Stardock Declares Victory Over Demigod Piracy 403
We recently got a look at some hard numbers related to the piracy of Demigod , a new game from Stardock and Gas Powered Games. Now, two weeks later, Stardock CEO Brad Wardell has essentially declared the game a success in spite of the piracy, and reaffirmed the company's stance that intrusive DRM is a bad thing. The game's sales figures seem to bear him out. Quoting:
"Yep. Demigod is heavily pirated. And make no mistake, piracy pisses me off. If you're playing a pirated copy right now, if you're one of those people on Hamachi or GameRanger playing a pirated copy and have been for more than a few days, then you should either buy it or accept that you're a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way. The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games and people who don't buy games. The focus of a business is to increase its sales. My job, as CEO of Stardock, is not to fight worldwide piracy no matter how much it aggravates me personally. My job is to maximize the sales of my product and service and I do that by focusing on the people who pay my salary — our customers."
Metcalfe's law (Score:5, Insightful)
Won't something like Metcalfe's law also apply to games. The more people that play the game the higher the worth of the game. So while losing customers to pirated versions is bad (but I'd argue not too common and entirely unstoppable by DRM), gaining non-customers to pirated versions is actually good (not very good as you don't get any money) as it adds value to your game. In the case of multiplayer games this value is obvious (even if they can't play against legit version, they will help augment the community) and for single player games they may tell friends and eventually somebody they know who likes the game may pay for it.
It would be interesting if somebody could put a monetary value on pirated version (other than stupidly assuming every pirated copy is a lost sale)
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Ah, that's true, they may tell their friends, but they're likely to give their friends a copy too. I've never seen this phenomenon where one friend says, "Dude, this game is great. I got it from The Pirate Bay." and the other guy goes, "Hmm, maybe I should buy it." though maybe it's more prevalent elsewhere.
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Definitelly, it is 2$.
Here is my reasoning:
a) Value of pirated item is basically what pirate would pay if pirating was not an option.
That is anytime from zero (zero being, be puts no value into item and would not even bother pirating it.) to several times of pricetag.
However, my observation is that 1-3$ DVDs on newstands here basically "ruined" piracy of whatever movies came out like that, sop rice would be around there.
Or:
b) Expenditures that pirate has to make to pirate.
That includes time (it take time to
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Maximizing profit or maximizing game development? (Score:2, Insightful)
What should we be focusing on? Maximizing profit or maximizing game development? or in other words - producing games to live, or living to produce games? I know which future i want ... and i want it now!
If you like what he's done.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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hehe.. if you like copy protection then you probably should go talk to a professional..
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Or better yet, buy a copy then tell them why.
Demigod = DRM (Score:4, Informative)
You = RMS (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, this stance on DRM is like the RMS stance on openness "Unless everything is 100% my way, no compromise it is WRONG!"
No, Demigod isn't DRM'd. The DVD is a standards compliant DVD with no trickey shit. The game installs and runs with no checks of any kind.
Online play requires authentication and use of an online server? Oh well stop the presses I mean that hasn't happened with except, well, maybe every online game ever. As to if something like that is DRM is rather a semantic argument. Sure it does require a legit copy, but then the anti-DRM stance was never supposed to be about being allowed to illegally copy things, now was it? Needing to log in to a central server to play is a feature many games have simply for player convenience. Heck I remember when Gamespy first got started it was because the whole decentralized server thing with games like Quake was a problem. How did you find people to play with? So there was a 3rd party "central server" created that all the distributed servers talked to. Newer games are just having their own central service.
Finally no, you needn't run Impulse to run the game. Impulse has it's little "Impulse now" thing that it likes to run, but all that does is check for patches. Shut it down if you like (there's an option to tell it not to load on startup). You can run the game without Impulse, or without a net connection for that matter.
The point here is that if you are going to cast things like having a CD key and using a central matching service in the same category as SecuROM and such, then you are effectively making you definition of DRM meaningless and running off in to zealot territory. The reason you should, as a gamer, be anti-DRM is because it makes games not work. Like you take these recent games with SecuROM that you can only install 3 times, ever. After that, you are done. THAT is DRM and that is a problem. Wanting you to have an account on their online play service to play online is not DRM.
Gamers need to be a little reasonable here because remember, as with all things, there is a balance of rights. Yes, you should have the right to buy a game and play that game for as long as you want in the way you want. You shouldn't have some DRM program getting mad because you installed it too many times or because it doesn't like your CD drive. However the developers have rights too. They have a right to try and make sure people aren't illegally copying their game, and they certianly have a right 0ot make sure those people who do illegally copy it can't make use of the services the company provides for it. It shouldn't be an all or nothing situation on either side.
I'd liken it to freedom of speech. Yes, you have the right to freedom of speech, however your right to freedom of speech can't interfere with my right to freedom of association. What that means if you are free to speak your mind, but not in my living room if I don't want you to. I am free to ignore what you say. Yes, that does limit your rights in a small way. You don't have the right to force me to listen to your views, however that is a necessary limit on your rights to preserve mine and one I think we can all agree is reasonable.
So you need a balance in games rights too. Demanding no DRM is fine when DRM means "Shit that interferes with rights I should have." Demanding no DRM is not fine when DRM means "Anything you do that I don't approve of."
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You're full of it.
If the game requires any form of authentication to unlock any significant functionality then it's DRM'ed. End of story.
HE'S FULL OF IT?
