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Comments: 372 + - Games: Game Industry Vets On DRM on Wednesday February 03, @03:33AM
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An anonymous reader points out an article at SavyGamer in which several game industry veterans were polled for their opinions on DRM. Cliff Harris of Positech Games said he didn't think his decision to stop using DRM significantly affected piracy of his games, accepting it as an unavoidable fact. "Maybe a few of the more honest people now buy the game rather than pirate it, but this sort of thing is impossible to measure. You can see how many people are cracking and uploading your game, but tracking downloads is harder. It seems any game, even if it's $0.99 has a five hour demo and is DRM-free and done by a nobel-peace prize winning game design legend, will be cracked and distributed on day one by some self righteous teenager anyway. People who crack and upload games don't give a damn what you've done to placate gamers, they crack it anyway." Nihal de Silva of Direct2Drive UK said his company hasn't noticed any sales patterns indicating customers are avoiding games with DRM. Richard Wilson of TIGA feels that customers should be adequately warned before buying a game that uses DRM, but makes no bones about the opinion that the resale of used games is not something publishers should worry about.
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Unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
I think piracy is unavoidable in a non-subscription based model like most standalone games. The target audience (teenagers) sees themselves as poor, or actually is poor, and is thus unwilling to pay for something they can get for free. Others undoubtedly resent the fact they are being asked to actually pay for a game, and so are willing to crack them. :P
I would like to see the demographics on who *does* pay for games and see if I am write, or if people of all ages are cheap bastards
Now the MMO world has it much better off, since you need a subscription to actually play the game at all. Of course that undoubtedly leads to a lot of problems with stolen CC numbers and the like, so perhaps you are no further ahead. By requiring a CC number to even register, they of course limit their potential sales massively as well.
Sadly I think this is going to lead to games which are free to play, but contain targeted in-game advertising down the road. I don't want to see how badly that warps the game designs we see as a result.
Re:Unavoidable (Score:5, Interesting)
Sadly I think this is going to lead to games which are free to play, but contain targeted in-game advertising down the road. I don't want to see how badly that warps the game designs we see as a result.
another option could be to follow the 'sudden attack' method of payment. sudden attack is a Korean FPS which is free to play. Weapons, costume sand power-ups are available through an in-game store. You can either earn points in-game, or pay cash, and exchange those for certain items.
This way, people with no money and lots of time can enjoy the game, they aren't completely locked out, but players who don't have hours and hours of free time to rack up points can just pay to get the goods.
I think this, combined with advertising is likely to be the future of gaming.
well, since companies are mostly made up of greedy ass holes, the future of gaming will probably be pay to buy the game, then pay to play the game online, then pay for the items to use in-game, AND have levels full of ads and product placements.
Parent
Re:Unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate games that do this. "Free to play" has become a warning. It means: "Danger! This game doesn't have a monthly subscription or upfront cost, but the "real money transactions" will turn out to be more expensive than a monthly subscription".
In all games of this sort, the game designers can alter the game design to maximise the amount of money they take from you. They figure out what you want to do and charge you for it. And if what you want to do changes, they nerf the game once more, again maximising profit at your expense.
It makes them more money than a monthly subscription, clearly, otherwise they wouldn't do it! The "free" parts of the game are arbitrarily crippled, and you have to pay and pay and pay to undo this. See for example the Facebook game "Farmville" (can't select an area of farmland by clicking and dragging unless you rent this facility) or the MMO "Runes of Magic" (the default bag is tiny and you must rent a bigger one to progress through the game).
The "free to play" model is a rip-off's charter. It is not a good thing. Do not support it. Pay up front, pay a fixed subscription, or play games that are genuinely free.
Parent
Re:Unavoidable (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Re:Unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
With f2p MMOs, I - not the developer - get to choose IF, WHEN, and HOW MUCH I'm willing to spend on the game. If the game is good, I'll gladly pay to get better gear, charms, etc. If the game sucks, I quit and I'm out of $0.
Compare that to Aion where you PAY $50 for the retail game, then PAY $15 a month just to SEE IF YOU'LL LIKE IT. That, my friend, IS a rip-off.
Obviously, the "race to the top" becomes a big spender's minigame, and you'll end up maxing out a few credit cards to get there, but that's only a minority of the player base.
F2P games were born in Asia, where most players are poor and play mostly from lan houses. So it doesn't make any sense to pay monthly fees.
Parent
Re:Unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree with this. The problem with this model is that it always trends towards having to sink some ungodly amount of cash into the game to remain competitive. There will always be somebody outthere who really, really gets into the game and is willing to dump a few hundred $$$ per month into it. With WoW, about the most that can get them is a dual box setup with multiple accounts. Nothing Blizzard sells for real world money has any tactical advantage in the game.
