So DRM doesn't stop piracy... what do you think developers should do instead?

[Legendsmith]

As for a solution, perhaps developing for a hack-proof platform would work.

While they're at it they could also invent a perpetual motion machine and discover a cheap source of infinite energy.

While I'm thinking about it, why are PC games hit harder than console games?

Because PCs don't require special discs (Wii), don't require mod-chipping or modding, can install other software (Disc emulators), PC games are platform native to the tool you are using to crack with... The list goes on.

 

[Volafortis]

I feel that it's far more effective to incentivise gamers to buy the actual game, rather than to try to thwart piracy with DRM. Incentives provide bonuses to actual buyers, which are not given to pirates. DRM will always get cracked, and generally hinders legitimate buyers more than pirates.

 

[AlanShore]

As for a solution, perhaps developing for a hack-proof platform would work.

While they're at it they could also invent a perpetual motion machine and discover a cheap source of infinite energy.

It's not quite as ridiculous of an idea as it first sounds. Although a "hack-proof" platform is impossible, it is possible to redesign hardware to make it much more difficult, which is what the concept of Trusted Computing (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_Computing) tries to implement. However, I can't see it catching on at all as it would effectively make all current hardware obsolete along with other more "moral" objections.

 

[Peta Michalek]

Because PCs don't require special discs (Wii), don't require mod-chipping or modding, can install other software (Disc emulators), PC games are platform native to the tool you are using to crack with... The list goes on.

And most importantly piracy on the consoles is perfectly legal - rentals - so there's not much to gain by getting games completely for free.

 

[Nazulu]

I don't agree with the DRM at all but I don't believe they should do nothing either. Fighting piracy doesn't look like a battle you could win so I think they should have little toys (not exactly toys) that come with the game, or lower the prices a bit since I usually I hear that is the reason why pirates pirate in the first place.

 

[DracoSuave]

Nothing, nobody can stop piracy it's like if you wanted to eliminate Lobby's that corrupt the Government systems around the world... it's just not very liable.

Thats not true if you remove copyprotection in all its forms you eliminate the need for groups. Half the scene would disappear.

Release groups would still be around but with no competition sharing would become friend to friend.

Similarly if you reduce the price of the title to such a low value that it took longer to d/l than to simply buy it piracy would be non-existant.

If a game cost say £5 a game whats the point in copying it ?

If you can only charge £5 a game, what's the point in making it?

The £4.50 of profit. I used to be a very good salesman in another life time,(quite likely before you were born) and back in those days big boxed, manuals (150 pages deep) with maps and colour keycards came with a half dozen floppies (A more expensive medium than CD & DVD BTW) for £20. So kindly explain to me how exactly a quick burn DVD (I can do one in 5 minutes at home I can only imagine how fast an industrial burner operates) with a bog standard box and a 9 pages of A5 cut n paste EULA agreement & epilipsey warning costs £40?


Sell lots of items at a small profit. That way you sell alot.

Sell few items at a high cost and youll sell less items.

Basic Economics.

Well, without getting into too much detail, Lets say you have a choice between selling X items at Y profit, or Y items at X profit, or somewhere in between... assuming X is greater than Y. Which do you choose?

The answer, actually, is somewhere in between. There's a sweet spot with any marketable item where the price is just high enough and the demand just high enough to maximize the profits you get from it.

An analogy is if you had to build a rectangle, and you have only so much material for the sides--how do you maximize the area? Build a square.

In reality tho, the 'cost' of producing a video game is not the cost of the materials, but it's a lot more complex than that. You have to pay the programmers and the sales people and the marketers, and the distributers and...

...it's not a matter of the physical cost of production, when you have to pay people just to -create- the work in the first place.

 

[Tony2077]

good games at a decent price would be nice

 

[Petromir]

Because PCs don't require special discs (Wii), don't require mod-chipping or modding, can install other software (Disc emulators), PC games are platform native to the tool you are using to crack with... The list goes on.

