f13.net

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/article.php?id=235596&site=pcg

Are you trying to be the new Gutboy Barrelhouse?

How often is this really a problem?

What?

Post your thoughts.  Drive by linking/quoting is something you shouldn't do.

You reposted a press release from another site with all the relevant bits butchered out of it, the title has nothing to do with the text you've posted, you've added nothing to the topic of debate, and you posted it in "PC/Console" rather than "News".  If you changed that link you'd be indistinguishable from an adbot.

I would like to point out that these two "advantages" were the norm before companies started dicking around with SecuROM and its ilk.  And obviously pirates always get to enjoy these advantages regardless of the DRM system used.

Also, Steam has the same advantages, including the cloud service (note: not sure if this is used for savegames yet, but the infrastructure is definitely there), but it will also let you play your single player games when your internet connection is out.  And yes, this is occasionally important, like the last time I moved; I had a week with no internet and got to spend it catching up on my backlog of single player Steam games.

Originally, typed a remark, but deleted it as I did not want to "prime" the discussion.

Was curious of what F13ers thought of it — I searched to see if there was another thread on the matter, but my search-fu must be weak or it's just not considered a relevant development…

Ubi are shortsighted. This is intentionally adding limitations to their product in order to accomplish absolutley nothing, since it does not limit piracy. Their target audience are experienced computer users who are going to know where to find the hacks and how to use them. Or know a friend who can tell them.
As long as other people are making software that doesn't require internet validation, they're making themselves the inferior product.

I don't want to buy CDs anymore. I also don't want to be treated like I'm a degenerate for buying a game

EDIT: Oh and I should add, I will consider anything at the $20 mark. If you make your game with $50, I'm really really questioning that purchase. This is not the economy or the market to be pulling those price points unless you are a spot-on producer. An example would be Diablo 3. Sell it for what you like.

You know, I'm a little mirfed that this meme where if only they can require online validation, like WoW, then piracy will go away. You really can't require online validation like that unless you're providing a service like a MMOG, thats designed from the ground up to be online multiplayer only. Trying to shoehorn an offline single player game into that role is dumb.

The man represents pirates. The car represents paying customers. The bus represents Ubisoft DRM.

(http://i.imgur.com/zPyuI.gif)

Strangely appropriate.

And thus the day is marked when I will no longer buy any Ubi products for PC, and if there's something I simply must play on PC, I'll retain the services of a fucking eyepatch.

I'm happy to report that none of their products interest me in the slightest.  I have a theory about good products and the postulated need for DRM.  It goes something like this:  If you make something worth buying, people will buy it.

Crazy but true.

Remind me again- is that reason #4 in between "piracy actually makes the retailer more money" and "I buy their T-shirts and go to their concerts", or is it #11 between "Piracy makes me a freedom fighter" and "DRM justifies piracy because it proves the company is mean?"

I mean, SERIOUSLY.  Piracy only affects games everyone dislikes?  If you make something good, that makes it MORE likely to be pirated, not less.  

I keep forgetting that when it comes to piracy, the pretty-damn-intelligent-on-average F13 posters start in with the stammering, paper-thin contortions of logic and rationality of the type that they instantly and concisely excoriate when it comes to any other topic.

And the better a game gets, the more people will pirate it, ergo the ultimate game would have no sales because everyone is pirating it, right?

They're right, you're wrong.  The only cost to pirating is time and bandwidth.  Bandwidth is effectively free for ISP's with reasonable or no caps, ergo the cost of pirating the game is simply the time it takes to find a cracked version of said game, a cost anyone with the slightest interest and no compunctions would pay.  Pirates will steal good and bad games equally, but people who buy will only buy games worth their time.  Therefore, with greater market share and roughly the same amount of pirates the good game will be less pirated than the bad.

Corollary #1: Loading the game with DRM makes the game unenjoyable for people who would otherwise enjoy it.  Less people buy it, the same amount of people pirate it, because they're pirating cracked versions with non-functional DRM anyways.

Corollary #2: Because the cracked versions are more valuable to the buyer for lack of DRM, and cost less to boot, the only thing that prevents a buyer from becoming a pirate when they would actually like to have the game is moral compunctions.  Ergo, when you add DRM to a game the opportunity : cost for the buyer skews more in favour of the pirated version.

Not make something good.  Make something worth buying.  Generally things that are worthy of being bought are also good, but it isn't necessary.  I'm talking about being of value, like Blizzard patching Diablo ten years later, or steam distributing three of the most awesome games in history for fifty bucks seamlessly on my pc while providing me a way to communicate with all my friends who also saw the value in buying. 

Also, I'm not remotely advocating piracy.  I'm merely saying that if your product isn't worth buying it will be pirated, and all the DRM in the world won't stop it.

Your theory is flawed when it comes to many things, including piracy.

A good game without DRM gets pirated at the same rate (and maybe higher) than an ordinary game without DRM. However, there is a chance it will make its money back, whereas the ordinary game doesn't. Some might think of this as a good thing, but it becomes a game of publishers only picking sure things when it comes to what they release, of which sure things include IP-titles (which are likely to sell well, even if they are crap), franchises and sequels. Innovative games that might have borderline chances of financial success (i.e. not going to be a big seller) get knocked back.

Piracy is slowly choking the PC single player game industry, pushing it inevitably towards subscription services that force players to have accounts to log in and play. Ubisoft is following this model, minus the sub fee / set-up cost. Someone will probably find a way to circumvent it and then Ubisoft will respond, going in a patch fix - pirate hack circle, but it's the way things are going.

Now, PC gaming is never going to die, but it isn't a healthy place at this point either. Plus a lot of devs are finding the solution to PC piracy is to release on consoles instead (which have their own piracy issues, yes, but it requires a physical pirate copy whereas PC pirates only require a connection to a torrent site).

No, the better a game is the better the chance it will sell the minimum number of boxes to fall into the 'profitable' side of the spreadsheet. It can still have an 80% or 90% piracy rate and be profitable if it sells enough boxes. Or DLC - another path the PC gaming industry is going down.

For me personally, the more invasive DRM gets, the less it's worth my time. It's essentially the argument that I want the bullshit-and-hassle-free version.

I mean, I say the same shit in every thread where this comes up, from Spore to Mass Effect to whatever. The fact and truth is that I haven't pirated a game in years because I can now afford to buy whatever I want and I also like owning the physical object (there's that thing again) - even to the extent of going back and buying legot copies of games I played and finished years ago in Pirated form.

I do though still retain the opinion that if I do ever really want to play one of these games that are DRM-fucked, I'll download the torrent/pirate version. From Spore to whatever Ubi is pumping out. In practical trerms as opposed to moral outrage standpoint ones though, I just end up either buying the console version or skipping the game altogether when I'd most likely have bought it.

I don't think anyone here is saying that piracy is good for the industry.  The question is if this move by Ubisoft (or maybe DRM in general) is good for the industry.  If companies like Ubisoft are actively pushing people to piracy, by providing a poorer product than the pirated version, while punishing the people who legitimately purchase the product with restrictive DRM, then they are contributing to the problem themselves, and this DRM shit is stupid and they should stop doing it.  You can say "they have to make money" and "it's their property" and whatever else you want, but if it drives away even one customer who would have otherwise bought it, it's a stupid business move, even if it stops a million people from pirating it.  You don't make money from people not-pirating your software, they have to actually buy it.

I'm going to go on the record and say that while piracy sucks, DRM sucks even more. Not copy protection, that's a different beast, and the distinction has to be made.

Copy protection just hinders you from making copies of the game, it doesn't stop you from, say, playing a game, and then giving it to your friend or brother or sister or mother. DRM does.

I've probably easily gone from buying 3-4 games a month purely by perusing the brick-and-mortar shops, to maybe 1 every 3 months by careful planning and tons of pre-purchase investigation. And if there's a game I really really want, but it has DRM (again, not copy protection), then I'll grit my teeth and read books/play eve online instead.

It isn't just piracy that's choking the PC single player game industry, they're happily helping themselves along as well, while decrying "them thar ebul piwatez".

What I find interesting is that older, more mature gamers who have the financial wherewithall and willingness to buy a lot of games like myself and a lot of the f13 crowd are buying fewer or barely any PC games now as a result of the increasingly horrid DRM. Self-fulfilling prophecy, anyone?

I mean, teenagers and college kids are going to pirate shit which they can't afford to buy either way. Same as it ever was. Except for the occasional f13_moral_crusader who never even listened to a mix tape.  :oh_i_see:

fake edit - I guess this is a rehash of what tgr just said. Ah well, bears repeating.

That was sarcasm, a logical extension of Triforcer's theory of "good games get pirated more."

Oh, and just to add to this, when I want to play a singleplayer game, then I don't give a fuck about saving my savegames online. I have 1 gaming rig, that means I don't give a flying fuck whether or not I can reach those savegames from a different PC. By all means, add it as an additional service, but do not require it. I've also seen some copy protection/drm systems use both a disc check AND the possibility for activating online, if you so choose. That way, you get the best of both worlds, and you still have access to the game even if your internet is down as you install/start it.

Case in point, I've missed out on a Call of Duty tournament once, because I'd installed it via steam, told steam to update it, but I hadn't started the game itself, so it hadn't "activated" itself or whatever. The internet connection at the lan party was also down until about 2 hours after the tournament started, at which point it was too late for me to get in. A normal disc check would've gotten me over that hump, as we had all the required patches at a local server somewhere.

It may fuck up only 0.01% of the time, but by god is that 0.01% fucking annoying. It also doesn't matter for pirates, as they've removed it anyways, so the more they go down this path, the worse it is going to be for real customers. And that, I believe, is a bad thing.

Fake edit: yes, what azazel said, the more fiscally stable I am, the less games I've been buying, because they're getting too annoying with the damn protection schemes of theirs. It's a nice self-fulilling prophecy, and it's always "them thar ebul piwates", and never "whoops, maybe we're getting too far ahead of ourselves". Take Spore. EA tried to use 3 activations, reauthed every 10 days. They removed the reauths due to bitching, then they upped the limit to 5. That still wasn't enough to stop people from whining, and now ubisoft is going to stop your game in the middle of a run if you lose your internet connection, because you're one of the üntermenschen PC gamers? And this struck anyone over there as a good idea? Really?

This should be carved into the foreheads of anyone who whines about lost sales due to piracy.

This DRM is stupid and unjustifiable in every sense of the word. The pirated versions of these games with the DRM stripped out will literally be a superior product to the legit versions.

That's about all that really needs to be said.

I guess I'm just lucky that not one of the games they mention as having this new and offensive DRM is one I want to play.  Even without the DRM I'd never have bought any of them.

If statistics are to be believed, then PC gaming is indeed dying, and console gaming seems to be on the rise. One statistics claims that MW2 was downloaded 4+ million times on the PC, and sold 200-300k units, while the console version sold 5+ million, and was pirated 900k times or so. What the statistics isn't taking into account is, while MW2 was "the most popular game of 2009" was also one of 2009's most bitched at games due to a lot of features it had which smacked of consoleitis. Of course it's going to sell badly on the PC, when PC users expect features IW brush off with comments like "the game is not balanced for lean". I was going to buy MW2. I saw that attitude, and I decided not to.

There's only so much piss-taking that PC gamers will accept, and I hit my limit 1-2 years ago. Console gamers appear to have taken up the slack, so PC gamers are getting games with clear signs of consoleitis, 1-6 months launch delay to "curb piracy", heavy restrictions on how the games can be used, and they're still looking at declining sales and going "wtf? damn pirates!"

Does anyone have a clear view of what the difference between PC gamers and console gamers are? My current view is that console gamers are probably younger, with a shorter attention span and less focus on gaming details and more on "the latest hip game" or the social aspects of a game, whereas PC gamers are more into the nerdy bits of a game, be that modding it or just through game mechanics.

I find that the older I get, the more I get into strategyish/simulator games. That market seems to be drying up slightly as time goes on.

Edit: Slightly stoked about the news of Civilization V, but fearing it'll be wrought with consoleitis, rendering it mostly hopeless to play.

I haven't pirated a game since the early 90's, but I would sooner pirate a Ubisoft game now than acquiesce to this ridiculous DRM scheme.  Most likely though, I just won't bother to either purchase or play the game.  I think I read somewhere "the PC gaming industry isn't dead and it isn't dying, it is being stabbed to death by the very people who could benefit from it the most..."

I have a friend who CONSTANTLY pirates game (successful professional as well) and I am always harping on him for not supporting the talent that puts these games out.  To be honest after this I kind of feel like a chump making that argument.

No, you were right to harp on him Amiable. He's not supporting the talent. Just because a publisher makes a stupid, dickish move doesn't mean that your friend is any less of a dick and that the devs aren't still making less money. Let's be honest. Piracy is costing the industry billions and I'd say it's responsible for things like studios being in a weak position which allows EA to move in and buy them out.

Billions?  Really?   I'm not in a position to argue the veracity of that statement but my response is that if that's true this doesn't seem like a good solution.  I mentioned this to my wife, who has never pirated a game in her life and even she said "F-that, I'm not going to ever buy a game with that type of copy protection, I would sooner download an illegal copy."  Punishing the legitimate customer never, ever ends well.  Effectively what this type of protection does is allow the pirates to offer a superior version of the software than the publisher.  It's insane.

Honestly, the fix to this type of thing is either a steam style activator (if you have a net connection, validate every once in a while), which will still get hacked, but at least it's not total bullshit. Or offer frequent online updates that include a security update as well. So encourage randomly checking in online with a copy of the app that isn't cracked to not check in, in order to get content updates.

You're never going to reduce piracy to 0. But you need to try not to default your design to "howabout we just pass the buck to the people who actually buy the game, and make them suffer for it"

I wouldn't be too surprised if it actually does cost the industry billions. Didn't MW2 manage to pull in close to half a billion in its first week, or am I way off my rocker?

As for the steam style activator is, you're still dependent on that internet connection at some point in the chain, which I got a painful reminder of. I was actually somewhat positive to that system up until that point, yet I'm currently only buying games I expect to be shitty and have a very very short lifetime for me. Granted, it's much better than Ubisoft's latest asinine solution, but there's still the problem of being dependent on a 3rd party.

Having said that, if that would be what would be required to get them to unfuck the current batch of consoleitis-infested titles, then I'm almost inclined to say bring it on. Almost. I still can't get completely over the whole "you can't do whatever you want with the game" deal, even though realistically very few games actually keep me interested more than a few weeks. It's the principle of the thing, though.

Is this really a big deal?  I can't think of a time in the past 5 years that one of my computers wasn't on line. 

We here might not exactly be the norm regarding these things.

Yes, I know people that still have dial-up connections. I also know people that have broadband connections with a mandatory disconnect every 24 hours. And there are notebooks where people disable Wireless if they don't need it to extend uptime.

My only PC now is a laptop. It's offline frequently.

edit: this system will also immediately terminate the game if say, your cat plays with your router, your cable goes down, or any router between you and there decides it just doesn't feel your packets should go anywhere for a minute.

The DRM is so far into the paranoid that it's atrocious. I should be able to play the game I bought while on a 3 hour layover. I should be able to play it even if a storm knocks out my internet access for the evening. Honestly, there is no reason a 100% single player game should require five nines of internet connectivity.

That's not really the issue.  It's that the entirety of the network/Internet infrastructure between your PC and their servers (and the servers themselves) needs to completely stable, and if it isn't, you lose all progress back to your last checkpoint.  That's even worse than an MMO, an inherently online game, which essentially saves your state exactly as it was when you lost connection.

Let's take this one step further. You're in the mood for reading a book. You're reading it on a kindle or whatever it will be in the next 10 years. Suddenly the book disappears, because your internet connection just went down. Or the publisher's server is DDoSed.

Would you just shrug it off and try again later, or would you get annoyed because the story was just getting interesting, and you now know absolutely NOTHING about when you might resume reading the book, if ever?

Much like their decision to go with StarForce, this will be overturned when they realize it only made the situation worse.

Utter nonsense.  It's statistically proven that for every person who does not pirate a game, a wizard conjures a gold coin into the developers' purse.

You would've thought EA's foray into online activations and periodic reauthentication would be a hint to Ubisoft that maybe, just maybe, requiring an online internet connection or you'll be dropped out of a singleplayer game might be a bad idea.

Nah. Who am I kidding. :oh_i_see:

Pirates: yarr! we are gonna fuck over the gaming companies!

Gaming companies: Fine! then we are just gonna have to fuck over our paying customers to somehow punish the pirates

Paying customer: fuck you, we are taking the pirates side

Gaming companies: BUT WHY!!!! THEY ARE THE BAD GUYS!

I like Stardock's Impulse as it installs the game I downoad, validates it, and then you can leave it off and not be connected to the net forever more.

Shit happens, hardware breaks, files corrupt, and driver quality is always dodgy.  Check to see if your game runs on your current system setup and you won't have a problem with Steam activation.  In the meantime, you're actually something out of the deal, so you at least have to recognize the fact that Valve knows DRM and authentication is for knobgoblins and is trying to make amends.

Quite a similar story, although trailers are not nearly as bad as DRM:

(http://cache.gawkerassets.com/assets/images/17/2010/02/pirate-vs-pay.png)

Trailers are not nearly as bad, but for the love of god can my main menu button PLEASE fucking work during them? No I do not care about your trailer, and even more than that I do not care for a coming soon trailer for a movie that came out 4 years ago because DVDS AGE YOU MARKETING FUCKS

This is a comment from that site that provides the counterpoint

Wow, people seem to suck at pirating. Here's a better flow:

Search for title on Newzbin -> Click Download -> Burn -> Insert into DVD player

You can have nzb files automatically open in Newsbin, you can have Newsbin automatically download pars, repair damaged files, and extract the content. I'm shocked to learn how some people do it.

But remember kids: Don't do it.

Wow, I just took the time and wrote Ubisoft that they can go fuck themself from now on (with kinder words) and wrote them all the games I bought from them.

It were only 12 in about 20 years of gaming. I now feel better because boycotting them won't hurt me at all.  :awesome_for_real:

Even if that were true (it is NOT anywhere near that hard to grab a high quality rip of a popular movie off bittorrent) it's not a good comparison since you only need to go through the hassle of acquiring the movie once, whereas the unskippable DVD stuff happens every time you play it.  The original chart didn't include the process of tracking down the DVD in a store, opening the goddamn shrinkwrap, peeling off all the stickers...

Dude.  Totally missed the point.  Not flawed in the slightest.  Let me try again.  It's not about the fact that good games still get pirated.  I'm aware.  It's about value.  The quality of the game-play experience is only part of the value.

How valuable is Battle.net?  What about the goodwill generated by Blizzard trough their proven dedication to their products and free updates?  How valuable is Steam?  How valuable was Torchlight at 20$?  I almost hesitate to say, but how valuable was the Sony Station Pass when it had games that were relevant?  Social networks, goodwill, price-pointing/packaging, and I'm sure I could think of more examples of shit you get that isn't part of the game you're buying.  Piracy a huge problem for any of the games associated with those non-gaming things?  Why is that?  It's because having a valuable product is the best DRM.

Attaching internet connectivity to single-player games also leaves the potential to be screwed if the company for whatever reason shuts down authentication servers.  EA recently cut servers for some older titles and titles less than 2 years old (LOTR: Conquest).  These are multiplayer servers, but the same upkeep and maintenance reasoning could be applied.  I don't normally go back to very many single-player games after I have finished them, with a few exceptions.  But the perception of not being able to access a game in the future, which I have purchased, makes me uneasy. 

If it is a game that I must have, then I don't really care about whatever DRM they employ. I am not into raging boycotts.  However,  if it is a game I might want and I am thinking about it, they have probably lost a sale.

Nod, that's a very weak counterpoint since it's pretty much all made up.

In fact, it's so easy to grab a rip of a movie off BT that I've actually downloaded movies that I've already purchased on DVD because I want it in a more convenient format and downloading it is easier than ripping it myself.  Although that was before I discovered Handbrake, which makes the ripping process a good bit more friendly.

