Yeah. It would be easy for Amazon to compare the text in new books with the existing ones.
Bear with me for a moment:
I would assume that the greatest part of indie-movie audience are people that mainly watch independent movies.
But if piracy hurt/killed independent film, then that would mean that most people who watch indepedent works are freeloaders!
The thing is that Freeloaders don´t make difference between big studio films and independent movies. Sure the numbers for those who pirated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Out Of The Shadows maybe generally higher than let´s say Patterson, but the smaller movies are hurt more by even the smaller numbers as there is less money involved to begin with.
I would avoid any kind of explicit blaming of people (or class of people).
Assuming that the “anti-piracy-system or nothing” rationale is true, the company could say something along the lines of… “Due to the specific situation of our market, the only way to make enough revenues and to continue to develop games was to adopt an online anti-piracy system. The only alternative would have been not to develop the game.”.
This statement would not prevent people from complaining, but it doesn’t directly blame people, only the generic “piracy” issue.
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You’re working under the assumption that a pirated copy is automatically a lost sale, but that is often not true. To use my own example regarding Doom, if they had added flawless copy protection to the game, I still did not have the money to buy the game. The end result is that they would have spent more time and money to implement a feature that would not have resulted in an extra sale–at least not from me. This would also be true in the case of people who don’t believe in paying for anything. They’d simply play something else or maybe even resort to methods that are more harmful to the developer than piracy. The only people that copy protection really works on are people who tend to buy games–but only as a last resort. There is a lot of debate as to how large that group of people is, but so far Denuvo didn’t turn any game into a massive hit during its initial implementation when nobody knew how to crack it. The most successful Denuvo-protected games were games that people expected to be big hits anyway. We’re not hearing about record-setting sales from Denuvo-protected titles, which is something publishers would be all to happy to announce if copy protection was resulting in a dramatic increase of legitimate purchases.
With that in mind, if copy protection isn’t dramatically increasing the number of copies sold, why should legitimate consumers forgive the developers from inconveniencing them with it–especially when most forms of copy protection aren’t particularly effective, and even Denuvo is starting to show cracks in its armor? For what it’s worth, the original Doom still made its developers quite wealthy, despite a complete absence of copy protection, and recently The Witcher 3 became a massive hit despite also not having any copy protection. A good game will sell to its audience, because a lot of people are willing to support the developers of the products they enjoy–especially if it’s easier to buy legitimately than it is to pirate. People absolutely will pay for convenience, which is why music providers like iTunes can actually get away with removing DRM from their song libraries. Why go through all the hassle of hunting around for .MP3s of variable quality when high-quality music can be purchased legitimately in one place for just 99 cents per song?
Getting back to the ineffectiveness of copy protection, would you still be forgiving of a developer that forces you to repeatedly prove you bought a product, when pirates get to enjoy the same product while avoiding that inconvenience? Back in the day, it was really annoying to be forced to stick a CD in the drive and be prohibited from having certain programs installed on a computer just to play a game, while people with pirated versions could play the game without the CD check and with no software restrictions.
Oh, regarding methods worse than piracy, one trick scammers have latched onto is to steal credit card details, buy lots of game keys, and then sell those game keys to other people. When the owner of the credit card finds out about the fraud and reports it, the credit card company does a charge-back. That charge back comes with a penalty, so not only does the developer lose out on the sale of the product, but they have to pay the penalty for the charge-back. This means the developer literally loses money to have someone steal from them, whereas with piracy they simply do not make money. The developer could always blacklist the product keys, but if the buyer didn’t know they were buying a stolen key, they’re not going to be happy when the key is suddenly invalidated and they lose out on the money they spent to buy the game. Because of the backlash that can come from that, developers often settle for absorbing the cost of the fraud, rather than risk alienating people who thought they were making legitimate purchases.
One final question for you: Would you be willing to pay a subscription free to play Thimbleweed Park, such as $5-10 per month?
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Subscription fee for TWP? In the range of 5-10$? Absolutely no. Even the suggestion makes me somehow upset.
I feel that this (hearing such a suggestion) is what maybe happened to Ransome in the past turning him bad.
