The Needles: "Crowd Contributed" Game Development: A Grim Dawn Breaks
- Thread starter Andy Chalk
- Start date
Titan Quest and its expansion i think can be bought now for like $10 each or $10 total on steam. Its a good place holder if you really need to get your diablo style gameplay fix. This game or Torchlight XD
I love the game and actually started with a cracked copy. even then i didnt get many bugs. so really have no idea where all the negative press came from. When steam had their package sales over the holiday i picked up the 'whole' game \o/
p.s. So basically you have effectively turned players into investors!
I love the game and actually started with a cracked copy. even then i didnt get many bugs. so really have no idea where all the negative press came from. When steam had their package sales over the holiday i picked up the 'whole' game \o/
p.s. So basically you have effectively turned players into investors!
Er, what? There's a part of your post that makes sense, and then there's the part you wrote. This proves the "download before you buy" group are full of shit. They cracked the game poorly, and then took out their frustrations on the poor crack instead of the code, killing the game. So it's completely their fault for being "jackasses" because no one else is being one.Asehujiko said:
As for not wanting to get ripped off by false promises, I could respect that except for one minor detail. THERE WAS A GODDAMN DEMO. All of those individuals who say "I'm going to download this first, and see if I like it, and if I don't I'm just not going to give them my money." Well, here's where we prove they're all completely full of shit. The game was available to them, for free, from the developers, and they chose instead to download a cracked version. To what end? Because they never had any intention of buying the game. They didn't want a taste, they wanted the whole thing. Maybe later they might have realized they were feeling guilty. But in the mean time they're hypocritical little whiny bastards who want everything right now, because, at heart, they're two year olds.
This is a lot like jacking a car from someone, wrecking it, and then saying it's the car company's fault for not making their car available to you to test, when you can (in theory) test drive the damn thing. (And before you start, don't even begin to get into the piracy isn't theft bullshit, or my theft won't affect these big corporate types. This bullshit cost them their jobs and their company. This wasn't a victim-less crime, THESE PEOPLE were the victims. And you are at least an enabler if not one of the perpetrators.)
The bad press comes from the initial prerelease crack. (There may have been more refined versions later.) This initial crack sucessfully bypassed the initial diskcheck, and partially bypassed the internal periodic security checks. Except, it didn't do the second correctly. So the game would get to a checkpoint in game, and the security check would fail, and (as I understand it) the game would try to call to the DRM, which was gone, resulting in a CTD. Ironically this system seems to be gone from the STEAM version, because it could result in some ruberbanding in the retail releases.DTWolfwood said:
So here's a question: Given that Titan Quest suffered as a result of piracy as Starke explained, what do we think about the prospects of Grim Dawn? Will people show it, and Crate, a little more consideration because it's a small, self-financed (with a heapin' helpin' of community support, of course) indie game?
Personally, I hope so. Titan Quest had enough press attention at launch that the game could have done very well, and then the pirates. In this case, the lack of widespread attention should keep piracy at low levels until after release, preventing them from shaping the general perception of the game's quality.Andy Chalk said:
It could go horribly wrong, somebody could get a build from an early beta, post it out there, and tank the game before it gets released, but I really hope that doesn't happen.
I am working off an assumption here:
The piracy in the case of Titan Quest kicked in before release, so (as I mentioned) the pirates started shaping perceptions of the game before legitimate players could get their hands on it. They spewed vitriolic comments as frequently as they could and by the time genuine players could play the game (a couple days later), a huge chunk of their user base had been scared off (myself included).
My assumption is that the specific danger that Grim Dawn faces is identical, a prerelease s***storm derailing legitimate consumers. If the game gets released before we start seeing forum posts about a sub-par version floating around they'll be fine. If we do see a repeat, I'm not sure anything can salvage it.
I'm sorry I'm having a hard time extracting the piracy issues from Grim Dawn's chances. A lot of that is because of how it has become integral to the debate frame of Titan Quest.
One little tiny detail that you missed in your accusatory rant against me: There was hidden DRM on TQ that INTENTIONALLY made the game crash when played by anybody unlucky to have it trigger on them(and that's quite a few legal customers, judging by the amount of posts on the tech support that show people holding up their game boxes next to a screen with the drm induced error on it), apparently in the belief that pirates have no vocal outlet about their findings. Personally, I trust day 0 reviews from pirates more then the "professional" ones because the average pirate isn't being bribed by a publisher to lie about how good a product is.Starke said:
TQ wasn't killed by pirates, TQ was killed by retarded decisions regarding pirates by the developers who spent more time pissing off non or potential customers then pleasing their current customers.