This has been a long time coming. Ever since the MMO business model proved so profitable other publishers have tried to find ways to use online play to incentive users of their products to buy a legit copy because of the added value their online services could provide.

"Internet lan servers" on which you could compete against players worldwide, all sorts of ranking systems, unlockable achievements, DLC's, all attempts to secure more paying customers which probably were able to attract a percentage of the playerbase who would otherwise pirate their games but nothing that reduced piracy to the level MMO's did.

DRM has failed, every game is pirated and as the arms race progressed it has become more and more a hassle to legit customers who aren't blind to the easy access pirated games provide. Publishers know that too.

The only model that stands with almost 100% paying customers are the MMO's. The client server model.

And that's why we are seeing the shift to mandatory internet access and great lan franchises who move their next itineration to online play only.

Publishers have seen the light, online play is the chain by which they can bind their playerbase.
Maybe it will be prove to be another futile attempt to stop piracy but it's pretty much the only winning ticket out there right now.
All big houses will move in that direction.

Online play is only a hook to those games that are really popular, though. Every FPS game has Multiplayer deathmatch tacked on, but who really gives a shit about playing online deathmatch in, say, Far Cry/2, The Darkness, etc etc..

Hence mandatory online play.
It makes sense in the publishers view of things. These are the guys who never considered you might not want that rootkit along with every game you bought until it blew up as a PR nightmare in their face and even then.
They have no feeling what so ever for the fact you only want to go online to play the good stuff.
They see the good stuff attracting people online so they'll make it mandatory for everything else they push out.

It sounds like where we're going is that every game will be an MMO in the future-  to what extent the online is necessary for gameplay might vary between games.  In a way I actually like MMOs because then it really doesn't matter which computer I'm on-  like a poor man's cloud computing.  I just pay for the client and access.  Guildwars might be a great example.  They get their DRM and I get my accessibility. 

It's a big deal because if for whatever reason your Internet connection dies while you are playing the game, you can't play the game until your Internet connection comes back up. Any unsaved progress is lost. The cracked version will be a superior product in every way, rewarding the people who circumvent the DRM while abusing the people who pay good money for the product.

Fuck UbiSoft in its earhole. As I said when I blogged this on Friday, the only way to handle the piracy issue is to deal with your customers respectfully - DRM can be done without being a nuisance, such as the way Valve has handled its products through Steam.

I certainly agree that Steam is doing a good job. 

Steam did a great job in providing ease of access to games and providing added value to paying customers.

It however does nothing to prevent the loss of income because of piracy and it costs money to publishers to get their games on there. Steam is a place brick and mortar consumers went to for easy access.
It changed nothing in the 'how do I get all my game copies to generate me money' biz, it's another outlet but not a game changer.

Ubisoft is the first with mandatory online play, others will follow.
Blizzard is going battlenet only, they know why.
We are talking about making every user pay. Facilitating easy downloads while adding perks like steam does, won't change the landscape.

Finding a way to bind every player to your servers will. This shit has only just begun.

And it'd work if console gaming didn't exist.

This will be as stillborn as when EA gave it a shot.  The first class action suit from gamers who buy one of these games and don't know about the DRM will shut it down.

Not every publisher can take that option though. Companies like Ubisoft, EA and Sony can but a whole lot of smaller publishers can't realistically set up that kind of network. Those guys are either going to slap Starforce on everything or take the losses on the chin. I can see a business opportunity for a steam-like authentication service for hire arising in the near future.

Blizzard doesn't need to worry about people pirating single player SC or D3 at all simply because their online play is so robust and that they know it is the reason people are going to buy their games. If people pirate SC2 it only serves as advertising money to get the full version and play on Bnet

Also because SC2's Battle.net integration is pure win.

Diablo 3 comes with B.net, Blizzard's goodwill track record, and a virtual guarantee I will have at least one orgasm while playing.  All this for 50$.  So why in the fuck do I buy Splinter Cell with none of the above for the same price?  The answer?  I don't.  But I do buy Torchlight on Steam for 20$.

The answer doesn't have to be that they add all that stuff.  They just can't charge as much money as the people who do.  It's like they think I'm retarded.  Nobody pays Rolls Royce money for a Hyundai.  Not all games are the same just because in the past you could dictate a price point from on high.  Internet created a path where there was less resistance.  And so it won't work anymore.  But if it wasn't pirates, it would have been something else.  Maybe not now.  But eventually.

Also the idea that small companies can't somehow do the same thing Blizzard did is quite frankly a cop out.  You can do it.  Runic is trying.  It's just hard.

DRM is the Tarkin Doctrine.  "The more you tighten your grip, Tarkin, the more star systems will slip through your fingers."  Google fu is strong with me today.  You should search your feelings, or something.  Don't you have a bad feeling about this?  Oh did I just nerd the fuck out there?

Blizzard was a small company once.

Considering the number of current and next gen consoles with built in internet capability, I dont expect your console to protect you from this kind of shit if the current batch manages to stick to the wall.

It's chicken and the egg thinking though. MW2 is focused on consoles because that is historically where they know they are going to get the best sales from. Plus you've just handwaved away an estimated 93% piracy rate on the PC platform as, "It was because it wasn't optimised for the PC that everyone pirated it."

Here's the issue: everyone recognises that piracy is a problem, but hate pretty much every option that comes up to deal with it. Steam, B.net and some other options do exist as a possibility, but not every developer has the ability to set up such infrastructure (and potentially get whipped by pirates when they try, such as happened for Demigod's launch).

So, the solution for game developers becomes:

1) Develop on consoles, which has some higher initial costs but your end product is less vulnerable to piracy so end returns will be better.

2) Require online authentication of some kind - you can't play the game / play key parts of the game (e.g. online multiplayer) without the correct online signature. MMOs do this in exchange for subs / RMT, Ubisoft is going down this path.

3) Slap up-front protection on the game, with this option being one that has generally showing less effectiveness over time.

4) Make the user pay for extra portions of the game through DLC. That way even pirates might put a few bucks in (or may just hack / copy the DLC when it becomes available too).

5) As little as possible goes to the user for pirating and everything stays server-side, as is the case with browser games.

If there are other options, fill 'em in.

It's nice to go, "Piracy is a problem, but mumble mumble mumble developers need to stop it!" but that completely avoids the problem. DRM is a symptom of piracy, not a cause (and frankly, the "DRM made me pirate this game!" is retarded as an argument). Here's the question: how do you stop piracy being an issue on the PC? If the answer is, "You can't" then we'll continue to see exactly what we've been seeing.

And as for 'value': if a title is worth the value of $20, it's even more worthwhile free.

(Also, I'm not going to separate copy protection from DRM, since CP is just a subset of DRM.)

I'd laugh because I read books on actual books. Reading books on a screen is for dipshits.

And now it's a big company, fancy that.

I'm still trying to figure out how those stickers stop me from jamming a DVD box up my shirt. Know what? The Freddies where I buy my DVDs doesn't even put those electronic tattle tales on them. I could walk out the store with a movie if I really wanted to.

I'm not sure how that sort of anecdotal statement is in itself an "argument" that you can refute.  If historically someone has always paid money for the games they play, but they decide that a new form of DRM lowers the value of the game to the point where they would rather pirate it, and they do so, would you say the DRM in that instance was a "cause" or an "effect" of them pirating the game?  (Hint: the DRM existed before they made the decision to pirate the game, and they don't have a time machine.)

At best you might argue that anecdotes like this are not indicative of broad trends.  Then again, if you see them come up again and again from different people, it seems foolish to dismiss them.

(As for myself, I plan on doing my part to support Ubisoft by not playing their games at all.   :awesome_for_real:)

Brosef.  I like you.  I think your assessments are sometimes a little off though.  I looked up the torrent for Torchlight on pirate bay.  It has 16 leechers.  That's not a whole lot, man.  I know it's not a tipple A title, and wasn't largely advertised outside of nerd HQ.  But uh.  Just sayin. 

I think it may just be that our versions of what needs to happen in order to curb rampant piracy may be different.  That's all.  I think that game developers need to chin up to the bar that Blizzard and Valve have set, or I will have many lulz at their expense.  You think that isn't realistic, so it's okay for them to keep trying to trick people into buying things for 50$ that aren't worth 50$.

So maybe I'm ignorant, but what's to stop pirates from creating a hack to get around the online system that UBI proposes?

Nothing.  But they have to do SOMETHING!!!111

So, this effects one game I was going to get on a console anyhow and one game I might buy when it's super cheap, again on a console.  I'm not going to boycott a company out of principle.  If someone made a true Shadow Hearts 2 follow on (not the third game, I pretend it doesn't exist) I'd play it even if it required the sacrifice of a kitten as DRM.

Bottom line to me doesn't seem to be changing much.  Woo hoo.  Continue equivocating everyone.

Piracy costs billions my ass.

That theory buys into the bullshit assumption that any significant proportion of the pirates would have bought the product if they hadn't pirated it.

I'm not suggesting that makes piracy ok, but billions my ass.


And ubi can do without my business. I'm not always online, and I don't feel the urge to explain this deviant behaviour to products that I own. I doubt ubi shareholders will be crying themselves to sleep over this, but there you go.

You're misreading me. I specifically did not buy MW2 because it was more expensive than normal PC games, for less SP content (5 hours? come on), it was missing tons of features the COD product line has had for years (lean, modabillity, console, dedicated server, although a bit of testing by PC users showed that it was indeed in the game, it was just "hidden"), it was the first game I've seen that ended up actually having a replicating virus, etc etc etc. Out of the people I LAN with twice a year, 30 out of 50 have specifically said they will not be buying it due to all of these issues, and they do not show up in the statistics. Unless they went and pirated the game anyways, of course.

I've had games such as Spore which I've wanted to buy, but I avoided buying them due to the activations. Turns out that was a blessing in disguise, as it apparently was a pretty shit game. MW2, however, is the first game that's caused me to go from holding a developer in high regard (granted, MW1 was a tad short, but it was still excellent, and I'm still playing CoD1/2 when I fancy a return to the good old days), to swearing that I'm not going to buy another game of theirs because of how they designed their game.

And that was my point. I did not just handwave away an estimated 93% piracy rate, I said that it being one of the most bitched at games didn't help. The piracy rate is probably exaggerated, but it's still pretty damn significant, and it's a very good indication that PC gaming is dying. And not just due to piracy, although that's what's always being touted as the reason as it's something they can easily point to. It's much harder to point to numbers and say "this many didn't buy our games because they hate our guts" or "this many didn't buy our games because they think they look like shit games".

As far as I've figured out, most PC gamers are for the most part older gamers with sizeable wallets. I have hundreds of games lying about my apartment that I've bought over the last 10-15 years, and maybe 5 of them are from 2009. I should make a graph of how many games I bought over the years, I'm pretty sure it'll nosedive hard sometime in 2008/2009, and it hasn't been replaced en masse by console games. The reason behind this will vary from gamer to gamer, but for me it's been the fact that PC games are getting shit-tastic with the consoleitis AND the ever-constricting DRM.

I'd call that a mistake, as DRM isn't just a superset of CP, but I'm not going to argue the point. It'll probably be moot in 5 years time anyway, when every game is an "MMO". Oh joy.

Correct. Nothing.
At that point, the pirated version of the product is superior to the legit one.
When this is a reality, as it is now becoming on many titles, I stop buying, and as I've said, if I really want to play it, I'll play the superior version.

How exactly do you imagine piracy stats for godawful console ports come to exist? That's right, they are pulled directly out of someone's ass.

You might as well go into the mmog forum and start posting 'Hey guys, I found this chart by some guy called Bruce...'.



Consoles games sell more units and will continue to sell more units because the boxes that run them are fucking cheap. And tbh, you get what you pay for.



TAG Heuer sell a shit load more watches than Rolex. Rolex watches get pirated far more often than TAG Heuer. Guess what, nobody is dying don't be a bunch of fucking drama queens.

Also there is little to no evidence that any DRM short of game-runs-on-servers has any impact on piracy, and little to no evidence that piracy replaces sales to any substantial degree.

I've been trying to stay out of this argument but that is a pretty terrible analogy. People buying knock-off Rolexes are not in any way a lost Rolex sale, because those want a real Rolex will buy one and won't even consider a fake. Someone buying a fake Rolex for $20 from some guy on the beach is not about to walk into a jewellers and drop a grand or so. On the other hand (and this ties into your second point), if people weren't able to pirate a game then are youreally saying that a decent percentage of the people who wanted to play it and would have pirated it normally wouldn't buy it instead?

Um, didn't you just agree with what he is arguing? The guys that aren't buying a real Rolex aren't exactly a 'net loss' for Rolex?

Furthermore, while yes, hypothetically if pirating games were impossible then sales of mediocre games might be higher, then going on to claim that wanting to play equals a guaranteed purchase - is a bit of a stretch.

To use the much-maligned MW2: i wanted to play it, until i found out about issues x/y/z... so i have not bought it, nor have i pirated it (because frankly it isn't worth the bandwidth). More then that, i would probably go on to tell anyone who asked me "Is it worth buying? No, it's a very average game, think twice about it." This isn't a lost sale now, is it?

No, I'm pointing out that the market for luxury watches and computer games are not at all analogous.

As was EA.

Blizzard grew by working its franchises heavily, as did EA. Both have been successful in refining a formula that gamers buy. B.net was innovative, back when such things were seen as being too expensive to do, but I am interested to see what Blactivision does about piracy with their next releases. Maybe nothing. Maybe a lot.


PC games have a bigger PC install base to sell to and often have cheaper titles, yet still don't typically beat console sales. They generally don't even come close. Sure, there are system spec issues, but that also makes consoles easier for people to use and game on compared to PCs.

And yes, I can't say that every single pirated copy of a title is a lost sale, but it's pretty safe to say that some of those people who pirate a title would go out and pay for it if they couldn't get it from Pirate Bay. There's some evidence in titles that manage to avoid day 1 pirated copies see better sales than titles that don't (but it is hard to work out for sure, given that not every title is equal when it comes to sales). BioShock remained uncracked for 13 days iirc post-launch and had fantastic PC sales. Would it have had the same sales without DRM? Don't know.

Going back to the OP: I don't think Ubisoft's system is going to work for long. Someone will crack it. But the reality is that publishers / distributors have to go down these paths in an attempt to reduce their potential losses. The alternative is to 1) ignore it and hope you keep releasing PC games that make back their million dollar investments or 2) go find something less risky to do with that money.

... I'm not sure if I'm the gasoline or the firewood for this particular argument.

From a commerical viewpoint it shouldn't be hard, do you get more sales by having more DRM? Customers can and will tolerate a certain level of it. At some point you're going to start losing customers. Anecdotally it seems that we passed that point long ago. The sales numbers appear to be backing this up.

The thing I don't get is that video game piracy is just a modern form of a black market. Don't people learn from the lesson of the past? If the black market provides a far superior good don't be surprised when people shift to black markets or to alternative goods (consoles).

I'm unconvinced that there are any statistics that show launch-day DRM works. It's just not an easy relationship to prove. I don't think there's any evidence that conclusively shows DRM works in any form, AFAIK no one's bothered to collect sufficient data to indicate anything.

I'm pretty certain you can say that having launch-day DRM will sell a few copies, there are a lot of impatient people who need gratification NOW DAMNIT.

Speaking of stats:
So 3.85 million buys MW2 for the 360 the first day it's available, and that number rises to 5.5 after the first week.

Interestingly, if these figures are correct, then the PC version sold 800-900 units on the first day alone, and that figure is much more in line with what I would expect, and probably peaks at over 1 million after the first week (although this is conjecture at this point).

And if you even get that figure up by 1% by preventing launch-day/week piracy, then it's still another 6 million dollars for the PC version alone. So it's not hard to see why they want to do it. It's just such a pity they have to go so far to try to maximize that that they're driving away players in the process.

There is a 'golden period' for major releases where there's a lot of added value from playing at the same time as everyone else even for single player games. If you're interested in playing ME2 for example, then playing at the same time as all of your friends and being able to join in the conversations about it is a benefit that you miss by not being able to play it from launch. I'd guess that if you have such a game and there is no day 1 piracy, then a lot of potential pirates will cave and buy it for that reason alone, this number increasing the longer that it takes for the crack to arrive.

Sure, but the flip-side is that in having DRM strong enough to not get cracked immediately, how many potential customers do you alienate? My feeling is that in the long-term you'd lose customers whilst gaining some short-term. I obviously have no stats to back this up but lots of anecdotes  :awesome_for_real:

Literally the only way to ensure that is to prohibit the crackers from getting access to the executable prior to launch day, but that again means using some 3rd party equipment like steam or the like, which again means you can end up with being unable to install/run the game (HL2 launch, anyone?).

And you're still facing the potential problem of disloyal employees who get hold of the real executable ahead of launch day and send that file to the crackers, and you're back to square 1.

If the PC market is killed, then piracy of console games will become just as ubiquitous.  Yes, it's easier to pirate PC games, so that is where a majority focus.  When it's their only option though, the people who put the real effort into cracking these things will just find a new challenge in the consoles.

We've seen this in every market that has fought piracy.  Has anything besides iTunes (selling music cheaply and easily without headaches) worked at curbing it?

OF COURSE THEY WOULDN'T.  Pirates pirate every freaking thing that comes along, they do it because its there and its easy not because they really really wanna play that one specific game.  THIS (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jP_mhunSQzE) is the best real representation of what a pirate is like.

I disagree with that. Who are these video gamers who apparently do not care what they are playing and have no particular interest in specific titles?

Me back when i was a broke highschool and college student, every guy i knew who also downloaded games, everyone i talked too in the pirate circles.  There's no reason to be picky when you have access to every single game available.

Edit: to make my point clearer: pirates download EVERYTHING, there's absolutely no reason NOT to download everything.  That's where the idea that downloads are lost sales fall flat on its face.

You forgot something else - consoles just work. The concept of consoles is all about sticking a disk in the tray and playing the goddamn game. There's little to no futzing with installations, configurations, drivers and all that other bullshit. That has a number of knock-on effects: 1) any idiot can play games on a console, so your potential market is bigger; 2) since the console manufacturer has a rigid QA testing certification process in addition to your own, you can save money on QA or have more reliable QA (though obviously not perfect); and 3) development times can be shorter because you are dealing with a minuscule set of hardware configurations as opposed to the bazillion different hardware/software combinations that exist on the PC platform.

PC gaming isn't "dying" - it's returning to what it should be, a dedicated hobbyist market. That means it is a niche market and should adjust its business model accordingly - make niche products, investigate non-traditional delivery mechanisms (which means give up on brick & mortar stores completely for digital delivery) and become a part of the market community. Piracy isn't driving PC games to this point, the 3 effects of console games are. If piracy is destroying PC gaming sales, why does a group like Stardock do so well with a niche product like Sins of the Solar Empire that contains no DRM and is widely pirated? Why? Because the developer doesn't treat his customers like criminals. He had a respectful relationship with them by offering a good product that did what it's supposed to, with few bugs, offered through a convenient service for a fair price without any hassles.

The MMO model is something completely different, and Ubisoft's DRM offers nothing like an MMO in extra functionality for the inconvenience.

Right but you haven't addressed the point in my original post, if you couldn't pirate ME2 for example for a while after launch might some people who would otherwise pirate it actually buy it? I believe the answer to that is 'yes' which is where the argument that piracy doesn't affect sales falls flat on its face.

Some? sure, a small percentage would.  I don't recall anyone saying pirating has ZERO effect on sales, but people who can have anything they want are going have very different habits than those that have to pay through the nose for the same privilege. 

Lies. This is what being a pirate is like. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3AzpByR3MvI&feature=related)


No, I'm not saying a decent percentage wouldn't have bought it. I'm saying the vast majority of people who pirated it would not have bought it.


Actually this is pretty much true for the vast majority of PC piracy events.


