I'm going to miss Iron Lore, they did damn good work. Very interesting read, thanks Brad.

Yeah, I read Michael's article earlier today when it was referenced in the Wargamer forums. I have to admit I was shocked that the percentage of piracy for PC games was that high -- it scarcely seems believable! There's a couple things I don't understand, however.

First of all, why is it that computer games can be pirated but not console games? What makes PC titles so much easier to crack than the same title on the PS3 or 360? And perhaps most pertinently, why can't PC game developers use the same techniques as console game makers to prevent piracy? I can only surmise that the reasons preventing them are technical in nature, but I'm utterly baffled as to why this is the case.

Piracy is just the symptom of a perverted economy where official product price does no longer reflect its actual value.

Basically there are two markets: The free market and the black market.

The price of a product on the free market represents the officially governed price, made by the producers or the government, while the price on the black market represents the true value of the product.

You want to make sure that the free market price is lower than the black market price.

In terms of Software, where the black market price is zero.nothing, you have to change the the free market price to match the black market price. Basically give your product away for free.

Now, you have to build an infrastructure around your product. Like support contracts, merchandise (e.g. sell some Drengin masks, good for Halloween) or just a plain donation button. The last one actually works very well, lots of people like charity.

A very good article indeed. I guess it helps to vent frustrations every once in a while. I may not be a developer, but I know the value of a hard days work. If someone came up to me the next day and said everything I just did was "stupid." I would be a little angry. Programs may be buggy at first and not work on every system but I can imagine that it is hard to make something that works on different machines with different hardware configurations. If you have an Xbox or Playstation, they are all the same. (For the most part.) You only have to make the software work a certain way. Maybe if all PCs were the same, PC developers would not have to keep a bottle of Excedrin permanently mounted on their desks.

I always try to describe to my friends about how bad piracy can be. How it hurts business. And of course, how it can drive up prices. I try to think about how much games could really cost if piracy didn't exist. I doubt it will ever go away but developers and pirates will constantly be finding ways to develop and crack new code.

Piracy is really, really, really tempting. I live in Asia right now. I go to work everyday and walk past a street vendor selling the latest movies on DVD. Sometimes ones that are not even in theaters yet. I always see a crowd around the vendor as they give away their money to get the latest movie. I have felt the urge to buy a copy now and then but I try to resist. I could get the lastest and greatest for about $2 a pop. Sometimes the quality is good and sometimes it is poor. But that does not stop people from snapping up a copy of something that was stolen. I guess the same could be said for PC games. You get what you pay for so be happy with it.

I think that developers deserve a lot more credit than they are given. Before you post how bad something may be, check yourself first. Do you meet the minimum requirements? Do you have the latest drivers? Did you get a legitimate copy? If you can answer yes to these questions, it may be a good time to post a bug. I am sure that if you do some research on your end, a techie will be more than happy to help you out from their end.

I take it you're not a developer.

I am a developer. But not on proprietary software.

There are lots of companies making money by giving away stuff. A common example would be the companies behind most Linux distributions.

Linux distribution companies do not make money from end-users.  Their money comes in from large support contracts for companies.  RedHat, the prime example of this model, realized that the end-user market was a waste of time and have fully focused on enterprise customers.

With the exception of MMOs, the "give it away for free, charge for the service" model doesn't work in games.  At least not to a level that could support an actual company.  Look at any single player game.  What services could you add to a non-internet game to justify a monthly fee to a regular user?

The biggest problem with the whole idea of depending on merch, donations & support contracts is that there is pretty much 0 guaranteed return on investment.  Spend 2 years working on a game with a team of developers, and you can't even count on X number of sales.  You have to rely on an even less reliable income source.  If I can get something for free, unless it's crippled, chances are I won't want/need the "extra" service.

I don't think piracy will ever stop until people sit down and think about how much financial effort goes into making a game. Developers can complain until they go blue in the face, but it won't do the industry any good because the people using their products have no idea how much it costs in time and money to create even the simplest game. Developers have to pay for licenses, engines, testing, artwork, marketing, distribution, programmers, demo creation, possibly support costs when they need help, and everything that goes into the planning process that ties the afore mentioned areas together. Those costs are monumental and there is NO guaranteed return on the initial investment.

