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Don't games like CoD4 have entire pirate/cracked server infrastructures, right down to the leveling system? If Steam's DRM can't stop piracy (and it doesn't) I don't see how this will be more successful.

To be honest, I think the success of Stardock's approach is simply that most pirated games aren't 'potential sales' at all. People might have pirated the shit out of Titan Quest, but just like MP3s, they're not all 'lost sales'. Aside from Sins, Stardock's games are all pretty niche or low-end, so the piracy that happens doesn't really hurt them. It's not like the patches REALLY need a registration, after all, any more than any other failed system of that sort.

Hotfoot wrote:

Vendetta wrote:But they're doing that anyway. PC gamers are a bunch of robbing cunts, Call of Duty 4 was reporting a very high proportion of pirated keys online, and Titan's Quest had something like an 80%-90% piracy rate.

PC gamers are being treated like thieves because by and large they are.

Do you have sources for those claims?

The Titan Quest piracy rate figure is from Michael Fitch, creative director at THQ, the publisher, in a rant he posted at another forum (http://www .quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663) at the time Iron Lore was forced to close it's doors. The CoD4 information comes from a developer blog from Robert Bowling from Infinity Ward Here (No numbers are given, but the percentage was significant enough to be "amazing".).

Stark wrote:Don't games like CoD4 have entire pirate/cracked server infrastructures, right down to the leveling system? If Steam's DRM can't stop piracy (and it doesn't) I don't see how this will be more successful.

I think really all they can try and do is to slow the pirates down and try and stop pre-release leaks, and ensure more first week sales. Games tend to do most of their business right after release. If they can get a one or two week headstart, they can make more money.

I actually generally crack most of my legally purchased games. Why? I install the app and throw the CD in the basement in a shelf. A no-CD crack is much more convenient than digging it up every time.

Praxis wrote:I actually generally crack most of my legally purchased games. Why? I install the app and throw the CD in the basement in a shelf. A no-CD crack is much more convenient than digging it up every time.

I don't even keep the disks. They all get imaged and slapped on my hard drive. I'd have shelves full of the fucking things otherwise.

Vendetta, that certainly seems to be the case with regard to sales. I'm not sure piracy is the whole answer to stuff like Titan Quest though, since it doesn't always happen that way (even with low- or no-DRM games). I think it was a combination of popular genre, relatively high-profile game and small developer that needed sales to live. I think Stardock's stuff survives by being niche and largely staying off the 'cheapass 14yo' demographic.

Part of the reason developers take damage from pirates is because they drive their own production costs through the roof every time they try to make something. Usually coming from developer obsession with graphics so they dig their own grave and then piss and moan like Cevat Yerli whenever they don't get their Halo-esque sales. Maybe if the assholes weren't blowing off millions of dollars on trivial things like 6 extra textures on a rock, it wouldn't be so bad. I mean, Sins had the right idea. Keep costs as low as possible and sell the game on, *gasp* gameplay design. Appeal to a small but reliable fan base.

Yeah, the guys who made that terrible Fury MMO went bankrupt about a week after launch - they'd obviously pumped their whole finance into the game and needed huge instant sales to NOT DIE. That's a retarded way to run a business.

Isn't this considered mild compared to Steam that requires that you log on to use anything purchased on Steam?

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Isn't this considered mild compared to Steam that requires that you log on to use anything purchased on Steam?

Steam keeps to itself, unlike many of the virus-esque DRM schemes.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Isn't this considered mild compared to Steam that requires that you log on to use anything purchased on Steam?

Steam can be booted in offline, which lets you make use of any off line content.

Dunno if they have something similar in place... but given steam is a digital distribution scheme... it's not particularly obtuse...

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Isn't this considered mild compared to Steam that requires that you log on to use anything purchased on Steam?

It's still crackable and would be fine if Steam wasn't so fucking slow. For people who keep Steam running all the time it's quite transparent.

Stark wrote:Yeah, the guys who made that terrible Fury MMO went bankrupt about a week after launch - they'd obviously pumped their whole finance into the game and needed huge instant sales to NOT DIE. That's a retarded way to run a business.