EDIT: Actually Haemish's post wins this thread. Though the 'just work' and 'cheap to develop, cheap to buy' elements are far more important than the QA thing.

Also, when you were 12 years old, and used to tape shit off the radio, how much of that would you have gone out and bought with your imaginary money if you didn't own a tape deck?

I will note that I purchased Sins of a Solar Empire, a game that remains unopened and untouched on my bookshelf to this day, solely because of Stardock's DRM policy concerning Galactic Civilizations II.  They got an extra random sale out of me because of the lack of DRM.

And I will confirm that back in my college pirate days (PS One games) I did pretty much download any and everything, regardless of if I was going to play it.  I found an old CD wallet from that time while cleaning out the garage and there were some interesting choices in there.  I doubt pirates have changed much.


Which then leaves the argument, is piracy effecting sales to such a grand degree that such draconian measures are needed?  That is the part that is difficult (or perhaps impossible) to quantify.

Cool analogy, bro.

It's a moot argument to say that piracy reduces sales. It obviously reduces sales in terms of the people who could've and would've bought it but pirated instead. But there are so many other factors that we can argue over it's actual effect as long as we want. What is pretty explicit though is that publishers are continuing to funnel PC games into different markets, and whilst they might win with some (WoW!), I don't see "having a good constant internet connection" as a good market.

I think you're missing the big picture here. Piracy is about picking the low-hanging fruit. As long as there are so many diverse titles available for free, you won't see a drastic increase in sales just because one game manages to remain uncracked, since the pirates are kept entertained by other, more easily cracked games and largely don't feel a need to play every major release. For example, if BioShock 2 proves "uncrackable", I might download Dead Space instead. If Civilization 5 is uncrackable, I might play Settlers 6 instead, and so on. In most cases I can find a cracked, good-enough surrogate for that uncrackable title. Really, the vast majority of games needs to be uncrackable to make overall sales pick up significantly, not just the odd major release here and there, and even then I don't think that individual titles would benefit that much, since the sales would be normalized across major/minor/indie releases. The industry on a whole certainly would benefit, though.

I'm not going to wade into the shithole. There are valid positions on both sides.

I just want to point out that Steam/GOG/Impulse is putting a new spin on things. I certainly nod to Iain's point about that chat factor (a constant topic here at the library, speeding up processing time to get bestsellers out so people can discuss them), I would rather be able to discuss whatever titles with you guys while they're relevant. But in general I can't go around buying retail price games for that convenience.

Normally that meant a lost sale with me, because unless the game was really good, it would get picked apart and I'd be the wiser and not buy the title. With stuff like the steam xmas sale, I bought more games over that period than I have in years of gaming.

I guess my point is, maybe the compromise is to make shitty, intrusive, activated, whatever DRM for the hot period to get that initial sales rush and stave off the inevitable piracy. Then in a year or two, dump it on a digital distro, drm-free. Also, Stardock's method is pretty cool: digital download with a mailed hard copy, best of both worlds.

I think there's a way through the morass of opinion on both sides to have a better world for gamers.

But then


:(

I meant debating whether piracy or DRM is evil.

They are both evil, the difference is one fucks us and the other fucks the stupid corporations that fuck us.

(http://www.xbox360bundleguide.com/images/2.jpg)

 :why_so_serious:

I think this is correct, yes. I'd actually say a significant number of those people wouln't buy it instead, rather than "decent".
There are a few exceptions, but the majority of those are super-AAA titles (GTA etc), and even then, I'd go with "decent percentage".

In my experience, the biggest pirates of games fall into two categories

1) Kids (and their parents). Usually between 10-23. They buy games when they can, but with little disposable income and a lot of free time,they can play more than they can pay. Their parents (Joe and Josephine sixpack) aren't gamers, so they'll put forth an investment of $1-200 to get a playstation or Xbox etc chipped so then they save the money later on their kids' games. Note the parents don't give a flying sideways fuck. These guys don't usually own a killer or even decent gaming PC, but if they do, rest assured that the 14+ year old knows how to torrent. This mentality can last into the 30's (at least) but when it does, you've got guys who just don't give a fuck, and probably won't be willing to pay for much. Ever.

2) "Collectors". I've known a few of these guys. They pirate everything in sight. While they play a few things, their main objective is to have a copy of everything.


Now this is coloured both my my own experiences growing up and the fact that I'm a teacher (and I've taught Primary, Secondary, Special P-12). And I guess my experiences, anecdotal as they are can easily be brushed aside, because after all, the game buying habits of 10-18 year old males (and their parents) has little interest or significance for the game industry..  :why_so_serious:


I get ticked off, because as a likely purchaser, I get fucked with the harsh DRM while the guys above me in this post are just going to sidestep it with the cracked version. Most of them were not going to purchase your game anyway.

In theory this is true. In actuality I disagree. My sister and Mum own PCs, but they're not likely to buy any games. As I mentioned in my other post, many "household" PCs can't run games for crap anyway. My #2 and #3 gaming rigs (aging by a few years, but not ancient) can't run Borderlands or half the shit I play.

OTOH, every kid has at least one console.

Actually, reading your second sentence, I'm not even sure what your point is...?

What Threash said. Through a series of posts. As well as many others in reference to wallets full of PS1 games, etc etc -That would be everyone I knew who had a console in those years when we were in our early 20s.

woot! triple post! time to go to work!

Does your average PC gamer (if that phrase even exists any more and they haven't all moved to consoles) know what DRM is?  I can see Ubi taking a punt that those of us in the know are a small vocal minority, and the average gamer will just buy a copy of Splinter Cell 6 or whatever, stick it in their PC, and play. 

Broadband is pretty common these days, so I can see someone in Ubi saying that its worth pissing off a small subset of potential purchasers, and the very small group of purchasers who don't have broadband (hey, we got their cash already - some of those probably wont be bothered asking for a refund), to enable less piracy.

And on a tangent, I have a mate in his mid-30s who is a TV show/movie pirate.  And he doesn't know what half of the stuff he downloads is, and will probably never watch it.  So it aint just kids who download everything they can.

Late to the thread, but as an example (and I'm not saying this is the rule, just illustrating the mentality), a friend of mine pirates basically any game/movie/tv show he can get his hands on. Recalling back a few months, he had mentioned he pirated Assassins Creed II. Being personally interested in this title, a week later I asked him how the game was. He said, "Oh, I haven't played it," to my great surprise. He was merely a habitual downloader with an addiction of sorts. I'd guess 95% of the games/movies he pirated he never actually played, or at the most played for 5 minutes (basically verifying the title worked). Even games he seemed to want to play he never finished or even engaged in for very long.

My theory, in his case, is there is a perceived value of 0 for the title in question, whereas when I purchase a title I have anywhere from $30 - $60 invested, and I dearly want to get my money's worth (hence my Platinum obsession). You get what you pay for, oddly.

I can't respond if this hurts the industry or not, but I wanted to illustrate this unusual circumstance you mentioned.

Honestly, I think it is.  When I was a kid I taped music I liked off the radio, or from borrowed recordings.  When the Internet and Napster came around I downloaded it instead.  And when I finally got old enough to have a job and money to spend, I started buying CDs of all those songs so I could have "legit" copies with nice cases.

My history as a consumer of video games has been very similar; most of the PC games I played as a kid were bootleg floppies and/or installed from borrowed media, but as I started to have my own spending money I started actually buying games I liked.  I remember one year I spent all the money I got for Christmas on a brand new copy of Doom II (which I'd already had a bootleg copy of) because it was my favorite game and I thought it was worth the money.

Nowadays I buy more music and games than I have time to play anyway, but IMO if like me you spent your childhood photocopying sections of library books you liked or making mix tapes or borrowing your friends' install disks, you're not on very firm moral ground for telling today's youth that they're destroying the industry by not spending their nonexistent money.

edit:  :oh_i_see: Best not to get drawn into this.. in any fashion.

Piracy is ok because you wouldn't have bought what you pirated?  That's Stammering Reason #- 9, I believe-, par for the course. 

What I like is the NEW contention that pirates don't even play what they pirate and have no interest in it, its just for their collection, which I haven't heard before- its just for their gallery, with CDs encased in portrait frames in the style of the Second French Republic while the pirate and his fellow conoisseurs twirl snifters of brandy in their red velvet chairs and comment on the animations in the Bioshock '07, and the oakiness of the Wolfenstein '01.  Totally harmless!

Oh yay. Trolling. :awesome_for_real:

I was wondering when that'd appear.

The average PC gamer that can run most of these newer games?  Yes, they probably know a great deal about DRM.  And those that don't?  The first time their single player game won't play because they weren't connected to the internet will send them running back to consoles.


Or a CD spindle full of random games they *might* play, movies they *might* watch and music they *might* listen to.  Because to them, shit, it's free.  You've never taken a freebie in a store that you wouldn't care about otherwise?  And then immediately throw it away?  I spent a summer giving out detergent samples.  Half the people who took them probably never even used them, they just got thrown away or put in their car.

So let's not be obtuse.  People do stupid shit when it's free.  And if you have no clue what I'm talking about, then you're step removed from the human condition I guess.

Note:  When I tried to post this the first time, my wireless connection went down.  Twice.  And thus, no Splinter Cell PC for me.  So there are many different reasons you can come up with, but the most important to me, is I cannot play a game I would've payed for, because of this specific DRM.  I'm sure, between the games I have on Steam, some of them have DRM, but none of them would prevent me from playing.  And so I haven't cared.  This will.  So to me, your justifications are moot at best.

Piracy of console games is fairly widespread, particularly in certain countries - Brazil, Indonesia, the Phillipines, etc. There you can buy physical copies of console titles (I believe PS3 titles are now making their way to the streets) off street corners or in small shops.

However, it is still harder to do because you can't just log on somewhere and download whatever you want - you need to actually have a physical alteration to the console plus have the physical disks to player the games (or a HD with everything pre-installed). If PC gaming died off, I'm sure there would be a push towards it, but it wouldn't be nearly as convenient as it is with PC titles.

Oh, and while we are recounting who we know who pirates - I've got a friend who still pirates all his music. To him, it's not even worth $1 a song to buy it when he can get it free. Never underestimate the power of free.

This is an issue as well - those who learn to pirate young and just keep doing it even when they have the money. Why? Because then they can save their money to spend on other things. Again, I know quite a few people who do that - movies, games, music, whatever.

So I don't triple-post: DRM actually has two separate issues - 1) how much it actually impacts on the user and 2) how much it is perceived to impact on the user, or its potential to impact. I played BioShock and never had any visible indication that DRM existed on that title. However, I swerved off buying STALKER: Clear Sky in part because of hostile DRM warnings. Things like SecuROM had really bad press, but it may be that if issues don't exist with Ubisoft's online systems then people start to accept it as just being there.

This is the worst neckbeard orgy EVER.

Luckily his imaginary interlocutors always make it unnecessary to craft a reply, as he's perfectly capable of carrying on without any help.

This one time, while playing Mirrors Edge, I got a BSOD.  Damn that Microsoft Windows XP for being required to play a game!
This one time, I bought a game, and it wouldn't play because my video card wasn't strong enough.  Damn them for requiring a video card one generation newer than the one I had!

I couldn't play those games I paid for!

 :uhrr:

Point being, requirements change.  You either adapt to those requirements, or you don't.  Its your choice, and the studio will feel it and do whatever they need to rectify it or they won't.

Fair enough.

Seems assbackwards to lose a sale over something that will subverted anyways.

Moot point though.  Like I said, this will be stillborn.  This isn't even near the Spore DRM, and that was drubbed right out of town for very little reason.  Or they'll just stop doing PC ports after awhile.

Some of us read when we were young.


Others played consoles.


And some ate lead paint.

I haven't seen anyone mention this, so forgive me if it has been discussed, but if you look at the latest industry trends this may very well have very little to do with piracy....

Ubisoft's argument is that this is needed so you can save your games in the cloud.  While that's a bullshit *requirement* for a single player game, it also alludes to certain things, such as a requiring an account with the game registered to your account.  That's a big deal because that means that once you tie your game to your Ubisoft account, you cannot resell the game because you will require to have the key tied to your account.  So not only do you buy a single player game that maybe lasts for 20 hours (for $50+), once you are done with it you cannot resell it at all, you are stuck with it even though you have the physical box.

This isn't even like ME2 or Dragon age, where used copies will have to pay $15 extra.  They could easily tie this system down so reselling is totally impossible (and making every one of their other games that way as well).

Now I do realize this is the case with Steam in general, but there are differences.  So far (as far as AAA developers are concerned) the only developer afaik to completely lock their software to steam accounts only is Valve itself. 

I think that's the true nature of this DRM, and it makes it even more ridiculous.  I prefer to buy all my games used precisely because I don't find most games worth the $50 price tag, I tend to buy them for $20-30 (especially single player games with little replay value, aka AC2).  This means I will be waiting a good 1.5 to 2 years until AC2 is a reasonable price, and by then why would I care.  Anyone who is like me (and i know i'm not alone in my price points) will either pirate or just not buy the game.  Either way, Ubisoft loses out.

Someone who buys a used game and someone who pirates or otherwise does not buy a game earn the publisher/developer exactly the same amount of money - zero dollars.

Why should they care whether you will play the game, if you're not going to purchase a copy from which they actually earn money?

....er, because when a copy of the game was originally purchased, they received money.  piracy and a used goods market aren't the same thing. 

Most pirated media started off as one guy's purchased copy as well, does that make it okay?   :awesome_for_real:  

Game publishers lose HUGE amounts of money to used game sales.  If you go into your EB with $50 in your hand planning to buy a $50 new game and they talk you into buying a $40 used copy, that's a much more real $50 loss for the publisher than if some college kid downloads it. You obviously would have given your money to the publisher if not for the used option, EB is not going to buy a new $50 copy to replace the used copy they sold you (more likely they'll buy it back from you for $10 and resell it to someone else), and you're not likely to "upgrade" to a new copy if you already shelled out money for the game.

What if this model was applied to cars, houses, etc.…?

Buying a used home? That's a loss for the developer. Used car? GM, Toyota, Ford, etc.… takes it in the shorts!

Of course I'm being silly, as you really don't "own" your game software — you pay a fee for the privilege of a license that temporarily (and according to the EULA, can be yanked on a whim) permits you to access said software on your machine (which I guess you do own this, but just about all the software you put on it you don't, so I guess you just own a hunk of metal and/or plastic) for a limited time and all rights belong to the game publisher.

God bless Richard Stallman.

Naum, when you contradict everything you say like that and moot your own analogy you can save everyone else a lot of time by just not posting it.

In the meantime, Triforcer attempting to rationalize used games is warming the cockles of my black heart.

I don't believe people are saying it's "okay". They're stating that every pirated copy does not = a lost sale, and that the truth is far from it.

Second point, "new" contention. Not new at all. I've known people like that since my first days with the Commodore 64 and throughout the passage of time since. Happy to enlighten your sheltered existence, though.  :awesome_for_real:



You missed "most of SE Asia and China including Taiwan and HK". In the more third-world m=countries you mentioned, I'm sure a trip down to the corner store is actually easier than downloading the games. You live in Australia, you know how shitty our broadband is. There's an Indian Grocery store about 3 blocks from where I live that does burnt movies (to people they know). I've never been there, but a few of my students go there. If I wanted a burnt copy of something new and somewhat mainstream, and wanted it NOW, it would actually be faster for me to go down there and buy it for $5 or whatever then to download the 750mb-1.5gb file over 4-14 hours.

Physical alterations to consoles is a simple enough affair, and is also pretty much a 1-time investment.



There's an Aussie comedian who has a bit on that - "'You wouldn't steal a car..' Well, sure, but if I could get a friend to burn me a copy...."

pffhhh.. you're easily impressed.

This thread is nothing compared to f13 neckbeard threads on SWG, the NGE, COLLISION DETECTION, The Star Wars Prequels, Lord of the Rings: Book vs Film, and Tanks vs Mechs.


It's basically a thread we've done a bunch of times before, just redux. We'll see this thread again a couple of times before the year is out, too.

War.
War never changes.

I don't think anyone is saying they are the same.

Only that piracy stats on lost revenue are bullshit, and the publishers are just as focused on destroying right of first sale as they are cracking down on piracy, because the secondary market costs them far more - used buyers are much more likely to buy direct from the publisher if they can't find a second hand copy (though probably still less than 50% likely) than pirates are to buy from anyone if they can't pirate.

Who cares if someone buys a used copy instead of a new copy? It's common for books, I don't see people bitching about people selling (or hell, GIVING or LENDING) a book to others, what makes games so damn special that rules regarding "THOU SHALT NOT RESELL" are actually even considered being allowed?

I guess we'll have to make libraries illegal as well, as it's obviously detrimental to new book sales.

:uhrr:

edit: additionally, some of the youths who are on a budget buy a game, play through it, resell it to EB and buy another new game. That sale might have been lost if they couldn't recoup at least some of their money once they'd extracted their entertainment from the game, and everybody wins.

The main difference with physical books is that there's a noticeable difference in quality between a new book and a book that's been read a hundred times, and hence a strong incentive to buy new rather than used.  What makes digital media special is that it doesn't tend to degrade with use and it can be duplicated with no loss in quality, so there is frequently very little benefit to buying a new copy.

I dp agree that if letting more than one person use one piece of media without paying separate fees to the copyright holder is intrinsically evil we should be torching those commie libraries first and foremost.

Not every used book is read 100 times. I've often bought used books when I were younger, because I couldn't afford new books, and I didn't want the pressure to read something within a certain period of time as I would've been if I borrowed the books from a library. I've also resold books because 1) I'd read them once and had consumed that story, and/or 2) I had to clear up space for new books. This is normal. It's even environmentally friendly.

Hell, I've even given books away because I were done with them and I didn't need cash at the time. If the book publishing industry were to treat its reading customers the same way as the gaming industry, then THAT would be illegal/useless as well. And I guess giving away or reselling my DVDs will have to be illegal and made impossible as well, since that's obviously not degrading in quality either. We'd best get those activation servers up for those DVDs as soon as possible, to thwart this blatant stealing of companies' money.

Oh, and just for the record, yes, I'm being ironic. I believe that the first-sale doctrine either applies or should apply to games and programs, as long as I sell or give the physical box it came in. If I make a copy of it, then that's copyright infringement, and that's a whole other ballpark, and is actively prohibited, whether what I'm copying is a game, program, book or a car.

As long as pirating is easy, people will do it. All the DRM in the world doesn't make it any more difficult for the common user once the game is cracked and distributed. The only way to combat that, is to make the legit version just as easy and convenient.

Steam and iTunes solved this shit years ago. I own games thanks to Steam that I wouldn't have normally purchased OR pirated, it was just that cheap and easy. iTunes is the same thing, I could go find that song/album on the intertubes, but fuck it, only a dollar on iTunes and it's right here.


It's either that, or be Blizzard.  :grin:

You have an interesting definition of 'solved'. Piracy is still a huge issue in both games and music. And I'd argue that both the music and games industries are only going to support a limited number of these solutions. Apple and Valve have 'solved' it in so far as they have carved a profitable business in offering those services. Could Ubisoft match Valve's Steam offer? Probably not.

The issue is less with game re-selling and more that major distributors are also being the competition in game sales. Second hand bookstores typically don't sit inside your local Borders. Plus video games have such a short shelf life anyway. Any title more than 6 months old gets viewed as something of an antique.

That said: I own my games and I don't resell them. Broke my heart when I had to go through my old Amiga collection, throw out the boxes with no disks and then sell the rest on eBay.

Maybe I'm completely clueless but as far as i know you can't pirate steam or itunes stuff can you?

Everything that's going to be decoded into a human-parseable format is pirateable, the question is just how much work is involved.

This.  But what's made Steam and iTunes so successful in the face of free alternatives is that it's more convenient to buy it from those services than it is to pirate it.  Which sort of pokes a hole in the "everyone just wants free shit and the only solution is to make everything as difficult as possible for paying customers" theory IMO.

Steam also knows how to market things and run sales to encourage purchasing.