Anyways, Demigod requires online servers to unlock functionality. Are those online servers DRM?
Because if they aren't, then anyone who sets up their own server (they're out there), has unlocked that functionality.
At the end of the day, you just seem like you don't want to participate in a capitalist society, and I have to wonder, what are you doing in the US?
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So unless you have full control over THEIR servers, it's DRM?
I didn't say that. Stop dishonestly pretending I did.
Anti cheating measures? DRM! unique usernames? DRM! not allowing incompatible out of date versions on the server? DRM!
That's it, dishonestly try to muddy the waters.
DRM is about your software and your PC. Not about services provided on someone else's systems.
When your software is deliberately locked to a system you don't control for the purpose of controlling your use and significant funct
Re:You = RMS (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Demigod = DRM (Score:4, Informative)
Slashdot seriously needs a "-1, wrong" moderator action.
You don't need Impulse running to play, even on multiplayer.
The retail copy has no DRM. You can take it, copy it, run it, and it works quite happily.
Multiplayer does check for an account. Show me a game where that isn't true these days.
"after 20 years of experiment, .." (Score:2, Insightful)
> The reality that most PC game publishers ignore is that there are people who buy games
> and people who don't buy games.
Thats what always puzzled my about filesharing haters: Why _do_ some of them bother at all, if they make enough money, that somwhere on the other side of the world, maybe also on some other planet, two people he never knew and will never know shared their stuff?
> accept that you're a thief and quit rationalizing it any other way.
And promptly, he delivers the answer himself. Just
Try and buy or try and ditch (Score:5, Insightful)
As I see it, pirating a game is only excusable if you're doing it to try it, after which you either buy it or stop playing.
Just recently I did this with Galactic Civilizations II - I downloaded it, played it for a while, liked it, went out and purposefully bought the game: Stardock got another sale when, had I not had a chance to check the game, they would have gotten nothing (I don't trust the industry - been burned once too many by some of the over-hyped turds they put out)
Way too many games out there come out not working well or not at all. The game reviews press is no help at all - they'll give glaring reviews to games which are pretty enormous turds, and conveniently forget about the bugs and lack of long term playability.
In my view, it's not at all morally reprehensible to pirate a game for testing - as long as you buy it if you keep playing it.
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Like Neverwinter Nights 2. That game was barely playable with average gamer hardware but received 9.0+ reviews.
Re:Try and buy or try and ditch (Score:5, Insightful)
The hardware thing is a real problem because there is no standard for what counts as "minimum" and "recommended". I mean sure every game lists though, but what they actually mean by it varies wildly. Some games are nice and realistic. Their "minimum" means "The minimum hardware you'll need to enjoy playing the game." You find that if you meet the minimum spec, no problem, you gameplay is good. You can't crank everything up, but you still have no play problems. Doom was a game I remember like that. My computer was right at the minimum spec, but it still ran well.
Well other games are very unrealistic. "Minimum" means "Minimum to get the game to execute, but don't bother trying to play it'll suck." Sometimes even the "recommended" means "Recommended to be even somewhat playable but you are still going to have lots of problems." Ultima 9 was one I remember like this. When my roommate at the time got it he had just about the highest end system money could buy, which met or exceeded the recommended specs, and it still ran like shit.
So I do sympathize with people because it's a real problem. We really do need some kind of standard in the game industry so that you can look at the required specs and get a feel for how your system will actually do with a game. If a game needs top notch hardware there's nothing wrong with that, however it needs to be clear. People need to be able to have some confidence that a game will work well on their system.
Re:Try and buy or try and ditch (Score:5, Informative)
Way too many games out there come out not working well or not at all.
Yep, and how many of those games don't work well because of DRM? Possibly a lot. I HATE DRM (I am agreeing with you, by the way, I think).
Why? Do I pirate games? No. I have a whole shelf full of legally purchased games. Some of these games I can only install a set number of times (I am looking at Far Cry 2 as an example, I had to reinstall XP because I felt like but didn't remember I had to first "revoke" my FC2 activation... there goes one install straight away). Now, continuing with the example, I don't particularly like FC2 and I doubt I will want to reinstall it in 5 years. But, that is MY CHOICE to make. It shouldn't be the publishers choice.
DRM takes my (legal) choices away from me, and the publishers are using piracy as an excuse. Do I want to sell my copy of CoD World at War? Not at the moment, but I SHOULD BE ALLOWED TO. Thanks.
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And you are prevented from buying the game then downloading the crack because...
thief? (Score:2, Insightful)
He used the term thief:
thief, noun,
a criminal who takes property belonging to someone else with the intention of keeping it or selling it.
which by it's definition doesn't apply in this situation.
I'll accept the use of the word piracy as it has widespread use as relating to copyright infringement but I do think it's rather ridiculous to compare copying data to theft and murder on the high seas.
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The more appropriate term, rather than "thief," might be "freeloader."
Perhaps the perfect attitude (Score:2)
It is not good business of IP publishers to turn their customers into casualties of the battle against copyright infringement. Furthermore, it is not the fault or failure of the customers that copyright infringement occurs and they are the absolutely LAST people who should be inconvenienced or penalized in any way for the actions of others.
By imposing unreasonable controls and limits on those who pay legitimately, they are only harming those who pay legitimately.
To do anything less than honor and respect y
Not really accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
He isn't gloating. He isn't saying they've beaten the pirates. He's saying the game is selling well despite them, and it is. There's a big difference.