People always say that if you give software X away for free, the public will respond and poof...instant profit. As a consumer and a software developer, that is not how life works. Free and OSS models work because a group of people wish to create or enhance a service or product that did not exist in the capacity that they wanted. It is not time efficient for one person to design an entire system, so multiple people decide to work on a project, usually to serve their own greater good. After the product has been proven to work for them, they may decide to let other people use their product for free, as a licensee, or under the guise of accepting non-obligational donations for updates and continued support. In this example, software X was not created with the intention of turning a profit, but the opportunity to profit exists. Most other game and software developers develop with the intention of making money. I'm not saying that we want to get rich, but we need to sustain a lifestyle or add to a coffer from which we'll draw to make our next project. This is the fundamental difference between the two software creation mentalities.

My needs as a consumer are automatically at odds with my needs as a developer. As a consumer, I want to pay the cheapest price possible for a good. The free market determines the cost of a product and boom....that is what an industry standardizes on. In the case of games, it is about the $50.00 price point. If a product or service is available for free, it completely disrupts or can even destroy the forces that balance a particular market segment. Said plainly, pirates are destroying the PC games market.

I don't know what the appropriate solution to this problem is though. I absolutely abhor DRM (even though I recognize its need). DRM does not solve the real problem: Content makers are trying to reign in ditribution of a good that is in infinite supply. Software is easy to copy because it is digital. Pirates will ALWAYS find a way to get around DRM checks. I've read about the idea that Content distributors will band together and unify their efforts to stop piracy. This sounds great, but is terrible from a consumer's standpoint; the consumer loses the ability to choose how they will use a service. I already hate the fact that I need a cd in a drive to play most PC games. Why? I don't need a cd in the drive to use windows, photoshop, or use winzip.

People out there need to support companies like Stardock (with their wallets), so that we aren't forced to accept DRM as a new standard. Individuals who pirate aren't bad per se, but they aren't doing the rest of us any good....

From reading this and the other thread here discussing IP and copyright it can clearly be seen that some people have an enormous sense of entitlement to use other peoples work without paying them anything. They would like there to be no laws governing IP.

That would mean an end to the video game, music, book and film industries, these things take a lot of time and resources to make and people need to make a living so making these things needs to be profitable anyone who doesn’t understand that is a self-deluding fools or a communist/anarchist.

Saying it’s not stealing because you are making a copy not taking anything from them is untrue; it’s like hiring someone to wash your car or trim your hedge and then refusing to pay them. When you buy software you’re paying for the time and sweat of the people who made it.

Now to be honest back when I was 13 or 14 I did sometimes pirate games for my friends and use games they copied for me (This was on 3 ½ inch disk in those days of course. But when I grew up, I came to understand the value of someone’s hard work once I had to earn a living for myself.

I now work as an IT Consultant, and I don’t work for free (on account of having rent and bills to pay), why should game developers? I can tell you a client refusing to pay for work I’d already done would have an appointment in court.

I think a lot of people who pirate software and condone it are either criminals, to young and immature to understand the value of hard work, or just on some wacky self-obsessed anarchist trip, (e.g. very immature but probably old enough to know better).

The same could be argued about the classical distribution model. It could happen nobody buys the game, either because the game isn't good enough or because everybody will pirate it.

So,
What would be the correct way of involving the Feds or States in this issue is the real question?

How much time and energy (therefore hard currency) would have to be spent?

Will the end product justify the means (or cost for that matter)? Would bringing thousands of millions of "pirates" to justice help increase sales (or decrease the actual customer base)? Of course, maybe, someone smarter than I, with a marketing background in PC Gaming and Games could come up with a way to bring the "Pirates" on board... such as...

Tada! Our favorite company, and probably the only company not in the "red" in lower Southeast Michigan, Stardock has the right idea, in that their response is "Here's a nibble of the real product, Mr and Ms. Beta Tester, now tell your friends to go watch a more full blown copy on G4!"

Yes, I did DVR the episode with Brad on G4 and I have decided to purchase a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire, after watching the battle scene, even to the point of investing some hard earned cash on another gigabyte of Random Access Money...er Memory.

Stay focused Stardock, your customer base is appreciative, even if they do not always seem like it.