It happened that, after buying a game, I downloaded or copied from a friend its crack
Sorry, but that just sounds like a very bad idea. Most cracks/key-generators that float around have malware. If your virus scanner say they such things are clean, its more likely you should have chosen another virus scanner, that is better at detecting (especially zero-day stuff), than that they are clean. And even then with the best money can buy, some malware will not be detected.
Only way to be truly sure there is no malware, is to have written the crack yourself.
Let me reopen this topic for a second because I am trying to isolate the problem. 
Consider the internet. Nobody, to my knowledge, complains that, to read an article on the internet, I need to be online. The mechanics is the following: I see text and pictures. I can click on a keyword or on a picture, and the client sends a request to the server. It is the server who decides the next set of text and pictures the client will see. The client alone would not be able to do that, because it does not have the logic and/or the content to do that. So this is the primary mechanism at work. And nobody, to my knowledge, complains about this, and says “I refuse to read wikipedia because I don’t like that I need to be online just to read it”.
Ok. Now, suppose you have a game that plays like Wikipedia. In particular, consider a game in turns (like an interactive comic. Like “All you can eat”, if you need a concrete example.) Now, what’s the difference? The play mechanics is the same: you click an object, the client sends a request to the server, and the server computes the following set of text and pictures the client needs to show. So the game could in theory be implemented like Wikipedia, i.e. online-only, without any significant loss in gameplay. True, each time you click an object you have to wait 2 seconds before you can see the next screen; but if this is acceptable when reading wikipedia, I assume it is acceptable when playing the game. It’s not that you have more patience when reading wikipedia. A wait is a wait. So I assume there is no significant loss in gameplay, compared to the hypothetical offline version of the game. So my question is: would you still refuse to buy such a game, assuming you like the story? If so, why?
I’m talking about games and cracks of 25 years ago… nowadays I nearly don’t play videogames at all with few exceptions. And I buy from Steam. I’m the most casual of the users.
Back then, cracks with my original games worked and I never had viruses issues, even with my under-updated CPAV (later, McAffee). So, retrospectively, I can say it has been a good idea. I supported my favorite devs, I didn’t break the law, I didn’t experience virus counterbacks.
Obviously, I’m not suggesting this strtegy today.
My profession has nothing to do with programming, and programming is not my hobby. So I cant write anything beyond a forum post 
I don’t think the analogy stands. Unless it’s an ONLINE game, like MMORPGs, what people expect when buying a game is… being able to play it. Internet or not.
Wikipedia is an online website. But you’re buying an encyclopedia. What good would it be to buy a paper encyclopedia and then having to connect to the Internet just to read stuff that is already there in the book, only to be allowed to do so? Just to make sure that you actually bought that volume instead of having it photocopied?
First, I am not a pirate and I have no problem paying even a premium for things that provide value to me. Although I did play fast and lose with copyrights when I was young (read: I did have a Commodore 64 back in the early-to-mid 1980s), I do pay for all my software, music, movies, and everything I own. I have a music collection that is going on 7,000 strong and growing – curated entirely from thousands of my own purchased CDs and complemented with several hundrends albums bought in iTunes.
I have paid for each and every one of those for the past 30 years.
All that said, one of the things that attracted me to the Thimbleweed Park project early on was that it would be released DRM-free on GoG.
There are many more reasons why I continued to follow the blog and got even more excited about the game later on, but that is really one of the first reasons.
Honestly, had I read first that it was going to be a Steam-only release, I wouldn’t have given it more than a casual once-over and moved on. I do not use Steam, do not like it, will not use it, and my reasons for this attitude are much broader than mere DRM, although that is certainly a primary reason.
Once the game was released, I was very excited to be able to download it and own it and of course, to play it.
At that point, had it not being made available on GoG for whatever reason, I still wouldn’t have used Steam. I would have been disappointed (perhaps a bit angry after backing the project on such expectation), but would have just waited for a release on a platform more agreeable to me, if there was that option. Otherwise, I would have moved on and strived to be more careful in my future fundraising participation.