Which has long been his position (Score:5, Insightful)
His argument for a long time has been that copyright infringement sucks, but it happens protections or not. However protections piss off your legit customers. Thus, since they don't stop copying and do piss off the people that pay, don't do them.
I think this is quite a good attitude. I mean yes, people copied the shit out of Demigod. People copy the shit out of most anticipated new releases so that shows nothing other than people are interested in the game. The interesting title to compare it to would be Spore. Spore was much more highly anticipated, however it had real whiz bang copyprotection: SecuROM 7 including online activation. To hear the talk on it, you'd think this was your 100% anti-copying solution. All sorts of nifty encryption and obfuscation and you have to connect to an online server! Ha, beat that shit pirates!
The result? A torrent with 5 digits worth of peers active on it on the Piratebay when it came out. Ya THAT was real effective.
So Demigod got copied all over, but still sells well and they spent $0 on copyprotection and didn't piss off legit customers with it. Spore got copied all over, and they spent a non-trivial amount on protection and pissed off customers.
I don't know how it'll all play out in the end. What I know is that I do own Demigod, and I do not own Spore. SecuROM 7 games can get fucked IMO. I don't play the limited activations thing. I like to be able to upgrade and reinstall my system, and I like to be able to play my games 10, 15, 20 years later (I still play Xcom).
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You can't really say that Spore's DRM either inflated or had no effect on Piracy. It was always going to be massively torrented because of the immense hype.
Was the fear of not being able to use the online sharing driving more people to buy it than were driven away by the heavy DRM? It's incredibly hard to know.
Either way, Spore was a mediocre collection of half arsed mini games masquerading as a single revolionary piece of software. It didn't even feature evolution. Even Black and White didn't quite fail to
Re:Which has long been his position (Score:4, Informative)
You can't really say that Spore's DRM either inflated or had no effect on Piracy. It was always going to be massively torrented because of the immense hype.
What? For me it was
"Hey I got this brand spankin' new game, This is great! Let's try it out"
5 alert windows pop up saying "This program is attempting to do things to your computer that you may not want it to do"
"... wha?" Checked online and found all the DRM, Got pissed, and torrented it.
Yes, Logically I trusted a torrent, by some guy I never knew, more then the official product.
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Ffwd to last year. Spore sounded great, then I started hearing about its DRM system. Care to guess whether I even bothered to pick up the box and look at it? I just won't touch PC games with restrictive DRM systems anymore. I can't be bothered with all the hassle.
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Given their stance on not screwing over paying customers, I would assume that at the end of life of the product they would release a regularly downloadable patch, but that stage the only multiplayer you'll be doing will be via hamachi etc anyway because they won't be running the matchmaking servers.
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Re:Not really accurate (Score:5, Informative)
Nothing wrong with it but he's so inconsistent it's funny. A couple of months ago he was on his usual hobby horse about Steam not being the only service with great weekend deals, because Stardock had a decent offer on at the time. Since then their weekend deals have been non-existent and Steam has had some beauties, like the L4D half off sale or the Orange Box at 66% off. When Steam announced COG (I think), their "non-DRM" DRM solution, Stardock announced GOO which was the same idea. I actually thought that was an April fools joke but apparently not.
This current story is about Demigod hitting no. 3 in the retail sales charts on its first week of release. If it drops off the top ten next week will he post? Of course not. Being at No. 3 means being beaten by a couple of expansion packs for admittedly huge games, but if Demigod from Gas Powered Games was a real splash at launch why wasn't it number one? Pre-orders alone for a successful game should guarantee that.
Re:Not really accurate (Score:5, Informative)
The numbers being quoted are from NPD, which is retail only. Stardock pushes their digital versions a lot more heavily then the retail ones.
Hell, around here *finding* a PC game that isn't WoW or The Sims in a store is an accomplishment in itself.
Nobody will know how it's really selling until they release the digital distribution numbers.
Re:Not really accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
They do it because they think some games are not worth paying fifty bucks to get eight hours of gameplay.
I'd rather think that more often than not the people that pirates games do so because it's free, convenient, and consequent-free.
Think of it from the point of view of kids. All they'll need is a computer and a broadband connection and they'll be able to play all the latest games(movies, music, applications, books, comics, etc.) that they want.
The only incentive to buy games is for multiplayer and new updates. Stardock understands this, and thus controls their patch distribution to the ones that have legitimate copies for Galactic Civilizations II.
And the kids who do pirate now, will eventually grow up and get jobs and more importantly, money. Hopefully by then, with all the years of guilt of screwing good developers, they would buy the games that brought hours of fun to their lives.
At least, that's what I did. Doesn't make up for all of my past actions but it did remove the guilt of screwing the really good game makers out there. And for the other hundreds of buggy/DRM-ed games & software out there, I'm just glad I didn't have to pay for them and will now avoid them. :)
Bottom line, I bet it's all about money. A small percentage of pirates might be pirates because of their ideologies on DRM and whatnot, but that's just a handful of souls.
Developers/distributors thinking that every pirated copy is a lost sale is idiotic and hopeless. There will always be piracy, better to just not think about them and concentrate on making a good product. It could be a marketing tool even if the game is well made: All things being fair, the more people playing the game the more mods, custom content, and vibrant communities will form.
Re:Not really accurate (Score:4, Interesting)
Bottom line, I bet it's all about money. A small percentage of pirates might be pirates because of their ideologies on DRM and whatnot, but that's just a handful of souls.
