How Piracy Affected the Launch of Demigod 613
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.
So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes but maybe the argument that people who do it mainly do it because they want to try before they buy still hold.
PS. I'm not saying that I believe it. It will be interesting to see the stats in a month or so.
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.
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Then wait a week and buy it like everyone else. I can sort of maybe understand "sticking it to the man" when it comes to DRM but infringing copyright just because they didn't release it when you wanted is a bullshit cop-out.
I buy all my music (I like mostly indie, non-big-label stuff), movies, games and other forms of entertainment. I also voted with my dollar for a very long time and never bought music online music when it was DRM'd, nor did I download it. I avoided CDs on RIAA labels. I told them with my
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.
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Informative)
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
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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?
There's a meme that shows up quite often whenever we discuss copyright reform, DRM, or other related topics. It goes along the lines of when so many /. readers make their livings from "intellectual property", how could we possibly support any concept that challenges it? Now before we get caught up in the debate of the meme, keep in mind that the fact that it surfaces shows that there are (trolls aside) people who do believe in the idea. There are undoubtedly those who see these issues as linchpins to the
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Now tell me. How can they use the server that much, without having an account on the server? Hm? Was it a login DDOS? Or did they just not check if the person bought the game? Hm? I think it was the second. And if it was the first, it definitely was underpowered even for the legitimate users.
By the way. As a sibling post quoted, there is no such thing in the article.
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Informative)
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?
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:4, Funny)
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.
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The vast majority of people who wanted to play this game had no alternative but to download it.
I suggest that they did have an alternative: they could have NOT downloaded it.
Seriously, "no alternative?" This isn't a life-giving drug, or people on the edge of starvation, it's a fucking VIDEO GAME. They could have shrugged their shoulders and gone back to Warcraft III for a few more days. "No alternative" my fat ass.
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].
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Re:Just because the wrong word has been used for a (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
An argument mainly put forth by people who don't know how to use It.
The important point that SmallFurryCreature makes is that language is political, and has often been used as tool of tyrants. Notice the use of the language of the American Right: "The Patriot Act" for a set of laws that run counter to the Constitution. "Right to Life" for people who would deny the rights of women. "Defense of Marriage Act" which would deny the rights of a significant portion
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."
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.
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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Didn't work out that way, though, did it?
Doesn't change that it was designed to benefit the few, in the short term, to encourage them to produce their hard to create but easily copied goods, in order to benefit the masses in the long run.
It's why I personally call for reforming copyright, not eliminating it. Eliminating copyright completely would do just as much damage, personally I think it'd do more damage, than what the current system is doing.
Like it or not, but piracy is creating a pushback effect on the current system. It effectively puts
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.
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.
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?
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Who said the people that have downloaded the game would have bought it?
I know at least one person that said specifically to me "I'd wish they'd bring out a demo for that, I really like DotA on Warcraft 3", but he didn't want to download it.
I cannot fault you on your statement about their reputation being tarnished, and was very confused that they would let pirated people play online using their servers. Usually pirated copies of a game don't cost the company anything, while due to them letting them on the s
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Doesn't matter if they wouldn't have bought it. It costs them money to have a player, in server costs and tech support costs. They'd much rather have no piracy and much less sales I'm sure - it'd just work out better financially.
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Or better yet, give the game away for free and charge for an account.
The idea of a cd-key is stupid, people will brute force or copy them resulting in legit buyers having a non working key and tons of hassle trying to play the game they actually bought.
Plus if you charge a subscription, people know they're paying for a service and won't expect to continue receiving that service when they stop. If you buy a game and it comes with access to a service, what happens when the publisher arbitrarily decides to shu
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Stardock is known for being very open about the piracy issue - even lackadaisical. What I'm wondering is why they even bother distributing games anymore.
No, this isn't a "They should just give up" post. We all know that the physical media isn't all that important considering that it can be ripped and uploaded.