W/R
Kirk Smith
USN CPO(R)

aka: Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

Random Access Money.

I like it.

From a purely technical standpoint, the pirates will always win. They are always one step ahead of the legacy content industry.

Even if all the hardware you could buy would only run DRM'ed software it wouldn't help. There are enough people capable and willing to build their very own computers from scratch, it is actually not that hard.

The next logical step would be to make self-made computers illegal. But as if that would help. One can still buy illegal drugs, illegal pornography, hire people to do illegal stuff and so on. A totally unregulated free market. Supply and demand, risk and profit.


What I'm saying is that there's no point to combat piracy with laws or DRM. You need to make a legal copy more valuable than a pirated one or if that's not possible, change to a different business model.

I thought some of the commentary on Stardock was interesting. In particular, the supposition that Stardock gamers are a different breed and that the distribution model that works for Stardock would not work with FPS gamers. I don't think that is true, but it seemed like a lot of others did. Frankly, the GC II user base as a whole seems to be pretty computer literate and quite capable of using something like a bit torrent...But simply chooses not to go that way. I believe this has more to do with the approach and less to do with the players. I know that I could easily pirate any game out there, but that is simply not something I want to do. Perhaps that is more true with the community as a whole than I had previously realized (or perhaps I should have a lower opinion of FPS players).

In addition, Stardock has built up credibility with me personally through it's past games and I am much more likely to buy a game from them blind than I am from any other game company. All the same, I did install and play the demo version of GC II before my purchase. Even with Sins of a Solar Empire I have held off of purchasing for two reasons. The first is that I have pretty limited time right now. The second is that I am ever leery of getting burned by buying a game that just doesn't suit my tastes, and I'm unsure if Sins suits my tastes without trying it. I probably will eventually try it, but I would be much more comfortable about it with just 15-30 minutes of time on a demo or even a youtube video walk through. The fact that Stardock is distributing it and that they appear to be doing post release patches counts heavily in their favor.

Do others agree/disagree? How about it Stardockians? You know us well, are we different in this respect compared to the FPS crowd?

Personally I think more game publishes / developers (if they have control over this sort of thing) need to use a model similar (or even exactly the same) to what Stardock does, and I’m not just saying this because this is the Stardock forum.

That is:
1. No disk based copy protection
2. The ability to download it straight from a trustworthy source. Also no BS ‘you can only download it once’ or anything like that should apply. It is also good if you can download it a little bit at a time. This also somewhat removes the issue of certain countries getting games much later than others.
3. Have the copy protection kick in when you apply a patch (i.e. you need to enter your key and it is checked online so it can't be faked, at least on any mass scale).

The reason I suggest this because as I consumer I want:
1. Not to have to go look for and put in a disk every time I want to play for no other reason than it needs to check a few lines of wasted space.
2. Not to have to worry that I will potentially waste my money because the power fails at the worst possible time (i.e. I know I have life time access to the game no matter what)
3. In at lot of cases I like to try before I buy.

I also believe this is the best path to follow because it is less likely to lead people into piracy in the first place:
1. If there is disk based copy protection (which in my experience is broken 9/10 within a day or two of a games release, if not sooner, and certainly within a week) then people will be driven to seek out a no-cd crack, which are generally not hard to find, or even make yourself if you know how.
2. If they can simply download it from an official site then why waste the time learning about how to use bit torrent etc. to get some copy that my not even work, or worse, my just be some virus or porn video, even if it is ‘free’.
3. I know the purpose of demos is to give people a taste of a game, but most demos these days are so big (mainly due to textures I guess) that you my as well almost download the full version anyway, not to mention that demos tend to come out about the same time as most full version, if not later.
4. If you support your games (like Stardock does ) and make it very hard, if not impossible to patch your game without a legitimate key, but very easy to do with one, and don’t require them to verify each time, or launch some ‘third party’ program each time (i.e. steam) then you give people a strong incentive to actually buy your game, even if they did pirate it to begin with.

Obviously this is going to work better for some games than for others (namely high re-playability games vs your more play and throw away type games), but on the whole I think a lot of the reasons for piracy (or at least the main reason I have done it) is that it was simply easier and most times faster to download a pirated copy of a game and get a crack and than it was to buy it legitimately and probably end up cracking it anyway.