Maybe...I know that I've downloaded some games in the past to get a feel for them...Most of them have ended up in purchases after I was impressed - Starcraft, Diablo & II, CS, Civ 4, DemiGod...but there's also a few games that I have not bought because I felt they were horrid.
This being said, now that I actually have a job, I do end up spending money on games more than I have in the past. However, being just a little idealistic, I am leery of paying for DRM. I've been burned myself in recent years and have no desire to experience that again (sorry EA, you can't have my money).
While I can't rationalize much downloading anymore to myself, I certainly understand where a number of those that I do know that download stuff come from and can't condemn them for it. I can't really honestly say that any of them feel that they are screwing the companies out of money. For them, buying twenty copies of UT2004 to play over LAN for one day is ridiculous (and a serious rip-off). But, buying UT3 or CS-Source over steam to play people around the world is 100% ok!
Maybe the real issue IS money - if UT2004 cost $2 (GOG games was about a year too late), maybe the LAN issue wouldn't have been there...seriously... when are more hardcore game publishers gonna realize that unless their game has some serious replay value (think Blizzard or Valve), they can't sell games for full price 10 years after they come out?!? Even EA and Ubisoft (or was it Eidos...didn't Ubisoft purchase the rights to UT recently...?) with titles like Command & Conquer and Unreal Tournament and other somewhat popular hardcore gamer games can't do that...the mainstream games like Guitar Hero at least reduce their prices or have "specials"...
Seems to me that this is all about market placement. On one hand, you have the game publishers trying to fix prices instead of allowing market forces to drive down prices and increase the competition and value of games in general, so on the other hand, piracy comes in to fill in the market void and compete. Of course, the whole gaming industry, after being spoiled in the United States by pro-business legislation, decide that they can just snuff out competition by complaining and trying to eliminate piracy rather than actually providing a better product that actually provides something that piracy can't (No, not everything can be WoW and force users to log in to a server. But I don't get paid to come up with ways to provide a better product. How about those guys with million dollar salaries?). Now, we have "rampant" piracy. Seems to me that those CEO's and everyone else involved in their business are just making stupid business decisions. THAT seems to be the REAL problem - as Stardock has shown.
However, it may take more than Stardock to shift the balance. Since people have been pushed so far as to pirate, they may not want to come back without incentive. That's the actual job of those CEO's and business execs. It's time they actually EARN their pay.
Re:Not really accurate (Score:4, Interesting)
For them, buying twenty copies of UT2004 to play over LAN for one day is ridiculous (and a serious rip-off). But, buying UT3 or CS-Source over steam to play people around the world is 100% ok!
Exactly. To take it further, the best "investment" I ever made was buying half-life. I played it for 8 years! Not because it had the best single player (I haven't even finished it, one day I will!) or multiplayer experience, but because of all the amazing mods it had. I suddenly found that the game was really 15 different games.
It's the same with Starcraft & Broodwar, I had played it for a couple of years straight, and yet every so often I would install it and waste a good hour or two on tower defense maps (the original).
Looking more at the games that I own, it seems multiplayer games are the only games that would sell. But then there's also Civilizations 4 and Galactic Civilizations II, which I never played online but still play extensively today, and it tells me that probably majority of gamers only buy games that offers high replay value or unlimited hours of gaming.
And I remember Portal (2-6 hours), The Monkey Island III, and Final Fantasy 7 which are all relatively quick games but I still bought and thoroughly enjoyed, even if I only played them once or twice.
And though there are plenty of copies out there for the said games I mentioned... most of my friends, cousins, and I still bought legit copies (even when we were teens back then and had no jobs).
Maybe it is a money issue... but maybe more importantly, it's the value of these games. If developers/distributors want to convert these 'pirates' into customers, they should polish their games and show some passion to their customers/communities.
E.A. for example, and in my own experiences pirating their games, are notorious in releasing unfinished games. Their games don't make it easy for modders and don't bother listening to community complaints. Suffice to say, I even stopped downloading their games off of torrents.
A pirate, paying for nothing, refusing to even look at their products.
Re:Not really accurate (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to 'infringe copyrights' because I didn't have the money to entertain myself otherwise. I could afford to pay 40 bucks for an internet connection, sometimes, but not 15 for this and this album and 35 for this and this game.
What I didn't download I usually picked up second-hand or borrowed from someone.
It wasn't merely convenience or a lack of consequence, those hardly played a part at all. The real motivation was jealousy, others had much more than I did, better lives than I could establish. I wanted fun things too, and it's effortless to copy bits than it is physical objects.
Life's been much different to me for the past few years, I've really picked up and put myself together and I finally do have the money to spend on more frivolous things. I used to never think I would buy a DVD but now I'm getting them all the time. I couldn't possibly afford to replace all my music with legal purchases at the time, but I can begin to start.
I don't regret any of the stuff I've downloaded, I even appreciate having the chance to see what games I looked forward to were garbage and not buy as soon as they came out.
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It's interesting to me how peoples' point of view changes reality.
It's interesting how when some people think they're broadening their minds what they're really doing is stretching their conscience.
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Oh, equating physical theft and copyright infringement, do I really have to explain the difference to you?
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Isn't the important aspect whether or not it results in financial harm to the person producing the product? In that case, there isn't a difference between stealing a car and stealing a game instead of paying for it.
