed 1. It was plain boring to play. "So I'm climbing another tower ... and ... jump, yay, so what's next? More climbing, k, I quit."
There is no way I would ever spend money on this.

Make games affordable.
I bought the Eidos Collection on Steam. It had Batman Arkham Asylum in it. I thought "I get a ton of games for the price I would normally pay for just one big title. I would be a mad man not to buy this."

 

[Petromir]

Make good games again or make games affordable.
For example:
The first Gothic was a huge success in germany it had none copy protection. You didn't have to have the cd in to play it. This is how I got the game. A friend came over installed it on my pc and I could play it. I bought it because it was so much fun to play.
I like to spend money on good games. Then I just know I have spend my money well.
Another good example is Assassin's Creed 1. It was plain boring to play. "So I'm climbing another tower ... and ... jump, yay, so what's next? More climbing, k, I quit."
There is no way I would ever spend money on this.

Make games affordable.
I bought the Eidos Collection on Steam. It had Batman Arkham Asylum in it. I thought "I get a ton of games for the price I would normally pay for just one big title. I would be a mad man not to buy this."

So just wait for them to come on sales, so what your not getting the game as it releases, you can still keepn up a steady stream of recent games on things like steam, d2d, and impulse sales, just lagging 3-8 months behind. Ocassionally you get brand new shit in the deals.

 

[Xanadu84]

There is the rule of, "No legitimate customer can ever be inconvenienced in a significant way". That's a great start. The issue here is that it is a baby step: Saying that an approach is acceptable is an act of cynicism on our part, because we already know that DRM will never DO anything. We are just trying to make publishers asinine choices not hurt us. What would help is different. For this, we need to realize that positive reinforcement is more effective at changing behavior then punishment. Devs need to start including in games more things which make legit customers lives easier. Mass Effect 2 (And project $10 in general) is one of the best things ive seen so far: Whereas a Pirate would have to go without the new, frequently updated content, or pirate the content separately each time, a legit player will just get it. It won't stop piracy, but it will make just buying the game far more desirable.

 

[brighteye]

make all games a mmo ?
sure there are pirate servers of world of warcraft, but if they should need some quick cash they just have to sel another sparkly flying mount again.