Steam and iTunes make it drop dead easy to get stuff you want.

And iTunes dropped the DRM a while back.

OK. Here's another metaphor.

You own your house. But everything in it (TV, fridge, furniture, etc.…) you "license" to use and that can be revoked (and removed) on a whim.

Or your car. You own the hunk of metal, but the ignition, radio, electrical/computer system, etc.… is "licensed" by a provider that can disable all on a whim, as specified in the small print when you "purchased" the product.

Point was, you don't "own" your games (not anymore). Read the small print in the EULA — you purchase a license to access software on a machine(s).

They've even found out that a quick sale leads to a lot of units sold, even long(ish) after the sale's ended. I've no idea why, but it's there.

I'd love to see the world where a car manufacturer could walk up to someone's car or TV and disable it for some "EULA violation", without serious repercussions. It sounds like utopia.

So?  They received that money independent of whether you purchase the used game or not.  If you don't purchase the used game, they receive $0.  If you do, they receive $0.  They already received their money from the original sale.  They have no reason to make it easy or even possible for that original buyer to resell, trade, loan, or give away the game.

This is not to say that they should insert restrictive measures in order to prevent the game from being resold.  I agree with BioWare's current strategy for that - add extra value for original purchases, give a positive benefit for buying new, rather than trying to restrict resales.  But when they decide what sort of restrictions to put on the software, there is no reason for them to make reselling the software easier.

Further, I agree with Samwise in that used games are probably more damaging and cause more loss to the publisher/developer than pirated games, because someone buying a used game is someone you know is willing to spend money on your product, as opposed to a pirate, who may or may not be willing to spend more than $0 in obtaining the product regardless of the ease or difficulty of pirating it.  The person that bought the used game is verly likely to have bought it new if that option weren't available, while they pirate very well may not buy at all even if it were impossible to pirate.

Now, if I may  :tinfoil: for a second...

My suspicion has long been that all of the MPAA/RIAA/etc hurf blurf about pirates and the attempts to inflate the supposed damage done by them is just laying the PR groundwork for chipping away at the REAL danger to their revenue, which is the set of rights given to consumers by current copyright law (namely the concepts of first sale and fair use).

I'm aware that this violates the rule of "don't ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence," but I have a hard time wrapping my head around them being dumb enough to believe their own propaganda.

If you're going to ascribe a conspiracy to the MPAA/RIAA bluster, you might as well get it right. It's not about fair use or first sale concepts. In fact, it's not about the consumers at all. It's about controlling the methods of distribution so that the commodities of the market (the artists, musicians, etc.) have to go through them to get paid. The whole concept of an artist recording music/making a movie, selling it direct to consumers and giving no cuts to the music label or movie company is frightening. Their entire business is built on being the arbiter of what content gets consumed and how much money the artist gets from the creation of said content. Lose control of commodities, your entire business is fucked.

Big-time video game publishers are the same way. They aren't really needed anymore for distribution or marketing, just for development seed money, which can be gotten outside of a major publisher.

It's no conspiracy and it's not even that they believe their bullshit, well not everyone. It's that it's simply easier to blame pirates for poor sales than it is to take responsibility for a bad game or movie.

The MPAA has already made a number of adamant declarations that it's a violation of Fair Use to make any form of backup of a DVD for any reason. They have it very much in their sights as something that needs to die, and aren't really hiding that fact.

I don't think they're using Piracy to drive that, however. They're using the DMCA as their justification that making a backup copy of a disc is circumvention and thus illegal.

People tell their friends how awesome the game is and they want to play.  It's already been vetted, so the extra cost is made up by not having to buy lots of games to find the good ones.

The DMCA was very much driven by their bleating about piracy though.  And it is a very effective wedge, since now if they want to legally prohibit someone from doing something otherwise perfectly legal with their purchased media, all they have to do is put some sort of protection in place that purports to prevent that activity, and that activity is now illegal.  When you can effectively write your own laws by slightly modifying your packaging you don't have to spend nearly as much money on lobbyists.

Libraries would not exist today if the power of

And flat out does apply in countries with actual consumer protection laws. Microsoft fell foul of this in Europe when they started trying to pretend that it is illegal to sell on windows without giving them a kick-back.


Again, except in countries with meaningful consumer protection law. I might be assuming incorrectly that most people in this thread are American, but a lot of countries take the rights of the individual more seriously and try to prevent the kind of corporate sharp practice described here that is nominally targeting pirates but is actually aimed at the secondary market.

This is part of why bullshit piracy stats irritate me. The pretence that activation based DRM is aimed at pirates is what stops consumer protection organisations being able to act against it.

EDIT

Actually the other big DRM driver I'm not mentioning is internal career politics.

Empty suit makes up unprovable statistic about piracy.
Empty suit sells huge DRM project that gives him a finger in every product across the organisation.
Empty suit claims success based upon unprovable statistics showing how much of corporate profit is ascribable directly to him (and it is always him).
Empty suit gets promoted before anyone starts asking serious questions which anyway can only be answered with yet more unprovable statistics.

Libraries would not exist today if the power of ... what? :P

Just for reference, I'm from Norway, and I am used to having actual consumer protection laws, which is why I've been so vocal here. Well, that, and the fact I'm getting annoyed with the DRM itself.

But when you mention microsoft, it's the case where they sued a guy for buying office as a student package and resold the programs individually, isn't it?

Legal status, the same reason the moral brigade uses to condemn pirates.  Seriously people, those paint chips are not good for you.

...publishing corporations was then what it is now.

Yeah, finishing sentences is pretty chill.

ok, I have no idea what you are arguing for/against here.


Against paint chips I guess.


I'm down with that.

You can't be against piracy and for used games without the use of aforementioned paint chips.  They both utilize the same legal argument (licensing rather than purchasing), which arbitrarily (but legally) differentiates software from other consumer goods.

Yes, you can.  Quite easily really. Takes a brain though.

My arguments against used games stem mostly towards snot and finger prints on my physical media.

Okay, lets roleplay it:

a) You are morally against piracy because the artist is not compensated, or the license is not legally transferable.
b) You are for resale.

Create a case where b) does not contradict a).

a) I'm against theft because it's theft.  

b) I go into Gamestop and trade Bioshock for credit towards something less shitty.  They sell it to some rube.  

I don't give a shit about your analogies or exercises in morality, honestly.   You're not nearly as clever as you think you are.

Congratulations you just invalidated the concept of design rights in manufacturing. Fuck, with a legal mind like that you are truly a loss to the profession.

EDIT : Not my profession you understand, I have a real job.

It's not actually, theft is taking the property of another with the intent to permanently deprive that party of the use of the property.

Its copyright infringement, which is its own thing but still makes you a very naughty boy.

That's kind of like how I'm against tautologies because they're tautologies.

It is what it is.  :grin:

So, I assume you're saying that games are so special that the first-sale doctrine doesn't apply to them because the software industry has decided to try to tell us what we can and can't do, despite what the laws in a fair bit of countries say they can or can't allow/disallow.

I'll clue you in (yet again) to the fact that while someone goes into gamestop and buys a used game, that does not automatically mean just a lost sale. The guy might not even HAVE enough money for a full-priced game, so he never went into gamestop with the intention of buying a fullsized game to start with, so in reality it isn't a lost sale at all. On the other hand, some other guy might have gone into gamestop and sold the very same game the first guy is going to buy, and he then used the money generated from that sale to buy another full-priced game. He wouldn't have been able to afford it otherwise, but now he does.

Suddenly, the used games market has facilitated the following: a full-price game has been sold, the publisher wins. An old game was sold to facilitate buying said full-priced game. One gamer wins, gamestop wins. Same old game was bought by another gamer. One gamer wins, gamestop wins. Everybody wins.

So, tell me, how is this such a bad thing that it must be fought against by stripping consumers of their rights and making the experience for legal customers suck ass through a straw?

I believe his point is the game companies hate both equally when it comes to the bottomline.  Or something.  Whatever.

Car chases would be extremely rare under those circumstances, that's for certain.

No, I'm pretty sure his point is that they are both morally equivalent to paint chips. Or something.

Got it, it's fine as long as you pay someone money.


Except first-sale does not exist everywhere, and the only jurisdiction that matters tends to uphold EULA's.


Three games for the price of two, and neither the artist(s) nor their agencies assented to the change in price.  But hey, as long as you pay someone you're not stealing nor infringing upon an intellectual property, right?

(http://i45.tinypic.com/2hokb9w.jpg)

Amusing.  So are we disputing the legality of selling our used games to retailers, on Ebay, etc?  I'm really trying to see what the hell your angle is here.  Beyond paint chips.

Picture does nothing for me.  Sorry.

Are people here really arguing against the right to resell things you bought by equating it to piracy?

Reselling is not the same as pirating. You bought it once, you sold it once. You are transferring ownership of a legally purchased product. After which you yourself don't own this product anymore.

I'm against piracy.
I'm for resale. Just not through the main distributor of 'first hand' video game sales as well. That strikes me as a substantial conflict of interest. Again, Borders doesn't have a second-hand book section where you can buy the latest titles at $5 off (well, afaik).

And what is this "only jurisdictin that matters" that you speak of that is so convenient to your case?
Gotcha. I'm going to jail for selling books and movies to others, then. At least in your twisted world view.

I've got a box here for the series "Ultimate Force". A friend bought it, watched it and gave it to me for my birthday, yet if I look at the back of the box it says "Any unauthorized use including but not limited to copying, editing, lending, exchanging, renting, hiring, exhibiting, public performance, radio or television broadcasting or any other diffusion or otherwise dealig with this DVD or any part thereof is strictly prohibited.". I guess I'm a filthy pirate for receiving a used DVD box set, since the artist(s) nor their agencies assented to the change in price (full price to no price).

I had a few books which I'd read once, many years ago, and I had no real intention of revisiting them. I didn't have space for them and I had a new book series that I wanted. I had the choice between throwing away some (or all) of them, or giving or selling them to someone else. I chose to sell it to a used book store, and I went and bought the entire wheel of time series (it was 11 books at the time) at full price. I did, however, see another book about photography I think it was, that I bought from the used book store.

Lock me up, for I are pirate, o great defender of morality, o great Sheepherder.

Edit: Oh, I almost forgot. I got the Xbox360 from work, along with coupons for 3 games. Gamestop (then EB Games) said they would swap games either 1 to 1 or 3 to 1 (depending on which game it was, how old it was etc). I used that to try out games such as GRAW, which sucked ass on the console, and I ended up swapping it and a few other games for Mass Effect 1. No money was exchanged between me and EB Games for Mass Effect. I was having money issues at that time, and I didn't have enough money to buy Mass Effect in addition to the 3 other games which I exchanged for ME1, so it was either swap those games or not buy/play ME1. I guess that also makes me a filthy pirate since I didn't just throw the old games into the garbage.

Edit 2: And I once bought Photoshop Elements 6, thought it wasn't good enough for my needs, so I went and bought Adobe Lightroom instead. My mother was complaining that she didn't have anything to organize her photos with, so I gave her my copy of Elements. Damn I'm an evil person.

Borders doesn't sell used books at all, but most largeish independent bookstores (at least around here) sell both new and used.  I've also never seen a college bookstore anywhere that didn't sell used textbooks alongside the new ones.

The US seems perfectly fine to let the "it's a license, not a good" thing sit, by only ruling against specific clauses in EULA's, or by ruling in certain cases that the EULA does not apply because the defendant is not an end-user (like the case against the guys reselling OEM software).  The other angle is that the artist has a right to be paid for their work.  There is no legal difference between pirating, and used games sales so long as nobody upsets the established case law or legislation.  Thus, making a distinction between downloading a game and walking into a Gamestop and picking it up is simply fooling yourself.

None of this applies to you if you can contain your moral outrage over pirates, or if you don't view rental/used games as being morally superior to pirating, or if you ditch the moralistic arguments altogether because almost everything publishers, retailers and their customers do is as shady as fuck.

EDIT:  Books and DVD's are different by dint of being special.  Nobody ever said justice makes sense.

The artist is paid for his work with the initial sale. Which just is transferred, not duplicated. Your point is either retarded or trolling.

What's the difference between transference and duplication as far as the cut the artist gets?

With duplication you create a version of the product the artist doesn't get money from. Transference allows a new person to use it, but denies the product to the original buyer at the same time.

Which would be an excellent point if I used the money I got from turning in my copy of Halo 3 to buy another copy of Halo 3.

DVDs are "not different". The only reason they're not made impossible to give/sell to others is because they haven't thought of going as far as software publishers are currently going in their quest of "protecting their intellectual property". I'm pretty sure that if they could have, they would have required that DVD/video players were permanently connected to the internet, constantly asking if this person is allowed to view this film.

But let's see. Copyright has been enforced by viewing the act of making copies of an intellectual work illegal, because it deprives the original creator of his paycheck for his work. This has been working fine for hundreds of years. There's even been provisions to allow for "fair use", by utilizing parts of someone's work to create new work. But now, in 2010, everything that's digital is suddenly "the norm" and "not transferable" or "licensed to the purchaser", and the copyright laws are suddenly "not applicable", and books are the special ones? And why are DVDs special, if they specifically say that "lending/exchanging is prohibited" ON THE DAMN BOX, yet selling or giving the DVD box set is apparently fine?

Now you're just either being stupid, or trolling. My money's on both.

Yet EB continues to live. If it were the same in any sense, legally, to sell preownwed games, don't you think the EBStop pawnshops would have been C&Ded out of that facet of their existence?



You're the "special" one here. As they are clearly not different. tgr - I'll go with both as well.


Though at this point in the conversation, I'm really mostly participating to entertain myself, I do have a kind-of reply to something Iain brought up.


Conversely, if publishers strip away all the bullshit layers of DRM a year or so after release (as Ubi did with Bioshock) then I have no problem buying that now-unfucked product.

The key part you missed out there is 'unauthorised lending, renting etc'. You are allowed to lend your friend a copy of your DvD, and you are allowed to resell the physical media. What you can't do is use your retail copy licenced for home use in a commercial endeavour such as a rental business or a library. It's similar to the prohibitions on showing it in hospitals, oil rigs, prisons, movie theatres etc. That's not home use and is not authorised under the terms of the licence.

Oh, I know that's how it works today, and that's fine. That's how everything related to intellectual works have been so far as well, but if you take Sheepherder's take on the whole thing, then selling a game to someone else is the same as denying the copyright holder their cut of the profit, and is morally equal to piracy. I was trying to make sheepherder define why he thought the EULA for a DVD would be interpreted that way, while the EULA for a game would magically make reselling it "piracy". Since, after all, that's what the gaming industry is basically labelling it now, and what sheepherder's been arguing for in his last few posts.

I think the relevant point is this.  The game industry doesn't care as they take both as a lost sale and stealing food from the tables of the developers themselves.

I just want to know why y'all hate freedom?

No, read my posts again, because you don't get it.  That's the conclusion to the hypothetical "pirating is wrong because the artist doesn't get a cut" or "it's illegal" arguments: everything not a first time purchase is illegal too if one were willing to apply the existing case law.  The reason publishers don't attempt to apply the existing law is that they would get fucking reamed in court if they tried and have their special protections vis a vis the validity of an EULA revoked.  Instead, they'll wait for a bit until they manage to find a good way to fuck the console resale market that protects them under the DMCA.

Again, the entire line of argument has nothing to do with you if you don't show up in threads shitposting about how immoral pirates are.

So if I understand this: resale = person 1 owns game - p1 sells game to p2 which passes the license to p2 and thus reliquishes it. One sale is made and only one person has the product/license at any one time. piracy = p1 owns game - p1 manipulates/cracks game and distributes it to p2, p3...pN. One sale is made and many people have the product. That about right? And no this is not a flippant remark, I am genuinely curious.

A. Piracy is [im|a]moral.

B. Piracy is [not] a significant detriment to the industry.

Two entirely different arguments. Thread started at B, now it's at a confused mix of A, B, trolling, and paint chips.

Mostly paint chips.

Also, I don't know how this has gone on so long without someone explaining the difference between a secondary market and pirated games/watches/car-parts/dildos/MtG-cards.


If you sell something used YOU DON'T HAVE IT ANY MORE, THIS IS WHY A MARKET WORKS AND EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD ISN'T FREE.

EDIT


Oh hey I didn't see you - you win an imaginary pineapple.

I'm always to improve my grasp of the English language, eldaec! Where exactly didn't I write what you just did? :awesome_for_real:

You can have a pineapple too.


But this guy can't because jesus christ what do you think most users of computer-games/dvds/mtg-cards do when they sell their shit on and no longer have the first game/movie/card? THEY BUY MORE SHIT and drive up the price the OEM can sell for. Hi there economics! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk)

I don't think there's any way you can say it's morally wrong to pirate games. There are no morals involved because everything is done indirectly without any real direct effect on a person. Plus, with the recent removal of most demos, allowing us the opportunity to fully understand the merit of our purchase, we're entitled to try the full game out. Not to mention the recent DLC craze with taking almost finished content, yanking it before release and deciding it would be real nice to sell it for $10-15 dollars. It's not pirating, it's retribution!

You demonstrated that you have no backbone when you posted this.

The moral implications are almost moot, because as we've seen, the publishers and developers think it's the same thing.

The Sony SOCOM system hts pirates and used game sales equally.  Actually, it hits used gamers more because again, they paid for the game.

Or Epic: (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/michael-capps-part-two)


Or EA: (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/ea-second-hand-sales-are-a-critical-situation)

Bungie: (http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/pre-owned-market-had-big-effect-on-halo-says-bungie-dev)

Crazy ass Dyack: (http://www.gamingunion.net/news/denis-dyack-used-game-sales-and-piracy-very-similar--689.html)

Not to say the sane aren't out there: (http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4020/pc_game_piracy_why_bother_with_.php)
like Valve: (http://www.destructoid.com/valve-fight-used-sales-by-making-good-supported-games-142089.phtml)

The point is that regardless, much of the game industry paints both with the same brush.  In the end, piracy and used game sales means no money for them.

I just bought a couple of second hand 360 games off the intermet! I didn't realise when I did it that I was engaging in piracy!  :why_so_serious:

True story: if I want a CD that's published by an RIAA member, I always buy it used, specifically so that they don't get my money but I can still say I own all my music legally.   :awesome_for_real:

You know what? FUCK YOU. Every single one of you developers and publishers who want to get another piece of the pie when someone buys a used game. FUCK YOU.

I'm a self-published author. People buy my book or my eBook and they pay me once. Never would I or should I expect that I will get one thin fucking dime off of a second person reading that physical copy or a second person getting that eBook copied over to them. I realize the medium is somewhat different. But it seems these jackholes want to ascribe the price charged to the actual act of playing the game. After all, according to them we are renting the intellectual property and buying the physical delivery medium. Which means that reading a novel should get the same consideration but the idea of a secondhand book store sending money to authors isn't even talked about.

People resell their disc games. GET OVER IT. You want to hassle somebody about it, start pressuring Gamestop to give you a cut. When they tell you to go fuck yourselves, please take their advice.

People are willing to buy games used for $5-10 off of the new price.  If I sold you my copy of a $60 game for $50, I'm most of the way there towards buying a new game.  Now of course, I might not buy another game from the same publisher/developer, and your example is crazy, but there's still some income generated that goes back into possibly buying more games.

The problem is that you have a middle-man taking a pretty substantial cut from pure arbitrage.  There's nothing really wrong with arbitrage if it adds some value for the counterparties, but GameStop doesn't do that.  At all.

One of the reasons I like EA's approach is that it puts a value on New over-and-above the new car smell.  Of course its natural progression is tying the entire game to an account, but that doesn't stop it from making sense.

Of all the crazy fucked up rationalisations for publishers fucking the paying customer - this is my favourite.

Coming, as it does, complete with the idea that today's gamer is going to be exactly as impressed with Duke Nukem today as he was in 1991.


Games don't wear out or diminish in value over time? Suck my balls EA.