Re:Not really accurate (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference, though. I'm not saying copyright infringement isn't bad, or that it doesn't harm the company, but there is a difference.
If someone steals a car off a dealer's lot, the dealer doesn't have that car to sell anymore, and thus can't make any money at all off it. If someone steals a comic off the shelf at a comic book store, the store doesn't have that comic book to sell anymore, and can't make money off it. If the person wouldn't have bought it if they couldn't steal it, the store has still lost money in either case: whatever they paid for the item, car or comic, is gone forever with no return. If the person would have bought it if they couldn't steal it, the store has lost whatever they paid for it, plus whatever profit they would have made.
If someone downloads a song, or a game, or a copy of some piece of proprietary software, the company still has it to sell to other people. If the person would have bought a copy if they couldn't download it, the company has lost the value of exactly one sale. If the person would not otherwise have bought it, the company has lost nothing.
Again, I'm not saying downloading software or music illegally is morally or ethically right -- in general, I think it's not, but that's irrelevant to the discussion at hand -- but there is certainly a difference between downloading cracked software and stealing a physical item.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
However, being able to make infinite copies of something means that you also have the potential hazard of infinitely diluting its value. $50 / infinity = pretty much $0. That's not a good equation to try to wrestle with if you're trying to deal with people stealing your stuff, and the final result can be the same as if you no longer had a car to sell.
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How is the "if a physical object is stolen it's gone, if a digital object is copied it's still there" argument flawed? Certainly many people follow it to its illogical conclusion ("the digital object is still there, so no harm has been done"), but I would say that's a problem with the people drawing the conclusion, not with the basic argument.
Regardless, I agree: dishonest is dishonest, crime is crime. The fact that illegal copying only deprives the company of one sale doesn't make it any better, just le
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
And what about the dishonesty of game producers who sometimes produce a dog, that needs patches downloading from their website before the game will even work, or simply won't work on certain hardware / software configurations, and their tech help suggests "upgrade your video card" to play this game.
Piracy offers an consumer a try-before-you-buy option. You wouldn't buy a car sight unseen, neither a house, or any other purchase. Yet media producers (software, movies, music) expect you to do JUST that, and ma
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
In the case of copyright infringement the person it was copied from does not lose possessions and there is no guarantee that the person who copied the product would have paid for the product under other circumstances.
Media companies believe that they are the victims of theft whenever a product of theirs is copied. They see it as someone taking money from their pockets, even though the money may never
Re:Not really accurate (Score:4, Insightful)
You can sit and twist and contort it however you want, but people pirating games costs other people money. Making a bit-for-bit copy of someone's software is not a consequence-free act no matter how much some people here want to believe otherwise.
Neither side can prove that money would or wouldn't have changed hands. It's all a moot point from a legal perspective, anyway.
However we can talk about things from a moral and ethical perspective. Here's my take:
Corporations own the majority of IP in the world. Corporations lobby for what is effectively becoming an unlimited copyright term, violating the spirit in which copyright was enacted. They aren't respecting the people. Why should the people respect them?
Re: (Score:2)
Has that person lost a physical disk?
No, all he *potentially* lost was a *potential* sale.
Many 'pirate' downloads often lead to real sales.
So a 'pirated' version does not equate a lost sale per se, it could actually even lead to a sale they wouldn't otherwise get. Try before you buy principle. I can spend my money only once, and I have to make decisions whether I want to buy a certain entertainment product or not.
And some companies offer demos, but more often than not, those demos contain only the best piec
Re: (Score:2)
One reason for downloading the game before buying it, for me, would be to see whether it runs decent enough under Wine/Crossover Games/Cedega.
If it doesn't I'm not going to buy it. If it does, and I like the game. I'd buy it.
Re: (Score:2)
There's a difference between physical objects and information.
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Yes, information is more valuable. And, theft is theft, be it a physical object, a service, or information that was created by the work of one's brow.
That you would suggest that taking something is OK because you don't want to pay the asked for price shows you have no morals or ethics. In short, you are a fucking piece of shit.
Re:One should never gloat (Score:5, Insightful)
Hey, come on now - he's a visionary standing up for our rights! [slashdot.org]
I don't care about the personality of the CEO, as long as he's providing me with DRM-free games I can play on any computer any time, without fighting with SecuCrap, ShitForce, or requiring a DVD.
The only thing I care about (as a gamer) is whether the game plays (excluding obvious stuff like the game should be fun :P ), and lately a lot of games just don't run. :/ I can't tell you how aggravating it is to buy a game, install it, and find out it crashes instantly with some error code related to the DRM.
Damn you EA. You suck.
Re:One should never gloat (Score:5, Interesting)
I dunno, I'm still annoyed. I bought GalCiv and all the expansion packs because 1) they are great games and 2) because they were not copyprotected.
Later on they snuck online-hardware authentication into the game. So if they go out of business, and I upgrade to a new computer, I lose the games I bought.
That pisses me off to no end since this exactly the reason why I've still not played games like BioShock (due to the DRM).
So StarDock is in no way the champion that they were in earlier days.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
1. "I bought GalCiv ... they were not copyprotected."
okay, got it, what you bought was not copyprotected... you can install it, play it, and nothing gets in your way.
2. "Later on they snuck online-hardware authentication into the game."
I suppose that's by means of an update or something of the sort... okay, with you so far...
3. "So if they go out of business, and I upgrade to a new computer, I lose the games I bought."
and here you lost me, at least on technical grounds.