Yes, I do know there were false positives. I'm willing to seriously bet that there weren't many false positives before day 1.(While we're on the subject, I have serious doubts as to the veracity of your claim about loads of threads of people with boxed copies standing in front of the monitor.) Which is when the word of mouth got started. Or, you can read what the creative director wrote. I'm willing to bet that said developer is actually better versed on the effects of piracy on the industry than you are.Asehujiko said:
The entire post is here [http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663].Michael Finch said:
I am aware of what the developers say, that doesn't change the fact that their "strategy" of deterring piracy(which is something COMPLETELY different then promoting buying) is retarded. Pirates get to play the game first, pirates see that the game doesn't work, they tell everybody that the game doesn't work and the game sells the same as every other game that doesn't work. The fact that the game is only broken for pirates doesn't change anything. I didn't buy TQ because i disagree with retarded DRM schemes that may or may not backfire on me and I can't get any support over because if that happens, I'm obviously a pirate and from the looks of how few people bought it after IL revealed that the game sucking was the result of DRM, I am not the only person with the same concerns.Starke said:
You can prevent bank robbers by putting land mines around your building and they might stop one of them the night before the grand opening but if your potential customers find a bloody corpse in front of your door the following day, they still won't go to that bank anymore. And the person to blame for that is the idiot who put the land mines there. Without them, the bank might be robbed, which doesn't matter since it doesn't hold any money yet anyway. And announcing later that the mines only target people wearing balaclava's does not make the idea of mining the place any less stupid. Especially not if the mines keep exploding under some of your few remaining customers because their style of facial hair resembles a mask too much while every single criminal in town can freely walk in and out of the vault by taking the back door.
I started to compose a response, but, it boils down to one thing. Please, don't use the term "retarded" as a prejorative. It's insenstivive, and it's a good way to get yourself banned on here.Asehujiko said:
But please, don't come back to this thread. You already admitted you're part of the reason that Iron Lore went down the tubes. And I honestly don't give a shit what moral high ground you try to generate for yourself. You stole these people's hard work out from under them once before, and you don't even have the decency to admit "yeah, I fucked these people's lives up." Instead you're stuck on a whole "it's their fault that I didn't buy it."
Except that the only people that said Titan Quest was shit BEFORE THE GAME WAS RELEASED were the people who had pirated it and used a poorly made crack for it. I heard on the PC Gamer Podcast that people had the balls to post these CTD problem on the official forums weeks before the game was even available. When asked by Iron Lore devs for permission to examine their systems to find the problem the people complaining quickly shut up and stopped posting, if they had nothing to hide...like say a no DVD crack they weren't supposed to be using on game they shouldn't have even had then what would be wrong with letting the devs take a quick peek at their machine to see what could be causing these problems?Asehujiko said:
Oh, oh! I have the answer, they pirated the game and were talking shit about it being buggy because their poorly written crack didn't disable all the DRM. So again it's nothing to do with Iron Lore having been bad developers and making a bad game. It's about cheap people trying to get something for free and bitching when their theft gets thwarted because they didn't do their research properly.
So your entire defense comes down to pulling facts out of your ass and deciding that based on those facts I am inherently wrong and unfit to discuss this? I didn't pirate the game before release, in fact I only heard about it when IL got in trouble over their gross mismanagement of their DRM and public relations and made a mental note to add TQ to my list of games i refuse to buy because of the DRM. If that somehow ruins somebody's life, they shouldn't have based their entire livelihood on me living under a rock when it comes to knowledge of DRM.Starke said:
The average person doesn't think "hey, this game is a buggy piece of shit, that's definitely the result of a cracking group screwing up completely despite flawlessly cracking and day 0 ing hundreds of games, some of them even using starforce and not caused by a completely unheard of studio putting out a bad game despite that being a very common problem". Instead, they think "Man I'm glad I pirated this game before buying it because that would have been a ripoff, better warn everybody who has this on preorder".tkaStryc9 said:
To use some numbers:
You have 100.000 potential pirates and 10.000 preorders. The game ships with secret drm that makes the game appear to suck. 10.000 of those pirates have good enough internet to warrant a day 0 download. They play the game, they find out that the game sucks(and have no way of knowing that this is because of the drm and not the game itself because the drm is still a secret and thus have to assume that it's the game itself), they warn the rest and uninstall the game. This has the effect of making the remaining 90.000 pirates value their up/down ratios more then having a (to their knowledge) broken game and causes 9.000 legal customers to cancel their preorders based on the reports from (to their knowledge) people who got it shipped early or are in a different time zone. In the end, only 1.000 people buy the game. None of the pirates buy it at a later date because 1. They played the game and it sucked. 2. the developer antagonized them by deliberately pissing them off with no benefit whatsoever to either themselves or the legal customers, apparently just for the sake of being a dick. Developer throws a hissy fit over how it's all somebody elses fault while another cracking group fixes the mistakes of their predecessor and releases a working crack. Everybody who checks the game in the future downloads that instead of risking the drm giving them a false positive.
SD method
You have 100.000 potential pirates and 10.000 preorders. The game ships without any form of DRM. 10.000 of those pirates have good enough internet to warrant a day 0 download. They play the game, they find out that the game is awesome and tell the rest. The remaining 90.000 pirates download the game too and the amount of preorders increases to 15.000, which may be from the additional word of mouth generated by the pirates or actual pirates buying the game, impossible to tell. Game gets released, 15.000 people buy the game. Constant patches are released, customers stay and convert more non buyers into buyers. Game sells about 20.000 cases total. Some pirates convert at a later date because they want the patches too. Developer now has an established fanbase and the entire pirate community acting as a giant advertising machine.