Auran are a bunch of fucking retards. They throw away the proverbial golden egg laying goose of their railway simulations to make YET ANOTHER FUCKING GENERIC FANTASY MMORPG! And then are surprised when it fucking fails to sell.

That as much as anything describes the problem with PC gaming right now. Too much fucking "design by consensus" bullshit, which leads to one big successful game spawning about five hundred fucking imitators, each of which will fail to make any money and bankrupt the fucking studio. And unlike consoles, they can't rely on sales for the rental market or anything like that either. And calling every fucking pirated copy a "lost sale" is ridiculous.

And lets not forget, that even those of us who actually purchase PC games will most of the time pirate them first to see if they're actually worth buying, because even if you get a demo now, it's likely to be completely unrepresentative of the actual product (ref: Dark Messiah of Might and Magic).

Perhaps most offensive though is the copy protection shit that we have to deal with. I have more issues playing games that I own than I care to deal with. Which is why I tend to get images or cracks for anything that I own, so I don't have to put up with finding discs, swapping them and even worrying about if they are in an acceptable type of fucking drive (fuck YOU starforce).

And this kind of copy protection is always the first thing to fucking go in a cracked version, so it's not like it's hurting those who pirate it, or even fucking slowing them down most of the time.

And 10 days between activation checks? What happens if I am offline at the time due to my ISP having down-time or any number of other reasons? Am I locked out of playing a game that I own until I get online again? Or does it assume that I'm still playing that legitimate copy that it's already verified a number of times?

weemadando wrote: Auran are a bunch of fucking retards. They throw away the proverbial golden egg laying goose of their railway simulations to make YET ANOTHER FUCKING GENERIC FANTASY MMORPG! And then are surprised when it fucking fails to sell.

Don't forget 'change core gameplay mechanics 2 days before retail launch and don't tell anyone so the game they buy isn't the game the box talks about'.

Andrew_Fireborn wrote:

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Isn't this considered mild compared to Steam that requires that you log on to use anything purchased on Steam?

Steam can be booted in offline, which lets you make use of any off line content.

Dunno if they have something similar in place... but given steam is a digital distribution scheme... it's not particularly obtuse...

You can play games offline? I tried that with the Orange Box. Unless I did it wrong, I couldn't boot and play anything.

Steam has a 'play offline' function. Different apps lose varying amounts of functionality in that mode.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:

Andrew_Fireborn wrote:

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Isn't this considered mild compared to Steam that requires that you log on to use anything purchased on Steam?

Steam can be booted in offline, which lets you make use of any off line content.

Dunno if they have something similar in place... but given steam is a digital distribution scheme... it's not particularly obtuse...

You can play games offline? I tried that with the Orange Box. Unless I did it wrong, I couldn't boot and play anything. :?

That can sometimes happen if you allow Steam to do it's fucking stupid "keep this game up to date automatically" shit. Which lets a game partially update in the background and then lets you shut down steam without letting you know that it's incomplete. So should you go to play it offline later, well, you're fucked.

Vendetta wrote:

Stark wrote:Don't games like CoD4 have entire pirate/cracked server infrastructures, right down to the leveling system? If Steam's DRM can't stop piracy (and it doesn't) I don't see how this will be more successful.

I think really all they can try and do is to slow the pirates down and try and stop pre-release leaks, and ensure more first week sales. Games tend to do most of their business right after release. If they can get a one or two week headstart, they can make more money.

Alienating potential customers isn't the way to do that. Convincing potential customers that they might as well pirate a copy because they''ll be treated like potential criminals anyway, and the anti-piracy protection will screw up the game or their computer isn't the way to do that either. Making people hate your guts and not WANT to give you money isn't the way to make a profit.

I've been to several forums reading about this story, and most people have the same reaction; either they no longer intend to get the game, or they'll make a point of pirating it. That's not the attitude you want to create to produce sales.

weemadando wrote:Auran are a bunch of fucking retards. They throw away the proverbial golden egg laying goose of their railway simulations to make YET ANOTHER FUCKING GENERIC FANTASY MMORPG! And then are surprised when it fucking fails to sell.