If at point 3 you can no longer play t
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3. "So if they go out of business, and I upgrade to a new computer, I lose the games I bought."
and here you lost me, at least on technical grounds.
If at point 3 you can no longer play the game from point 2, could you still play the game from point 1?
I bought the game as an electronic download. I also bought the expansion packs via electronic download. This all goes through the Stardock package manager.
At some point the protection was added (I don't know at exactly what date). Since it wasn't announced and no permission was asked, I have lost the version without copyright protection.
I also believe the expansions require a certain patch-level of the main game, so if I had a backup of the main game somewhere, I still be locked out of playing my expansions
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The type of DRM limits his play, and the update basically made it impossible to play the game,e ven with a new install of the original media.
Either it was download electronically(steam?) or there is online play you must ahve the DRM for.
The company added a limitation AFTER the purchase. At the very least people who don't like it should get there money back if they so choose.
It isn't a fix, it's adding a limitation to being able to play the game.
Response to piracy (Score:5, Insightful)
Games are easy to make. Gpogle for 'flash games' and you'll find 100,000 crappy little card games and Tetris clones. Good games are HARD to make. It costs real time from people with real talent who need to be paid in real money. The problem is that the costs of developing a game are not connected to the cost of replicating the game. The first copy of the game costs 5 million dollars. the second copy costs 4 cents.
Piracy isn't an issue until it's so rampant that those with the money choose to pirate anyway.
Would you pay 4 dollars to see a matinee? Would you buy a scifi novel for 6 bucks? Try comparing the time you spend enjoying each of these to the time you spend on a video game, and you'll find that the 40-50 dollars spent on a good game is surprisingly cheap!
I bought GTA San Andreas a long time ago. (years?) I picked it up again this last weekend and got another afternoon of fun out of it!
Don't be at all hesitant to buy a good game, even if you have a playable pirate copy - it's insurance for more fun in the future!
Re:Response to piracy (Score:5, Interesting)
Most $40-50 dollar games give me significantly less enjoyment than a good scifi novel. A good novel might take me 10-40 hours to read. Most $40-50 dollar games cease to be interesting in less than ten hours, making then ten times worse value in terms of entertainment hours per dollar. Only MMOs make sense in the entertainment hours per dollar--even if you just play an hour a day they're damn cheap.
Obviously games vary a lot in this. Morrowind and the later Oblivion absorbed, minimum, a combined 1000 hours from my life over several years (and possibly as much as double that). Damn good values, damn good games, and I was damn willing to pay. World of Warcraft similarly has probably consumed around 2,000 hours of my life over the last four years.
But for every Counter-Strike, there's been Fable I-II, Spore, Black&White 1&2(Molyneux games have especially burned me, and I will not pay for them on principle anymore), Force Unleashed (ten hours play time and it was a glorified coaster.). These are just the ones I can think of recently. Too Human, Mirror's Edge, Dead Space (I was so excited that a survival horror game was being made, and so disappointed with the results), Every 3D Sonic Game, Every racing game made post-SNES...... .....the list goes on, and on and vastly outnumbers those games that were worthy of their price tag.
Most games are not good, and are not worth $40-50, no matter how shiny the graphics. You could run Spore on the fastest supercomputer ever built, past present or future, by any civilization in the galaxy and it would still be a pretty boring game. No matter how much the texture artists got paid.
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And the view I take supports this. I buy games in order to say "I like this game, make more of this." I also buy games in order to make it a statement when I don't buy Spore or Far Cry 2. For other games, I think it's important to note that just about everyone I know who pirates does it in two stages.
The first stage consists of "Am I going to buy this product? Do I have the money to buy it? Is it worth the money?" If the answer is yes then we buy it. If no then we move on to the next stage.
The second stage
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Don't be silly.. most pirates' stages are:
1. can I pirate this? If no: f it. If yes:
2. was that game fun? If no: whine about it wherever possible. If yes A: lol and it cost me $0. If yes B:
3. enough to spend money on it? If no: lol and it cost me $0. If yes A: well alright, I guess I'll pick it up in the bargain bin. If yes B: hells yes, where do I send my moneys!?
I won't claim to now the numbers here, but
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
Secondly, I am a privately-educated (in high school) American and am doing just fine with an electrical engineering and computer science degree from a well known university, thank you very much. I don't know if that qualifies me as literate but I sure fucking hope so.
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Especially when it comes to one's own product. It usually just encourages people to find ways to prove you wrong...........
Or corporations. Gamestop in this case. [kotaku.com] Although they were probably more motivated from a hissy fit at stardock daring to release it online, cutting out them as a middleman, when gamestop has faithfully treated PC games like garbage.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
> the "copying = theft" mistake
From the definition of steal, courtesy of dictionary.com:
2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment.
3. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance
Def #2 makes illegitimate copying theft pretty much by definition, but even if you want to interpret that as only "ideas" and not "intellectual property", then #3 will cover it with its fairly broad "to ... get ... insidiously".
So yes, copying is, in fact, theft. May
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The problem is the word "appropriate". Appropriate means (m-w.com):
1. to take exclusive possession of
But you cannot take exclusive possession of "intellectual property", because it's not really property at all. In a world without scarcity, the concept of property has no meaning.
The third definition is extremely broad - winning the lottery is clearly not theft, but it clearly happens "by chance" and therefore meets the definition. So does buying a gift in secret.
