The State of Piracy and DRM In PC Gaming

VideoGamer sat down with Randy Stude, president of the PC Gaming Alliance, to talk about the state of piracy and DRM in today's gaming industry. He suggests that many game studios have themselves to blame for leaks and pre-launch piracy by not integrating their protection measures earlier in the development process. He mentions that some companies, such as Blizzard and Valve, have worked out anti-piracy schemes that generate much less of a backlash than occurred for Spore . Stude also has harsh words for companies who decline to create PC versions of their games, LucasArts in particular, saying, "LucasArts hasn't made a good PC game in a long time. That's my opinion. ... It's ridiculous to say that there's not enough audience for that game ... and that it falls into this enthusiast extreme category when ported over to the PC. That's an uneducated response." Finally, Stude discusses what the PCGA would like to see out of Vista and the next version of Windows.

Easy - make the Games free and charge for online

If a game is good, charge a nominal fee which includes patches, etc and ability to play online. Those who dont want to pay can play the local version (and may get hooked and end up paying)

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

I don't know why the parent was modded -1. Creative business models around video games like this have succeeded. If I remember correctly, Guild Wars charged for the game and subsequent upgrades but online play was free, which often negated the cost of the game as many would attest to after months and years of playing other games such as WoW (look up the guy that plays 36 characters and spends ~$5700 yearly on subscriptions). Forcing game companies to become more competitive and creative is a good thing.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

The problem is that it's encouraging "creativity" in the wrong places. If the industry abandoned traditional business models, we'd never have Portal or Ico. These games would not have been improved with online-play.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

Indeed. I'm a habitual software pirate. I know it's wrong, but I simply don't want to pay more for less.

Games with significant online content (MP mostly) I buy or skip entirely. I have bought, and not even at a discount, the entire Guild Wars series, as well as a great number of the optional addon content (extra character slots, skill unlock packs). I have spent more on GW than any one other game series in PC history. Why? It's good, it's fairly priced, has effectively no copy protection, and I can freely download the client. I have several times set it down for months and then picked up again. A subscription MMO would have lapsed, and I would likely have lost my characters or their gear.

This is why I don't play WoW. GW is better in all the ways I care about. Steam is also a leader in the Right Way to do things. I have probably bought more titles on Steam than via physical purchase over the last 4 or 5 years. Physical media is dying.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

I find it quite curious how people that stand firm against DRM are so positive about Steam.

Doesn't Steam suffer from everything DRM does? It isn't portable, you need Steam to be ON to play and worse of all, what happens when Steam goes offline one day? Wouldn't all our games just stop playing?

I buy quite a lot of titles on Steam, however, I can't say I feel too good about it. I merely do it because it is comfortable, but it still doesn't seem to me like the Right Way to do things.

What do you guys think?

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

I find it quite curious how people that stand firm against DRM are so positive about Steam.

Because despite all of the errors you can (and will eventually) get with Steam, they don't make it annoying.

Doesn't Steam suffer from everything DRM does?

Not really? One of the core tenets of anti-DRM is that it just screws over the user who paid for stuff. I don't think Steam really does for the most part IMO.

It isn't portable, you need Steam to be ON to play and worse of all, what happens when Steam goes offline one day? Wouldn't all our games just stop playing?

It depends on your definition of "portable". To me, Steam is actually highly portable.

Let's say I go to a buddy's house and I want to show him what Portal is like. I can download Steam, log into my account, and show him the game. Installing on a new format is easy as pie. Hell, even backing up files is easy - just copy and paste. It always works. Steam keeps 99.9% of their files in the Steam folder, so backing it up just consists of copying it elsewhere.

You don't need Steam to be ON to play, just to play online. If you want to play only single player games, you just need to verify the games *once* on the current install of Windows (which happens automatically in the background - you just load it up, I believe). Then you can set the games to "Offline Mode" and play without having to log into Steam.