And most importantly piracy on the consoles is perfectly legal - rentals - so there's not much to gain by getting games completely for free.

Not piracy though, I'd be suprised if in many countries they didnt have to buy licensed versions and the like these days.

 

[Treblaine]

Well, DUH.

It's very simple.

Make games that people WANT to pay for.

Piracy: The natural selection of the gaming industry.

Want to pay for?

Excuse me but have you any idea how few people have found so few games (or ANY product) that they insist on paying for them?

Trust me, this will no where near cover development costs, it may work for he music industry where the effort in making music is almost entirely artistic, the cost in MAKING games are very large and unavoidable.

OK, maybe some small indie titles made in spare time will work this way but games that take hundreds of thousands of man hours to make like Crysis, Arkham Asylum or Uncharted... it won't work with them. Maybe a price cut... but I don't see the point in a price cut considering how quickly games devalue in price due to the incessant pace of the games industry (i.e. people could jsut wait 3-6 months and the game will have dropped to half it's retail price).



EDIT OARG!!

This gives me an idea, maybe publishers should use far more target advertising, seek out the customers who are going the piracy route and undercut them with a last minute special offer.

For example if someone puts into google "Batman Arkham Asylum Torrent" then the first google ad could be a special offer selling the game for an extra low price

Or a special edition (extra content, not necessarily in the Pirate cut). Give the pirate every opportunity so kind of like:

"Thirty Five quid? nah, I'm off to pirate that shit"

"no wait! How about £22.99, limited time only..."

"aww, but I could just pirate it for free"

"yeah, but this is the special edition with extra content"

 

[the D0rk One]

Is it me or most of you actually like pirates?

They're cheap, immature, inconsiderate nerds who don't give a toss for the devs' efforts, not romantic swashbucklers hanging from the rigging going "Aharrr matey!" on the high seas. Probably living in their mum's basement. And virgin.

As for a solution, perhaps developing for a hack-proof platform would work. Of course, that would leave owners of other platforms (Windows, 360, Wii, etc) seriously butthurting, but since most of the a fore-mentioned seem to sympathize with the digital "Robin Hoods" they could go and hang out together and talk about how awesome their l33t h4xorz skills are, and how they (probably) don't degrade with honest work (since they're so uberly awesomsorz).

Hmm... Well, at least try to grasp the fact that some gamers (and most of the pirates are those, trust me, I know) just don't have enough money to buy games, but want to stay gamers. For example myself. I have enough money to buy maybe 3 games a year, if it's a good year.
Stop generalizing, I hate it when people do that.
As for the not giving a toss about the devs' efforts, I (and most of the pirates I know) go out of my way to buy games I consider good. I would never, ever pirate a Valve and BioWare game.
OT: What Cali said.

dude, I'm not generalizing, I'm talking statistics based on people I know, and it just happens that you're the only guy I've heard saying he's got some ethics on the matter.

even so, how about those devs you don't like? I mean come on, most make shitty games, it's true, but still, those 'tards try to make a living makin' and selling games. Just because you don't like their game, it's still their work and playing it for free is kinda wrong.

I know most demos are worth crap regarding the games' actual enjoyment value, but maybe you should play the demo 'n try to decide whether you like it or not. If a crappy demo gets you curious enough about it to consider it relevant for your gamer culture perhaps that game's a little bit good. Not memorable but at least a little entertaining. Not worth 60$ but worth waiting to save money for it.

 

[lapan]

There are many solutions, neither of them will completly defeat piracy, but it will most certainly convince more people to buy games:

1. Release a demo of your game, so people can test the game before buying it.
2. Lower the price of the games
3. Release additional content in retail versions, could be dlc, could be gamerelated goodies
4. DONT PUT OVERLY RESTRICTIVE DRM IN YOUR PRODUCT

 

[Callate]

Spam the torrents with their own "pirated" versions of games- a version without jump, a version that quits two levels in, a version that only plays at 320x200... And devote a small team to making sure that those versions are as close to undetectably similar to the "real" pirated versions floating around the torrents.

