Planetary Annihilation on GOG? - PC Gamer Article Here

Like one wise man once said, offer much more godlike features for a paid version compared to the pirated one and more people will buy.

Well this is my version, there is one that is worded with more sense somewhere on the internetz

No drm just means what I wrote: Anybody may just copy it without paying it.
GOG is a whole store build up by selling such games.
I think your impression of people is way too bad. Most people actually are willing to pay for the games they love and play.
The effects of pirated copies are hard to understand, but I would suspect they are not as bad as some people in the games industry may think.
For example, I am here because I got a pirated copy of TA into my hands at some point around 2003. I had not known TA before that. I bought SupCom:FA right after release because of it. I pledged a lot of money on PA because of it. By now I even bought the GOG-Version of TA. All because I was lucky enough to be given a self-burned CD labeled "TA".
Was it bad that somebody gave me that CD?

@neutrino:
Yey for your planned online-features.

Same goes for me man, I played TA from a pirated disc back in 2002. Bought both TA and SupCom in 2012 and pledged a load for PA.

I have been pirating every single game until I started getting some income last year. I'm not sure about others but it wouldn't surprise me if many people still pirated simply cause they are cheap bastards

I entirely disagree with your viewpoint. We are both arguing with opinions (which would explain why no one ever 'wins' this argument), but down the rabbit hole we go:

• Some downloaders will not buy software period, you can't protect from them and why would you want to? There will be no money from them, the only use they serve is to bulk up the community and advertise via word of mouth (both good imo). This will not burden uber because any online play will be on 3rd party servers. I think this is the majority of downloaders.
• Some downloaders buy games if they like them. I've done it.
• Some downloaders do it just for convenience. For example I bought red alert 2 years ago and it's 5 feet away on my shelf, but that didn't stop me downloading it to play on a computer with no optical drive.
• You're worried about a subset of downloaders that would definitely buy a game only if they couldn't download it free. Sounds like a small minority to me.

The thing is what do you propose they do that does not inconvenience the legit player? What DRM usually is, is only a problem to legit players. Because it is removed in pirated versions. You're basically biting the hand that feeds and rewarding the dog that bites. It's literally insane.

Traditional disc based copy protection schemes would not be effective because it's digital only. And generally it seems to me like there are only two kinds of DRM that actually work, only the best disc based systems such as Starforce or TAGES. And serverside always on. Nothing else will stop the pirates. A lot of these crackers see a tough DRM scheme as a challenge to be broken too.

On the other hand what happens if you don't have DRM? Absolutely nothing happens is actually what. The legit players are not inconvenienced. And they don't pay because they have to, they pay because they want to. People don't want to commit crimes, that isn't something normal people want to do. Time and time again it has been shown that given the chance and reasonable terms people will buy things even if they don't have to. And the people who wouldn't do this wouldn't pay under any circumstance so it doesn't matter.

TL;DR DRM is ineffective, harms the paying customer and does nothing to hardcore pirates.

Handle it as in minecraft.
Backcheck with master server to authenticate player. Done.
Sure there will be also cracked servers, but on the official ones that should be enough.

I don't think forcing people to have their server talk to the UBER-server is a good idea. What if the UBER-servers are down for whatever reason?

I think the server-software should offer an option to list the server in the official list by logging in to a valid UBERnet account. That way you can create servers all you want without any dependency to UBER, but you can only use the official online-system and server browser with a legal key.

Ever "played" minecraft?
Its only for the authentication and its even toggelable.
There is no spydatastream anywhere.
BTW: Your propsed system would have the need for communication between servers too.

I don't think piracy will be that much of an issue for PA since it is a kickstarter funded game. Community funded games like PA have a fair amount of positive karma in the parts of the hacker community that care about games so people are not as likely to pirate it as they would be some new faceless crappy overpriced AAA remake of last year's AAA title.

Besides, if there is no DRM then there is no challenge to be overcome in the piracy process and a pirate who is not being challenged is a pirate who is bored and will move on to something else.

Many in the piracy scene see the kickstarter development model as a legitimate solution to the problem that (in their minds) piracy currently solves. They want the kickstarter model to succeed in the market just as much as Uber, inXile Entertainment, and other kickstarter devs do, albeit for slightly different reasons. I honestly think that anyone who posted a copy of PA to a torrent site would actually be shunned a bit in certain circles.

