PA release and DRM

As for the people who are gloating with Witcher links -- Diablo 3 sold more. Nothing is proved by all this either way. A game can sell millions without DRM, and still sell more with it due to decreased piracy. For huge games like Witcher and Diablo a hundred thousand copies more or less means nothing, but for games like PA it can mean the difference between continued development and death. That's why the choice is much harder for Uber than it is for these big companies (or for the really small ones). Being somewhere in the middle of the spectrum, in the gray area, makes all your decisions that much harder to make, and that much more crucial.

Maybe freemium would be the best way forward for PA at some point. Maybe it is the best way forward right now. I don't pretend to know if it is -- but what I do know is that the idea of someone pirating this game makes my insides turn. And that's why I stand behind DRM at this point.

Yeah. I realize I'm being a bit silly, it's that or dumb.
Both dumb and silly to expect that to change in any way shape or form.

Regardless, I subscribe to the "Honor System" concept of "game piracy" or sales.

If I "pirate" a game, and like it enough, when I get the chance I'll probably buy it later if I'm still interested.
I did so for Mass Effect 1 & 2, Star Wars: Republic Commando, WarCraft III, Space Engineers, Starbound, StarCraft II, Counterstrike, 3089, Civ 3, 40k Space Marine, and more.

It seems to me like I am not alone in this concept. Allowing offline/LAN play for a game, or offering DRM-free, can have more people easily access the game, give it a shot and maybe buy it one day if they feel like it. I usually won't buy a game if I can't try it out in a feature-complete state for free (which tends to be multiplayer games). That sort of trend isn't bad; has nothing to do with DRM. Just the state of affairs for me.

Everyone agrees that organized crime and world hunger are bad things, too. But that doesn't give video game publishers the right to do whatever they want on your computer, or to sell you a deliberately defective product.

Not to mention the data is already in that games can easily be commercial successes without DRM. All this discussion about whether DRM hurts or helps is pointless. It's expensive to implement, it ruins games, it violates consumers' rights, and you can't even tell whether it has a business impact?


The amount of money that has been spent on lobbying and ad campaigns about piracy is purely because the content industries are huge businesses. Those industries have actually convinced people that they don't have rights. That the might of those industries, and their ability to force consumers to swallow such trash, is so great is yet another source of concern.

No right-thinking individual should actually support DRM. Consumers should be livid every time it is forced upon them. Even publishers should realize they are (at best) wasting money on a completely ineffective security measure.

So you are saying the publishers are stupid and don't know what's good for them?

Yes.

They are also not alone in this. History is full of examples of established industries exhibiting institutional stupidity of exactly this nature. From the Biltmore Agreement in radio to the recent opposition to digital distribution of TV.

It's people with your mentality which are killing today's gaming industry. For starters do you know why so many Aussies pirate? Probably not, but I'll tell you why a good portion of us pirate, yes this includes me I'm one of those thieves/law breakers/no good doers. A good portion of Aussies pirate because we get shafted price wise here in Australia. Civ beyond earth costs $45 au in America and guess how much we are being charged here, that's right $90 because Australia tax says screw the Aussie consumer.
PA is priced reasonably and is not subject to that price gouging bull so this already eliminates a good portion of pirates. And I'm telling you if I had not backed pa and I was buying it at release I would refuse to buy drm crap purely because of principal.

Also don't assume that each pirate instance is a lost sale, because a good amount of people would not have bought the game otherwise. Also some piracy even promotes sales, I know I had minecraft pirated a while back, but I decided to support the development in the end because they made a good game and they were just generally good devs that deserved support.

I pirate a couple games that I want to see if I like/if I can run it. If I like it, or can run it... I buy the real version.

ledarsi, your stance is a little contradictory, don't you think?

On the one hand, publishers invest tons of money and effort to maximize their profits.

On the other hand, publishers suck at maximizing their profits.