The same pirates, the same customers, different drm, radically different outcomes.
No, it's because, according to your own statements you're a pirate. Except you're not, and it was poor word choice on your part. Normally I'd appologize, but you're own attitude has ensure'd I'll make an exception. You're not a pirate, you're an appologist.Asehujiko said:
You're right the average person doesn't think, "Hey, this game is a buggy piece of shit, that's definitely the result of a cracking group screwing up." because the people that pirated the game and then wrote negative reviews because their defective crack triggered DRM that wouldn't have done anything had they purchased the game and played it legally didn't bother to mention they pirated the game and used a crack in their negative review of the game.Asehujiko said:
So again, the whole crux of your argument comes down to saying that the game sucks not based on it having bad gameplay or bad story or poor level design. Your argument is that the game sucks because it has DRM programmed into it that can only be triggered by using crack to get around the disc check, which you wouldn't have to do if you had purchased a copy of the game legally. Again I point to the story from the Iron Lore devs about people bitching about the game being buggy weeks before it was even released...you know, before it was on store shelves, so obviously the people bitching were people who had pirated and cracked the game.
Using StarForce in your argument doesn't really help all that much because StarForce isn't hidden DRM, you know it's there because it installs the drivers right in front of your face, makes you reboot, then checks the disc every time you start the game. Yes StarForce is horrible DRM, I've had more experience with it than I care for. StarForce has been proven to physically damage hardware, cause OS problems, prevent games from being played\installed. The DRM in Titan Quest was never linked to any such things, if triggered it simply caused the game crash out, which if you had purchased the game in the first place wouldn't have happened.
Games being shipped out before launch dates and being released at different times based on location are a very common occurrence and as far as the fans knew at that point, the complaints originated from those people. On the other side, the pirates had absolutely no idea that their problems were caused by a cracking group's laziness, which is generally unprecedented and not(a well made crack makes the game run better), and not an unknown developer putting out a garbage game, which is a very common occurrence. The solution to that is very simple: A press release stating that all the perceived problems are drm related and not flaws of the game itself.tkaStryc9 said:
But do you know what happened? IL did nothing. They didn't give an answer to all the bad press, they didn't explain or justify the seemingly broken game, they didn't reveal their hidden drm, they just let the entire fanbase decide the state of their purchase based on only one side of the story.
And again, the drm DOES give false positives and if that happens, the customer is completely screwed because you can't ask tech support for any problems with it.
And the reason i mention starforce is because cracking a game infected with it is a great boost to the credibility of any scene release group, as was the case with the original release of TQ. Who would you trust when you have a problem with a game?
A group of people who, time after time prove themselves more capable with a keyboard and a hex editor then entire offices full of drm coders(who have the home field advantage) and say that the problem isn't on their side?
Or a group of people who haven't done anything of note at all and remain conspicuously quiet whenever the topic is being discussed?
One last thing. IL didn't even go under because of the TQ disaster. They went under because nobody hired them after they put out the thoroughly broken dawn of war: soulstorm, which is a by all accounts a shitty game, pirates or no pirates.
As a slight aside, Stryc9, this runs into a personal peeve of mine, of late, regarding StarForce.
There's actually a very interesting discussion on the subject of StarForce here [http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_9.html].
A few quick excerpts
Starforce's genuine crime was this:
From here he discusses the death of Starforce and then moves on to SecureRom. Anyway, I do recomend reading it.
As an aside, about Starforce, it acctually hasn't been proven to physically damage hardware. I'm unsure about OS problems, it's quite possible, but I am slightly suspicious. Now, as for preventing other games from being installed/run. Yeah, the various iterations of Starforce don't play nice with one another.tkaStryc9 said:
There's actually a very interesting discussion on the subject of StarForce here [http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_9.html].
A few quick excerpts
To be fair, it would be somewhat idiotic of Ubisoft to present evidence showing these failures, but, in a n=12k survey, you'd actually expect at least a few positive cases if the claim had some merit.
Like the author of this article, I bought into this too. In retrospect though, I feel like an idiot, as someone with some technical proficiency.
Starforce's genuine crime was this:
Their PR team should be drawn and quartered. Though, as I recal the one who linked to the pirated copy of GalCiv2 wasn't even in the PR, it was a programer, who was pissed off with the treatment he was getting (I could be completly mistaken on this point, it's been 4 years).
From here he discusses the death of Starforce and then moves on to SecureRom. Anyway, I do recomend reading it.
One thing that I don't think many people appreciate is that developers themselves rarely make the decision to include DRM in their games but rather it is mandated by publishers. This was the case with TQ where Iron Lore, the developer, argued against using DRM but was ultimately required by THQ to implement it before they would release the game.