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How Piracy Affected the Launch of Demigod
Posted by
Soulskill
on Sat Apr 18, 2009 04:12 AM
from the might-need-more-than-three-bullets-this-time dept.
from the might-need-more-than-three-bullets-this-time dept.
Demigod is an RTS/RPG hybrid developed by Gas Powered Games and published by Stardock, a company notable for their progressive and lenient stance on DRM. The game was set to be released on April 14th, and shipped without any form of copy protection. Unfortunately, retailer Gamestop broke the street date and released it earlier in the week. A day after pointing this out, Gas Powered Games posted some numbers about the players hitting their servers. Roughly 18,000 connections were made from legitimately purchased copies; over 100,000 were made from pirated copies. Meanwhile, the servers, which were not yet ready for that level of traffic, buckled under the strain, resulting in poor experiences for people trying to participate in multiplayer. While some reviews were positive, others criticized the game for the connectivity issues. After another day, they were able to stabilize the servers to the point they'd planned on for the original launch.
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[+]
The Gamer's Bill of Rights 272 comments
Edge Magazine is running a piece by Brad Wardell, CEO of game developer Stardock, in which he presents a "Gamer's Bill of Rights." Stardock teamed up with Gas Powered Games to develop a list of ideals they think all game publishers should follow. Some are rather basic operational guidelines (not requiring a disc to play, minimum requirements that make sense), and some are aimed at repairing the damaged relationship between game companies and customers ("Gamers shall have the right to not be treated as potential criminals by developers or publishers"). Wishful thinking or not, it will be interesting to see if they manage to get other publishers to sign on.
[+]
Game Retailers Hurting Themselves With Digital Distribution 167 comments
GameBiz recently had the chance to speak with Brad Wardell, CEO of Stardock, about pricing and distribution within the games industry. Wardell follows up a bit on the Demigod piracy fiasco from a few days ago, and mentions that retail outlets may be on their way out.
"Retailers need to be careful about this stuff. They're kind of signing their own death warrants once they push digital distribution at the store. Once you have the thing set up — once you've experienced how to purchase the game or deal with it online — why would I go back to the store for the next purchase? Especially if the store isn't providing added value. If you're a retailer, you're killing yourself. If I can't get a game off Impulse, I'm going to Steam. I like stores, but I'm really lazy."
[+]
Stardock Declares Victory Over <em>Demigod</em> Piracy 403 comments
We recently got a look at some hard numbers related to the piracy of Demigod , a new game from Stardock and Gas Powered Games. Now, two weeks later, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has essentially declared the game a success in spite of the piracy, and reaffirmed the company's stance that intrusive DRM is a bad thing. The game's sales figures seem to bear him out. Quoting:
"Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you're playing a pirated copy right now, if you're one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you're a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way. The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don't buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary — our customers."
[+]
Why Bother With DRM? 376 comments
Brad Wardell of Stardock and Ron Carmel of 2D Boy recently spoke with Gamasutra about their efforts to move the games industry away from restrictive DRM. Despite the fact that both have had their own troubles with piracy, they contend that overall piracy rates aren't significantly affected by DRM — and that most companies know it. Instead, the two suggest that most DRM solutions are still around to hamper a few more specific situations. Quoting:
"'Publishers aren't stupid. They know that DRM doesn't work against piracy,' Carmel explains. 'What they're trying to do is stop people from going to GameStop to buy $50 games for $35, none of which goes into the publishers' pockets. If DRM permits only a few installs, that minimizes the number of times a game can be resold.' ... 'I believe their argument is that while DRM doesn't work perfectly,' says Wardell, 'it does make it more difficult for someone to get the game for free in the first five or six days of its release. That's when a lot of the sales take place and that's when the royalties from the retailers are determined. Publishers would be very happy for a first week without "warez" copies circulating on the Web.'"