It's hard to reconcile those two views. Not impossible, but hard, from where I am standing. If you are right, then your stance will eventually dominate the industry, because even if publishers are on the wrong track now, despite their best efforts, they will eventually learn from what you say are their mistakes. After all, they didn't get to the point they are now (i.e. the point of COMPLETE DOMINATION of their industry) by being continually stupid. They got there by being overwhelmingly smart.

As for nicb1's parochial viewpoint: your problem is created by your government, not by videogame publishers. It's your government that decides your taxes, not EA. Move to America if you don't like Australia: the land of freedom and opportunity. I myself live in Europe, so I am no stranger to high taxes, but there are advantages to that too, especially if you are poor.

Hey @icycalm

DRM actually doesn't stop pirates and is pretty much just a way of protecting investors..... what most DRMs do is actually disrupt people who purchased the game. Especially always on DRMs that involve the requirement to connect to a server. What you'll also find is that if someone created some sort of copy protection it can usually be hacked (except for perhaps the requirements to connect to a server). Further to this apart of the initial buzz for the game was DRM free.

The end of the day you can't stop someone from having a pirate mentality. What Uber can do however is promote a great experience for players that purchased the game which no DRM certainly does. I don't think Uber care about pirates, they care about their clients. PA just isn't a spiritual successor to TA but it's also a spiritual successor to how games used to be.

Cheers,

-Todd

@icycalm: The reason DRM was a derailment of the other thread, whereas uber cannons etc aren't, is that DRM is a general subject requiring discussion. The talk on uber cannons and offline and linux etc can be distilled down to words like "when", "soon" and "bitterness", rather than discussion.

I have a couple of opinions in no particular order:

1) DRM is bad. Enforcing DRM would have killed PA dead on kickstarter (an assertion, but given the nature of people and kickstarter, probably correct imo), at the very least I wouldn't be here.

2) I think you're overestimating the negative impact of piracy. To the extreme.

Screw that. It's just a bad idea, imagine if all the classics were online only. It might be good for the industry (aka in a dystopian future they disable last years releases so you have to buy this years releases), but for the medium it would be insane.

Not even possible, let alone proportionate or sensible.

I've touched on piracy with my point 2 above. I believe the gains from allowing offline play will far outweigh any perceived losses. Piracy will continue forever, it's not a problem at all imo. I'm interested in why you think piracy is a problem? Your viewpoint seems so far from my viewpoint, I can't understand the logic behind it.

My main viewpoint is this: If you want to see something live into the future, you support it to help it get there. If you don't, it's your loss if it dies. Idealised to the extreme, worthy things thrive and unworthy things die. DRM makes something less worthy of support imo, because of its restrictive nature.

Um no that's not the case. Here in Australia the govt has absolutely no say with pricing of online based goods. The online price here is decided purely by the publisher.

You can, it's called prison. Deterrence, my friend. It's why we have policemen in the first place, except if you care to argue against that too. That's how all of us became civilized. Freud explains it well. It took an insane amount of prohibition and violence to turn a bunch of apes into a society, and I am having trouble seeing how this process could be maintained, never mind improved if we remove all laws (even if merely IP laws) and their enforcement. After all, intellectual production is mankind's greatest production.

On the other hand, you can also have too much prohibition, and violence and deterrence, so we are definitely looking for a balance -- which is why I think that people who go around screaming that any attempt at IP protection is Evil are wrong. They are as much extremist as the people who would stick pirates on death row. I want neither the one nor the other, but I DO want to see intellectual property respected and protected.

Also commonly known by all Aussie gamers as "The Australia Tax".......

Dude... The tax is not the same thing as the price...

There is no tax. We just get charged more than physical goods because companies can. Aussie games just call this greed the Australia tax. There is no actual government enforced tax.

I guess the thread could be moved to off topic, since it's not specifically about PA anymore. It's hard to keep discussion on a subject as deep as this on topic. If there is "derailment" involved, it's not intentional, just the nature of the beast. If anything, "derailment" on such matters is a good sign, a sign that superficialities (such as the specific case of PA) are being set aside and people are going into the deeper issues.