As for playing online, well... it's a compromise worth making. You're going to be online anyway, and the conveniences (able to pull down my games from their servers at 1.7 MB/s, anywhere, anytime, the friends network, easy to backup, etc.) are more than worth it.

If Steam ever went down, I believe that someone at Valve (I think it was Gabe Newell) stated that it wouldn't be too hard for them to write up a "killswitch" patch. Considering that there already are shadow Steam networks running for people who pirate the games, somebody else would write up a patch on the off chance Valve *didn't* write such a patch themselves.

I buy quite a lot of titles on Steam, however, I can't say I feel too good about it. I merely do it because it is comfortable, but it still doesn't seem to me like the Right Way to do things.

So you're saying you keep building up this collection of games that could disappear at any moment - you're aware of this, but you do it anyway? I don't know whether it's subconscious or conscious, but it's because Steam is probably the best compromise when it comes to DRM out there. That's a Hell of a statement for me to make, yes, but it wouldn't be so successful if it weren't so damned convenient.

I do have my gripes, though. One of my mates lost his Steam account. Why? Someone re-registered his original Hotmail account that expired and used password recovery to get his account. Nevermind the fact that he bought many games under a credit card in his name - they tie the account to the e-mail. He was basically shit outta luck.

The Steam API is also a huge resource hog. Playing Steam on a low-end system with in-game friends enabled will *hurt* your system - some games will flat-out just not run, and many will run slow. It's coded very sloppily and is in need of many efficiency improvements.

I'd like to be able to "sell" games, using Steam as a payment system. While you can sell your account (which is against the TOS), you can't really sell one game off of it because it is tied to your account. However, the Steam Store lets you buy games as a "gift" that you can give to another account. I don't see why it would be so hard to say "transfer X game to this account when I receive the money over Steam". Hell, use the money as credit in the Steam store or something - even that would be better than not being able to sell it at all.

Steam customer service leaves a lot to be desired and there's still a good lot of bugs, but it's a big improvement over previous DRM schemes and previous iterations of Steam.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

What if I don't own a console -- or don't want to own a console?

The wonderful thing about computers is they can simulate anything else -- including a game console, or better yet, a more complex interface (such as a flight sim) - while also allowing me to concurrently search the web, write in my blog, podcast, record my music, and write software...a console can't do that.

The more we move away from the general purpose computer, the more we will be constrained by the limitations imposed on us by the console makers - and each will have their own standards and OS - creating walled gardens, instead of standards based architectures. Furthermore, if consoles are opened up to be as general purpose as a computer --- why bother having a console in the first place?

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

Even games that don't charge still can make money this way. For example, Neverwinter Nights 1 patched out its CD copy protection, but piracy remained low on the game because a big part of the game was automatic updates (which requires unique serial numbers), online persistent worlds, and the sheer numbers of player made modules available which equaled or surpassed the single player campaign of the game.

Re:Easy - make the Games free and charge for onlin

"However, the simple answer is that you're not entitled to other people's money."

And you're not entitled to the game. See how easy that was? But the simple answer is that he's not entitled to your money, and you're not entitled to his work.

He created a product and set a price for it. You get to determine if that product has sufficient value to you and, if so, to pay the price. Quid pro quo. If, however, you DON'T think it has value, then you're free not to pay, and he is not "magically entitled" to anything. He invested his time and money, rolled the dice, and lost.

"...setting a specific price is not respective of people's perception of value."

Actually it is. As said, you're free to make the judgement call on your own.

"What you think is worth 500$ and maybe is to one or two people, might be worth 0$ to the rest of the world."

Again, don't pay. If enough people fail to do so, maybe he'll adjust his price accordingly. Or maybe he's happy with one or two $500 sales. His creation, his choice.

The problem with letting you decide what, if anything, you're willing to pay is that it always devolves into people not paying their share, or what game theorists call the "free rider" problem.

Me, I just call 'em parasites.

