alternative licensing?

So, this might be a controversial suggestion, but hear me out

I find that a huge problem about any multiplayer game is that very few of my friends generally have them. This makes getting together over a few beers and a LAN complicated.
Once upon a time (and probably still to some extent) the solution was getting a pirated version of the game that everybody could install, these days it means going to gog.com (where there is no DRM) and picking an old classic.

How about making that simpler? What if you could get a master license (worth perhaps 1.5 regular licenses) which would allow people to play with you in a LAN game without them having licenses? You could make all sorts of restrictions, like for instance it wouldn't work for more than 24 hours after the first peering, or the "freeriders" would have to buy a mini-license at the price of only one or two USD.

You could say that it is a problem that you'd be handing out full games at very low prices, just waiting to be pirated, but most people only pirate if they don't see a low-cost way of being legal. I'm never going to get 4 or 5 friends to shell out 50 USD just so they can play some game they've never heard about for an evening, but I could get them to spend 2 USD, and if they had fun, chances are they'd buy the full version anyway so they could play once they got home and couldn't peer with me anymore. It's excellent advertisement. And whether people crack the 2 USD-version or the 50 USD-version must be pretty irrelevant to Uber.

I'd really like to "sell" this game to my friends, but I'm not going to unless they can have a free taste first.

This has never been a problem to the TA/SupCom Franchise.
The original TA allowed for multiple players per CD in the game and had a pretty simple copy-protection anyway.
SupCom patched the CD-Check away with its first patch, it is possible to just copy the installed game from somebody who has it and play LAN.

Since PA won't have any DRM you will be able to just copy the game around and play it on a self-hosted server in your lan.

Since a LAN game is offline you don't really need more licenses anyway. Well legally you do but everyone usually just pirates stuff like that.

Some old games like Diablo and maybe Starcraft (If I remember correctly) allowed you to spawn multiplayer only copies from a regular game disk, so that everyone could join in a LAN game from only one disc, but only one person could play the campaign at the same time (because you needed the cd for it)

Worked pretty well. Of course, pirating also works

Why wouldn't you just install the game on all the computers that are involved with the LAN? I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but won't the game be released in a non-DRM format, among others? You would really only need a license or a key to play online, with other people around the world, but for a LAN, you won't need that.

Unless you're using the term LAN incorrectly, and you actually do mean over the internet, in which case there's nothing one can do.

:shock:
You want to sell stuff? Do you?

Having done a few LANs in my day, I am familiar with a few scenarios on how this will play out:

Damn it! There's no way to win.

Yeah, I used to love that feature in games, TA had it as well.

If it was up to me I'd give everyone that bought the game 2 keys, one for the owner, and one the owner can give to everyone else, the one they give to everyone else only lets the client play a game which the owner is playing in or hosting. It's easy enough to use at LANs but restrictive enough that after the LAN people aren't walking away with free copies of the game.

Of course one of the big benefits of having used crowd funding for PA instead of traditional methods is that Uber gets the money for development up front so they can afford to be more relaxed about piracy and whatnot because they don't have as big a risk of bankruptcy and IMO it's great they are making PA as DRM free as possible... but don't let that be an excuse to pirate the game and never buy it! I'm sure Uber could always use more money to update and improve PA over it's lifetime.

Piracy is not something worth expending a lot of effort fighting. We are working hard to make sure the UberNet experience is worth having a legit account for.

People who are going to pirate are likely going to pirate no matter what. Unless you make it compelling to want a legit copy. Layering on a bunch of always on DRM, unless you're making an MMO which requires a connection to a huge server cluster to even work, just punishes legitimate players, not pirates.

We're not going to go out of our way to make it easy to pirate, but if we're going to expend energy, it'll be toward making the game, and UberNet, an experience people want. Not fighting a losing battle against people who don't care anyway and will just download the first cracked version off of their favorite torrent site.

Fighting piracy you're doing it right

I can only wish more companies had this attitude. I would actually buy their games instead of pirating them

If the UberNet is great, pirates would be be huge issue, as Starcraft 1 did.

Uber definitely has the right attitude about piracy. If only EA and Ubisoft could figure this out.

The paradigm they have is that if someone plays the game and didn't buy it from them, that this is money somehow lost. But what they don't realize is that usually those people would not have bought the game just because they were prevented from pirating it. What they don't understand is that there is always going to be a certain percentage of the population which pirates the games/movies/whatever. Its just a demographic. Putting on stricter DRM measures doesn't somehow squeeze money out of this demographic. And its making money which is their motivation, right?

Uber's take on piracy is much better. To entice sales by actually creating a superior product is definitely a winning answer. Will people still pirate it? Sure, of course. But probably only the people who there is no way they are paying for the game anyway. So no money is truly lost. Making a superior game means more people who like to buy games will choose to buy this one. And that's where the real money comes in. After all, this is the very idea behind the successful Kickstarter campaign. Many people such as us who have backed the game with a lot more money than we would ordinarily pay for a game, don't mind doing so because its the kind of game we've always dreamed of having. Its the quality of the developers and their attitude and commitment toward making a good product that brings the money in. Not DRM.

Here here, Garat. What an awesome, and refreshing perspective to have on it.

This year will likely be both the year of the kickstarter, and a shift in games which recognize the problems that EA/Ubi give us day to day gamers. Heck, LAN Gaming has been drifting on life support since, and I see myself playing this to death many times on lans of all sizes - I wish it all the best and can see it from your open updates the amount of well, positive energy you are putting all into making the game well.

I'd say I'm shedding a tear here, but I'll hold that back for the Alpha Thanks again crew of Uber!

Also a "lite" Edition would be nice to encourage PPL to get it legally instead of pirating.
Giving every Owner of PA "test licences" wich can play online for limited Time would be pretty cool.

I like the idea of having "day passes", to give to players to test the game or whatever.

I mean, you give customers a few day passes for them to give friends, sell day passes for a dollar right next to the full game on the site and on the ubernet launcher (which is free to set up an account on ubernet, even without the game, so one could open and login to ubernet without buying anything and see what is on sale), and then you make a buck and spread the ability for potential customers to buy the game.

Maybe make it a two day pass too, two days seems to give a player long enough to not want to put the game back down and move on.

I will say Uber, well done. A good product that is worth paying for won't be pirated as much. Plus, we can go and DDoS those who do download it.

I already wrote up my opinion on this in another thread. So rather than cross post I will just link it.

I'd generally put this in the category of "fair use" anyway. And that's good.

so, the game has launched now and I have a friend visiting tomorrow - where are we on this?