He's right to say its not like other products, because clothes, cars, books actually remain relevant a lot fucking longer than Madden 2006.

As you point out, this isn't the reality when you have a middleman sucking up most of the money along the way.  

But even in a nice frictionless vacuum scenario, the publisher/developer loses out if the consumers have more money than they do time to play games.  For example, let's say me and 5 friends have 5 games that we all want to play at some point, and we all have enough disposable income to buy all those games.  (Assume that these are single-player games so we don't necessarily need to play them all at once; this is the type of game that's most germane to the discussion anyway.)  

There are two ways we can do this.  One is for each of us to buy a new copy of each game; if each game costs $50, we buy 25 copies altogether and the publisher gets $1250.  The other is for each of us to buy a different game, play it, get tired of it, uninstall, resell it to someone else for full price, and use the proceeds to buy another game from someone else in our group; this means that there are 5 purchases from the publisher, 20 among ourselves, and the publisher ends up with $250 ($1000 less than if it weren't possible for us to resell to each other).

Now, in a further idealized world where we all had infinite time and inclination to play games, we might spend the saved money on more games from the publisher and it would all even out.  Or maybe the games would all have infinite replay value and we'd all want our own copies to keep forever.  But in reality how many games are out at any given point that are worth paying full price for, and if you're buying a whole bunch of games how many of them are you ever going back to?

In the reselling scenario, we might as well have made copies of the games and passed them around to each other for free to simplify the bookkeeping.  In either case the same amount of money ends up in the same pockets and we all play all the games until we get bored and uninstall them.  That the reselling is legal and the copying isn't doesn't change the impact that either of those courses of action have on any of the involved parties.

Banter and debate over "piracy" aside, again, you don't "own" the software. You purchase a license to use the software and publisher retains all "ownership" rights. That is why the posture over used games transactions.

It really isn't any different with other software — it's just only enforced for enterprise edition software. Or at least it used to be — Ebay used to pull down used Adobe CS auctions regularly — people would just post them so they could exchange contact info and engage the sale on their own afterwards. Though now, I'm sure there's a host of software still being sold, but believe it's all tagged as "NEW".

You may not share this sentiment, but every time you check that little box in the small print EULA, that is what's in effect.

This comes back to the point that any jurisdiction with adequate consumer protection law, the provisions where the publisher pretends that the "license" can't be sold on are unfair contract terms that you are free to ignore.

And it doesn't change the point people are making that this is what drm is here to stop, not piracy.

Call me a cynic, but "adequate consumer protection laws" are easily steamrolled by teams of corporate lawyers and fellow interest minded lobbyists.

Which brings to surface, another elephant in the DRM squabble — a lot of the legal territory is hazy — fair use, backup copy, lend to RL friend, multiple machines, but if there is a efficient, systematic enforcement (like say, an industry consortium task force of lawyers and lawyer-bots), the "consumer" may be in the "right", but face punitive financial and temporal constraints that prevent true justice.

:oh_i_see:

Oh sure, if your point is that corporate lawyers are assholes, then no one is going to argue.

I don't suppose anyone is willing to concede that the vitality of the second-hand games market has anything at all to due with the fact that most games aren't worth the asking price.  Funny thing that capital market. 

Not that this has anything what-so-ever to do with whether DRM is an unnecessary overreaction to piracy.

The fun part of this is that the focus seems to have gone from "fuck pirates" and over to "fuck the consumer if he doesn't do things exactly the way we say he should do it. We need to make more money.". At least I haven't felt like I'm a valued customer the last year.

If it wasn't worth the asking price to enough people there would be no used market, and EB / Gamestop wouldn't be able to set the price to buy used games for $15 and resell them for $45.  The fact that they can buy back month old games for that much less indicates there is an absolute glut of people willing to sell them at any price one they're done with them.

It's also conveniently ignoring the fact that a certain portion of the products they mention actually increase in value over time.

You read that wrong.  Most games aren't worth the publisher's asking price.  I'm speaking to the whole new vs. used phase this thread is going through.

No, it speaks to the fact that most games don't even have a month's worth of entertainment in them. People want to use them and then get a new one but unfortunately, the price of such transient entertainment is completely out of whack. $60 for a game you play for 5-10 hours? Who wouldn't want to get $20 bucks back on that to put towards another new game. It's not like most people are game hoarders/collectors like schild - they want to be entertained and when they stop being entertained, they want something new.

If publishers are so fucking concerned about used games, they need to go full digital distribution and offer a subscription service to all their games. Pay $20 a month and get any games in their catalog, or any games released in their catalog in the last year.

Wow. I could get behind that idea. Renting digital games is definitely an attractive offer for me who went through games in less than a month.
I haven't found a game I could finish beyond a month. So $30 price for monthly rent is reasonable.

Wait, what? Publishers aren't concerned about used games per se, just the money they're "missing out on." They don't want to deliver a better product in any way, they just want your money. The less they have to do in order to do so, the better. Collorary, if you want DRM'ed rental services for games, you're probably better off pirating shit than buying it.

Edit:
I understand that you obviously understand this, it was more a remark that publishers won't change their greater strategy at all until they absolutely have to.

Yeah, I was getting at that too.  The publisher's asking price will be based on how high they can realistically jack the rates up before people simply stop buying in enough numbers to harm profit, the price EB charges is not indicative of what the game is actually worth, it's indicative of how close they can shave to the MRSP while maximizing profit (by not losing customers who don't want boogers in their manual).  I would suspect Haemish is right: the reason end-user -> retail store resale value is low is because people generally don't value games they've played, though most people I know hold on to their games.

Steam's sale prices are probably near enough to the worth of the game, minus packaging.

There's already a lot of premiums going into 'early adopters' I can think of the recent Dragon Age for example with limited time offers of DLC and pre-orders exclusives. I don't mind not getting some shiny shit for not paying extra $5-15 for the ultimate edition but a whole DLC consisting of companion with side quest? Shit. That made me think twice. Fuck the shiny weapon of insta kill for $5 though. Too little effort went into that which isn't worth the money.

Fucking bingo.

All the evidence-free speculation about who pirates games and why they pirate them is useless nonsense and just all of your opinions battering against each other. At the end of the day no amount of DRM is ever going to stop piracy of games, same as with music and movies. The only solution that makes sense iss for publishers to accept this and embrace the reality of digital distribution properly. This means making it easier and better to buy games/music/movies than to pirate them.

If they insist on sticking with a single-purchase system then they need to add some serious value to the physical product. Every game needs to have maps, good manuals, an awesome box, a plushie, whatever, but it's got to be fucking good. I don't honestly see how this can be made to work profitably.

Far, far better is to monetarise the existing distribution. Lifetime subscriptions at a reasonable price point that give you unferrered (i.e DRM free) access to everything you want. Price point is crucial, as is quality of service - remember it has to be BETTER than just firing up uTorrent. Music would have to be top quality, none of the low-bitrate crap that Radiohead did for instance. Similarly movies, HD with no unskippable ads, trailers or FBI warnings and sensible formats.

If it was done right then it could benefit all sides. The entertainment industry becomes a contract-based subscription industry. This would give them a guaranteed, consistent revenue stream, which is the dream of almost any industry. Make the contracts 10 years long ffs, but make them cheap enough to ensure mass take-up. The way to price it is to look at how much money is spent right now, per year, on music, movies and games, average it out and set it up so that they get the same amount of money back in the end. Yeah I know that's easy to say but the instant rampant corporate greed tries to ramp that price up is the instant such a plan would fail. People will pay £20 a month, every month, for ever more, for all the games or music or films they want. They won't pay £20/month to Ubisoft *and* EA *and* Paramount *and* Virgin *and* Sony....

Yeah, it's utopian. Yeah, it's not going to happen. But it's the only thing I can think of, after 20 years of discussing piracy with many, many people, that I can see working. Anything else is just going to perpetuate the status quo which really only hurts the paying customer in the end.

Piracy is never going to go away. Ubisoft's decision here is only going to slow down the guys who write the cracks by a week or two. And piss off the paying customer. And get them shitloads of bad publicity. It's just retarded and what's needed is smart solutions that aren't aimed at making things shittier.

1. Do you want me to buy your PC Game? Yes, go to 2.
2. Is it on Steam? No? Go to 3.
3. Is it a kickass collector's edition that I would even forgo having it even if it was available on Steam? No. Go to 4.
4. Fuckoff.

I don't really have anything else to add. Steam or bust these days. I like the idea of Gog, but I like Steam more. I like the idea of Impulse, but it's GENERATIONS behind old Steam let alone new Steam. Paying directly to a publisher? No dice. Paying directly do a developer? No dice there really either unless you're the indiest of the indie. Get on Steam.

I feel like Apocrypha just wasted a lot of text when the end-all be-all solution is right in front of us and all Valve has to say is:

"Steam DRM or nothing. You decide. We take X% of sales. You can pick when your item goes on sale."

The contract needs to boil down to that and every fucking publisher and dev on Earth (screw b.net, I don't need another thing for ONE dev) needs to get behind it.

I hate to line Newell's pockets with money, but it's just how things lined up.

Oh, and if it's not on Steam or has an amazing collector's edition, I will not begrudge a soul for morally being opposed to paying money for something and still playing it. I would expect the same treatment should I release a PC game.

Edit: Also, this thread sucks giant dick.

I think we can all agree that the solution to the gaming industry's problems should be very simple:

1) Make great games
2) If possible, treat the pirates as criminals
3) Don't treat customers like criminals

where 1) and 3) would have to be the most important bit.

I have to agree with schild on steam being the best current solution. It has drawbacks (as I experienced on the LAN party I've been harping on about), but if the future looks like Ubisoft's current solution, or "every game is an MMO", then I'd much rather swallow the steam pill and live with it. Steam has bitten me ONCE, the current DRM systems either in planning, development or actual production are going to bite a lot more than that. Also, steam is at the correct level of convenience so the barrier of buying games are that much less. It might turn into a monopoly, though, so it might be best to have a few competitors just to see if we can't keep the prices down a bit. I wouldn't want to see games hit $100+ just because valve etc decide "hey, we can".

And they could fix a certain pet peeve of mine, which is how different markets get different launch dates.

Edit: Hell, it would even be nice if they would add the possibility of transferring games to other accounts. I don't care if there's a reasonable fee involved, the main reason for wanting this is:

1) allow people who don't want a certain game anymore, to get rid of it, and
2) reduce the value of said steam account. A steam account with 400-500 games can be a valuable target for hackers.

Steam games still get pirated.

The only things that aren't pirated are free. And this will always be the case.

Steam knows how to make me WANT to buy games, and that's the real type of "DRM" that needs to be used.

Shit, during the holiday season I spent money on a fuck-ton of money on games that I probably will not get a chance to play for a while, because I had an interest in the game and it was presented to me for a price that I didn't have to think about in order for the chance to play it. 

Seriously, this christmas season i spent about 80 dollars on steam and it hasn't even cost them the bandwidth to download the games because i still haven't even done that.  So basically i handed steam 80 dollars for absolutely nothing AND I'M VERY FUCKING HAPPY ABOUT IT.

:oh_i_see:

Seriously though,
But Steam (or Valve, I guess) is a publisher, aren't they? They're making games available to you and taking a cut of the profits. They're not dicks to their customers the way the big publishers are, but they're hardly unique in that regard.

Steam better than Gog? How is Steam's DRM, however lax it may be, preferable to no DRM? Or do you just mean you like Steam because it has current games?

I don't buy enough games to be a huge fan of Steam so it's a moot point for me, but I can't see why they're treated as if they are incapable of doing wrong. Odds are they'll slip up someday.

Steam has slipped up many times. But on the whole, over the life cycle of that product, it has IMPROVED the state of digital video game distribution. The fact they have great weekly sales of older games and newer games, and have made their service much more customer friendly without too much onerous DRM makes them the platform to beat for digital distribution.

Steam are certainly being dicks to their European customers by insisting that €1 equals $1. And even more so to their Norwegian customers seeing as we have to pay extra EU-specific VAT even though we're not actually part of the EU.

I'll bite when they've got holiday sales and specials - but having to pay €49.99 (402,69 NOK) for a random game (Batman: Arkham Asylum) when the US version costs $49.99 (296,99 NOK)? Fuck off, Valve.

Steam needs competition.  That's all.

Hard to imagine any company competing with Steam what with its years-long head start and massive catalog that encompasses most of the games industry.

Europe gets screwed by everyone, blaming any one platform/dev/publisher is just silly.

The entire model of an online repository + friends/chat + quick game making system makes it unlikely Steam will wind up with a significant competitor.

They'd need to offer the same service with enough tempting extras to make you willing to have a second game store open all the time. That or steam would have to really really hose things up in a fit of stupid.

I have my doubts that Valve sets the prices for non-Valve games.

No they wouldn't. Hell, not wanting to run the Steam app all the time is enough motivation for me to buy things from other places. Steam does need competition, and it has it. Otherwise they'd be dicking over consumers as hard as any other monopoly. That's what corporations do.
This doesn't mean anything except that Steam is willing to be dicks as long as everyone else is too.

Also, "everyone is doing it" doesn't absolve everyone of blame of being dicks.

Make sure you are blaming the correct people though.  Valve rarely sets prices, the publishers do.  Valve has to get their permission before doing sales as well.  That is why that whole COD4 price jump in Australia happened (where COD4 went from $50AUD to $80 AUD overnight, because Activision didn't like it being marked at $50AUD).

Steam lacks any real competition right now. It's closest is probably Impulse or Direct2Drive, neither of which seem to have near it's income.

The reason is they know they WOULD have competition if they tried to fuck consumers. But it's easy (and cheap) to just peg to near or just below brick and mortar prices, and run stupidly good sales frequently. You eventually wind up with a militantly loyal customer base. edit: and a really loyal publisher/developer base. Devs seem to LOVE them some steamworks these days.

Not every company with large market share thinks "we can use this to completely fuck our customers!" because you can also use it to print money hats WITHOUT dicking your customers enough to chase them away.

And the steam app is pretty freaking trivial to run. Hell, you can even just not run it until you want to start a Steam game.

I've always just assumed that B.net will eventually be reworked into the real competition for Steam.  Even if they don't ever distribute non blizz games, Steam will be competing with them on a quality of service level for sure in the very near future.

This.

I own 10 Steam games I haven't yet bothered to download.
I own 21 Steam games I haven't yet fired up (at all)
I own 36 Steam Games I've barely looked at-played for up to 10mins total.

I don't feel ripped off on any of them, nor do I think I'm a unique snowflake with those kinds of numbers, either. FFS, when they have uber cheap sales on things I already have, I've been buying them to gift to a friend.
(Also, can you imagine what the numbers were llike when I used to pirate stuff instead of buy it?)  :why_so_serious:

Yes, Steam absolutely does have competition. They may be the biggest player in their field but there are tons of places to buy games online, and absolutely nothing stopping any Steam user - aside from brand loyalty - from saying "eh, I think I'll pick this one up from GamersGate instead" the moment they take a wrong step.

They're not being nice to you because they like you.

They are being nice because they like your filthy sweet cash.

The reason they are on top over their competition is because they provide a superior service, better deals and the road from purchase decision to playtime is fucking short and smooth. Direct2Drive still has you download and install stuff the old fashioned way, whereas Steam puts you two clicks from purchase to play.

Steam has come a long, long way. When it started, it was a bloated buggy mess, sure, but Valve fixes shit. And with competitors like EA's download system cutting you off from your games after 6 months? I'll stick with Steam.

So you're telling me that every single publisher is in on this whole "€1 = $1"-scam? :|

Go check the European retailers and find out.

I suspect the answer will be yes. Or if not, very close to all.

Not only software publishers, but hardware vendors as well.

1 Euro pretty much equals 1 Dollar.

It could be worse, my European friends. How about US$1=AU$2 at retail?

For your reference, the exchange rate is about US$1=AU$1.13

 :why_so_serious:

The only thing wrong with online-required DRM is when they don't provide a compelling service. Online stored save games and unlimited installs so I can play from one of my three different computers whenever I want without worrying about syncing account data and it's included for free because I was an original purchaser? Sign me the heck up. Like Steam. But if you've got the money to build your own system and don't want to give Valve their cut, go for it. Like Blizzard. Or Ubi.

This is all just bringing PCs up to par with what we've long since gotten used to on consoles. And MMOs.


Facebook.

And I'm not being facetious.

So we're at the point where DRM is okay provided it offers some benefits to players? That is sort of where UbiSoft was going, but they just didn't offer enough benefits and everyone was suddenly concerned their ISP was a house of cards.

With the way things are going, it's either going to be "be okay with DRM as long as it offers some benefits", or "live without new games".

I certainly don't see this changing until the gaming industry's sued enough times to actually start realizing that maybe they're going down the wrong path. I foresee, however, that the chances of that are less than copyright/intellectual property laws etc being changed to suit the reality they (i.e. those that make/produce movies, music, games, etc) want, if it hasn't already.

You forgot option 3: pirate it.  Anything that does have any level of DRM I personally find unacceptable, but I'm still interested in playing?  Yeah, I'll be in the torrent line.  I don't care about the 'morality' of the situation, and it doesn't matter whether it's 'stealing' or not, as long as I'm not likely to be punished for it, the only way you're stopping me from pirating your game is to make it easier and more convenient for me to purchase it than for me to pirate it - which Steam does.

I'm pretty much with schild on this one as well - games on Steam are mostly DRM free with, I believe, a few exceptions, and convenient enough that I want to buy them instead of torrent them.

If by "we" you mean yourself and Darniaq.

Most of the rest of us said our piece and just stopped posting 11 times a day on the topic. One indivudual posting their own opinion later on doesn't exactly indicate a quantum shift of opinion for the guys who stopped posting on that aspect.

Indeed.  Fuck that noise.  Who cares if they have online storage?  I just want to be able to play the damn game uninterrupted, on my computer.  Simple.  Ubi's DRM will prevent that.  Thus, fuck that.

Yea, this. I am ok with it because it provides a benefit I want (or would want if they make a game I want). I'm not joining a pro-DRM march or anything. I just don't mind it when it doesn't get in the way and includes something(s) that will enhance my experience. Like Steam Cloud or MMOs.

Mostly I like that they're trying something other than imposing some stupid ass restriction that won't stop anyone with a p2p client. Your goal needs to be more than just anti-piracy because that alone is too easy to beat.

I don't speak for anyone else. Mostly because I don't care :-)

Wasn't so much a dig at you as one at Unsub, who appeared to read your individual post as a seachange of opinion from f13 at large.

As a totally scientific survey, I just did a poll of my class and 10 out of the 11 kids I have own a ps3/360/wii. 4 of them have a ps3/360. None of them have their consoles connected to the net. Just thoght it was interesting considering the current discussions we are having about consoles and drm and dlc. Only 3 of them say they sometimes buy preowned games.

DRM is ok so long as it does not either restrict my right of first sale, inconvenience me while doing jack shit about piracy, or piss me off in some other manner that I have not yet thought of but which I know publishers are dreaming up as we speak.

Um, Digital Rights Management is ok as long as it doesn't manage your rights?   :wink:

Dude.  The Rights part of DRM is not referring to your rights.  So the joke is a flop, I'm afraid.

I don't get it, care to explain? Who's rights are being affected apart from yours (as in the customers')?

The Rights being managed are the rights of the creator, not the consumer.

Well, kinda.

Steam has gone from "OMG the debbil" to "OMG so useful" here at f13.net since it launched. DRM was initially a big concern but that has kind of petered off because of the other things offered by the Steam service.

If Ubisoft continue to extend the flexibility / product offer of what they are putting on the table while also meeting their own security requirements, it appears they have a chance to run around the majority of objections to the scheme.

I'm fully aware that there hasn't been any kind of progress made on this issue that we'll all be back in 3 months time to discuss it again ( :awesome_for_real: ) while PC publishers will continue to move towards MMO-style subscription / registration models and / or head towards consoles with love in their eyes.

Followed your sig link. I saw Broughen in there!