So why bother with distribution at all? Put your game up for free. Let people download it. And sell the serials. Boxed copies come with some sort of physical extra to make it worth it along with the CD
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.
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.
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.
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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.
Or, to put it more realistically and less pejoratively, companies need to come up with business models that don't rely on scarcity of non-scarce commodities.
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!
Re:So much for pirate ethics (Score:5, Funny)
Eventually, they will stop playing. Just wait!
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No, it wouldn't be stealing, it would be breaking copyright and eventually also breaking into their systems since they don't have legitimate access.
It wouldn't be theft as defined in law, but it most certainly is stealing in the colloquial meaning of the word. Stealing can mean an awful lot of things, just consider "stealing time" or "stealing a girlfriend". Thinking piracy isn't stealing is just self-delusion, trying to justify ones immoral actions.
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Thats great, except in both of those "stealing" arguments, you are depriving someone of something tangeable by taking it away from them.
With piracy you havent taken anything away from anyone.
The argument that you have taken money away from the developers by pirating the game doesnt even hold, as you cant say with certainty that everyone who pirated the game would have purchased it.
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You might have had a point there, if any of what you said followed in logical sequence.
Next time, stick to "copying". Anything else is your interpretation.
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Wrong. They have legitimate access. The server did not ask for any unique account or identification. It just lets anyone in. Maybe ony those that send them some data, that is openly available for everyone. But that does not change a thing.
You can't give 50 people on the street a piece of paper with a flower on it, let anyone in your club that shows you such a piece of paper (but is keeping it), and expect the people to not give that piece to anyone else or copy it. That is just a delusional unrealistic pipe
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Wrong. They have legitimate access. The server did not ask for any unique account or identification. It just lets anyone in.
That's obviously wrong since Demigod asks for my Impulse logon name and password then I select Mulitplayer/Internet play.
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This example muddies the waters, though, because the non-purchasers are using the company's server resources without having paid them any money.
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By taking money from the developer you're
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Not at all unlikely. In many games with a strong online component, competitive players in particular want to get in right from the start. Since only one retailer broke the street date, customers of other retailers were left with the choice of pirating the game or giving Gamestop customers an unfair 1 week head start.
Let's hope this is the case.
The argument against DRM is that it diminishes the value of the product for customers who get it legitimately. You effectively punish your customers for giving you money. Pirated versions don't have DRM and exist regardless of the DRM on the retail copies.
Indeed, DRM is evil. I don't buy (or play) games with stupid DRM. Needless to say, I haven't bought or played many commercial PC games lately...
(And no, copyright infringement is not stealing.)
Yes it is, though not as defined in the law of a country (but I bet there are exceptions). "Stealing" means taking something you're not supposed to take or get. Piracy certainly meets this defintion, as do many other things named differently in the law, or not mentioned in any law at all.
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That was never the argument.
it was more, piracy will happen. Don't increase the no of dodgy copies by pissing off your legitimate customers with a substandard version pushing them onto piracy.
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I don't think anyone has really argued that. 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. This example is interesting for me in two ways:
Firstly, and somewhat negatively, it demonstrates that people pirating your game can increase the cost of running the servers for it considerably. That is a strong argument in favour of anti-piracy techniques such as DRM (assuming the DRM costs less than the cost of addit
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For server based games, you can simply deny access for pirated copies.
If your server is capable of handling the free copies, you could even let them have limited access with nag screens, messages etc. to buy the legal version.
Just stomp down any pirate server versions of your game.
Bad launch, not piracy (Score:2)
For server based games, you can simply deny access for pirated copies.
Yes, this is clearly the right thing to do. Frankly, it's amazing that they didn't do it, and furthermore, that their servers collapsed under the load.
It sounds to me like shoddy preparation for the launch. Blaming the pirates is just a convenient way to ignore that.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re: (Score:2)
(Btw: Piracy has nothing to do with it. Copying stuff has.)
I think if you do not hurt anyone, there's nothing bad in people copying stuff they would not buy anyway. Because that is the very point of all this.