[+]
Breaking Down the <em>Demigod</em> Launch 70 comments
In addition to the piracy troubles that plagued Demigod's launch (and partly exacerbated by them), Stardock and Gas Powered Games ran into severe networking issues that hampered their ability to accommodate players with a legitimately purchased copy of the game. Brad Wardell has now posted a frank, detailed explanation of what happened and how they dealt with it. Quoting:
"Demigod's connectivity problems have basically boiled down to 1 bad design decision and 1 architectural limitation. The bad design decision was made in December of 2008 when it was decided to have the network library hand off sockets to Demigod proper. In most games, the connection between players is handled purely by one source. ... So in Demigod, on launch day, Alice would host a game. Tom would be connected to Alice by the network library and then that socket would be handed to Demigod. Then, Alice and Tom would open a new socket to listen for more players to join in. As a result, a user might end up using a half dozen ports and sockets which some routers didn't like and it just made things incredibly complex to connect people and put a lot of strain on the servers to manage all those connections.
[+]
How <em>Demigod's</em> Networking Problems Were Fixed 65 comments
The launch of Demigod was troubled by piracy and networking difficulties, which publisher Stardock worked quickly to correct. They've now released a documentary that gives a detailed look behind the scenes of diagnosing and fixing those problems. It includes meetings, interviews with the devs, and part of the bug-tracking process during a frenzied 108-hour work week.
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So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Funny)
Now now, let's not jump to conclusions. I'm sure all of those 100000 pirates just want to test the game before buying. All of them will either stop playing, or they'll buy a legal copy.
What, you think they won't? Ooh, but that would be... stealing? They'd never!
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Funny)
Eventually, they will stop playing. Just wait!
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Use occam's razor and go with the simplest explanation: People pirate because they want free shit and it's easier in some cases than going to the store.
If you've ever seen the breakdown of law & order (Iraq right after invasion, New Orleans after Hurrican Katrina, LA after the riots, false Craiglist ads [racetalkblog.com]), you should know a lot of people are freeloading scavengers as soon as they don't think their actions have any consequences.
Do you think the internet, especially, which promotes the feeling of such an environment is immune from that? I don't think the explanation is complex at all.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Informative)
...try not to cut yourself. occam's razor is a prohibition against needlessly multiplying entities. your version of explanation does nothing to remove any entities from the parent's explanation. instead, you simply substitute one set of motivations for another.
i actually agree with your argument. but it's more compelling because the motivation is more base, not because the explanation is less complex.
i wish people would stop abusing poor old occam. his razor's getting dull from misuse. i blame Contact.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
So much for ethics (Score:5, Informative)
http://forums.demigodthegame.com/347467 [demigodthegame.com]
Well, what a dramatic week it's been. The teams at Stardock and GPG have been burning the midnight oil this week.
As those of you who have the game can already see, the server issues are gone. We've recreated a duplicate of the server infrastructure we had but dedicated to users who have the most recent version of the game and a valid CD key (serial #).
Based on the logs, we are seeing lots of games being played on-line now. Yay. Average game has approximately 4.7 humans in it which is a good sign.
Some clarifications
I've seen a lot of news articles this week and a lot of confusion about what occurred this week. The issue isn't terribly complicated.
Ars Technica had a good article that describes what happened. But still, a lot of people seem to think warez users are able to play multiplayer games. No, they can't. Even the retail box has a serial # in it that users have to use and be validated to play online. What brought down servers was a lot more benign than that. It was the HTTPS requests to inform users if there was a new version along with checking the community features for info (friends lists, chat channels, etc.) and things like that. Things like that are pretty piddly. It's only when you get a ton of users doing that at the same time that it becomes a problem as we saw.
But here's the thing: While piracy is annoying, you can't blame piracy for this problem. Let's face it, there's plenty of data out there about how many pirated games are being played. We should have looked at that. We assumed since Sins of a Solar Empire and Galactic Civilizations, both of which sold extremely well and got great reviews, that the # of pirated copies of Demigod in use would probably be in the same ballpark, maybe twice as much. But had we looked at what other publishers have said, we would have known that it's not unusual for there to be hundreds of thousands of warez copies in use. And if we had, we could have simply had the retail version not have any HTTP calls in it and instead just had an update button on the main menu to check for updates and voila, problem solved.
The second misconception is the argument that because Demigod's retail version is heavily pirated that it costs massive sales. But that, again, puts the blame on the wrong parties. If you want to talk about the horrible multiplayer experience on launch day, well, that's our fault because of what I said above. If you want to say that the horrible day 1 multiplayer experience resulted in negative game reviews which will seriously damage the game's sales then I say again, that's our fault too because of what I said above OR we could have just sent out the review copies on release day (Tuesday) and reviewers wouldn't have had it until Thursday by which point the problem had largely been resolved and the review scores would have been fine. But in either case, it's still our fault.
