Aquaria hit the P2P

[Radix]

Yeah, it's not very nice, but we buy things from evil corporations all the time, even though we know they're McDemonspawn. 2K could have built their offices using ground-up baby mortar and everyone would've still bought Bioshock. Inconvenience or notniceness doesn't significantly hurt mainstream games, I mean just look how many people gleefully purchase new video cards when big titles come out.

StarForce/SecuROM suck, but they aren't going to stop anyone spending money, and as long as they're effective and there's nothing better on the market it still makes business sense to use them.

[realyst]

I'm curious as to how effective the SecureRom nonsense truly is on the bottom line.

Yes, lots of games are bought immediately.  But lots aren't either.  Let's think Bioshock:

Lots of people bought it on release.  That was a given.  There is a given amount of sales that can be counted on based on hype and loyalty alone.  That will not change.  AND, that demographic is not likely to pirate the game, at least in the long term.

Now, think of the fellow who doesn't have the video card for it yet or saving up for it.  Maybe he can't afford the game just yet.  By the time he wants to buy it, he hears all  this bad press about limited installs and such.  But his buddy tells him he has a pirated version of it that works nonetheless, no install worries at all!(yes, this is two weeks later, but this fellow couldn't afford it on release anyway...or maybe he's in Canada or, even worse, the UK where he only gets it after a suitable decade has passed).

"Wow!" he exclaims and wonders why he would shell out 80$ (remember, Canada) for something that can break his computer when he can get, for free, a fully functional copy.

For the short term, it looks great.  In the long term:  you probably lose lots of money.

Problem is, most of the bigwigs only care about the short term initial oomph of sales.

Now, also factor in the enormous cost to implement these systems and in the long term:  you're looking at massive suckage.

You also lose credibility.  Ubi got lots of bad press with Starforce and some games, such as Oblivion, got so much bad press they took it out of the final release.

DRM is a bad business model.  Problem is, spreadsheets, which is all the money monkeys in the accounting and marketing depts understand, have a hard time revealing this.

[bovi]

Copy protection, of ANY kind, is pretty much useless anyway. It will be cracked, no matter what you use. In the end, it's really just a waste of time.

Well, the usual response to that is it buys time. There's probably some merit in that, as any borderline cases who usually pirate but are hyped about your game might bite the bullet and shell out on impulse. The importance of copy protection probably scales with the anticipation level of your game for that reason. If you know what you're doing it may be possible to baffle crackers for a week or more, but that's probably not worth the effort.

Additionally, buyers expect it, so you need at least some generic protection to look professional.

That's funny, I work the opposite way. If I know there's going to be some malware being installed with the legit version, I will definitely pirate it first. If it's worth buying, I'll do so and leave the bought copy unopened. As every game has its small glitches in the first iteration, there's nothing to lose by being a few days or even months later than its release to get it.

[rinkuhero]

I don't think copy protection is totally useless. I don't use it on my games, but that's more because my games aren't yet popular enough to be pirated. But I can see why Aquaria used it (in the form of a registration key and such).

I see copy protection as not intended for the hardcore pirates, but more for the casual pirates, it prevents piracy in the people who know how to send their friends a copy or know how to search for a rapidshare or megaupload link in Google but don't know how to use torrents or key gens and so on. It's true that you can't prevent most pirates from pirating a game, but you can prevent the less tech-savvy ones from doing so.

It's the same reasoning behind locking doors: no lock will keep an expert burglar out of your house, but it'll keep a drunk neighbor out.

[realyst]

rinku:

Registration codes are not that bad.  And I hardly object to their use.  this is mainly because they do not inconvenience the actual buyer any more then the pirated copy does and does assist in tracking purchases and the like.

Heck, even older games had clever ways of doing the reg code thing   Remember Wing Commander asking you when the USO show was going to be shown on the deck of the Cat's Claw carrier ship (you had to read the included 'newsletter' to find out).

That which I'm against is anything above that measure such as installing secret extra bits or bloating your registry or limiting how many installs you're allowed to do after you purchase the game for full retail price.  That is silly and counterproductive.

[barret232hxc]

It makes me cry. I guess i should feel bad that' I've obtained unlegit copies of games several times from much larger studios but still technically it is always wrong and I dunno just seeing aquaria out there for free. I guess i feel a deep sadness in my heart. I should seed a copy with a virus hahaha jk that's just wrong

[RvLeshrac]

Chris Delay from Introversion posted some interesting thoughts on it awhile ago;

"...there were at least ten times as many pirate copies of Uplink and Darwinia as there were legitimate sales. How do we know? Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games. Now hard-line corporate types will tell you this means they've lost 10 x sales x price million dollars based on this, but thats just nonsense. Would all 10 of those 11 users have ever bought the game? No, of course not. But 1 out of 10 of them might, and that would have doubled our sales and made us very happy devs indeed. "

http://forums.introversion.co.uk/introversion/viewtopic.php?t=1046

This is a blatant cum hoc fallacy (it is possibly true, but impossible to verify or disprove, for the record).

'there were at least ten times as many pirate copies... as there were legitimate sales...'
OK, that's a reasonable statement. Prove it.
'Patches available on our website which only work on the full games have been downloaded more than ten times the sales totals of their games'
That fails to account for people who installed the game on a desktop and a laptop (arguably piracy, but certainly people who are never going to buy the second copy), individuals who had to redownload the patches multiple times due to reinstalls/hardware failure/upgrades, individuals who downloaded the file as 'run' instead of 'save as' and crashed after completion (and individuals who didn't complete the download - did the count include only finished downloads, or did it include people on dialup who attempted to download the patch 100 times?), and on and on and on.