The only problem was, that the company created an open server that they had to pay for, and did not ask the players for any money. I would have made them have unique accounts. Accounts that do not require anything other than the code in the game box, an e-mail-address and a password. People could not gi
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.
18K legitimate copies, 100K pirated... (Score:2)
Anybody still doubting, that piracy is a real threat to content-producers?
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.
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?
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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Actual
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No, it indicates a piracy rate of around 80-90% which is in line with what other game developers report, regardless of ship dates.
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How many "pirates" were foreigners who have no way to buy the game legally even if they wanted to?
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Non sequitur.
It may be true, but please provide a more meaningful argument.
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While I'm not saying that piracy doesn't hurt content-producers, or that all the people that pirated wouldn't have bought it, a lot of people pirate games to play them risk-free, games they wouldn't have bought otherwise. Those numbers don't really tell us what the lost sales are, because many pirates were never going to purchase the game to begin with.
A worthless anecdote that says NOTHING, though: I randomly downloaded Neverwinter Nights when it came out because I was bored and wanted to play an RPG. I
In a word (Score:2)
Yes.
In more words: it's funny how more people on slashdot seem to be suddenly anti-piracy after the pirate bay verdict. I can't help wondering if these people would be against eating, if the media told them it was bad.
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?
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And what, pray tell, is so evil about supplying a product you have when customers want it? This game release date thing is no better than DVD regional release dates, which everyone rightly hates.
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And WHY weren't the servers ready? Because the game was not supposed to be released yet.
You can't expect something to work properly before it's released, otherwise it'd probably been released earlier.
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Don't just blow me off as foolish, back up your claims or withdraw them. I asked a simple question and instead of either answering it or properly blowing me off by ignoring it you chose snide derision. Well, I -DO- get it, and your factless (and tactless) claim notwithstanding, the OP seems to as well.
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Your problem is that you believe the game to be contained in the box (an idea that the OP was trying specifically to nullify). If you consider the server-side backend to be a part of the product, and it is, then there is nothing "false" about the delay imposed. One part of a multi-part product being in place does not magically make the other part(s) irrelevant. The "ahead of time" you chose to put in quotes is the date the server portion would be in place. There is nothing at all twisted about that.
You
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.
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. :/
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I think it only shows that the person designing TQ's DRM didn't think it through, all the people downloading TQ assumed it was the developers fault that it was so buggy and spread really bad PR leading to poor sales.
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?
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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. :/
Isn't what happened with Titan Quest precisely DRM working as designed? The bootleg copies didn't work right, thus making the game unplayable for pirates. Seems like the publisher got bit in the ass by unintended consequences of DRM doing exactly what it was designed to do.
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)
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Maybe they should charge for the service and use the revenue to expand their server farm.
This is what I was thinking too. Treat the whole operation as a razors-blades model, charging and giving away the game in order to make money off of game hosting.
+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.
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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.
Perspectives on reality (Score:2)
Thanks for that insight, "Merlin".
High piracy numbers (Score:2)
Having skirmish multiplayer as the only play type makes people less willing to throw down $50. Sure, if you like that game type it's awesome, but if you don't you're out you $50 and you have another game for the shelf.
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.
Patriotism (Score:2, Insightful)
Some more Information (Score:5, Informative)
Arrr! (Score:2)
Pirate Mr. T says: Stop usin' the word "piracy" fo' somethin' that is not piracy [imageshack.us], ya foolish landlubbers!
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)
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.
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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Companies have a financial incentive to follow the facts where they lead. If piracy helps them or harms them - they benefit by accurately perceiving the situation. Pirates, on the other hand, are always biased towards legitimizing piracy.
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It's not exactly difficult to have a serial number inside each copy of the game, and register that to the user account. It's even possible to build that mechanism in a way that allows resales.
But it is difficult to keep your authentication server from getting slashdotted by copyright infringers' repeated failures to authenticate.
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