However in "free to play" games that use micro-transactions for USEFUL gear, that guy who spends all that money is going to wipe the floor with you unless you pay similar amounts to keep up. I refuse to do this.
Parent
Re:Unavoidable (Score:4, Insightful)
Because the time sink argument doesn't scale. You see while time spent in the game and money might be interechangeable to you, it certainly ISN'T to the companies. They don't care if you spend 5 minutes playing or 5 hours - they don't make anymore money.
WoW and EVE are not THAT bad to jump into with not much time input. They dangle the carrot, but they don't really care how much time you spend in the game - they're making their money elsewhere. It's in their best interest to strike a balance that makes the game fun for everyone, because it's financially best for them that they keep the game accessible to as many people and play styles as possible - because everyone pays the same.
Micro-transaction games are different. They make MORE money the more that they can convince you to spend. Which means that often they make it flat out unbearable in order for people to play without dumping money into it. While your top tier free armor might have 5 defense - the new shiny $5 piece might have 115 defense. And the next $5 piece coming out the following week will have 120.
You end up forced to keep spending that money - and unlike with "time sink" games - the company has an incentive to foster that.
Then there's the other little problem: the whole PURPOSE of the game is to spend some time in it. If you're looking at the time you spend as a "cost" - then honestly, what the hell are you playing for in the first place? If you don't enjoy it, don't play. Seems like a waste to be dumping money into a game to boost stats and then sitting back enjoying the fact that you're paying a company for the privilege of not having to play their game. I can avoid playing a game for free if I want ;).
Parent
Re:Unavoidable (Score:5, Insightful)
Or they could just, you know, be like me and this guy [metacafe.com] (warning: language NSFW but can you blame him?) and downloading cracked versions of games we already bought because the shitty DRM doesn't work!
Being in PC repair I can attest that the latest DRM can be worse than most viruses. If you get Starforce or SecuROM mixed together, or either of those with any other like SafeDisc, well lets just say I hope you look back on the days of unstable Win9x fondly, because you will be getting a taste of those times. I can't even count the number of DVD drives of customers I had to throw away because Starforce or SecuROM decided they were "dirty evil filthy pirates" for actually having a burner and threw it into PIO mode and burned their drive smooth up.
And be sure to place close attention to the background in that video. Notice the huge mounds of game boxes? Here he is a major customer and what does he get for doing the right thing and buying? Well he gets spit upon, that's what? Does the DRM do jack shit to stop piracy? Hell no! In fact the nastier DRM like Spore gets cracked even quicker than the others! It has gotten so bad with shitty DRM that I refuse to buy at release day anymore, simply because I don't have the cracked version yet. Once I have a working crack then and ONLY then will I buy, because I am frankly tired of shelling out $50+ for a paperweight I can even return when it is defective by design!
Meanwhile the pirates are laughing their asses off, because their version just works straight out of the box, no hassles and no bullshit, meanwhile the ones that DO work expect me to hop up and change discs every. single. time. I want to play a game. WTF? Why did I spend all this money on fat hard drives when you ass clowns are gonna treat me like I'm using an x360?
You want to cut down on piracy, game publishers? Instead of ass raping us with ever higher prices, "multiplatform" games that are nothing but really shitty x360 games, less and less game thanks to the lack of dedicated servers and the scourge that is DLC, how about giving us real value for our money, hmmm? How about that? EA got me to shell out for MOH:10th anniversary even though I heard Airborne wasn't great by offering me MORE value for my money! For $25 I got Airborne, Allied Assault with the two expansions, Pacific Assault the Director's Cut, and a making of, a WW2 Pacific War interactive timeline, and a music of MOH CD. All of the big game houses have older games, why not throw us a couple of older titles in? Why not a music CD or making of?
But there isn't any surprise as to why there is so much piracy now. I have been gaming since the days of Win3.x, and never before have we gamers been treated so badly, charged so much for substandard fare, and generally spit upon for daring to pay good money. Is it any wonder so many say fuck it and get the actually working pirate version? And sorry about the length, but I am so damned sick of how shitty we gamers are being treated by these gaming corps. If we buy they spit in our faces and screw us over every chance they get, if we boycott they just scream "piracy!" and bribe our politicians to get nastier laws and put even worse DRM in. either way we are royally screwed.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
>> Being in PC repair I can attest that the latest DRM can be worse than most viruses. If you get Starforce or SecuROM mixed together, or either of those with any other like SafeDisc, well lets just say I hope you look back on the days of unstable Win9x fondly, because you will be getting a taste of those times. I can't even count the number of DVD drives of customers I had to throw away because Starforce or SecuROM decided they were "dirty evil filthy pirates" for actually having a burner and threw i
Re:Unavoidable (Score:4, Funny)
downloading cracked versions of games we already bought because the shitty DRM doesn't work!