Anyway, I just wanted to offer my view. I may be in the extreme minority, I don’t know, but there are some of us who completely appreciate the piracy problem; absolutely side with the developers and support ways for them to make a living; do not practice nor condone piracy; and yet still do not agree that limiting their own rights, freedoms, and privacy on onerous one-sided agreements is the correct solution – and certainly not an acceptable solution for us.
I love Thimbleweed Park and I am very glad that Terrible Toybox decided to offer it on so many platforms. I also think that this can serve to expand their market reach.
As Mr. Gilbert. mentioned above, there are cheap-ass freeloaders out there and there will always be pirates trying to get their way – but asking for, promoting the use of, or expecting DRM-free software does not necessarily place one in that category.
GoG exists and has grown from its humble roots precisely because there is indeed an audience that pays for their wares. 
dZ.
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Let me be sure I understand… you are saying that you agree that there is no significant worsening in gameplay due to the fact that the game is online-only, but still you are reluctant to buy the game because you realise that the developers could have made it an offline game, if only they wanted. Is this a correct description of what you said?
@seguso, I’ve mentioned before that your arguments are riddled with fallacies, as illustrated by your comments above, for example. This could be a language miscommunication issue, but it seems to me more of a narrow-minded view.
You seem to imagine disparate things being equal, and if they are equal, so must their consequences and implications. However, all things are not equal, even when they have similarities. The differences in outcomes, consequences, and implications become even more significant when the similarities stop and their intrinsic, subtle, and very nuanced differences are considered.
Reading Wikipedia is not the same as playing a video game. Purchasing an encyclopædia collection as books is not the same as using Wikipedia.
In order to have a constructive conversation we first must accept a common reality of human experience. If you cannot (or will not) accept or understand the differences between the activities above then, there is little that can be discussed about them.
Hand-waving the differences as minor or inconsequential does not necessarily help prove a point, it may serve to undermine or discredit it.
In Spanish we have a saying, “y si mi abuela tuviese ruedas, sería bicicleta.” (Literally, “and if my grandmother had wheels, she’d be a bicycle.”)
This is used to cancel out (and somewhat ridicule) a fallacy by pointing out that, once you ignore differences or hand-wave potentially important details, then all bets are off and any absurd claim can be made.
I do not say any of this to insult you or with intent to offend. I seriously wish you would consider that the world is messy, and incongruous, and very complex and complicated; and that sometimes things do not fit neatly into a simple formula. (Doubly so for people.) At such times, we must consider the small details, the nuances that define the essence of things, people, and actions.
It’s perfectly fine for people to disagree, we all think and reason differently. If so, we should also accept that others do and act differently, even if it goes counter to our own beliefs. This is fine too.
dZ.
Basically, yes.
If the game doesn’t need to be online except for making sure I paid for it, I probably won’t buy it. Because my first thought would be, “what if I my ISP is down? I can’t surf the net AND I can’t even play the game I bought”. I’d think, then, I’d be excused if I pirated it, since pirated copy would work offline.
The difference is that wikipedia is free to use, you can download every article for offline use without pay and I think there is even an offline app were you can read a fixed number of articles offline. So the comparison isn´t very good.
The game that forces me to only be online always might be mostly free of piracy but it´s also free of being used by me.
A big part of that is that there’s no other option. It’s literally impossible to have an offline copy of the internet, or even a subset of the internet solely based on your known interests. There’s also the matter that a lot of content on the internet is updated quite frequently. Unlike a person’s game collection, there is no feasible offline option for the internet.
A wait is a wait, but a wait is not 20 waits. When I’m reading a wikipedia article, that wait you’re talking about only happens once–at the beginning of the article. After that, you get the entirely of the article uninterrupted. Now, imagine if after every five lines in an article, Wikipedia required you to click a button in order to scroll to the next five lines. After you clicked the button, you’d be presented with another 2-second wait, followed by the next five lines of the article, and if you wanted to scroll to a previous point in the article, there was a separate button that would let you scroll up five lines at a time, with that same 2-second wait. Does that still sound convenient to you?