I'm not here to argue that copyright infringem
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Just wanted to highlight a portion of the parent poster's.. post:
Let me paraphrase that.. In a world without scarcity, all physical property becomes intellectual property.
There is no (notable; you'll still have to use electricity, maybe the media to write them on, etc.) scarcity of bits/bytes - therefore everything that can be described in, and used almost directly from, those bits and bytes becomes intellectual property. The same applies
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It's depressing really.
I used to think that if we ever created nanotech(in the sci fi style, the kind of goop which can create anything out of raw material) then we'd have a chance at fixing most of the worlds problems.
Now I know when someone learns how to build a house for free someone else will sue them for using some variation on a "4 walls and a roof" patent.
Governments who don't understand the technology will be lobbied to ban it much as they are lobbied to ban P2P.
It will probably be justified on the
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#3 is bullshit, since it more depends on the definition of a right, not on the definition of theft itself.
Using the logic that ignoring someone elses artificial (its not natural nor consensual, remember) "right" on something _you_ already possess you then could also argue that William Wallace was "stealing" when he refused to hand over his wife to get fucked by the english occupying forces who installed themselves an exclusive artificial right "ius primae noctis". Also a slave running away from his owner wo
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I would be very suprised to find the US definition was not much the same.
That 'permanently depriving' bit though, means copyright infringment can never be theft.
http://www.opsi.gov.uk/acts/acts1968/pdf/ukpga_19680060_en.pdf [opsi.gov.uk]
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Last week I stole £300 by betting on the horses.
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You're trying to beat a regular dictionary into something else.
2. covers "I had this great idea, but my coworker stole credit for it"
3. covers "He stole second base", "He stole a kiss" and "They stole the win through sheer luck"
If you don't want to talk in pictures about things that really aren't stealing, a conservative definition as found in a legal dictionary is:
"STEAL - the wrongful or willful taking of money or property belonging to someone else with intent to deprive the owner of its use or benefit ei
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#3 also seems to cover winning in lottery: "to ... get ... by chance".
That kinda reminds me of the radical feminist argument that all heterosexual sex is rape,
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According to that definition, when I was given a free Nintendo DS and 10 games because I won a raffle, I stole it - "to take, get or win [...] by chance"
For completely not-creepy reasons, the local teen center turned me into a criminal!
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> the "copying = theft" mistake
From the definition of steal, courtesy of dictionary.com: 2. to appropriate (ideas, credit, words, etc.) without right or acknowledgment. 3. to take, get, or win insidiously, surreptitiously, subtly, or by chance
Both of those definitions imply that the thief is denying the original owner the thing stolen. Copyright infringement doesn't have that attribute. Neither of those definitions fit particularly well. So why you do you want to call one offence (copyright infringement) by the name of a different offence? I can't see any legitimate reason, so you must be just looking to get some sort of emotional response from people.
Just use the correct term: copyright infringement.
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Dictionary.com doesn't a legal argument make.
According to US law, theft is simply depriving of use of property and has a completely different set of rules and punishment than copyright violations. Sort of like the difference between murder of the 1st degree, 2nd degree, homicidal negligence, and manslaughter.
Each type of crime has a different set of laws and punishments.
If you were before a judge and said "But it this dictionary gives a different definition of the law I broke!", he'd probably laugh at you
You mean 'shit'. (Score:3, Insightful)
Bears don't do 'business' in the woods.
Bears do, however, shit in the woods.
Just, y'know, when people start cringing from /language/, then we truly are doomed.
Re:You mean 'shit'. (Score:4, Funny)
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Copying is a fact of nature, and we will never get everyone to agree not to do it, nor would we want to. Seek out another business model, or suck it up and live with the current awful one.
I don't know why you were modded redundant because you made a different point than most others.
And I agree as a person who firmly believes in reductionism of the world around me.
What is the difference between being killed by a mugger, a grizzly bear, or lightning bolt.
There is really none in the end result because I'm dea
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For a game that is almost all on-line, single player gets really boring after a few plays, that the on-line setup are so bad is something that should of been fixed before they shipped.
You have to be kidding. (Score:4, Insightful)
Because a feature of a game is broken justifies pirating it?
You did exactly what he stated, you used whatever inane reason you could find to justify being a thief.
In other words, you declared yourself a victim and decided upon restitution you deemed appropriate, which apparently is that stealing other people's property is ok if it has a bug. What's next ? Unacceptable box art?
Game companies, actually any software company, do not have to attain a defensible position in regards to not wanting to have their products pirated.
What it really comes down to is that thieves will always find some justification. As soon as the their condition is met they will invent a new offense and thereby justify their continued thievery.
sorry, but your post sucks and that it was rated insightful is a disgrace to those of us who do programming for a living. I can't meet your high standards because they don't exist in any form that can be quantified thereby meaning anything I produce you want you will just take.
Re:You have to be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
Shivetya Said
But Brad Wardell is quoted as saying...
sounds to me like Brad accepts at least some of the downloads are people trying out the game to check fun factor and playability. I guess it depends on your definition of pirate, downing to try out for a limited time is not in my opinion pirating, find you like the game, conituing to play but not paying for it is.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
I agree with most of the above.
You are a pirate, accept it and realize that you are not paying for what you are using. If you just trying it out (most demos show you the best, not the worst in a game, like movie trailers), are caught in our "Changing economic times" or are just unable to pay then so be it. Accept that what you do is wrong, its a matter of the self-centered thought that only you matter.
