Piracy avoidance

81

The reason you can’t separate the factors is because people don’t object to always-online for the same reason. For instance, my objection is primarily practical. If somehow online-only game access could be done in a 100% reliable way that wasn’t going to cost me extra money, was never going to shut down, or otherwise inconvenience me, then I might be willing to consider it, but it would have a bitter, uphill battle to fight before it could convince me. Considering that EA is infamous to shutting down game servers once a game’s popularity wanes, there are good reasons to be skeptical of a company’s willingness or ability to stream content in perpetuity, especially when you consider the increased maintenance costs. When Steam sells an old game, they just need to have the installer on their server. The game doesn’t have to be able to run on their equipment. Getting it to run is basically my problem, since I’m running it on my hardware. On the other hand, if a company sells an online-only game streamed from their servers, it has to be able to run on their equipment 5/10/20 years down the road, even after upgrading server hardware and OS. That’s a difficult task to do with one game. Now imagine maintaining a library of hundreds or thousands of games. If EA can’t be bothered to keep servers up for something as relatively minor as online multiplayer, how can I trust them to keep servers up for something much more bandwidth intensive?

For other people, the objection is ideological. They’re often easy to spot, because they’re the ones who will only buy physical copies of games, or if they buy games digitally they only do so from GoG or similar sites that offer DRM-free games. If a person refuses to use Steam because of its DRM–which generally has been proven to not have a detrimental effect on actual gameplay–I can guarantee you they won’t be okay with always-online games.

Regarding the practical concerns, here are some numbers to illustrate one of my many misgivings. Nvidia already has a service that does what you’re describing: GeForce NOW. If you have an Nvidia Shield device, you can subscribe to GeForce NOW for $7.99 USD per month. The service does include access to some games, but typically only indie titles or some older AAA games. So let’s say I wanted to play The Witcher 3. On top of that $7.99 per month for accessing the service, I have to pay $49.99 to buy a copy of The Witcher 3 on the service. If I cancel my subscription, I can no longer play the game I bought. According to their FAQ most game purchases include an activation code for PC, but what if I don’t have a PC that can play the game? What if a developer doesn’t offer the key? According to Nvidia, they only keep record of game purchases and saves for five years after a subscription is canceled. If I renew after that, it’s too late. All that data is gone.

If you think that deal is great, wait until you hear the next one. Nvidia is also working on a different service where you can stream games to your PC instead of to an Nvidia Shield device. For $25 USD you can rent a computer with 1060-class GPU for 20 hours, or a computer with 1080-class GPU for 10 hours. As with the other version of the service, you have to pay for many games yourself. Imagine paying $49.99 USD for The Witcher 3, and then racking up a mere 50 hours of gameplay. That would be $62.50 USD for that 50 hours on a 1060-class GPU, or a whopping $125 USD for the same 50 hours on a 1080-class GPU! And that’s for a relatively rushed playthrough. The Witcher 3 is the sort of game a person could play for hundreds of hours. A dedicated Witcher 3 fan could easily rack up double, triple, or quadruple the fees in the course of gameplay. And of course, this service is still useless if I don’t have a computer on my end to stream the game to. So I’d be paying for one computer, renting a second, and still having to buy a copy of the game.

If the future of games is paying dramatically more for restricted access, I’m just going to give up on computer gaming entirely. Now that would be a large number of lost sales that no amount of DRM could possibly get back.

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82

This is exactly my point. If I have Internet, my first choice of entertainment is Internet. If I don’t, I resort to games. If my games need Internet, they’re completely pointless.

83

But I paid extra for absolution because of me pirating the LucasArts games as a kid. :sweat_smile:

In the mean time I have multiple physical versions and all the GoG versions I could get.
But again, I’m not a kid anymore and can afford new and especially old and price reduced games.
So I was somewhere between reason 2 and 3 20 years ago.

84

This is not true. I very rarely had any such problems with cracks. But they regularly do get recognised by antivirus applications, but they are detected as cracks/keygens, that’s all.

I actually deem some copyprotection mechanisms more dangerous and should be detected as malware.

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85

Force you to play online, I mean. Put some part of the logic on the server, so there’s no way to pirate it, because what you install is not the complete game. What am I missing?

Well, several problems there. Not everyone always has internet access, like if they want to play on a train for example, or as a passenger in a car.