Why developers don't like making games for PC

Not because there isn't an audience, but because the audience is too diverse. From the $4000 liquid cooled (or even oil cooled [slashdot.org]) systems to the Pentium IVs, it's hard to find settings that work across the board, or scale well.

Console games all play on machines with roughly the same processing power. That makes things a lot easier.

Re:Why developers don't like making games for PC

Do you have any basis for making this claim, or is this just a good sounding excuse that you heard once and are now repeating?

It could be that what you claim is what developers are thinking, but we'd have to find some game company executive in charge of that sort of decision and ask them if we wanted to find out. It's not obvious enough that we can come to a conclusion by guessing - if you declare a PC platform like "Windows XP, Direct X 9 Dedicated Graphics" that's a relatively large install base. People with older PCs are no more relevant than PS2s are if you're considering developing a PS3 game.

Re:Why developers don't like making games for PC

Okay, to back up the original post, I used to contract for Epicgames on the Unreal series. When developing for the main PC market, we were constantly rolling our specs and expectations forward and backwards, gain some here, lose some there, roll up with this new tech etc. When porting to consoles everything was set in lovely stone. This is the amount of memory you have, this is how much transfer you have. It is amazingly much easier to do development work when you have limits like "Your textures for this level/environment cannot be more than xxx megs total" or "your level has to be under xxx megs in file size to load properly". This is black and white. You know the performance you will get, you won't see a shift here or there. On the other hand, working with the PC development, it's not black and white, it's all a shifting gradient.

Let me use a slashdot friendly car analogy.

Working with a console is like buying a little hatchback and keeping it factory standard. You know how fast it goes, you know how much you can pop into the back before it gets too much. Working with PC's is like going to a custom car show. Each one is different, you don't know how fast they go and you don't even know if there is space beside the subs in the back to fit any luggage.

Which one can potentially be better is a no brainer, but which one is easier to plan around is just as plain.

Re:Why developers don't like making games for PC

Or there's that "minimum specs" idea, or using common sense to program for the lowest common denominator in a similar fashion to a console, no?

Isn't that how blizzard, warhammer, all sorts of games do well? By programming for the lowest common denominator as a console does?

Sounds like sales has their hands steering way too much of the developer pot, in general.

Re:Why developers don't like making games for PC

Or there's that "minimum specs" idea, or using common sense to program for the lowest common denominator in a similar fashion to a console, no?

No. Programming for the lowest common denominator means making a game that looks five years old. Publishers will publish those games, but they will not market and sell them along with all the other big name titles. Blizzard gets away with low (though ever rising) min-specs on WoW because the game's art is cartoonish - it doesn't look like it should be ultra-realistic or anything. Most games, however, won't have art direction that allows similarly low min specs without giving the impression that the game belongs in the $10 bin. The only way to support a low min spec while pleasing publishers is to make content that scales, and that opens a whole new set of problems (unless you're huge and can throw your weight around like Blizzard). Now the physics engine needs to work in "low end" and "high end" mode (tons of testing and hunting for subtle bugs - who remembers the little bugs in Quake3's movement code that only show up when the server runs at certain multiples of some frequency?), and the graphics code ends up with separate code paths for "Intel Integrated", "old NVIDIA", "not-so-old NVIDIA", "recent NVIDIA", "bleeding-edge NVIDIA", "old ATI", the list goes on - all which the artists and designers then have to work around. The fact that all you see is a neat little "Graphics Quality" slider is a testament to some graphics programmer's hard work and his company's amazing QA team.