@icycalm,

Despite disagreeing with you dude I can see your as equally passionate about the issue which is awesome.

Cheers for the discussion,

-Todd

Yeah, I hate to say it, but I hate pirates, and if you design a game around them, it limits who else can play it.

The sad thing is, you build it online-only, you try to prevent pirates, THEN squishy can't play because he has no available internet in his living environment to access it, BUT the pirate CAN play once he cracks the software to run locally anyway.

So, if you market it friendly, and you make it reasonable, people will buy it simply out of convinence and appreciation.

I won't lie, I know 1 friend, who pirates games at least to try them, even if he has to complex crack it to do so, he was one of the ones who bought simcity, couldn't login to server because extreme capacity on launch date, and cracked it to play local by the very next day. He buys them if they are worth it, mainly because the updates are easier to come by and because he wants to support development/possible sequel. If he doesn't buy or has no reason to, he usually deletes the copy anyway.

I think he is cool, because he usually tells me the best games he has come across. He usually has good taste too, mainly because he isn't based off hype but actual experience looking at the game.

You must be joking.

That's like saying Comcast got to its current position of COMPLETE DOMINATION of its industry by being overwhelmingly smart. Obviously wrong. There are a lot of other possible explanations, most of which are simpler.

Not to mention that there isn't really complete domination the way you say there is. In video games, small developers are less individually powerful, but in aggregate make far more games and more of the profits than in other sectors of the economy (e.g. telecommunications). Sure, Ubisoft or EA is big, but they don't completely dominate in any way. And there are quite a few such big corporations, and there isn't just one of them which has "dominated" between them.


But even the underlying premise is obviously wrong. There is so much else to economic success beside just delivering the best product or being "smartest." It is entirely possible to do almost everything wrong and still "win" in the market. Political influence, the ear of venture capitalists, support from currently powerful corporations, politics between boards of directors, litigation, advertising, and so on and so forth.

In the case of videogames, they have largely copied the movie industry by focusing on an ad blitz instead of product quality, maximizing upfront purchases, sight unseen, to the greatest extent possible. A strategy which is designed to work for large publishers who need to be able to write off costs of failures by large profits from big successes.


You make the extremely bizarre statement that Diablo 3 sold well, and that therefore the game was good (and by extension, that DRM is good). Which is completely illogical. If it's raining, then the grass will be wet. You can't say that because the grass is wet, it must be raining. Perhaps some other cause also leads to that result. Perhaps the sprinkler system is on. You are ascribing a particular cause to D3's sales (quality), but you have no evidence for it.

Sales don't make a game good, much as sales don't make food good. McDonald's has a hell of a lot more sales than a local burger joint, but I know where I would rather buy a burger. But quality isn't the only factor; advertising, control of the distribution system, legal, politics, finance, etc. etc.

Nobody seriously believes their propaganda about the best company or the best product always being blessed with success. It's an almost Calvinistic attempt to rationalize success only flows to inherent quality, or the deserving, like how Calvinists said that the wealthy must be loved by God to be blessed with wealth. It's obvious self-serving bullshit.


I don't mean any offense, but you sound like a corporate shill, to be perfectly honest. I have never, ever, in my entire life heard of a buyer of videogames that actually wants DRM. Even video game studios hate DRM (I bet SimCity 5's made Maxis' devs tear their hair out). The only people who (mistakenly) think DRM is beneficial to them are the publishers.

Yes. Exactly. EA basically sells stupid stuff to stupid people. They sell sports games to the large population that watches every football game, they sell military shooters to people that overglamourize military theme. Similar companies sell expensive rims and spinners to the pop culture, movies about drug use to the large population that "thinks it's cool", and the such.

I mean, take spintires. That game sold well, because mudding is overly glamourized. "Man that's cool, big trucks and mudding, and everyone that does it is cool." You can't say that game was an engineering marvel though, it is a pretty simple game, it was just a theme that ingeniously targetted a capital audience.