Umm - if you need to download cracked versions, then it would seem that the DRM is working perfectly fine.
The entire point of DRM is to prevent people from playing the game. Since it's preventing you from playing, then it's obviously working.
Parent
Re:Unavoidable (Score:4, Informative)
i recall a big name pc gaming mag suggesting people get a crack for elder scrolls: oblivion, as it would improve the performance of the game by as much as 30%.
i think that was something of a watershed moment for DRM in games...
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
If you bothered to read, he *buys* the games and then plays the pirated version because it doesn't have the limitation. It is pig arses like YOU that clog up slashdot with useless fucking trolls after not even reading the post you are replying to. Many of us *buy* the game but play a pirated version for convenience. The main bitch isn't paying $50, it is paying $50 for something you can't play the way you want to, or at all.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
"The target audience (teenagers) sees themselves as poor, or actually is poor, and is thus unwilling to pay for something they can get for free"
Since the article mentions cliffski, the problem is cliff's games are competing against all AAA games of yesteryear, why should an indie developer expect large sales when the competition is so fierce?
Why would I want to play space battles instead of darksiders which I can rent for $5 or less and finish then send back? Game developers forget that when we were kids w
Crack when there is no DRM? (Score:4, Insightful)
even if it's $0.99 has a five hour demo and is DRM-free and done by a nobel-peace prize winning game design legend, will be cracked and distributed on day one by some self righteous teenager anyway.
Huh? What's to crack if there is no DRM?
Pirate the whole game, I can see that happening, but that's cracker-lackin!
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
CD checks are DRM.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales (Score:3, Insightful)
Then just see it as a 'service' for the people that do buy your game to not use digital restrictions. Those are your customers, not the ones downloading it. They probably wouldn't have bought it even if it was impossible to download anyway.
Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales (Score:5, Insightful)
Net result of DRM in this case - 1 lost sale.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I bought a game it would be because I wanted to play the game, not because I feel a need to support a company. If the company makes it a PITA (or even refusing me) to even reach the point where I can start playing, I too would say "fuck this shit!", return the game and get a much better gaming experience by pirating it.
BTW, I have a proud collection of 50+ legally bought original games in my bookcase.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oh, so if anyone treats you like shit they forfeit their rights to their stuff?
Methinks the law isn't on your side. And neither are ethics.
BTW, I have a collection of 150+ legally bought original games in my k'nex game holding tower.
Also, five paperweights from EA and Sega. Mostly EA.
And unfortunately, I have to use pirate copies of about a dozen games.
Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed.
Hey, asshats, we gave you copyright protection for a reason, and it wasn't to help you. It was to help society.
You've stopped helping society? But you bought all the lawmakers so we can't change the copyright laws?
Bite me.
Copyright laws have long since stopped reflecting the will of the people. Laws are supposed to be a social contract we all agree to, but no one in his right mind would, for example, agree to retroactive copyright extension to encourage long-dead people to produce more stuff. Copyright laws have managed to work themselves outside said social contact, and hence, morally, you can do whatever the fuck you want WRT them.
You want society to abide by the laws, they have to, at least vaguely, match what society actually thinks should be legal. Period. That's how laws work. It's not 'society has to do whatever laws corporations can buy'. Copyright law has long falling out of matching what society wants, long enough to actually have people grow up with mismatched laws, resulting in no respect whatsoever of them.
Sucks for the numerous content creators who didn't have anything to do with this brokenness, but they should, by this point, know what world they live in.
That said, game manufacturers aren't Disney, and aren't trying to rip off the entire system. They really do need to get paid for their games.
But that doesn't mean it's moral for them to sell people games that will crap all over user's systems and/or not function and not give a refund. Even if the law says they can, because copyright law is not a reflection of what laws society actually wants.
Parent
Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Legitimate Customers (Score:5, Interesting)
What they should discuss is the negative impact on legitimate customers rather than on piracy...
For one example, I legally own *two* copies of Red Alert 2 yet I have them both no-CD cracked. Why? Because I don't want to have to go find the CD each time I want to play and worse still the game even supports playing back Audio CD while you play but yet that requires you to juggle the RA2 and Audio CD constantly just to get the damn thing to work!