And it's never as simple as typing if( uber_shadows_supported ) here and there, as most of the "this game doesn't do much, it should run on my machine, this developer sucks for not supporting my machine!" crowd likes to scream. The available set of GL extensions and D3D capability flags varies hugely and in unpredictable ways across hardware, and even driver revisions, leading to many subtle bugs where features are half-implemented (*cough* ATI *cough*) or missing for no good reason (*cough* Apple) or implemented three times in three ways because the vendors couldn't agree on what to call a function (most any recent GL extension), and all sorts of crap like that. The amount of testing and bug-fixing even a single "enable shadows" option adds is massive. Also, once you have a moving target you lose the ability to fine-tune the art for the system. Suddenly you have to add things like low/medium/high-detail texture support (because you don't know what the target resolution is so you have no idea of knowing what resolution the game will ultimately run at), which means the artists have to do tons of extra work, which must be tested and reviewed, etc. Oh yes, resolution and aspect ratio. Because those can now be anything and the HUD has to do something intelligent about it instead of just throwing up the perfectly hand-tweaked 4:3 or the lovingly crafted 16:9 version, as you can do with a console.

And then, on top of that, every now and then the hardware companies will ship a driver that has a bug in it, or some malware will eat a critical file, or some other small catastrophe will befall one of your customers, and you'll have to hire a support department to tell people "upgrade your drivers", or "downgrade your drivers", and the all-time favorite, "You can get the latest drivers from your video card manufacturer's web site. What do you mean, 'What's a video card?'".

Gah. It's late and I'm ranting. I'll stop.

With a console, on the other hand, you know you have X CPU cycles, a GPU that can push Y triangles and shade Z pixels, and a memory buss that will transfer W bytes each frame. You decide what effects you want to see, you tell the artists "you have X triangles and Y MB of texture space - textures should have such and such dimensions per game unit", you tell the designers "X square meters of destructible wall, Y throwable objects, no more than Z players at a time", and then spend the time you used to spend dealing with o

Gee.

I went out and bought Sins of a Solar Empire recently.

First game purchase in years. I'll be honest, it's mostly because the market has degenerated into crap of late. But it's at least partially because - get this - I can play Sins without needing the disc. Without shitware being installed on my system. Without a company that knows better treating me like a goddamned thief.

There's no excuse for DRM, unless you put out crap games.

Piracy issue overstated

For the most part games are HARDER to pirate on a console almost always requiring hardware mods, so if piracy were such a primary motivator, people would never buy consoles. They don't put draconian anti-piracy measures into most console games (yet) so by doing so on the PC they're pushing people further away. Consoles are fine for shoot them ups - platformers, FPS and the like, and they're even good for some interesting additions with peripherals like eyetoy, guitar sims, golf sims, fishing sims etc. but for certain games they're awful.

Any serious flight simulation for instance is best done on a PC, with a keyboard and multiple screens. I'm not talking about flight games, I'm talking about realistic simulation. Flight simulation isn't a potential mass market so any peripheral made for it tends to be pricy...and people do go to extremes. Flight sims also tend to need more power than consoles provide.

So what we're missing by going to the consoles is the flexibility. The other thing we're missing is the ability for a hobbiest to dive in and write their own software, although the games are complex enough now that there are only a handful of open games without a proprietary heritage. That's what the push is about - shutting out any remaining competition and innovation by hobby projects. The less competition and the harder it is for people to pirate, the more they can charge for 3rd rate games.

Console issue overstated

"Consoles are fine for shoot them ups - platformers, FPS and the like, and they're even good for some interesting additions with peripherals like eyetoy, guitar sims, golf sims, fishing sims etc. but for certain games they're awful."

So basically the difference between one kind of computer vs another is external devices.

"The other thing we're missing is the ability for a hobbiest to dive in and write their own software, although the games are complex enough now that there are only a handful of open games without a proprietary heritage. "

XNA,Xbox live.

Astute observations of a (mostly) sober reader

With such stunning insights as:

...don't leave anything to chance and keep it protected all the way through the production pipeline.

I can't see why those idiots in the video game industry aren't listening to Randy Stude. Obviously we're dealing with someone who's seen the issues and thought out detailed solutions to them. And when confronted with this biting criticism from the interviewer:

VideoGamer.com: It doesn't sound like rocket science to me. I don't understand why publishers don't shore up the production line.