This is like saying that 2,000,000,000,000 peanuts were eaten in Georgia last year, so the population of Georgia must be 2,000,000,000,000.

[Radix]

That fails to account for people who installed the game on a desktop and a laptop (arguably piracy, but certainly people who are never going to buy the second copy), individuals who had to redownload the patches multiple times due to reinstalls/hardware failure/upgrades, individuals who downloaded the file as 'run' instead of 'save as' and crashed after completion (and individuals who didn't complete the download - did the count include only finished downloads, or did it include people on dialup who attempted to download the patch 100 times?), and on and on and on.

I don't suppose statistical significance means anything to you.

I'll also direct your attention to the key terms "at least" and "more than". Ten times may be an extremely conservative estimate for all you know. But even if it were as low as fractionally more copies the point may still be valid, as the actual figure is irrelevant to the argument.

[blackzeroflame]

2K could have built their offices using ground-up baby mortar and everyone would've still bought Bioshock.

Are you kidding?!? iIf 2K did that, I'd buy a dozen copies!

[DialogPimp]

I dunno - I answer to my own sense of honesty. I'm a full time software developer, so I won't steal other's work. Period. If I can't afford Paintshop Pro, I'll save until I can. That said, I can understand the whole piracy thing too - how many games have I paid $AU90 for, that are absolute pieces of crap. If I had have warezed those games, I'd be a lot richer.

Once my family went to single income and child, I could no longer afford to buy everything as soon as it came out. Once I adjusted my mindset to buying on budget labels, I began to see the advantages. For example: Far Cry for $AU20. All bugs worked out. Plenty of walkthroughs if I need it. Plenty of reviews so I know I'm making a sensible purchasing decision rather than marketing hype.

Once you overcome the "I have to have it now" thing, it's actually pretty easy. Except for me wanting a damn Xbox 360 of course

[DavidBeoulve]

Personally I like StarDock's solution, makers of Galactic Civilizations II. They used no copy protection but made their game patches authenticate with their servers - unique CD keys that, to my knowledge, nobody keygened / broke.

So folks pirated their game and then couldn't download the patches, which not only fixed bugs but added gameplay, updated AI and made the ship editor more fun.

But I'm not in the business, just a bystander. I just thought that was a cool solution. Authenticating with live servers seems to work great for online games; maybe offline games should do that more.

[Mull]

This is a blatant cum hoc fallacy (it is possibly true, but impossible to verify or disprove, for the record).

You're very right about that - I thought a similar thing myself when i first read it. I quoted the paragraph mostly because it was the first, and that it made sense out-of-context - not because it was representative of the entire piece. My mistake!

The reason I posted the link was because Chris takes a sort of middle-way and discusses some of the problems with the binary reasoning people use when talking about intellectual property. I have heard others make this argument in more elaborate manners before, but seeing as Introversion are quite big in indie circles, I figured the fact that he posted it should increase interest in the article enough to warrant it being posted.

[RvLeshrac]

I don't suppose statistical significance means anything to you.

I'll also direct your attention to the key terms "at least" and "more than". Ten times may be an extremely conservative estimate for all you know. But even if it were as low as fractionally more copies the point may still be valid, as the actual figure is irrelevant to the argument.

The actual figure DOES matter. You also have to remember that there are plenty of people who download just to download, and many websites which will download the patches in order to host them. There are also people who will download the patch thinking that it will patch a demo, and people who downloaded the patch instead of the demo, be it a misclick or stupidity.

I also pointed out that a cum hoc fallacy is impossible to disprove - the 'ten times' figure may indeed be perfectly accurate, but there's no way to tell.

You're very right about that - I thought a similar thing myself when i first read it. I quoted the paragraph mostly because it was the first, and that it made sense out-of-context - not because it was representative of the entire piece. My mistake!

The reason I posted the link was because Chris takes a sort of middle-way and discusses some of the problems with the binary reasoning people use when talking about intellectual property. I have heard others make this argument in more elaborate manners before, but seeing as Introversion are quite big in indie circles, I figured the fact that he posted it should increase interest in the article enough to warrant it being posted.

I should probably have read the whole thing, but I posted from work and didn't have the chance. :p

[DSProgrammer]

It would be quite naive to think that every single person who bought a game downloaded a patch ten times - that's a HUGE amount.  You could pretty much say that at least 8 copies of the game were pirated per copy sold with that.

Something I always thought a company should do, especially with electronic downloads - have each copy of the game include a "fingerprint" code which differentiates that copy sold from the rest, and when the game is downloaded, store in your records who bought which copy.  Don't ever check it or do anything with the code when the game's run, otherwise pirates would hack it out, just have it embedded in the game.  Then after like 15 minutes of gameplay the very first time the game is run (and only then), have your game secretly try to contact your servers and let them know that fingerprint was just installed.  If in a week a copy was installed 50 times, you know that copy was pirated and you know exactly who did it - get a lawyer and have some fun.  Sure, some people won't have always-on internet connections, and eventually the pirates will notice, but it should still work.

[Sfiera]

In general, "phoning home" without the user's knowledge is something that's very strongly frowned on. Also--even if you had the IP address of the pirates, how would you figure out who to sue? Presumably you could transmit more information, but then you're talking about transmitting users' (even legitimate users') private information without their knowledge.