The best thing to happen to DRM has been Steam. They have a fairly healthy level of DRM or at least the Valve games do... I hear Bioshock 2 has Steam + "Games for Windows" + SecureRom? What the heck? And an activation limit on Steam?! ... Well Steam *used* to be good for consumers before they started letting publishers do whatever the hell they want.
Re:Legitimate Customers (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Legitimate Customers (Score:5, Insightful)
NOTE TO GAME PUBLISHERS: This line should keep you up at night and give you nightmares. If it doesn't make you question every 'security' decision you've ever made, you're a fool.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
There is only one "healthy level of DRM". Hint: Steam exceeds it.
Re:Legitimate Customers (Score:5, Interesting)
Steam was never good for customers. It was just less bad than various other solutions. Steam just makes up for some of it's customer limitations. But in the end you are still renting games that come with a remote kill switch.
Parent
Re: (Score:3)
The best way to convert me from a paying customer back into a pirate is to cripple the stuff I bought in good faith. I hope all game publishers realise that.
Re:Legitimate Customers (Score:5, Insightful)
... along with a widely publicised promise to unlock all content should Steam be discontinued / Valve go under.
When companies go under, there is a priority order to who gets what, and guess what... customers are at the end of a very long list. That being the case, do you really believe that they'll be allowed to continue developing for long enough to do right by the customers when that is going to directly translate into further losses for the creditors? That's just not the way these things work, it's not even like the management there would be in charge if they were in liquidation, even if their promise is genuine. Maybe if the solution is already written and they literally just have to flick a switch to deploy it it'll happen, otherwise it's just a marketing tool to assure us everything will be okay (disclaimer: I really like Valve's games and have a few on Steam, I don't object to the service but I'm under no illusion of what will likely happen if they fail - people who still want to play games they bought will have to go find a cracked version somewhere).
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
As I've done dozens of times with never a single result:
This claim is not in the legally binding contract you agree to when you purchase a Steam game.
Please provide some documentation of this claim.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Steam has also gotten "less bad" over time, and as a result the nostalgia effect has kicked in. It's a shame I remember how terrible it was when it came out, and few other people do. I still boycott it, simply because of the horrible way it was established in the first place.
I buy (and play) so few modern games these days. Mandatory online activation of any sort is the day I stop gaming. The old ones I have are numerous and plenty good enough.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Steam is the worst possible DRM.
You have to ask permission to play.
You have to agree to a legally binding contract that gives Steam the right to revoke your "purchase" at any time.
Would you buy a car if the dealer had an option to come into your garage and take it back at their whim. Even if you'd paid for it in cash up front?
Fairplay, Impulse, disc in drive, CSS are all examples of good DRM.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The thing that worries me about Steam and many of these other schemes is what I prefer to call the "Circuit City factor." That is to say, I am very reluctant to purchase a game that will disappear from my library the second the publisher either goes out of business or shuts down their servers. That's why I've gotten more into console games in recent years. At least most of those are still "Pop in and play," whereas it seems more and more PC games have moved to the "Verify that it's okay with some distant se
Ubisoft (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Ubisoft (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:Ubisoft (Score:5, Insightful)
It didn't offer to start in offline mode?
What game was it? If I have it I'll test that particular one.
Parent
Re:Ubisoft (Score:4, Informative)
This happens if you have the steam's friend system turned on by default. Turn it off, and it stops complaining.
Parent
Games should come with a DRM warning on the box (Score:5, Insightful)
"The security measures used to restrict the unauthorized use of this software may cause your computer to experience partial or total loss of functionality, and may conflict with other software or hardware you may have installed on this machine"
It's true enough, and worse is that they are not going to be responsible for restoring your system if it does in fact get hosed.
It's about used games (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Most of the industry is missing a trend (Score:5, Insightful)
The trend is that the average age of gamers is now in the 30s.
What this has to do with DRM is the fact that, at our age (yes, I am in my 30s) what we have the least is time - at the point in your life where you do have a decent income, money is much less of an issue than when you're a teen - if all I have is 1 or 2 hours a day for gaming I don't want to have to jump through extra hoops to play a game and I sure don't want to see my gaming time wasted because my Internet connection is down or the gaming servers are down and the games requires remote authentication (something that adds no value for me).
The second point is that, when you actually work for a living you can relate the true value of money to the time it takes you to earn it. The cost of a game is then more than a mathematical figure, it's measure in how long do you have to work to pay for it.
The third point is the increased awareness of the value of things that comes with age. To put it simply, a game fulfils one's need for entertainment and escapism and bad games cost twice as much as good movies and 3 times as much as good books and yet have less entertainment value.