That's exactly who I was thinking of when I read it too.  :grin:

The main concern with steam at launch was that it was a buggy slow piece of shit.

Avid gamers don't care. Actually, most software users in general, care not, as long as the DRM stays out of their way.

But a big factor in games is still in price. If a game is ~$50, aggravation abounds but at < $20, or the cost of buying a pitcher of beer or your friends a round of drinks (in fact, people will spend a bundle, shoving dollars into the jukebox for one time song plays), as long as the DRM does not annoy and publisher makes it easy to click and go, nobody is going to bark much.

Like iTunes. $.99 (or $1.29 or whatever it is now for the non-DRM), click and play…

 

Shut up. Yes they did at launch. This website is equipped with a fully functioning WayBack machine if you want to go read what people thought of steam back in the day.

I still occasionally rail against Steam's slowass* POS spyware and DRM infrastructure but unfortunately their awesome sales have greatly sapped my resistance levels.

* Before I got my new comp and started using Steam more (stupid sales) every FUCKING time schild wanted to talk to me on Steam and I had to literally wait 10 FUCKING MINUTES for it to update itself before it would let me chat.

It's true; I like going back to point out how I was one of the few who recognized Steam's potential for awesome during its painful adolescence.   :awesome_for_real:


Yes, how dare they release free updates for their software.   :awesome_for_real:

Steam's "spyware" aspect actually points out another place where DRM can actually add value to the consumer rather than just being a kick in the dick: cheat prevention in multiplayer games.  VAC alone makes Steam worthwhile IMO.

The updates would be fine IF THEY FUCKING DOWNLOADED THEM AFTER the app is launched.

How would you like it if, for example, every time you started Windows it would go through a Windows Update check and there was no way of canceling the process?

And yet some of them couldn't use their ps3s on March 1st (assuming they had non-slim models). Stupid ass/how'd-they-miss-that bug, but still, DRM hits ya even if you're not connected.

I don't think there's a seachange with regards to accepting DRM. But nobody is quitting the industry because of it either. There's principal and then there's just having some fun. And if the latter can be had with transparent DRM, then people are going to. This isn't something you build barricades over.

Both of the ones who have PS3s have slims, but yes you're right.

I just thought it was interesting, based on the fact that these kids have the consoles, yet things like exclusive pre-order DLC and so forth like PS3-exclusive Batman AA levels and Saboteur Titties DLC codes mean exactly jack shit to them since none of them are online. I mean, we know a lot of people are on PSN/XBL/WhateverWiiNetIsCalled, but it was interesting that none of them are on. And they do all buy games. To them, Lost and the Damned is a "new Grand Theft Auto game" at retail since it comes on a disc, not a piece of DLC, since they would/could have never bought it.

You mean like when auto-update is turned on (which is the only reasonably secure way to run Windows)?

I agree it'd be nice if it just let you run with the old version until it could upgrade itself at a convenient time, but I suspect their thinking is that they'd rather not have to worry about backwards compatibility with old versions (say, if they update their chat protocol) when their software is designed to run quietly in the background and update stuff automatically, and since it's always going to be there grabbing updates it should do no harm to require that it always be up to date.  Turning Steam off after every chat session just put you in a weird lunatic fringe of their userbase.

The Euro/Dollar scam drives me crazy.

I paid Heavy Rain in an Italian Gamestop store few days ago €69, which is regular PS3 price. That is $94 US dollars!

Conversely, if I bought THE SAME GAME in a Gamestop store in the US, it would be $59 USD, which is... €43 Euros.

So, if I buy the same product on launch day, same retail chain store:

US: $59 = €43
EU: $94 = €69

Edit: it's pretty much the same thing with PC games.

By being European I pay on average $35 additional USD for any given new PS3 title. It's hard not to feel cheated. Or pirated. Capitalism pirates me all the time.

And the shitty thing is that Gamestop is still making nothing off that $35 USD extra because that's pretty much what the publisher charges the foreign gamestop.

I just like to have hard copies of all my games. I break down every once in a while, like for download only games from smaller companies, and the occasional title that I can't find in the store. (Torchlight) But for the most part, I want my disks.

This is why I buy most of my games from Hong Kong, or amazingly enough, the UK. As software in the UK seems to drop to 10-20 pounds relatively quickly and the exchange rate is quite decent. Quite a few UK sellers have free postage or very cheap postage (1UKP) as well, which I guess is supplemented by the VAT which they don't need to pay on foreign orders.

Auto-update downloads in the background without blocking the rest of Windows from use.

Except when it forces a reboot.  We had this problem with the media PC in our break room -- since it wasn't powered on every day, when you did power it on it to watch a movie or something it usually had some update it wanted to apply.  It'd start off quietly in the background, but halfway through the movie it would say "OKAY REBOOTING IN FIFTEEN SECONDS, SAVE YOUR WORK KTHX".  Not a problem I have with any of my own machines since I leave them on and have them set to apply updates overnight.

Apparently the DRM has been cracked, so unless they radically change their DRM again they're not going to get that "2 week window" or whatever:

http://i.imgur.com/Q6Ei0.png

(http://imagemacros.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/hurr_durr.jpg)

I like Durr the best.

Oh my god that is fucking hilarious. What is this doing in this thread?

God I hate wall-eyed dogs.

Assassin's Creed 2 is also out on the interwebs already apparently. (http://www.evilavatar.com/forums/showthread.php?t=107615)  Days before release.  (From the Russian release apparently)

Well, that clearly worked extraordinarily well to combat piracy.  :why_so_serious:

I think it motivated the pirates to do their best.  :awesome_for_real:

Nothing motivates a talented group of individuals with time on their hands better than telling em Fuck You. It's how I hear the best shit talk from a rabid complainer when I tell him to shut the fuck up; it doesn't really do anything but make him bitch more, and at me.

I'm not sure what to do, giggle with glee at ubisoft's latest attempt at DRM getting thoroughly buttreamed, or weep at the future loss to the PC gamers.

I'm kind of siding with the giggling with glee part.

Yeah, definitely the giggling with glee part. Fuck UBISoft.

Requiring you to be online to play a single player game... which you bought. Is asinine.

But piracy is huge. I'm sure that making portions of your game online with an account linked to a serial number is the way of the future.  I don't know how much moral outrage I would have if the last chapter of Mass Effect 2 was online only.

In my case, that outrage would be *huge*. I would not buy that game if that was the case. If it was some side-quest that might be interesting if you could get access to, but wasn't required, then fine. It's added value. But if it's required to get closure, then it'd be like some book publisher posting everything except the last chapter and going "you have to authenticate yourself online to be able to read the last chapter. Oh, and I may take down the server at any moment, or it may be unavailable due to DDoS, or your internet connection may be down. Guess you'll just have to wait and hope for the best.". Fuck that noise, it would have to be an absolutely orgasmic book (or game) to be worth that shit.

Yes, piracy is huge, but treating your customers more and more like criminals is emphatically not the solution. It'll become part of the problem.

I only play single player PC games on my laptop, when I am somewhere away from my house. That's the reason why I buy single player PC games in the first place, to play them on my laptop when I am in a no-internet area since open wireless aren't as common as they probably are in North America. I spent additional money just to buy a "gaming laptop", so basically this UBI thing is a big FUCK YOU aimed at me, my wallet and my entertainment. Neat.

Yes the outrage would be (and it is) HUGE that you need to be wired all the time. It reeks of science fiction too, the beginning of an era where simple rights start to be negated unless you are connected to "the network", and people think it's ok. It doesn't matter how widespread the internet is, I want to be able to play it in my log cabin in the woods or in a submarine, or just at my place the night my router dies. It's ridiculous I cannot anymore.

Music and movies suffer piracy too. How long before they force you to be connected to listen to your CDs or watch your DVDs?

I hope this is a joke.
I hope I read it wrong.
I hope someone will put a mandatory internet connection on their penises, so next time they want to have sex they will have to find a suitable network.

And be forced to view/listen to advertising.

Oh god. I can see it now...

"uNF uNF uNF" "oh god don't stop" *DING* do YOU feel wilted? wish you were bigger? buy Viagra today and please your lady like she deserves!

As long as you don't see copies of AC 2 on the used games bin the DRM is doing its job.

I don't think sales prevention was their goal :awesome_for_real:

You'd think so, but I sometimes begin to wonder. Take "it's not balanced for lean" as an example.

Not quite related to the problem we're looking at now, yet somehow it might be: linky (http://en.akihabaranews.com/6699/pc/2nd-hand-electronics-sales-will-soon-be-illegal-in-japan)

More and more, DRM strikes me as akin to gun control legislation; it rarely manages to affect anyone other than those who obey the law. While we wade through crap, criminals continue to get their guns games from a guy in a van down by the river.

You had to bring guns into it because we were too much in agreement here, didn't you?

Nice four year old link you've got there.

I'll take CD authetication as an example, since I had a brush with this.
For a long while there, my DVD Rom didn't quite work correctly. (I posted a bit of my adventures in the tech help thread here.) I could sometimes use it, and sometimes not. Really odd problem that resisted all kinds of troubleshooting. So I wound up investigating CD cracks on the net. I hadn't done any piracy related stuff since the Commodore 64 days, but if I wanted to play my games, I had to go all Renegade Shepard.  :why_so_serious: I was surprised at how easy it was. Download the crack, throw it in the game directory. Bingo. All this to play games that I had legitimatley purchased.
I've since managed to get my drive working properly. (And Lord, don't ask me how. I just kinda "grew" out of it in the last set up upgrades we did.) But if I ever wanted to buy used PC games, I'm a lot less apprehensive about downloading cracks.

IMO DRM has the potential to widen the pirate population as people will be encouraged to seek out cracks in order to use their products.

I always hated that "need to input CD/DVD" to play. I can see why companies do that, but it still pisses me off if I have to go dig through a pile of discs to play a game already installed on my pc. However, I can't say that I have ever NOT bought a game because of this feature... in fact I can't say I ever paid attention to it till a later time when the company already bought it's drugs with my money.

Didn't notice the date when I got it from a friend of mine, but I still reckon it's relevant, and a potential glimpse into the future.

Second hand sales prevention was totally their goal. 

1. One person buys the product.

2. That person makes that product available to others, DRM or no.

3. Team of competent people hack your code in isolation from outside sources to make it work.

4. Isolated hacked code is then made available to public.

5. Profit! (of the entertainment variety)

No amount of DRM is going to stop Step 3. Code and data files are not protected if they aren't being executed, and once its on a hacker's computer, they can tell that code / data to behave however they want it to, no matter how protected you make it. The only way you could stop it is to have all game files on a remote computer and only stream the graphics to the user.

I think some company was trying that.

Actually I think I just defined Web Games.

I'm just about to.....buffering....

I have enjoyed your adorable interpretation of how cracking works.  :hello_kitty_2:

It seems UBI has already patched the DRM code to "let you keep playing from exactly where you left off" in case your connection drops.  How...  nice.

They also warn you that "any gamer who downloads and plays a cracked version of [AC2] and [SH5] will find that their version is not complete" (http://www.shacknews.com/laryn.x?story=62628).

Still not buying it, and I enjoyed AC1 (minus the hordes of lamprey women and imbeciles).

Oh nose?

It works well enough for my purposes.

 :facepalm:

Pretty much this.

Before you all get ahead of yourselves, it's broken. Whatever their new DRM is, all of the current cracked versions have issues. The biggest being that the animus trigger doesn't work, so you can't actually play the game.

Still time until the release date for this to change, but it looks like it wasn't THAT easy.

You insert the bitstream into the softice to break the wrapper on the shell and decode the demuxer WHARGARBLE.

The internet warriors neckbeards have struck again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qu-Vgi5H3FA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUgS24uSFSk

Das DRM. :grin:

Second hand PC games? Really? I'd never touch a second hand PC game, since you don't want to find that the serial number is in use/has been banned when you go and play some MP. Does EB/Gamestop in the US even do used PC games? They don't here. It's all console.

No, Gamestop in the US does not sell used PC games.

I walked into a Game (that's all it is called) today and the PC games sold there were 1) all originals and 2) all on one shelf behind the counter (and iirc consisted of WoW, STO and Dragon Age - that was your PC section right there). Console titles were everywhere else.


This is true with many things though: obeying the law can be a slow, costly and problematic exercise. Plus it stops you doing lots of fun stuff too. Lots of options open up if you choose to ignore those laws.

Tha various EBs around Melbourne seem to have a ton more than that, still, none are second hand. There's also one Gametraders in my area, which does have a shelf of secondhand PC games.

But in this case, the difference is that gun control does involve laws, but not serious modifictions to the guns themselves. DRM involves no laws, but major modifications to the product that make it undesirable.

It's harder to make infinite copies of a gun for free.

The Soviet Union and China disagree with that statement. :awesome_for_real:

I was about to make a witty comment about China, but when I got out of the other thread, you'd beaten me to it...
 :awesome_for_real:

I suppose copyright holders would've loved being able to use the line "but it's so easy to make copies" to make the exact same changes to the product, and restrict our consumer rights, every damn time they've bitched and whined about that exact "problem". cassettes, CDs, videos.

They have made that exact argument, they never got anywhere, until now. Now it's digital, so now it's suddenly okay to fuck your customers in the ass while saying "it's to protect you from yourself!". Bullshit. Moneygrab is what it is.

The DRM authentication servers were down for more than 10 hours (http://forums.ubi.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/4721051016/m/7481010838) today. Nobody with a legit copy was able to play.
What a trainwreck.

This is ridiculous. Ubisoft lost me as a customer if they insist on this shit. What happens when I want to reload a game in 4 years?

The pirates win?  :why_so_serious:

Don't worry, they'll have an up to date/new version for you to buy for when you do feel the need!

They never needed to because their core supply chain/business was relatively untouched by the "downgraded" copies a cassette or VHS tape made of a CD or broadcast, respectively. It wasn't laws that changed. It is the decay of a business model and the needs of the old guard to fight while retreating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnHmskwqCCQ

Oh, the Comedy/Tragedy of it all..  :why_so_serious:

I wonder what Ubi's next step will be?

Blame the downtime on pirates?
Require blood and urine samples for each game you buy?
Have some guy tail you and make sure you don't make illegal copies?

I honestly have no idea what the next step will be, mainly because I find the whole debacle ludicrous. Everyone knows that any copy protection system will be cracked at some point, so I honestly do not see the reason to go beyond the disc-based copy protection (or even really bother with any protection at all).

And everyone who does anything online knows that if you piss people off sufficiently, chances are someone'll DDoS your shit, even if just to piss off everyone that is depending on your server being online. And if it isn't DDoS, then it's someone fucking up and taking the server down. Or the internet provider goes down. I'm flabbergasted at how they apparently haven't thought of that distinct possibility, or if they have, how they could've thought that would actually fly well with their public line of "adding value to the games for our valued customers".

If I were to guess, then they're either going to keep on suiciding in slow motion like they're doing now, or they pull out of the PC market alltogether. I do not see them ever stepping down a notch in this "war", not with their history of being (among the) first with the most controversial copy protection/DRM systems.

They did. Off the top of my head, Sony had to defend a charge that the recording function on VHS' would have huge impacts on TV shows since people could just tape things off it. Sony won when the judge decided that being able to record had material other benefits that outweighed that potentially negative impact.

However, again the issue with that comparison is personal use and limited distribution (it's a physical copy that requires other physical copies to be made of it for distribution) versus online where one single unprotected version can spawn an unlimited number of copies. The scale and impact is potentially very different.

Also, it might be a money grab, but developing games isn't free. Especially the AAA titles the market chews up very quickly (even if they are considered "high quality, high value" titles).

Well, yeah, these things costs money.  You know what saves money?  Optional digital distribution through Steam.

Arrrr...... page 10 of that thread is definitely not work-safe. Or safe at any other time or place, for that matter. *tries to clean his eyes with a cheese grater*

Actually, I'd completely forgotten about this. I did some research a while back, and I then found reports that there were quarrels between musicians and manufacturers of "playback devices" as far back as in the 1500s or 1600s I believe. The crux was that musicians of the time were complaining about how playback devices would kill off their livelihood, since they were no longer required to travel around and play for people, people could just buy a playback device and the appropriate drumroll or similar, and play it whenever they wanted. The major change that actually happened was that music became more common/prevalent, the musicians were just as much in demand as before.

I must note, however, the irony of the Sony case. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

Also, if you were to take today's laws regarding "software disassembly" etc, back to the 1980s etc, taping over the hole on a cassette to allow you to record stuff on it would make you liable for jailtime. There's logic for you.
I've no quarrel with that problem being the case. What I (unsuccessfully) tried to get across was, this problem with new technology coming along and making the old ways "quaint" has been the case time and time again. Certainly when you had the playback devices which could play the piano automatically, and I believe also when you could print books instead of having to manually copy them letter for letter. They bitched for a while, then they changed their business model, and they made more money as a result, while letting more people consume what was being produced. Everybody won.

What the publishers are doing right now is just restricting, I'm not seeing any value added anywhere for the customer. Basically the only right he has is the right to pay money for something, and possibly play the game (as long as it isn't too old or there are other technical issues the customer can't fix). If the publisher goes bust, removes the auth server or just gets DDoSed to death, the user is without any rights to return the product as defective, nor can he fix the problem (i.e. remove the DRM) without breaking the law.

Games being expensive should not give publishers carte blanche to do what the hell ever they want to do, and say it's "to fight piracy". I'll allow for "reasonable measures to curb piracy", but why I call it a money grab these days is, they're well beyond reasonable measures. To me, they went too far when they required that what is essentially single-player games be online at any point during its install or execution, let alone ubisoft's current solution.

MMOs are a different matter, since they actually provide "added value" when you can actually interact with other people and it actually expands the experience, and it's actually something you expect when you enter into the agreement. It's implied. Singleplayer games, however, imply by definition that you're playing it alone. That means I expect to be dependent on nothing outside of my apartment working when I fire it up. I should be able to sit at a hut in the mountains with a diesel generator and play it if I so choose.

And no, being able to "save your savegames online" is far from sufficient added value to even begin to justify requiring you be online at all times (or even just during the first-time activation), let alone disallowing you from installing it on more than x PCs you might have/want to play it on, or even stop working if you upgrade your existing PC. There's no way anyone can spin that, which will make me agree that it's right or a good idea, or even that it should be an allowed limitation. None.

And that is what pisses me off and makes me call the whole deal a money grab. I'm all for them getting return on their investment, as long as they aren't being so blatantly consumer-hostile about it. Cut that shit out or get the fuck out.

PS: It's just unfathomable to me how they could've gotten the biggest bout of bad press over DRM with Spore in 2008, and continue to go even further in 2009/2010. It's gone from something fanatics froth at the mouth over (while everyone else just shrug and play the game), to something which almost everybody is going to be frothing at the mouth over, and how they can seriously consider that a great idea is beyond me.

Because Spore made them lots of money. The only thing that has a chance of Ubi "seeing the light" regarding their DRM is if their games just stop selling because of it.

This one was tasty:


Your online saves can go away due to errors?  Fabulous. At least they patched in the offline save.

EDIT:  Did their forums just go down?  EDIT2: And they're back.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/03/08/ubisoft-says-server-downtime-due-to-attacks/

I tried to quickly look for when I said I expected ubisoft's drm servers to be attacked to hell and back, but I couldn't find it off-hand, but I'm *not* surprised that they are attacked. They're a high-profile target with a high level of possible grief. Ubisoft has to have known this would happen.

Edit:


So the server didn't "go down", and they were only "unavailable to 5% of their customers"? So how to interpret this number? 95% of their games are sold on the console? They have multiple servers spread around the world, so only certain locations lose the ability to play games?

Frankly, I'd be surprised if there was a moment in the next month that the Ubisoft servers AREN'T under attack. A month should be sufficient time for the nerdrage to die down and something shiny and new to distract them.

But really, in this case, Ubi is getting what they deserve.