So now what?
Now that the servers are working fine we're moving away from the "#$R@#@# Demigod sux!" posts and into the regular new game release issues.
So what issues are we seeing and working on? Here are a few at the top of our lists:
1. Players getting disconnected during games. Demigod's lag tolerance is fairly low resulting in disconnects if a player lags out a bit. This is fairly easy to fix. You get a player in Australia playing a user in Europe and there will be times when there's a hicup in their connection and POW, disconnect and it's extremely frustrating. I played all day today and it happened to me. This is a very high priority.
2. NAT negotiation. For users outside the United States in particular using DSL, this is a problem. This is a case where player A can't see player B and thus they can't play together. This is something we will be aggressively looking at next week. If we hadn't had the server overload, we likely would have this addressed already.
3. Panthe
Parent
Re:So much for ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
So, if Stardock doesn't think the problem was piracy, why are so many people here using this opportunity to bash people who tried warez versions of the game?
Parent
Re:So much for ethics (Score:5, Interesting)
because they barely read the summary, not the article and especially not the Stardock blog entry.
This is the modern world, shaped by headlines and soundbites. Did you really expect anything else. Fortunately we have people like the the parent poster who take the time to put us right.
Parent
Re:So much for ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
People who buy games feel being hurt by those who pirate games. What is obvious load of crap.
The actual PC game crisis was projected long time ago and number of PC market journalists have predicted that PC gaming is going to experience huge shake up. No, not because of piracy which was there since day one. But because of many many good games were already released are all are still playable. New games and ideas have to compete with huge existing catalog. Consoles have the problem to lesser extent, as they are refreshed after some time fixing bunch of technical issues, so there are more incentives for console gamers to buy new version of the same game compared to PC counterpart. Video consoles are still evolving, PC gaming is pretty much came to its plateau.
What the journalists called gamer for was to buy new games to essentially sponsor PC game developer to continue their work. Now enter DRM. As PC gaming came out of its dark BBS ages, it grew into huge business. Managerial decision to deploy DRM as a way to fend off piracy and maximize profits is only logical - from pov of manager. But it actually back-fired: gamers skipped many new DRMed games and reinstalled some 10yo classical games of the same genre.
What StarDock now tries to do is worth all support and praise we can give: they try to return PC gaming to its roots, when distance between gamers and developers was very very thin. The glorious times when publishers were actually doing what their name stands for: publishing, only publishing and no DRM non-sense.
After reading the StarDock comments, I actually want to go and buy Demigod off Impulse. Not to play - my PC barely meets recommended system requirements nor do I like GPG games - but probably as a way to support them both in their aspiration.
Parent
Re:So much for ethics (Score:4, Informative)
Incidentally, what you're describing here is the book market: in English, virtually everything published since 1800 is still readable. Granted, most 19th Century books aren't of much interest to anyone, but a few are, and many, many used copies of books wander about the globe. (Gabriel Zaid wrote some about the literary plenitude/plethora in So Many Books: Reading and Publishing in an Age of Abundance [wordpress.com], which I describe in the post at the link).
You can see more on the subject at the bottom of this post [wordpress.com], which links here [mhpbooks.com]:
Amazon, Abe Books, and the like make buying and selling used books easier than ever. Many good books have been released and are still readable. The internet makes coordinating the exchange of them easy. Hence, part of the problem the publishing industry faces today: competition from its old stock. Computer games, welcome to the world of books.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:4, Insightful)
Or, you know, maybe they could have waited for the fucking release date?
This is the voice of America: "Me, me, me! Now, now, now!" Makes you proud, doesn't it?
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:4, Informative)
Or, you know, maybe they could have waited for the fucking release date?
This is the voice of America: "Me, me, me! Now, now, now!" Makes you proud, doesn't it?
Not just the voice of America. Thats the voice of humanity.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Informative)
I'll be lenient, because of your sig and I've been caught out by odd word usage before.