Ultimately, most piracy is about convenience. If it becomes inconvenient, more of the customers who can pay for a game will do so. The problem right now is that, increasingly, the more inconvenient version is the one they sell you in the store.

 

[Gunner 51]

DRM goes in cycles, for every new one that annoys people, another one has a similar effect on the bakers confidence, without pissing people off.

People only tend to remember the systems that annoy them (hence the common but false belief that game DRM only exists on the PC).

Publishers and developers know they are unlikely to ever beat the pirates, they arent really trying to (no matter what they say, as admitting this would lose their finantial backers). They do have a tendancy to miss judge how much people will put up with, and how much something may affct someones experience.

That said I've yet to find a DRM system thats caused me half as much faf and effort per game as alot of DOS games did, or the tranistions to win 95, or to XP ever did.

Most games these days pratically install themselves comapred to Dos days, set themselves up, and even tell you your current drivers are out of date and may not work. In the DOS days half the games required you to make a disk to boot your PC into a state where you could even begin to do any of that, pre universal internet unless you had a mate to do it for you, or with an almost identical set up to you yo had to do that yourslef.

It is true that people remember the most intrusive of DRM. But it has steadily gotten worse over the past 15-20 years. Back then, you didn't have digital distribution, which made things a lot simpler for the publishers.

I think the financial backers are jumping at nothing and their fear of piracy is over-inflated somewhat. If they aren't willing to invest in a game developer, then that is sad but it wouldn't be my place to tell someone how to spend their money.

Mind you, I've heard tales of DRM installing spyware with the game. Though back in the days of DOS based games, I don't think publishers had the gall or expertise to install intrusive spyware on their games.

Though I must ask what games do you refer of when you speak of these old DOS based games? Are we talking about games from era of Rise of the Triad? (which is about the time I started PC gaming.)

Before those days I was pottering about with an Amiga 500 which was given to me from my Uncle "Dodgy" Darren. (Complete with a large selection of pirated games with it - though I should add that all the games I bought after getting it were all legitimate ones.)

Tornado and Seawolf both required boot floppies on my PC, though as CD games they were erltitvely late on in my early pc career. I cant remeber all of them.

I started gaming on the BBC micro (which makes me sound older than I really am). And games back then came on floppy (and the big 5 and a bit ones that were actually floppy), tape, and in books where you had to type out the game if you wanted to play it.

Wow, that is what I call some pretty old school gaming. Though I do remember using those enormous 5.25 inch floppy disks for the BBC Micros. Though I was only allowed to get on those things at school, I think I must have been about 6 or 7 at the time. (Even the Witch from Granny's Garden used to startle me back then.)

Though back then, I was messing around with an Amstrad CPC 464 back then. Those were the days when I was an unwitting pirate. I used to copy all the cassette games and give the copy to any of my chums who asked for one of my games. In return, they'd do the same for me.

But getting back onto topic, DRM and piracy have both come on leaps and bounds and yet not got one over the other. Like two big kids fighting in the sandbox and not caring whose sandcastle gets knocked over.

 

[The_Prophet]

Is it me or most of you actually like pirates?

They're cheap, immature, inconsiderate nerds who don't give a toss for the devs' efforts, not romantic swashbucklers hanging from the rigging going "Aharrr matey!" on the high seas. Probably living in their mum's basement. And virgin.

As for a solution, perhaps developing for a hack-proof platform would work. Of course, that would leave owners of other platforms (Windows, 360, Wii, etc) seriously butthurting, but since most of the a fore-mentioned seem to sympathize with the digital "Robin Hoods" they could go and hang out together and talk about how awesome their l33t h4xorz skills are, and how they (probably) don't degrade with honest work (since they're so uberly awesomsorz).