Um no. Auran themselves killed their railway simulation; by constantly changing the rules for add-on content; and fragmenting the goddamn codebase so that we have addons that work only specifically for Trainz SP 1.3; or Trainz UTC, or Trainz 2004, or Trainz 2006; and not across the entire series; there are some bitching Amtrak Acela sets that simply don't work past IIRC UTC without serious editing of the configuration files which are very very hard to find (Uh, which one is the Amtrak Acela, is it 23123 12921 or 211312831?).

Here is a pretty decent rundown on the DRM that an Arsian put together from dev posts on the Bioware forums. Already played ME on 360 so this doesn't really affect me on that, but Spore can suck my balls.

Atavarius wrote:Here is a pretty decent rundown on the DRM that an Arsian put together from dev posts on the Bioware forums. Already played ME on 360 so this doesn't really affect me on that, but Spore can suck my balls.

... Wow... I was reading that thread... and the people there are stupid...

I mean GFAQs stupid on the topic... Just, brain numbingly obtuse and backwards on the idea Pro-DRM side... >_<


Crack'd spore ahoy. (I love how one says Multiplayer is a big feature of it, when it's really just a file sharing scheme. >_> And I highly doubt the program itself will be the -only- way to do it. Hell I doubt the DRM itself would prevent the program from doing it...)

Still, fuck EA. Seems like they're doing their most to become the RIAA of gaming...

Andrew_Fireborn wrote:

Atavarius wrote:Here is a pretty decent rundown on the DRM that an Arsian put together from dev posts on the Bioware forums. Already played ME on 360 so this doesn't really affect me on that, but Spore can suck my balls.

... Wow... I was reading that thread... and the people there are stupid...

I mean GFAQs stupid on the topic... Just, brain numbingly obtuse and backwards on the idea Pro-DRM side... >_<

Yeah, there are a group of PC gamers and devs who refuse to believe that PC games are problematic because of moronic publishers who say game X must have features X Y and Z, and must be very likely to sell as well as WoW/Half-Life, and must be released one year from now, or developers who decide to make a game in X heavily saturated genre for nearly all the money they have as a company on it, which then can only be run on "next-gen lol" computers, or gamer morons who support this idiotic "all games must be like game X" bullshit.

Instead they blame software pirates (who yeah, make it shitting harder to recoup developer/publisher costs on making game X, but again, what Stark and others have said), console gamers, biased reviews, the intarwebs, anyone/thing who they can think of a justification to blame. Furthermore, they then come up with retarded "solutions" to these problems like (and I'd forgotten about this one until that link to QT3 was posted) "pay per minute" schemes or DRMd demos.

Fuck this then. I'm even more glad I got a PS3 for gaming now rather than do up the PC. The way it's going, you're going to have to have a separate online server and operating system to install a fucking game.

Yup, I won't be buying Spore unless a patch is released that removes the DRM. Otherwise, EA can kiss my ass, yay actual "lost sale" rather than imaginary "all pirates would buy this game if it was uncrackable" lost sale.

Fingolfin_Noldor wrote:Isn't this considered mild compared to Steam that requires that you log on to use anything purchased on Steam?

As bad as Steam is, most of that is from a usability point of view.

Malware like SecureROM or Starforce actively damages your computer. Adding directories, and registry values which you cant remove by the GUI and break a number of built-in features of Windows and kernel-level drivers which can permemently degrade your computer's performance. Even after you remove the fuckers.

Vendetta wrote:But they're doing that anyway. PC gamers are a bunch of robbing cunts, Call of Duty 4 was reporting a very high proportion of pirated keys online, and Titan's Quest had something like an 80%-90% piracy rate.

PC gamers are being treated like thieves because by and large they are.

And of course everyone that pirated the game would have bought it otherwise, right? And No one that pirated the game actually went on to buy a copy either, I'm sure...