Randy fires back a steadfast conclusion:

Yeah. And that doesn't even mean that at the end of the day someone's not going to hack the game and put it up on a torrent network ... We in the PCGA believe than an industry group such as ours and others out there should be the ones that tackle it from a standards perspective, provide guidance ... We don't have the answer yet today but we would invite anyone who believes piracy is a problem to join our organisation ...

Amazing! This nearly tops the genius and wisdom of a self referential slashdot post. Hats off to you, Randy! I'm going to join the PC Gaming Alliance right now!

3rd Party DRM on top of Steam

The latest trend in annoying DRM: publishers using SecuROM and install limits on games sold through Steam. Crysis Warhead, Far Cry 2, and X3 have a 5 install limit, crippling one of Steam's greatest features: unlimited installs on any PC. The former two games also use SecuROM. Why on earth would you add third-party DRM on top of Steam? Maybe because these publishers are run by dicks? Who knows. What I do know is that my PC game purchases have gone down solely because of DRM. I'd love to play Red Alert 3 or Far Cry 2, but I won't until EA gives up on installation limits and SecuROM. Shame, too, since I don't own any consoles.

(I know that Steam is a form of DRM with its own share of problems, but I rather enjoy the service. Unlike SecuROM or similar schemes, Steam at least provides some side benefits to gamers.)

Re:DRM? No sir, not around these parts

You could always try sending a message to the gaming industry by playing Game! - The Witty Online RPG. It's DRM free and you don't need to pirate it.

Or you could play Slashdot! It has very limited character development and most of the NPCs have an AI worthy of Nethack, but the end game is awesome.

Re:Insert New Business Model Here

Innovation is overrated. I prefer playing games that are fun. It is possible to create a game that's innovative and yet not that much fun, Spore being a good example. It is also possible to make a game that's innovative AND fun, Portal being a good example.

Innovation is a nice concept, but all in all, I'd prefer a game that's just plain fun, innovative or not. Believe it or not, some formulas aren't "tired" and can be done again and again with a few changes between iterations. The GTA and Civilization games come to mind.

Re:Insert New Business Model Here

I'm fairly old for a gamer at 26

No, you're fairly young for a gamer at 26, unless you're British. The average American gamer is 7 years older than you.

http://www.theaveragegamer.com/averagegamers/ [theaveragegamer.com]

Valve doesn't want you

I don't know about anyone else, but I will NEVER be buying a call-home-during-install game again. I can't play Half-Life 2 because I can't make the updates over a modem, and I can't just play the damned game (even from my Steam backups!) Valve, pay attention - I will NOT be paying for Half-Life 3 if you keep this shit up, and I know you will.

Sadly, your threats don't carry any weight -- Valve doesn't want you as a customer. They would ideally like to get out of retail and move entirely to digital distribution. They cut out the middlemen and have far greater margins that way.

As dialup user, you don't fit with their plans.

Re:LOL! Mod Points For A Retard With A Modem

Give him a break. He wrote that message 8 years ago, it just took a while to transmit. He's probably changed his mind by now, and we'll find out about that in 2016.

Re:Where are all the great FOSS Games??

The democratic nature of FOSS is its main weakness, and in the context of games, makes FOSS nearly impossible to pull off.

Unlike most FOSS projects I've seen, which is basically a core developed by a handful of developers, consistently added on and improved by additions and fixes from the community at large. This works great for enterprise software and web apps, where iterative development on top of ever-changing demands demands this sort of development - whatever features are most needed tend to make it into the next release, etc etc.

Games don't work like this. Games do not have evolving feature sets. They have a spec'ed scope, and the development team executes it, end of story. They also require vision and centralized leadership - something FOSS projects find very difficult, since the voluntary nature of the whole thing makes it such that "unsexy" features never get worked on. In a game, unsexy features that don't get coded = game that never ships.

Oh, and games require extensive amounts of art. I would argue that for most games, more artists are needed than coders, by at least a 2:1 margin. I don't see that many capable artists in the FOSS scene, do you?