That said I still pirate games, and in the end it boils down to 1 reason: ...
- There is no more try-before-you-buy for most games anymore - the age of Game Demos is gone. I don't want to waste my hard earned money (and I do know how hard it was to earn that money) in a game just to take it home and discover that it sucks, it has too many bugs or it refuses to run in my system due to DRM. I've had plenty of situations where I would buy a game and it would either not work properly, turn out to be little fun or exceptionally short even though gaming sites had been hyping it to no end. At this point (after 20! years of gaming) the gaming industry and the gaming press have shown me again and again that they are not to be trusted
So what I do nowadays is I download the game, try it and if it works ok and I like it, I buy it. Just recently I got X3:TC and bought it as soon as I found out that the game maker had removed DRM in the latest patch (in fact I even got the Gold edition since I trully believe they deserve the money).
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Great argument for DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
From summary:
Cliff Harris of Positech Games said he didn't think his decision to stop using DRM significantly affected piracy of his games, accepting it as an unavoidable fact.
That was an argument FOR using DRM?
"I have a rock that keeps away shoplifters, it only cost me $ton_of_money annually, and I use it to knock customers on their head every time they buy something. Now, the rate of shoplifting is the same both with and without the rock, so I see no reason to stop using it."
If more DRM = More Sales, lock the game down hard (Score:4, Informative)
Don't allow users to even see the screen without making receiving a certified letter from the publisher with a secret code. Don't let the user even play the full game. Force them to download large chunks of it from your server after releasing only half of it on disc.
Store integral parts of every level on a master server that can only be accessed by pausing the game and entering the secret code.
It will sell trillions of copies!
Living here in Korea (Score:3, Interesting)
Living in Korea, I see the sort of extreme example of piracy run rampant. Korean companies scarcely consider the idea of a game that isn't online because it would be universally pirated that very day. They'd never see a dime from it.
I teach in a private academy where I see lots of kids with Nintendo DS's; I never see real games in them. They universally use this R4 chip that has all the games loaded on it. Because of this, Nintendo barely considers them a market. Meanwhile OS bootlegging is so prevalent, that people no longer even expect a legitimate OS with a new system. Microsoft even jacked the price up on Vista when they released it here to try to bleed some of the losses out of the few remaining customers.
I don't support DRM or prosecuting old ladies, but I also think measures to prevent piracy must be taken in some capacity lest it irreparably warp the industry like it has here in Korea.
If it has no effect (Score:3, Interesting)
Then stop doing it. DRM has a development and/or licensing cost associated with it. If using is the same as not using it, then don't use it, and you'll save that money. It's very simple to do a value proposition when the value is zero.
Someone got it right (at least for old games) (Score:5, Informative)
Well, since we are talking about DRM, I should mention Good Old Games [gog.com].
Basically, they sell "old games", without any DRM whatsoever, and that are 7/Vista/XP compatible.
And although they have some fairly "recent" titles (Painkiller, for example), I don't recall seeing any of their games on the P2P networks. Or any cracks. Oh, right, they don't have anything to crack to begin with :)
Oh and the games are dirty cheap as well. And legal.
I think that the person that mention that this should be about beneficts for the legitimate client is right.
In the GOG case, I can install the game wherever I want, when I want, no activation or "phone-home" or whatsoever. And they really provide a "value added" service: some games aren't available anywere else (even P2P networks), and they have gone the extra step of making them playable on the modern versions of Windows.
So the publisher cashes in their older titles, instead of clinging on them and not doing anything with them (like actually selling the games) and/or chasing whoever dares to mess with it, i.e. fan-made remakes, reverse engineering and things like that, GOG cashes in with the nostalgia of the clients, and the quality of the majority of the offerings, and the clients cash in as well, being able to play quality games for low-low prices, and not having to worry about if SecureRom will break their Windows.
Just a quick mention of Steam. I like the concept, and they are doing some things right. But I hope they don't let the publishers run wild with the platform (the Bioshock 2 "protection" seems insane! DRM on top of Steam and validations?!).
The Lesson is: DRM doesn't work. (Score:4, Interesting)
Harris bemoans the fact that, regardless what effort he puts into a game, someone will crack it. But, he's attempting to learn the wrong lesson.
It isn't that people (/ consumers) are intrinsically fair.
It isn't that crackers are acting out of some noble desire to rid the world of DRM.
The lesson here is simple: DRM doesn't work. There's no real ROI on it, so don't put in on games and make it difficult or unplayable for your paying customers. Period.