Now if you can afford it and have tried it out, you really should pay for it if you feel its worth the buy.
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If you'd "copyright infringement" instead of "theft" this would have been the perfect response to the GP poster's remark.
It amazes me to no end how they can justify taking a copy of something their not entitled to- just because of something that went wrong or this or that. They're going to commit the act of infringement no matter what the reason- so, would they have ever really been one of the company's customers. Unlikely.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't give the user any excuses to not buy the game, a few more people (with a conscience, just a slow one) will give you some money. If you treat them poorly, they will make shit up and convince themselves they don't need to pay. Then they buy your game out of the bargain bin five years later and say "I paid for it eventually!" I've lived with those guys a zillion times. I've also been part of groups where we all bought the game. YMMV.
As a programmer... (Score:2, Insightful)
You're right that if copyright infringement is wrong, something like bugs at launch don't suddenly override this. However, if one doesn't believe copyright should even exist, then nitpicks like this have more force.
And yes, it's perfectly possible to make a decent living as a programmer without the existence of copyright. I don't feel personally aggrieved by copyright infringement. I try to stay out of businesses where a company depends on copyright for its existence.
Re:As a programmer... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're right that if copyright infringement is wrong, something like bugs at launch don't suddenly override this. However, if one doesn't believe copyright should even exist, then nitpicks like this have more force.
If one doesn't believe copyright should even exist, then one should not participate within the society that has copyright. To be a part of society, you essentially agree to abide by the laws that society establishes. There is never a legitimate justification for breaking/ignoring laws, until such a time where you're seeking to overthrow your government.
Re:As a programmer... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't infringe copyright, I just don't believe that copyright should exist. It's silly to suppose that one must fully believe and internalize all laws of the current society. Social change in such case would be impossible.
Even if I was inclined to risk the consequences of copyright infringement, it would still be fairly silly to abandon society due to such a minor thing. Your "accept every single law or GTFO" attitude is fairly unrealistic.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Replace "copyright" with "seperate but equal" and lets see if your statement about "never a legitimate justification to breaking / ignoring laws" holds true.
If you don't believe in copyright, then infringe, but do it in the open, just like others have fought laws they precieved to be unjust... and be ready to face the consequences.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If I were to go to target and buy a vacuum cleaner and found that an attachment was broken when I got it home, I could go back to Target and return the defective item. Games offer no such resolution. I can't take demigod back to Target and demand a refund because the multiplayer is
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Yeah, isn't that great? By classifying any opinion that disagrees with his as "rationalizing," everyone is automatically wrong but him! Clearly, then, you must be a thief.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You did exactly what he stated, you used whatever inane reason you could find to justify being a thief.
Most people have a hard time justifying paying money for a non-finite good that can be had for free. Your time is a finite good. Code that you've written is non-finite, and so is this post.
If you wish to make money in a world where everyone can talk with everyone, you may wish to reconsider your business model of trying to sell things which can be easily copied and sell things which cannot.
This is no worse than construction workers put out of work by a machine that can be operated by fewer people with
Re: (Score:2)
> Because a feature of a game is broken justifies pirating it?
>
Not just yes, but HELL YES.
> You did exactly what he stated, you used whatever inane reason you could find to justify being a thief.
Due to all of this "pirating" nonsense, the UCC has been suspended for software products.
That means that you will have a hard time trying to return a game if it is infact defective.
THIS is the one area where pirates really do have a point and corporatists really don't have
a leg to stand on.
If I can't return
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You could substitute 'purple monkey dishwasher' for thief. Whatever you call it, it's someone trying to argue that they should automatically have the rights of something that someone has put in a lot of time, effort and money into without any cost to them.
It's like crashing a wedding party. It doesn't usually actually cost the hosts anything but you're free-loading off of something someone else has paid for against their wishes.
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Which is still wrong. It's a differing act with differing consequences, but it's still wrong.
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Huh? What?
You (or someone) thinks a game has a horribly broken feature A and therefore thinks it's ok to pirate the shit?
Excuse me but just as the quote says, you're trying to rationalize your thiefing.
If you think game is broken piece of crap, don't buy it. It doesn't give magically give you right to ignore copyrights and pirate it.
Legitimate users were told to use GameRanger (Score:4, Interesting)
...the horribly broken multiplayer in Demigod is an example of exactly why many people choose to pirate games rather than pay upwards of $90 (in Australia, equivalent in your local currency) for broken software.
Stardock recommended GameRanger [stardock.com] precisely because of the major multiplayer problems with Demigod's built-in matchmaking. The game's multiplayer itself played just fine through GameRanger. It's safe to say there would have been a lot more refund requests otherwise, and it took some of the heat off Stardock while they tried to address the problems.
They even added a download button for GameRanger on their Demigod page [demigodthegame.com] right next to the Impulse one.
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Re:Ironically... (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe this is flamebait because Brad Wardell has been posting a lot of information about the networking problems they had, how they didn't found them during beta and what they are doing about it.
In the first week, there was an update at least once a day, and even now he's still keeping the players updated about how far along they are, answering questions on the forum and helping players with connection problems.
Re: (Score:2, Insightful)
Was nearly flawless with GameRanger (Score:2)
Is it now possible to play a round without one guy with bad networking destroying the whole game?
Using GameRanger to play Demigod online made this possible from the start. The problems only occurred when you used their matchmaking infrastructure, Impulse.