Hmm... Well, at least try to grasp the fact that some gamers (and most of the pirates are those, trust me, I know) just don't have enough money to buy games, but want to stay gamers. For example myself. I have enough money to buy maybe 3 games a year, if it's a good year.
Stop generalizing, I hate it when people do that.
As for the not giving a toss about the devs' efforts, I (and most of the pirates I know) go out of my way to buy games I consider good. I would never, ever pirate a Valve and BioWare game.
OT: What Cali said.

dude, I'm not generalizing, I'm talking statistics based on people I know, and it just happens that you're the only guy I've heard saying he's got some ethics on the matter.

even so, how about those devs you don't like? I mean come on, most make shitty games, it's true, but still, those 'tards try to make a living makin' and selling games. Just because you don't like their game, it's still their work and playing it for free is kinda wrong.

I know most demos are worth crap regarding the games' actual enjoyment value, but maybe you should play the demo 'n try to decide whether you like it or not. If a crappy demo gets you curious enough about it to consider it relevant for your gamer culture perhaps that game's a little bit good. Not memorable but at least a little entertaining. Not worth 60$ but worth waiting to save money for it.

Yes, you said all pirates are those things, not the people you know, but anyway let's drop that and talk about what you typed there.
This is where the no-money thing kicks in. As I've said I (and most of the pirates I know, in real life or not) just don't have enough money. 60$ are to me, believe it or not, what 240$ are to you, and trust me, it does feel wrong playing pirated games.
Those games I don't like are the ones I encourage piracy of. Modern Warfare 2 is a good example.
Anyway, sorry for the late response.

 

[cieply]

no drm or developers just won't support pc and we will end up playing strategy games with what 12 buttons or on the wii 4 buttons.

Then people will just start cracking and pirating console games. Life moves on and piracy evolves.

 

[Mr. In-between]

Those games I don't like are the ones I encourage piracy of.

I support this statement because it applies to all media. BrokenCYDE is a perfect example of why music piracy is a good thing.

 

[Voodoomancer]

Well, DUH.

It's very simple.

Make games that people WANT to pay for.

Piracy: The natural selection of the gaming industry.

Want to pay for?

Excuse me but have you any idea how few people have found so few games (or ANY product) that they insist on paying for them?

Trust me, this will no where near cover development costs, it may work for he music industry where the effort in making music is almost entirely artistic, the cost in MAKING games are very large and unavoidable.

OK, maybe some small indie titles made in spare time will work this way but games that take hundreds of thousands of man hours to make like Crysis, Arkham Asylum or Uncharted... it won't work with them. Maybe a price cut... but I don't see the point in a price cut considering how quickly games devalue in price due to the incessant pace of the games industry (i.e. people could jsut wait 3-6 months and the game will have dropped to half it's retail price).

If the game is really good, you'll want to buy it, thus supporting the studio. Plus, purchased copies come with official customer support and other neat things.

EDIT OARG!!

This gives me an idea, maybe publishers should use far more target advertising, seek out the customers who are going the piracy route and undercut them with a last minute special offer.

For example if someone puts into google "Batman Arkham Asylum Torrent" then the first google ad could be a special offer selling the game for an extra low price

Or a special edition (extra content, not necessarily in the Pirate cut). Give the pirate every opportunity so kind of like:

"Thirty Five quid? nah, I'm off to pirate that shit"

"no wait! How about £22.99, limited time only..."

"aww, but I could just pirate it for free"

"yeah, but this is the special edition with extra content"

And very few people would click that, the internet, and it's ads, being what it is.

 

[Ewyx]

stop making games, let the market collapse. Start over.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Spam the torrents with their own "pirated" versions of games- a version without jump, a version that quits two levels in, a version that only plays at 320x200... And devote a small team to making sure that those versions are as close to undetectably similar to the "real" pirated versions floating around the torrents.

Then the pirates would just start glomming to the uploaders who were reliable.