To me their "did not affect 95% of players" statement seems to have a suspicious stench of bullshit surrounding it.

If you assume only 5% of the people in the world with computers bought their games, then 95% of (potential) players were not impacted!

Those 95% aren't "potential" players, they're lost sales. The pirates stole those sales from Ubi.

 :oh_i_see:

I'm sure I'm rehashing something you all have argued about before, but what's the difference between pirating the game and me borrowing my brothers copy of AC2 for PS3?

Stolen from quarter to three forums
(http://i46.tinypic.com/2py18bo.jpg) :awesome_for_real:

Your brother bought that copy, he's lending it to you. He's not able to play the game while you're playing it, thus there's no illegal copying going on, and no copyright infringement.

I was just running with the previous exaggeration. I was parodying the nonsense that people who play the game without paying for it are "lost sales".

Shoulda used green text amirite?

I was acknowledging what you were doing. Doubly green!


So then why are sales ever mentioned in piracy arguments? They still lost a sale.

If you want to look at the world in black and white, then sure. You've fired the game up so it's automatically a lost sale. I'd call that faulty logic, however.

In my world, however, lending a game to someone or giving a game to someone after you've bought it, isn't even remotely close to piracy. It can lead to a lost sale, sure, but that is not even in the same ballpark as piracy. Most people define piracy as "making illegal copies", aka "copyright infringement". Transferring ownership of a copyrighted material, either temporary or permanently, isn't illegal last time I checked.

But honestly, has nobody ever borrowed a game from a friend, found out that the game does indeed rock, so you go out and buy it for yourself because your friend is nagging you to get his game back so HE can play it?

This thread is losing its edge.
 :sad:

Rationalize your theft however you want, pirate scum.

I didn't say it was piracy, I asked why sales are mentioned. A lost sale is a lost sale regardless of whether it's because it was borrowed or pirated.

Sins of a Solar Empire proved that sales don't necessarily make for a compelling argument against piracy.

Because there's no other way that piracy can be made to resemble actual theft.  If someone steals a loaf of bread, the store has lost a loaf of bread, and this is easy to understand.  If someone copies a piece of software, the only thing the store has lost is a possible sale.  Someone trying to make the case that piracy equals theft has to make the case that the lost sale is real and has a tangible value that has been transferred from its rightful owner to someone else.

My impression is that the people yammering on about "lost sales" tend to be publishers, who seem to be very for seeing this particular issue in black and white. In their world, borrowing a copy from a friend can't possibly mean you'll try it out, find it's good, and buy your own copy. No, it's got to be a lost sale.

But what's this about SoaSE? I thought it was goo that was the poster-child for how bad piracy was these days.

Personally? No.  When I borrow a game, I beat it and hand it back.  Been this way forever with me.  Even playing a game at someone's house has rarely led to a sale, but it did eventually with Metal Gear Solid 4 once I actually had a PS3.

This.  Not only that but i can't see any scenario were you'd loan out a game before you are done with it.

I am completely the opposite. Playing UO at convinced me I needed a system to play it. Playing Guitar Hero at Furiously's house convinced me I needed to buy a 360 for GH II.

I agree, but isn't that the same unquantifiable situation as piracy?  Will someone who borrows a game buy it on their own if it wasn't available from a friend?  Would a pirate buy a game if it wasn't available online?

This is more or less where I was going with this, but still wanted to know what qualified the use of sales data. There have been times where I have borrowed a game and ended up buying it, but in most cases of me purchasing a game I was on the fence about, in some cases piracy led to the sale.


Depends on how you look at it. They didn't put any copy protection and sold 500,000 units (or more.) It was highly pirated, but that goes without saying for most good PC games out there.

http://twitter.com/Ubisoft/statuses/10166866294 (http://twitter.com/Ubisoft/statuses/10166866294)

lol Can't play single player due to online server down. Wtf. Ass Creed

What? Again?

So I bet there are gamers out there who get mad they bought this game.  I bet they return it.  I'm wondering.  Since AC2 is for XBox, those returns are going to be put back on the self at the EBStop and resold as used.  Do those count as lost sales?  I mean the ones specifically returned because of this denial of service.  I'm just wondering.  Where do the bean counters stand on that?

All this can go away if Jade Raymond gives the internet what it wants.

You appear slightly confused. The XBox one is like any other Xbox game. The nerdrage, etc is over the PC version.

Yeah it's for the PC version mainly. The only way to play the game while their online verification server is down....is to download a crack. LMAO.

Oh, I thought they DDoSed the DRM server and fucked the console people too.  Either way, Raymond, you know what to do.

No, no, it's just the PC gamers that are the üntermenschen so far. They'll probably move on to the console in due time, however. Can't have all those lost sales to piracy and games resale, you know.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgFdwFKDhiE

She's not going to strip for you. You'll have to be content with the very small amount of other free porn accessable on the internet.

Piracy leads to a Schodinger's Cat issue of a pirated copy both costing and not costing a sale. The only way it can be determined if a pirated copy cost a sale is to know the alternate state if the pirated version wasn't available, which is near impossible to do.

Does piracy reduce sales of titles? Yes. The exact extent of the loss is impossible to determine though. The other issue is that a number of AAA titles will still sell exceptionally well, even without DRM. Spore sold well, despite being crowned "the most pirated game in history". Fallout 3, Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age didn't have DRM of note and all sold well (plus they had console sales too... and both Bethseda and BioWare are heading towards MMOs as well). I've got an hypothesis that piracy hits the sub-AAA titles the hardest, raising the barriers to making them a success, which means that publishers increasingly stick to 'sure things' like established IPs or majorly hyped AAA titles... but I'm not sure I can prove it. (By AAA, I mean development budget.)

Do pirated copies have tangible value? Yes. It is a pretty clear case if I'm buying a DVD in a plastic sleeve off the streets of Bali, but a little less defined if I just grab it from a torrent site. I suppose you could measure 'tangible value' if someone was using services intended for those legitimate purchasers, but it is less clear.

Anyway, we are into "can you steal an idea?" territory. Which you can, there are lots of caveats / loopholes because an idea / IP isn't a tangible object.

As for DRMing the console versions: only if they can openly connect to the internet.

I'd hypothesize that pirating of sub-AAA titles which no one would know about gives them more publicity than they can afford with their own marketing.  If it is a good title it will make money from the interest generated.  If it's a crap title then they wouldn't have generated those sales from positive word of mouth.

So games that make a lot of money also get pirated a lot... therefore if a game gets pirated a lot it will not make lots of money?

We've been here before, but you're basically assuming a tangible cost to sales that results from piracy and then casually saying that a game sold well "despite piracy" when the statistics don't agree with you.  It's no more scientific than using anecdotal evidence to prove that piracy is good for sales.

:awesome_for_real:

Some games that get pirated a lot still make lots of money. The two aren't mutually exclusive. However, piracy does reduce the pool of people looking to buy a title (because, again, if you have a working version of the game it is highly unlikely you'll buy another one to go legit without significant other motivation like added services) which in turn reduces the potential for titles to break even. We already know that most video games aren't profitable (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-10106612-17.html) with only about 20% of titles on the shelf bringing in more than they cost to develop. This is why I said I think that AAA titles can probably be piracy resistant enough to sell enough copies - they have enough hype and push behind them to reach gamers who wouldn't pirate it. Sub-AAA titles have a much tougher time of attracting buyers and that's before piracy comes along and takes part of their potential market.

Piracy adds to these barriers of achieving profitability. Although it is easy to say, "Just make better games to sell more copies" there are certainly games that were good but didn't sell and bad games that fly off the shelves.

My personal perspective on the costs of piracy is that I used to have a Commodore Amiga 500, a platform and company who's demise was certainly helped along by massive piracy of its titles, especially in the US. I'm not going to say that piracy killed Commodore, because there were particular management decisions that didn't help, but piracy certainly dropped the threshold in which mistakes from Commodore meant the end of the company.

All in all, it is pretty much impossible to say that piracy is directly responsible for much, despite titles being torrented millions of times. I can't prove that Spore would have been more profitable without piracy, or without DRM for that matter, nor can I prove that a small studio who closed its doors did so simply because their title was widely pirated. No-one trusts any numbers in this area for a mix of methodological and ideological reasons. However, I do see piracy as comparable (bad internet analogy time!) to a persistent virus - it might not kill you, but it makes you susceptible to other problems that come up.

Some DRM may be the cure that equals the disease, of course.

I agree with everything you said, UnSub. My frustration is with companies that point to piracy as a scapegoat for their problems. It's a problem, but there seem to be companies who manage to survive and thrive even though piracy exists. If there were some magical DRM that make games unpiratable  :awesome_for_real: and had no further impact on the user, I'd be completely for it.

I can't help but think that in the past few posts you've made, you've mis-characterized what I said earlier in the thread in an attempt to get me to pop out and challenge you.  Well here I am, successfully trolled.

What I did say was that more valuable games get pirated less.  You've somehow translated that to good, and then jumped to quality having little to do with what gets pirated.  Which is probably true, but not what I said.  Value means more than just quality.  I think I spelled it out pretty well earlier in the thread.

You seem to imply that if we don't stop pirates by any means necessary, it's the end of the PC gaming era.  But you're just taking it too far.  It will undoubtedly hurt some companies, as they will persist with the shit they've been shoveling for the past twenty years with ever increasingly draconian security measures.  And those companies will continue to lose share to companies that have figured out that building in value is more important than pure bombastic gameplay hype.  I will continue to buy games I think are worth it, and play them on my PC.  Sky is not falling, Chicken Little.

But you're right in that it is easy to say, "Just make more valuable games to increase profitability."  I know it's not as easy to do, and I already admitted so in this thread.  But what you're saying (DRM is okay because it helps sales in the face of piracy) just compounds the difficulty of getting my otherwise very salient message across by completely obfuscating it's inherent truth: A product worth buying curbs piracy much more effectively than DRM. 

Hell I don't even care about DRM if the game is worth it.  I'd buy a game from somebody who I know will give me my money's worth - even if they decide they need to use DRM.  But I have yet to find a game with DRM that wasn't either hiding a catastrophic shortcoming (Hi Spore!), or totally bereft of value.  After a while you have to stop and wonder why that is.  If you can't manage to give me a game that's worth my money, then pirates aren't the problem.

Actually!  I bought Space Rangers.  I can't honestly say its DRM was hiding a catastrophic shortcoming or the game was bereft of value, because the DRM prevented it from working on my PC.  Good times.

This is a single-player game, where the full price has been paid. Exactly how are they "compensating those affected by the recent OSP server downtime"? Anyone know?

Free DLC?

Really, this is a PR nightmare anyway. I don't know why they even bother. They have the money and everybody burnt that way wil think twice buying another game with that DRM.

I see a new way of getting value for your money with UBI if that'd be the case. Buy tons of their games, initiate DDoS against their servers, get more content a few weeks later.

:grin:

As a potential customer who passed on AC2's PC version solely because of the DRM, I find it really hard to sympathise with UBI's DDoS plight. Sure, this is all anecdotal and I don't claim to speak for any significant market segment, but here it is: UBI has actually created a situation where it's far more appealing to consider pirating the game than it is to purchase a legitimate copy.

"The carrot is still in development, in the meantime, please enjoy stick instead."

Well done.  :facepalm:

Well, DRM works: I didn't pirate Ubisoft's games.  Of course, I didn't buy them, either, but they seem to care much more about who doesn't steal the game than about who does buy it, so I guess that's a win in their book.

I couldn't be arsed to make a new thread over this, so I'll inject it here.

Apparently Ubisoft's taken settlers 7 even further online:


I bolded the funny bit.

Not the first game by a long shot to do that.  It's not even limited to games.  When I finished doing my taxes, TurboTax asked if I wanted to brag about it on my Facebook page (and I did).  I'm surprised Steam doesn't have an option yet to tweet your achievements.

Thank christ they don't

I wiped my ass today. I thought everyone here should know about it.

Inflicting your banal everyday tedium on others is what social media is all about.  :awesome_for_real:

Yeah, the facebook/twitter shit is Ubi's attempt to add additional value to buying their games, and suffering through the "always on" aspect. XBL does this now with it's facebook and twitter integtration, as well as MSN. Man I hate bullshit social networking (andmost people), but so many of the kids today are right into it.

Hey, at least they'll be even easier to cyberstalk as adults!

It'll be interesting to see where our social-networked society will be in 10 or 20 years. The amount of information they are putting out there that can be used against them is extremely high, and they don't even realize it.

It's already ridonkulous when people blog or tweet that they hate their boss, who's on their friend list or whatever.

Is Settlers 7 using the same "need to be online" DRM?

Is there even multiplayer in Settlers 7?

Yep, comes with UBI-DRM.

I think it has multiplayer too, not sure though.

Apparently Silent Hunter 5 players get a free game, either shaun white snowboarding, or prince of persia. Assassins Creed 2 owners get the choice between Hawx, Heroes over Europe, EndWar or Prince of Persia.

Somehow, I can't see how getting a 2 year old game of snowboarding, or PoP would appease me if I bought a submarine simulator.

Weak.

AFAIK that is only for US customers. EU AC2 customers get the bonus maps from the Black Edition, and for the Black Edition owners, they get the bonus maps from the Black Edition (no, that is not a copy and paste error  :awesome_for_real:). Ubi forums are fun to read at the moment.

Some guy apparently thinks UBI is going in the right direction, and that we'll all learn to accept our new role as whipping boys:

He has apparently also not gotten the memo where EA is also going in the same direction, where the exact same reaction is occurring.

"Ahead of its time" indeed.

I question the credentials and legitimacy of anyone who mentions Stardock ahead of Steam.

That depends. When I bought the medieval: total war game, it required I be online to initiate it the first time I fire it up. stardock's system doesn't require that, but it rewards you if you do register and update the game. They also have a resale policy. Overall, however, if you do have a fairly quick internet connection, then yes, steam is usually the more convenient system, but there are situations when that isn't the case.

He also fails to mention that the day-one DLC was available to pirates too.

He also glosses over the fact that the game can't be fucking used if your internet connection is down. Which while not maliciously intended, sure as fuck would feel like a punch in the gut when it happens on a single-player game.

:oh_i_see:

(http://dl.dropbox.com/u/963220/dubious.gif)

That smilie better become a standard, stat.

Solution: make all games an MMO. Whee! Yay! (http://mindriot.as/awesomepictures/dubious.gif)

(that dubious smilie was so awesome I had to steal it.)

This is the reason I won't be buying AC2 or any other Ubisoft product.  I've never pirated anything ever, be it games, music, movies or whatever, and yet I'm being subjected to restrictions as a paying customer.  Gaming companies better pull their heads out of their asses and find other ways to combat pirating without adversly effecting people that are actually buying their product.  If DRM methods become too intrusive, I'll find other places to spend my disposable income that aren't gaming related.  It might be difficult at first, but I can find other hobbies to spend my money on.

Seeing the stellar retention rates in most recent MMOG launches, I doubt Even Ubi is dim enough to go all service industry on us.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, being the broken record that I am: If Ubi could find it in their hearts to insert a bit more perceived value and incentive and fewer punitive measures in their DRM, I'd be a happy camper. Nobody likes being treated like a criminal, especially when forking money over.

I've been disconnected from single player vs AI Starcraft 2 beta games multiple times.

There is absolutely no way I would ever pay any amount of money to play something single player that required constant internet access. The second I got dropped from my own game I would snap the disc in half.

Fallout 3 was tied to GFWL for save games and DLC, iirc. I forget if it caused any problems, I don't remember any...but I also reconnected quickly every time it kicked me off. If each boot had actually interrupted gameplay (I think it may have interfered with saving/loading?), I would've been pissed.

The only problems with that was localization (only German for German-speaking countries, racist Microsoft assholes). But I had a problem with my Firewall once (didn't connect to GfW so I had to turn it off), and as soon as I was in the game, I could turn the Firewall back on and could still play the game.

There was no compulsory GFWL bullshit in my fallout 3.

You needed GFWL to buy the DLC - which was enough to stop me buying it, so I don't know if it required you to remain connected.

Nod. I got my Fallout 3 DLC via retail discs - which just had the files dumped onto them. No G4WL connection needed.

The only thing was that if you saved a game in GfW mode it wasn't available to you if not online. But if you started offline and stayed that way all worked splendidly.

That's what I did, I think it was the only way to get achievements. Then I remembered I don't care about achievements and the fallout ones aren't great anyway.

Steam was pimping Settlers 7 on the ads menu when I closed Titan Age. Neat, I thought, having really read much about the series. I was reading the features and ran into this brick wall at the end:

A PERMANENT INTERNET CONNECTION AND CREATION OF A UBISOFT ACCOUNT ARE REQUIRED TO PLAY THIS VIDEO GAME AT ALL TIMES AND TO UNLOCK EXCLUSIVE CONTENT. SUCH CONTENT MAY ONLY BE UNLOCKED ONE SINGLE TIME WITH A UNIQUE KEY. YOU MUST BE AT LEAST 13 TO CREATE A UBISOFT ACCOUNT WITHOUT PARENTAL CONSENT. UBISOFT MAY CANCEL ACCESS TO ONLINE FEATURES UPON A 30-DAY PRIOR NOTICE.

I mean, good lord. You actually put this shit on customers who are already on Steam, and have to have an internet connection to even play your game? NO, NOT ENOUGH ASSHATS! WE MUST PRINT IN BOLD LETTER THAT YOU NEED EXTRA ACCOUNTS AND SHIT BECAUSE YOU HAVE MONEY AND ARE FUCKING CRIMINALS.

I'm not exaggerating about the caps, that's actually how they printed it.

Sheer class, yelling at the customer. I love the French.  :Love_Letters:

Silly joking aside, I'd understand the connectivity issue if we were talking about a retail box copy, but on Steam? Seems a bit redundant. The separate Ubi account on the other hand is plain douchebaggery, no excuse there. Kind of defeats the whole purpose of an umbrella service. Someone should clue Ubi in on why people like Steam in the first place.

That would involve ubisoft cluing in on why it's nice to actually have CUSTOMERS in the first place. I'm starting to get worried they've forgotten all about that bit lately, at least that's what it looks like.

As for the yelling, could that be for some EULA-type legal reason? I know they love to type in allcaps.

Well duh, removing the customers allows you to remove the product allows you to remove the employees. All of those cost Ubi money. So logically, if you go all the way, only profit will remain!

Yes indeedy. Legalese has its textual conventions. I just find it funny when those conventions clash in different social contexts. One man's legalese is another's yelling on an internet message board.

Yes, I'm a nerd.  :facepalm:

Would wer rather it not be mentioned?  Having it plainly stated in all caps seems like something we should be thankful for.  It could only be improved by being put at the top in giant flashing colored font.

I tend to agree.

Personally I don't think the warning is prominent enough.

(example from steampowered.com : http://store.steampowered.com/app/21970/)

I was planning to buy new Settlers but there is no way I am going to tolerate such obnoxious DRM.

I forgot Ubi published Settlers. Very disappointing.

Yeah, entertained a notion of purchasing that particular title too, and will definitely not now.

UBI'S DRM practices also prevent their games from working properly behind firewalls. I had a friend who had to return Settlers because he couldn't connect to Ubi servers.

I don't know if this has been covered (mostly skimmed through,) but doesn't the phrase "UBISOFT MAY CANCEL ACCESS TO ONLINE FEATURES UPON A 30-DAY PRIOR NOTICE" mean that they effectively have the right to simply void your purchase, for whatever reason they see fit as long as it's tentatively covered by the EULA or whatever make-believe legalese that they add to games nowadays? Sure, those clauses have in theory been there for a long time, but this would mean they have a perfectly viable way of enforcing all their bullshit policies.

Software calling home and destroying itself because I've been fiddling around in its files doesn't make me happy.

Welcome to the future, it's a happy place.

That particular phrase has been on every online game in the history of ever, I'm pretty sure. It came up recently in a WHO thread too. In any case it isn't really saying anything about canceling YOUR access with a 30 day notice, it means everyone. As in, you get 30 days notice when they end of life the game and take the servers down for it. You could be individually banned without 30 days notice at all by any of these companies.