Piracy is on the high seas, it is also copyright infringement, a usage that dates back to Daniel Defoe in 1703 [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re:Just because the wrong word has been used for a (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Piracy = Copyright Infringement. Stop Fighting It. (Score:5, Interesting)
Just because the wrong word has been used wrong for a long time doesn't make it right.
Uh, that's *exactly* what makes it right. I am old enough to remember when "hacker" used to mean "computer enthusiast," and did not have any pejorative connotations. I am even so old as to remember when "hacker" meant "a bad golfer," before the word was co-opted by computer use entirely.
Seriously, "Piracy" now equals "Copyright Infringement." Stop fighting it, you're embarrassing the rest of us.
Like it or not, media influences language, and it's completely legit. If you want a fascinating and telling lesson in the process, look up the history of the word "geek."
Parent
Re:Hypocrisy.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The larger RIAA/MPAA groups would still be forcing out the smaller producers regardless of the level of piracy, infact if piracy were zero then they would be concentrating on killing the smaller producers as it would be the only way to increase their profits.
Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many.. And the more draconian it gets the more people will fight against it.
Current rules are extremely detrimental to our culture, a work can remain copyrighted long enough that the original customers of the work are dead before the term expires, and for things like software that rapidly becomes obsolete the terms are just insane - many applications completely vanish long before their copyright terms would expire.
If copyright terms were more sensible, then the people standing up against them would be fewer in number and less credible in their message.
Parent
Re:Hypocrisy.. (Score:4, Informative)
Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many..
Let me fix that for you: Copyright is an artificial construct designed to benefit the few at the expense of the many on the short term, in a gambit to maximize the many's benefits in the long term. Of course, at this point in time short term means "life of author plus however many years", but that's a problem with the implementation, not the concept.
Parent
Re:Hypocrisy.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't work out that way, though, did it?
It got misused, mislabeled and mistaken for something that "helps creative people" when it really is just a way to accumulate wealth and power, and to create artificial scarcity.
When I see copyrights being enforced on stuff where all the creative people involved have been dead for decades, it kind of shows it to be the scam that it is.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes but maybe the argument that people who do it mainly do it because they want to try before they buy still hold.
Bullshit. If they've got a copy which seemingly works 100%, most of them won't bother buying it because whats the point? In a month or so, the stats will be even worse. Guaranteed. So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes but maybe the argument that people who do it mainly do it because they want to try before they buy still hold.
Bullshit. If they've got a copy which seemingly works 100%, most of them won't bother buying it because whats the point? In a month or so, the stats will be even worse. Guaranteed. So already IN ONE SINGLE WEEK, Gas Powered Games and Stardock have lost 80% of the potential revenue of the game and had its reputation tarnished by the freeloaders because of the server load issue.
You assume those 80% of people would have purchased the game, had it been impossible for them to obtain a pirate copy.
I find this a difficult concept to accept. There are a whole bunch of digital media on my laptop and desktop that I would never have purchased, had free copies not been available.
I buy things that are good. If I pay e.g. £24.99 for something, it's because I want to reward people with their hard work. I guess a lot of non-pirates pay for many things which they later feel were not worth the money? I'm not happy to accept this.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah it's a promotional tool for your friend to pirate it too. Doesn't exactly help the developer does it? Oh but you got something for nothing so it's all OK isn't it?
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
You, and everybody else, seems to be missing the point. The game wasn't OUT at the time. GameStop leaked it, pre-orders got activated, and the rest of the game buying public still couldn't buy it.
When a game is only really available to pirates, of COURSE there will be more pirates than paying customers.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Interesting)
Similarly for me...
I started off buying games based on reviews in magazines, i would get maybe 1 new game every couple of months... Some of those games i bought turned out to be lousy and a complete waste of money (they all had positive reviews), while some kept me entertained for weeks.
After a while i realized i could copy games, so i started doing that, trading games with friends, buying copied games off a guy on a local market stall. I still spent most of what limited cash i had on computers, but now i bought less games (only the ones which would actually provide me weeks of entertainment), more blank disks and was able to upgrade my hardware.
So yes, some game companies lost out, the ones producing lousy games and paying off reviewers... But because of that, the only games i ever bought were ones i knew to be good, so those publishers making good games actually got more sales from me because my available funds weren't being conned out of me by publishers of crap games.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
I do know some people that have downloaded things and then bought them. It does happen but there is a huge amount of people that are just tight wads or think they deserve more entertainment than they can afford.