That would admittedly be a pretty ridiculous implementation of Wikipedia, but the point I’m making is that in a game, you’re not going to interact with this just once at the beginning. You’re going to be interacting with it constantly, and so those tiny delays will add up fast. Heck, Thimbleweed park actually does have built-in delays in it, taking the form of an elevator. It’s realistic that an elevator takes time to move from floor to floor, but that delay started getting on my nerves if I needed to take multiple elevator rides in a row. Even if I needed to have a character make one elevator ride, I’d get annoyed if they were at the ground floor and the elevator had to be called from the top floors, especially if the character needed to ride to the floor the elevator started at. It was just a matter of seconds, but still annoying. And for a more fundamental example, why did developers ever bother to implement default verbs if the two seconds it takes to click on a verb and then the item was no big deal? Surely it’s a waste of programming effort that could have been used for more interesting functionality. Convenience is an important feature, and even something as seemingly inconsequential as a single second can add up, particularly if it requires extra effort out of a user.
One last point is that your hypothetical solution only works for games that have absolutely no real-time interaction requirements. By far, the vast majority of games require real-time interaction, and 200ms of latency (not unusual on the internet) is enough to completely ruin game timing, especially if your inputs have to be sent to a server that then returns an updated player view. It would be terrible for any fast paced game, of which there are many. In many cases, the games that would suffer least from your proposal are from small developers who couldn’t afford to pay for the server needed to run the game.
As far as I’m concerned, even your hypothetical example does come with a significant worsening of gameplay. I have access to what I consider to be pretty decent internet access. Even though it’s fast and reliable, it’s not 100% reliable. On many occasions, on other forums I’ve lost posts I’ve typed due to internet connectivity issues causing the post to fail to upload, and then going back to try again refreshes the page, helpfully deleting the post I was trying to upload. On many cases, I’ve been playing an online game and been booted from the game due to a brief internet hiccup.
In the case of playing games, I absolutely despise the idea of having my gameplay interrupted by something that isn’t an inherently vital part of running a game. Single-player games have been proven time and time again that they can be made to work without internet access. Would you enjoy losing hours of progress in Thimbleweed Park because your internet glitched for a few seconds? How about if it happened because your modem crashed and needed to be restarted? Would you enjoy not being able to play your game for hours or days because the host is currently being slammed by DDoS attacks, meaning you can’t connect to your single-player game in the first place? How about if that DDoS attack was hitting some major service provider, which meant you actually couldn’t play any of your games, and couldn’t even use some of your productivity applications?
If a game company expects me to have to use the internet to play a single-player game, then I expect them to be fully responsible for all the unnecessary hardware and infrastructure they’re making me use. And if they’re going to force me to go through additional inconvenience for no additional benefit, then I’m going to do the thing that’s guaranteed to cost them a sale: Not buy the game. I refused to buy Diablo III and the final SimCity game for those reasons, and in the case of SimCity, the backlash was so severe that it actually resulted in the rise of a competing product. Cities: Skylines probably would never have been made if EA hadn’t gone through so much effort to kill their own product.
Thank you guys. What I was trying to do is to create an example of a game where being always-online does not worsen the game experience in any significant way.
My purpose was to understand if your objections were practical or ideological, i.e. I wanted to understand if you do not buy the game because A) you honestly feel that an online game gives a significantly worse game experience; or B) you admit that the worsening in gameplay is insignificant, but still you don’t like the idea that the authors could have made a game without that insignificant worsening, but still they decided to put in that insignificant worsening.
But it seems that I failed because it seems that is it impossible to conceive (today, at least) an always-online game where the experience is not significantly worse. So I can’t separate the two factors, practical and ideological.
I wouldn’t exclude a third option: maybe they are both. I’m sure that each of these two reasons has an importance that changes from person to person.
I also expect that the more the Internet will be perceived and accepted as an indispensable pervasive commodity (even when it isn’t actually indispensable), the more the consumers will modify their opinion about the requisite of being online to do something.
Yet you have to exclude most trains, airports, cheap hotels and other places with shitty, expensive or no Internet. Places actually fit for killing some time in a game.
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