Mark me down as another lost sale to their DRM policy, though, I was going to check out the Settlers game until I saw that it had that.

Figure I'll just pop in with this:
http://www.guru3d.com/news/ubisoft-drm-completely-cracked/

Quietly hoping they've gotten it now. I'm still going to avoid their game (I've suddenly got way too many old games I figure should give a try again), but they need to get their face rubbed in over this at some point.

I fear the only thing they've gotten is that they were too lenient on their customers and need to be more draconic in their copy protection measures.

Because customers are people paying for the right to be their enemy...

Skid Row!

kicking it old-school!  :why_so_serious:

Wow, I am glad I am not the only one who thought that.

UbiSoft didn't expect this kind of protection to last forever. Cue phase 2, sometime around their next big release.

I bet they expected it to last longer than it did.  :why_so_serious:

I'm surprised it lasted as long as it did.

Hey!  Now I could play Settlers in a morally responsible way, you know, if I wanted.

:why_so_serious:

Out of curiosity from reading guru3d's article title I went spelunking.  The original cnet article (http://news.cnet.com/8301-27076_3-20003120-248.html) guru3d quotes is talking about an .exe crack and/or multiple files for AC2 (I can't follow the erratic writing), not a general Ubisoft DRM crack. 

And cnet was unsurprisingly wrong about everything.  There is no .exe or multiple files, the "crack" is a .dll which does nothing beyond what is already available, and the .dll isn't even Skid Row's work product despite Skid Row taking credit for it.

I figured this out in a few minutes of reading.  I'm too sleepy to figure out why neither cnet's Josh Lowensohn nor guru3d's Hilbert Hagedoorn could be bothered to do the same.  Maybe they were sleepy too.

Lots of posts claiming it was cracked and working through.

AC2's single player campaign can be completed without connecting to Ubisoft's servers by emulating Ubisoft's servers.  That isn't a crack.  The values used for AC2 cannot be used with Settlers 7, Splinter Cell: Conviction, etc.  To say "Ubisoft DRM Completely Cracked" is an incredible overstatement.

This is what Razor1911 has to say about it in their Settlers 7 .nfo file.

 :why_so_serious:

I would have been interested in checking out Settlers but the whole "Need to connect to server" shit pretty much negates that.

I'm disappointed about Settlers as well because it looks like a friendlier version of Anno I can enjoy.  In an attempt to curb piracy and generate more sales, Ubisoft's DRM has accomplished the following:

1)  Chased away everyone wary of mandatory internet connectivity for single player games.  Ubisoft's DRM created current lost sales.

2)  Frustrated legitimate purchasers of Settlers 7 who suffer from the repeated server problems preventing single player gaming.  Ubisoft's DRM created future lost sales.

3)  Pirating Settlers 7 offers a superior experience over buying it because the pirated version has no mandatory internet connection to prevent single player gaming.  Ubisoft's DRM fails to generate sales.

Ubisoft's DRM punishes everyone except pirates.  As an added bonus pirates get to hear catchy stuff like this (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHVD_z54alY).   :drill:

Sooo... what are the sales for the Ubisoft titles under their current DRM regime?

I don't know. Most people I know that pirate games have actually passed on pirating the latest Ubisoft games that are loaded with the current DRM scheme. Of course, they've also all foregone buying the games. Most because its just a general pain in the ass and Ubisoft is fairly fanatical about tracking torrents and sending letters to ISPs. Personally I'm somewhat glad Ubisoft games tend to be extremely low on my play-list even disregarding DRM.

Part of me wants to pirate their games and then delete them, just on principle, though.

That's exactly it.  Piracy doesn't always equal a lost sale, but DRM always punishes the legitimate consumer.

They'll never tell you. Hell, they even went out and said that prince of persia PC edition (...or one of them, I forget the exact details) was copy protection-free to test the theory, but that was only announced on their forums. The box still said it had CP I believe. I bought a copy just to try to influence them, but they never went on record to specify what their expectations were (except "people suck and we hate them"), and they certainly never released any specific sales numbers.

Of course, 6 months later they went all Mr Hyde on us with the latest creation, so I suppose either PoP didn't sell as well as they wanted it to, or they were dead set on going down this path anyways, PoP was just a kind of publicity stunt.

I was sort of interested in AC2, very interested in settlers, and probably a few other ubisoft games I've forgotten about already because they've pissed me off with their latest DRM. Same goes with a few of my friends. I guess they didn't want those sales anyways.

Hell, I'm not even going to bother pirating the games to see what they play like, I certainly don't want to give them the satisfaction of being able to point at numbers I helped grow and say "see? see? them thar ebul piwates, we hatses them and they must die".

lac: good thing you posted that razor announcement. I was shown that by a friend of mine yesterday, but I didn't get around to copy/pasting it. It'll probably have to be customized still for each game, as ubisoft'll probably keep making minor changes to "defeat" the pirates for a few days, but I'll take this as a victory for the "good guys" nontheless.

Taking the new laptop to work on Friday, since I have to mind the office for the day. Going to use my crappy work Lenovo machine for work, and when nothing is happening, particularly for the 90mins-2hrs I have to stay after everyone else goes home, I will use the Dell to play games on via offline Steam (since I can't connect to my secure work network with it). If I'd bought any of Ubi's bullshit DRM games, I wouldn't be able to play them, as opposed to a fucking ton of offline-mode Steam games.

Not that I'd have bought AC2, Anno or Settlers, but I do buy a lot of games from Steam, and now Ubi's shit is excluded from my "I'll buy that" list...

I'd wager almost exactly the same as they otherwise would have been.

Nerd rage, even well justified nerd rage, doesn't sting as much as you'd hope.

I was literally clicking to buy Settlers. I read the DRM warning, clicked away and bought Mount and Blade: Warband. They lost an actual sale from me they will never get back until they remove that bloated, ridiculous shit.

I would have picked up Settlers were it not for DRM. The measures they took with Anno 1404 preventing me from accessing my game data from certain locations was the start of that.

The best copy protection Ubi and other publishers can get is to just hire Razor1911 to create it. I'm pretty sure anything they were satisfied with would take other groups a long, long time to crack. The problem is they're probably not interested.

Or they could just man up and realize me, and people like me with disposable income and an absolute aversion to piracy are really eager to toss at least $300 a year at their products.

But we don't like being fucked for our patronage.

I'm pretty sure the "nerd rage" is going to go beyond just nerds, if it hasn't already.

Unless, you know, they shrug and ditch the PC for gaming and go for consoles, where the games quality overall is so much higher.

Oh god, I nearly fell into my own sarchasm.

Someone check my reasoning:

UbiSoft announces 9 million units sold of Assassin's Creed 2. (http://www.joystiq.com/2010/05/18/assassins-creed-2-ships-close-to-9-million-conviction-sales-re/)

VGChartz indicates that AC2 sold about 7.25m on consoles (rough 52/48 Xbox and PS3 split). (http://www.vgchartz.com/games/index.php?name=assassin%27s+creed+2)

...which leaves about 1.75m units for PCs, even under the DRM.

That doesn't mean a lot in a vacuum.  Can you find the numbers by platform for Ass Creed 1?  (My Google-fu is failing me.)

(edit: Mind you, the REAL test will be the same numbers for Ass Creed 3 if it ever exists.  A lot of people didn't realize the implications of the DRM until after they'd bought the game; that impact won't be felt until the next time they have a choice whether to buy a game in the same franchise.)

Good point.

Assassin's Creed sold 4.86m on Xbox 360 and 3.73m on PS3 (http://www.vgchartz.com/games/index.php?name=assassin%27s+creed) for a total of 8.59m on the main consoles.

Ubisoft has announced that AssCreed had over 8m sales (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed), but that appears to not include PC sales (which it may not, given that it released 5 months later on the PC). Or, if it does, VGChartz is overestimating sales figures. AssCreed did pop up as a top seller on the PC for the month it came out and hung around for a while, but didn't make it into the top selling PC games of 2008 list (http://www.techspot.com/news/33262-npd-reveals-best-selling-pc-games-of-2008.html)... so maybe it didn't sell enough to push the total sold over 9m (but I doubt that AssCreed sold less than 500k on the PC).

Funnily enough, AssCreed did pop up as one of the most pirated titles on the PC for 2008. (http://torrentfreak.com/top-10-most-pirated-games-of-2008-081204/)

So, no PC sales figures?  I couldn't find any either, except a quote from Ubi where they said that PC sales were very good and had "exceeded expectations".  Before they decided to sue someone or other for piracy losses, that is, at which point their story changes and AC becomes the worst selling PC title of all time.  Nothing resembling an actual number either way, though.

Problem is that NPD doesn't report PC sales any more, probably because they look so pathetic. And the direct distributors don't make their sales public either.

And because of that lawsuit, they have probably made an effort to make whatever numbers were available disappear.

Someone should look through this (http://www.ecobook.eu/ubisoft/ra2009uk/index.html).  Not me though.  I'm not inclined for that sort of business.

Only 9% of their sales are for the PC. That's roughly $95M. Take that and divide it by $40 average (high and low costs) on a sale, you'll looking at ~2.4M units. They released 16 PC games on the year, three of which were heavy hitters. Assassin's creed came in late, so it's probably not a big part of the numbers.

Take into account games from 2008 & prior selling in 2009, moving some of the numbers forward and making some estimates, you can probably estimate that Assassins Creed 2 would push .75-1M units on the PC, but not much beyond that.

http://www.gametrailers.com/video/episode-118-pach-attack/100545

I love how this guy is apparently only focusing on people stealing games, he's apparently ignoring all the people who are/have/will have issues because of this system.

quote: "So I think anything the publisher does to make sure you don't rip off their game is their right, and if you don't like it, great, go find something else to do with your time. Do I think they made a mistake? I wish all games were like that, because I think people who steal should be in jail. And I welcome the flamer's comments on this one, because if you think that's right, good for you, we don't have any interest in YOUR business, since you don't pay for stuff anyway."

Yeah, good plan. Tell your customers when they complain to find something else to do with their time instead of actually evaluating the problem.

 :oh_i_see:  :uhrr:

Found this on bluesnews (where I found the vlog to begin with), and I have to agree with kxmode. I, and as many of my friends as I could educate on ubisoft's new take on DRM, have more or less completely stopped buying and playing ubisoft's games. It's literally the only recourse we have, since sending emails to them is most likely just going to get sent to /dev/null and ignored, and I fear that the "lost sales" are just lumped in with "them thar ebul piwates".

/shrug

Opinionated guy with an online journal/blog gets all straight-arrow and misses the point entirely along with passing on some incorrect information/misinformation. BFD.

tgr, this guy is basically trying to drive some controvery with the flamebait. How many of use looked at at least some of that guy's vlog because of his "extreme" comments? Ad-views, baby. Paelos, he doesn't work for Ubi. He's just some random opininated tool. Pretty much like all of us.

I don't even bother railing against the worst of DRM anymore. I just spend more on Steam and console games, and don't buy the DRM-fucked stuff. (With the caveat that if I ever really really wanted to play any of the DRM-fucked stuff, I'd pirate it, but honestly I have too much shit to play anyway so will just never bother to get around to Spore, et al.)

He may be an opinionated fuckwad just trying to drive some controversy, but how much would you bet he's at least somewhat representative to how most publishers think these days?

I too have too much shit to play to bother with piracy these days, but Spore is probably not the game I would use as an example of something I have to get. In fact, DRM probably saved me from buying what I probably would've thought of as a shit game. Oh the irony. :awesome_for_real:

I don't think it really matters what the rate of piracy is when it comes to your point. Devs/Publishers will lump lack of sales in with whatever justifies them being given money to make a go at another game. Boycotting a game by not buying doesn't have the impact you think it should and it never will.

So basically, we're fucked.

Not really.  They're fucked.  If it has the impact of the only people who play their games are pirates, their sales will be non-existent and they'll go out of business.  Someone else with good games who realizes DRM isn't the answer will prosper.  It'll all work out in the end.

Actually, I'm fairly certain that "they" will just stop developing for (or having any significant sales on) the PC, which means the PC market will be more open to indie people who'd rather go for gameplay than glitz (because, well, they're tiny).

I can hope, but I'm so not holding my breath for the next 5 years. :P

UbiSoft has five F2P MMOs (the Might and Magic one and Trackmania are known) in development and looks to be developing that DRM as part of a larger online service platform ala Steam. They are shifting their PC strategy in that direction.

I don't think it has any particular impact, and I'm quite in agreement that they'll call it a lost sale due to piracy whether I'd have bought the game or not. I pretty much don't care anymore though, which is kinda my point. If I could be arsed to really want to play their games, I'd pirate them. Usually this point of view devolves into an internet slapfight with one of a few people on f13 who have never taped a song off the radio and consider applying a no-CD cracked .exe to a game you bought and paid or can't get to work for whatever reason for as exactly the same as carjacking. But who can be fucked with that argument again, anymore? tgr can take up that particular mantle next time around, I'm pretty much done with caring.  :oh_i_see:

I'll be fucked in the ear five ways till the cows come home before I'll ever start a moralistic piss-fight over that particular subject. I'm not a saint, but I'm far from a demon either in this regard, and if someone's never taped a song off the radio, pirated any games or applied a no-CD cracked .exe, ever, in any way, shape or form, good for them. Have a cookie.

Given their track record I'm not in favor of that at all. Steam is already Steam, and it works well. They would just be trying to reinvent the wheel in order to cut out a middle-man margin, which I can't imagine is that huge on digital only content.

If you stacked up the possible gain of running your own shit vs. all the losses you take by being totally over-protective on Steam, I'd imagine it's no-where near break even.

Steam has shown that everyone wants a Steam.

Funny, considering how badly it was received when it was brand new.  I remember thinking, I don't know how I feel about this, however it really and truly revolutionized how I get and play games, and I don't say that lightly.

Both good points. The thing is that Steam is already here, set up, developed well, and has everyone's games already on it. It's like iTunes in that regard, but with a lot more consumer goodwill.  :awesome_for_real:

The difference is, steam rode on the coattails of halflife, and hasn't gone too gay since then.

Not like ubisoft and EA's initial offering (I'm assuming EA will be trying to do the same thing), which started off by stopping people from playing (and losing progress) the instant they lost the connection to the server, with no way of circumventing that.

Ok, I'm not trying to pull one of those "don't say gay" holier than thou things here, but I seriously have no idea what the hell you mean.

What I meant is that it hasn't become too unreasonable since then. It's always available (at least I haven't seen it go unavailable, although I'm going to to admit to not being the heaviest user of the service the past few years), it has an offline mode so you can drag the laptop to a no-internet cabin if you want and still play (you just have to prepare), it has regular sales of tons of games, it has tons of games, etc etc etc.

What would ubisoft and EA have to compete with that? They start off by requiring that you're always online, and you lost progress when you lost the connection. If you ignore the fact that this is literally 6 years behind steam already, that's still not the greatest way of starting off a games distribution scheme.

If steam had required that you be online at all times, or that you upload your savegames to their "cloud" to even be able to use the savegames, then that would be grounds for me calling steam "too gay". Or if anyone's of the persuasion that "gay" is a bad word, fine. "too unreasonable".

If they're going to put their multi-player games on a social network, that's one thing.  But they're putting single-player games on there and requiring you to be logged in to play.  They don't need this for those F2P multi-player games.  You have to use their server for those already anyway, and that's fine.  But if I have to be logged in to play a single player game, I'm just going to buy one that doesn't require that.  Validate installs when you issue patches or something.  I know it doesn't work 100%, but it's better than taking away the ability for your customers to play your games offline.

The problem with giving everything to Steam puts UbiSoft into a similar position as they are with GameStop - they give a lot of power to the distributor. Valve is always going to prefer its own titles over 'competitor' titles. Plus it is pretty clear in direct distribution it is better to control your own channel than be subject to the whims of others.

UbiSoft's DRM can use some work, of course, but there is a sweet spot where people will accept it (or at least accept it more willingly than they do now).

"Some work"?

Personally, if they'd replicated steam, that would've been a much better start than the half-wit cousin they spawned.

Since we've brought it up, I would prefer "too unreasonable" for future usage.  Thanks.

Another factor to consider is the benefit Steam's install base has.  You might not get all the control you'd like, but it's worth a fair bit of goodwill just for the extra exposure your game will get on Steam.  If UbiSoft is going to pull an Orange Box out of their ass and get their version on that many systems, I'll be happy to slurp them too.

Not sure what you mean by "prefers" their own games, since Steam as a distribution service is pretty neutral. I read an interview not too long ago with the devs behind Killing Floor where they said that Steam had been really good to work with despite the similarities between KF and some zombie-survival game that Valve owns, and that they had no issues whatsoever. After all, it's in Valve's higher interests to not show any favoritism to their own stuff, since I'm sure that they make more money from distribution these days than from sales of their own non-prolific output...

Also, with Gay, Ghey, Fags, "fagging up the thread" etc - I don't mind it on South Park, but it's pretty much the domain of idiot teenagers otherwise. Use more generic swearing instead. :)

Valve releases like, what, one game every year or two? Much more in their interest as a distributor to make it as easy as possible for the hundreds of other developers out there to release their games through their service.

Steam is popular because it sells greatly discounted software, i didn't start using it until they started having some of those great 5 dollar sales and since then i haven't bought a single game at full price.  Having a distributing system "just like steam" ain't going to do shit if you are still charging 50 bucks for your games.

Actually, the funny thing about steam and their discounts is apparently that while it does sell more copies while the discount is there, the increased sales continues for a while even after the discount has expired.

Not surprising really.  If even one of my friends picks up a game and raves about it (even if he bought it for 5-10 bucks), and I didn't notice or care at the time, I might be willing to shell out the 20 bucks for it a couple weeks later.

This forum has almost certainly had the same effect for a number of people.

What pisses me off is when I buy a game off steam and it has extra drm installed by the publisher. This is frankly, bullshit and not to mention that but steam does not say when this drm is present. For instance needing a solid internet connection to buy, register and play GTA4 on my pc which I bought through steam.

I'm already using this online service to show I want to give you my money and still you make me jump through hoops? Fuck you, double fuck you. 

And that pretty much sums up why I didn't buy Settlers on Steam.

I just checked, and it says:

3rd-party DRM: SecuROM™
Unlimited machine activations

Other Requirements: Initial activation requires internet connection; Online play requires log-in to Games For Windows - Live and Rockstar Games Social Club (13+ to register); software installations required including Adobe Flash, DirectX, Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0, Games For Windows - LIVE, and Internet Explorer.

How long ago is it since you bought gta4? because I think they had a few months of not mentioning it, but these days I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be pretty good about mentioning 3rd party DRM.

I'm pretty sure Steam tells you about DRM.

They usually do. Settlers was in bold italic caps of all things. It looked like they put a huge Surgeon General's warning at the bottom of their game text.

They might have only started doing that after a couple of mishaps, but I haven't heard of any recent issues with stealth DRM on a Steam purchase.  There's always a full disclosure right there on the store page.  (Which I hope will eventually encourage publishers to strip that stuff out for the Steam release so they don't have the equivalent of the "causes cancer in lab rats" sticker on their game's store page.)

It's about control and future-proofing.

Steam is great today, then (say) Apple buys Valve and things change. Or Valve starts asking for a higher cut of prices on Steam or something.

If UbiSoft has their own distribution system set-up, it gives them a much greater control over the release of their titles and protects them against these kind of future events.

Except I don't trust Ubisoft to support digital agreements at all after it stops being convenient. I just reloaded Civ 4 on my computer. Do you think I would be able to do that with anything I bought digitally from Ubisoft's system in 2, 3, or even 5 years?

Not sure when you got it. Rockstar club stuff has been patched out to be required only for online stuff, totally optional. I still do need to find out how to get rid of the two nag popups every time the game starts up, but I'd rather click those than have to sign in every time I play.