If we want to save the internet from DRM we have to find a way to get rid of this dead weight so they don't ruin it for the rest of us.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with your second and third paragraph, which is why I believe your first paragraph is just a steaming pile of trolling crap. Yes, there's plenty of idiots that download anything that tickles their fancy and even many that don't (but hey, it had lots of seeders so it'd be fast anyways) and they should be taught the idiocy of their ways, mostly because they're driving the costs of broadband up for the rest of us, but the fact remains that both the prices of games have stayed way up, and the availability of demos has continued its trend down.
Case in point, the game featured in TFA, looked cool, searched for the demo, nothing. Do you seriously expect me to shell $39.99 for something that I'm not sure I'll like? 'cause that money would pay for an awful lot of indie and even big-name games that do have demos available.
Don't be so quick in blaming the BitTorrent-addicted idiots for this one at least. Plenty of reasons to go to TPB with this one, even if I won't. And yes, I'm one of those that download from TPB and, if I like it, buy retail and *then* buy on Steam again if its cheap enough (or the game was just *that* good), replaying it each time, and if I don't like it, trash can it is.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes they have.
The main argument "in favour" is that piracy doesn't affect sales - most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place.
That's not an argument "in favor" of piracy. Example: A company has zero piracy and 100,000 sales. Along comes piracy. Now, they have 1,000,000 pirates and 10,000 sales. In the second case, you can truthfully make the statement that "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place". In this imaginary example, 900,000 people wouldn't have bought it. But, another 90,000 people pirated it INSTEAD of buying it, causing sales to plumet 90%. Nobody's going to seriously accept the "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" argument because even if it's true, it doesn't address what companies are REALLY concerned about: losing sales due to piracy. All "most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it" really tells you is that each pirated copy wasn't a lost sale, rather, each pirated copy represents part of a sale - but that can still add-up to huge losses.
A community of 18,000 would amount to empty servers a lot of the time especially if the game is available globally.
Yeah, because 18,000 players means you'd never find anyone to play against. Anyway, the "enough players to play against" is the kind of argument a pirate might think is great (because it legitimizes their piracy), but no smart company is seriously going to accept that answer.
Only a very detailed statistical analysis of the numbers could tell you if it was a good or a bad thing, and even then people would still argue with the result.
In general, the people creating the media thinks it doesn't help. People who pirate like to pretend it does help.
I can make a pretty good guess at who's more biased between those two groups. The companies want to maximize their profit. This means if piracy helps them, they will want piracy. If piracy doesn't help them, they won't like piracy. So, companies benefit by following the facts wherever they lead. They have an interest in finding out the truth - whatever it is. And most companies agree: piracy harms them.
Pirates, on the other hand, benefit from piracy regardless of whether piracy hurts or harms companies. This puts them in a position where they should always claim (or convince themselves) that piracy helps companies - which makes them biased towards one single conclusion.
In the end, I don't buy that there are two sides to piracy claim.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
We should beware of physics envy. Do we really need pseudo-complex econometric studies that probably fail to control for many variables (most of which might not even be clearly identifiable in the first place)? I'm always amazed when people argue that a statistical analysis or econometric study is what we need, when all it takes is 5 minutes of rational thought.
Maybe not everyone will always act rationally. Maybe *some* people will say "I've been playing for 1-hour, I should buy a legit copy". But most people will behave rationally and not buy what they can get for free. The precise percentage of people who will still buy video games is unknown, but it is lower than if piracy did not exist (the availability of free perfect substitutes causes the demand curve to shift to the left).
I think the pro-piracy movement should learn more about economics. They seem to assume that people either would be willing to buy a game or would not. In the real world, people make decisions at the margin. Maybe you're not willing to pay $50 to play the game now but, in two years' time, when it costs $10, you'd be willing to buy it. Is it a lost sale or not? Perhaps not at current prices (thus, "I'd never have bought it anyway"), but a lost sale indeed at a lower price.
Parent
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
That's what demos are for. Anyway, the problem is not that they are trying out your game. The problem is that people have the full product and no longer gain anything by paying for it.