Will people pirate PA? Sure they will. Will it be a big deal and cost Uber tons of money in lost sales? Probably not. Most of the people who do pirate PA probably weren't going to bother buying it anyway since it just isn't their kind of game and they only wanted to play it once just to see what all the fuss was about. Either that or they couldn't have afforded the game anyway. The majority of people who really do like it will buy it.

People like not having to bother with draconian DRM that slows down their systems, doesn't work all the time, and treats them like criminals. That's why piracy exists, NoCD cracks, keygens, and activation spoofing servers are almost as much of a pain as the DRM is, almost, but not quite. It is generally easier to pirate a game than it is to buy it. Most people will be honest and buy the game if you don't make it hard and annoying to do so via DRM.

I have personally purchased about 10 games from GoG that I already owned the disks for just so I could get a DRM free version. Yes DRM is that annoying. Even though a good friend of mine had already bought the same games on GoG and even gave me a copy of the GoG installer for said games I still bought them myself anyway. Why did I do that? Because I *want* to be honest. I know this may come as a surprise but most people, even on the internet, are honest about things that matter, or at least want to be.

And honestly, the number of people who know how to pirate a game is pretty small compared to the size of the PC game market. Most people have trouble just working out which version of Windows they are running and couldn't pirate a game if they wanted to. They just don't have the technical skills to do so. The lack of technical BS created by DRM and piracy is one of the reasons why consoles are doing so well these days.

the best protection is to make the game most fun while playing online. Thats the only thing that helps. This is what makes MMORPGs so succesful. or games like World of Tanks.
Its hard to do that in an RTS, cos a lot of players prefer playing the ai or coop anyway. But with galactic war and such things, it can be quite successfull i think

Well 40+ Player games, maybe with jump in and out is a step into the right direction.

No I never played minecraft tbh.
If it is toggleable it is pretty much what I was suggesting.
My proposed system requires a connection only if the host of a server decided to have the server listed in the official serverbrowser of UBERnet. Which is kinda necessary to list it there.

What you are saying makes sense.

Basically if you want your server to show up on UberNet so people can find it then you will need to login. If you want to just run a dedicated server at an ip address that only you know then you can point people at it all you want, just not through our online services.

I would like that, keeping with the minecraft example I believe they're aware of the problem with finding servers and are working on a solution.

I think they're going to host dedicated servers for players to use to host "open-worlds" that other players can then see and join. The above system sidesteps that though without also infringing on players' ability to host their own dedicated private servers.

Exactly. We may also offer a service to host your private server with us as well for people that don't want to deal with it (and for things like clans).

Might be worth looking into getting a deal set up with a gameserver provider for people to rent beefy servers for clans and such. They would have to be more dedicated machines though.

I currently have a rented server from Gameservers.com for Minecraft, hosted in Sydney, it works really well.

Another game also that had little to no DRM is Sins of a solar Empire. It is actually up to the third installment of the title now...I have actually bought the game about 3 times (lost a copy, bought my dad a copy) and was more then happy to do that because of the very little DRM involved.

PA I scrimped and saved and actually bought the Cosmic addition for my wedding anniversary, hehe. I look forward to Seeing how this all pans out, though I have the feeling in my gut that it is going to be revolutionary, like minecraft was/is.

Neutrino,

Have you ever played Battlefield 3?
I think those guys had "big plans for online" as well.
Having a web-profile is good and all, but it just felt clunky and it wasn't integrated into the game well.

IMHO, as much as everybody hates on Diablo 3, having the web be a reflection of the user's gear, stats and profile while the game being the primary source of interaction was a much better implementation.


The problem I see how with modern day match making services is you don't have any say who you connect to, their ping, their stats and reputation. It is definitely more convenient for some games, but by removing a traditional server browser also leaves a sour taste in the mouths of many gamers.

On some level I feel that jump-in multiplayer is harmful to the enjoyment. I'd much prefer to be able to play a match from beginning to end with the same people under the same conditions. Jumping in at the tail end of a match is boring to me. And it's not quite so exciting to win when both teams have been virtually replaced during the match.

And autobalance is extremely annoying. You end up fighting yourself. In more casual games it's not so bad but if I'm heavily invested into fighting for my side and I get teamswitched then I'm going to ragequit.

And with jump in matchmaking team balance is going to be an issue.

It's nice that your friends can instantly join your game but from all other perspectives I see only downsides.

There are some large threads already out there on the topic of what can be done to make drop-in/out games work, you might want to check them out.

Mike