Parent
Idiot run server then. (Score:5, Insightful)
And they could not have the server respond with a message built into the game.
This would not be DRM. Just sense.
1. Game asks server for connection.
2. Server responds. game not released, kindly piss off. (and this could not be interfered with since they server knows the time and then closes connection with failure message)
3. Customer goes back to doing something else for a week and returns when server is working and it mildly mad at retailer for selling game early.
Re:Idiot run server then. (Score:5, Insightful)
Even though gamestop were the evildoers here, some 18.000 customers DID buy a legal version of the game.
Most likely most of them didn't know it was sold before the official release date.
Would you, as the company selling this game, want to deny your customers access to the server because somebody else broke the rules?
Parent
Re:Idiot run server then. (Score:4, Interesting)
Irritating the few legitimate purchasers at that date is guaranteed to irritate those legitimate customers, who have personally done nothing wrong.
An announcement that "GameStop released early, my god a lot of people jumped on, we're bringing the rest of our servers online ASAP" would be reasonable.
Parent
Figures! (Score:5, Interesting)
This is so typical.
The same thing happened to the game Titan Quest. I've never seen a game so stable and masterfully crafted before. The devs listened to the community and actually added features and tweaks to the game just for them.
Yet all the reviews I saw were negative. "Yet another Diablo II rehash", "plagued with crash problems - can't even get past the cave in the starting area". Well, it's a rehash in the way WoW is a rehash of EQ or UO, I suppose.
Unfortunately for them, the guy cracking their DRM failed and didn't care, so every torrented copy crashed 5 mins in. Also, he released it 1 month before TQ went on sale, giving time for thousands of people to download it (millions if it hadn't crashed 5 mins in :P )
Ever since I bought three games that wouldn't run because of DRM, I've been a bigger supporter of Piracy - but seeing my favourite companies go down because of it makes me less happy. :/
Re:Figures! (Score:4, Interesting)
Possible. But if the cracker released the game a full month before the official launch, there could have been other reasons for the problems. For instance, he somehow got his paws on a beta that was not fully debugged.
And then there are games where the bugs are the fault of the developers, or even the fault of uncracked DRM. My copy of X2 (original without any cracks) went from stable to reproducably crashing when I installed the patch to version 1.4. In the same patch, the copy protection was upgraded to a new, more aggressive version of StarForce. Coincidence?
Parent
How would DRM have helped? (Score:5, Interesting)
If one person who could crack the game had gotten it a week early, would DRM have helped prevent this?
One store sells early, and then there are a bunch of downloads.
One person breaks the DRM, and then there are a bunch of downloads.
Difference between purchase and service? (Score:4, Interesting)
+1 Star Trek! (Score:5, Insightful)
Forget ... the William Shatner jokes.
Star Trek nailed it right on the money here.
"Oh, we don't work directly for material things. The Replicators can make almost anything. So we live for other values".
So, we have a Replicator for Books/Music/Movies/Games/Software.
Give it 20 more years for the 3-D form printers.
IANAE (I am not an economist) but Trek portrayed a kind of Location Meritocracy. You worked to get good, and earned the right to be on the group that could make you better. (Enterprise). All the niceities became De Minimis Fringes.
Dr. Who aside, *physical premises* are not replicatable, so that became the new equation.
Re:+1 Star Trek! (Score:4, Insightful)
"Oh, we don't work directly for material things. The Replicators can make almost anything. So we live for other values".
So, we have a Replicator for Books/Music/Movies/Games/Software.
The problem with that is the fact that you still have to design things. Design can be a major investment. The basic business model for (say) software is invest X dollars and sell Z copies for Y dollars in profit (each). Essentially, you'd splitting up your development costs into Z parts and having each customer pay for a single chunk. You'd better have X smaller than Y*Z, otherwise you just lost money. Of course, if everyone treats software like it's freely replicatable, the whole things falls apart because no one contributes to the development cost, the software won't get written (because it's too easy for people to rip-you off), and society is worse-off for the it's selfishness on an individual level.
Parent
Early releases (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, it's not that weird that people want to try a game at the earliest possible moment.
The problem here was that the game was leaked.
A leaked copy will naturally spread, people are interested in new games they can't get their hands on.
The sad part is that some will se this as proof that DRM is necessary, nevermind the fact that this would've happened even if they had DRM.
Some more Information (Score:5, Informative)
Piracy? Bonus! (Score:5, Insightful)
I read this from a developer's perspective and I see something different than most of you: Piracy helped them!
(I can hear the collective 'What!?', so you can save those replies.)
They were only prepared for dismal sales. They said the server initially ran 'less well' with 10s of thousands of people online at once. They sold 18,000 copies. All of those people will want to be online at once at the start, so they weren't even really prepared for the real sales they got.
Then they got 5x that amount because of the piracy. This let them see exactly where the system needed to be improved to handle the load.
They managed this improvement -in a single day-.
In my world, anything that can help me make that kind of improvement is a massive help.
And lastly, I'm a -very- avid gamer and I had never heard of this game. Now it's on Slashdot's front page. You cannot -buy- that kind of advertising.
Last note: Anyone that publishes an online game without a serial code is a fscking moron. Most crackers will not write a keygen for an online game specifically because it costs the developers money when they do so. They only write keygens for offline games.
And 1 more: Note that there are only 6,000 players on the rankings for the tournament. http://pantheon.demigodthegame.com/rankings/tournament/8/page/182 [demigodthegame.com] Are we really supposed to believe that only 6% of the people playing an online strategy game are interested in its first tournament? Or maybe that 100,000 was pulled out of their ass.
We pirate because we want shareware back. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:18K legitimate copies, 100K pirated... (Score:5, Insightful)
100K pirated because it was not legitimately available at the time to most people. You can't draw any other conclusions from this.
This is GameStop's fault for breaking the street date by such a large margin, and it's invalid as a measure of the effect of piracy.
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Re:18K legitimate copies, 100K pirated... (Score:4, Interesting)
Why, oh why is it that everyone is so gullible around here and just assumes that the data, as presented, has any relationship whatsoever to reality? Can any one of you verify this claim of hundreds of thousands of "pirates"?! Isn't the man telling you this a rather biased source, who has, based on his Stardock forums posts long since regretted not putting DRM in his stuff and has been increasingly draconian about the updates, activations, use of Impulse update software and what not? How is it that no one bothers to ask these questions before simply taking these dire proclamations at face value?
Do you guys start pulling your hair out and beating your chests in penitence every time some Sony or Warner announces that they "lost" 20 times the GDP of France to "piracy" last week?! Do you?
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Re:18K legitimate copies, 100K pirated... (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if these guys really used to have a more lenient stance on DRM and have only moved towards stricter attitudes over time, you'd think there might be a reason for that.
The main reason why people wouldn't trust Sony or Warner making such a claim is that they tend to believe the motivation these companies have for pushing DRM isn't the piracy figures alone; they're also used as an excuse for schemes that give the big corps more control over the market and ways to milk the same product for more cash. The motivation was always there regardless of the piracy figures, and thus there's also more incentive to make the figures support those other motives.
If Stardock indeed used to have a lenient stance at least in the past, clearly they didn't have these motivations. If their opinion has changed, they've either picked up these ulterior motives over time (which, I suppose, is also a possibility), or they've actually come to believe that it's necessary due to the piracy figures. If they believe in that themselves and also state it as the reason in public, they would seem to have less incentive to forge the figures than the big corps who also have completely different reasons for wanting to yell "omg pirates!111".
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The game DOES use a key. (Score:5, Informative)
You can't play multiplayer without a valid one. Just like most other online games these days. The problem with Demigod is that it runs some other http requests (checking for updates, querying system info, etc.). This is why the launch was borked. Not because there are tons of players with pirated copies trying to play on legit servers, but because their servers were effectively getting DDoS'ed by a level of traffic that they were not expecting or ready to serve.
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Re:Yes! And we should believe them because ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ugh, another one of these idiotic comments.
It's not a made up lost sales number. It's a server connection count. It's an absolute, easy to measure metric. You're REALLY going to sit here and say that Stardock isn't capable of counting connections to their own servers, or that they made up a bunch of connection numbers randomly, while spending the entire Easter Weekend working overtime to try and get things working due to Gamestop breaking the street date?
Why don't you show me your numbers showing how his numbers are wrong? Oh wait, thats right. You're just making shit up to fit your little preconceived world view.
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