And it doesn’t solve the problem that copy protection is supposed to solve. Copy protection in practise stops most people from making copies of their own games for their friends, or to upload to the pirate bay, or just so they can copy to their own other systems. But it doesn’t stop anyone from downloading a copy that has already had its copy protection removed. This is what happens to just about any Steam game for example.

The final problem is to get really hardened copy protection that will stop your game from being pirated for let’s say at least 2-3 months is very expensive. It just wouldn’t represent a cost-effective solution for indie game developers.

Your best option to combat piracy is to do stuff like this where a game developer went onto the pirate bay and engaged in the comment section. Only thing he left out was a link to the official website which would have helped.

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86

That’s great! I’m an original backer of Paradigm but didn’t know that Jacob did this!

87

Jacob’s gesture is very nice, because it’s true that some people pirate games because they can’t afford them. It seems that he shared those keys because he cared for those people (he didn’t even mention a place where to buy the game).

But measuring the hypothetical positive impact on sales that this decision might have had is extremely difficult, in my opinion. I’m not sure that this can be a way to fight piracy.

88

Would you rather spend your time fighting piracy, or getting new sales? My guess is that Jacob’s view is that “fighting piracy” is futile waste of his time, and it’s better to concentrate on ways to market your game and get new sales instead.

You could always do what some really old games used to do as well and put a “where to buy” in the game itself - maybe on the options menu, where people can click through and you can have a short message about piracy but also give the sales information there. There used to be a few MS-DOS games for example that used to give this information when the game was closed on the DOS prompt - it was used more for demos I think, but there were also some full version games that did it as well and usually said “please don’t pirate etc”.

89

Well, this is a difficult question. You ask me to choose only one of the two options, but in reality both things could be done and doing the first one could influence sales, so the two things don’t seem to me strictly separated.

I think that an answer to this question could be given only after having established if fighting piracy actually helps the company to sell more. Do we have data that supports or refute the hypothesis that fighting piracy is one of the many ways to generate more money?

Also, it’s not clear to me if your question was about what an indie developer should do or also about what bigger companies should do. The answer could change depending on who the subject is.

90

You’re not going to be able to stop the game being pirated. The only fight worth making is to convert potential pirates to paying customers. I don’t think there’s any DRM that would be worth the money to indie developers, and DRM isn’t really worth it to larger developers either. For online games like World of Warcraft, yes it makes perfect sense for the company to use their server to enforce legit copies, and that’s pretty easy to do.

16 years ago I used to play Warcraft III with my friends occasionally and I didn’t have a copy… but that wasn’t a problem for a LAN, only for online play. So I used to use one of their copies for a while (until I eventually bought a copy) while they weren’t using it (or more correctly their CD key). Blizzard’s server wouldn’t let you log on using the same CD key twice at the same time. Occasionally we’d play LANs where we had 3 actual copies but 4 of us playing the game. I suppose you might count that last bit as piracy, but then again you only ever used to need one copy of a console game for up to 4 people to play, so it never really occurred to me that everyone should have unique copies at a LAN anyway. Besides that though, it was just quite literally sharing copies and using it while their actual owners weren’t.

That said, I wouldn’t pirate an indie game… or use some else’s copy. Well unless it’s completely out of print or something like Tales of Monkey Island (which I own so don’t need to pirate). :slight_smile:

91

The RPG Drakensang used similair approach - if they detected a cracked version, they just let more and more items disappear randomly from the game. And you just weren’t able to complete the game.

92

The adventure “Undercover: Operation Wintersun” did that too: If the game detects a pirated version, some items disappear and you are not able to solve the game.

93

why does this work? the crackers do not notice that they haven’t cracked the whole game? or they notice, but it’s more difficult to crack (because you can’t reproduce it always)?

94

That suddenly reminded me of

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95

Most crack just the copy to be 1st, they crack as far as the game starts without CD (especially with Drakensang and Undercover), the other measure is deeper in the game code, it’s not obvious, if programmed correctly. And you have to play for some time to notice the effects of the game not being cracked 100%.

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96

Exactly, they make it so that issues happen only later during gameplay.
But there are also drawbacks for the developer: People will complain about “bugs” which could affect reviews and support.

Another game with such measures was The Settlers III:

… the game would seem to run perfectly at first. However, iron smelters would produce only pigs, residences wouldn’t produce new settlers, newly planted trees wouldn’t grow, goods placed at a harbour for transport would disappear, and manna couldn’t be generated.

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97

and how does the game know it has been cracked?

98

It uses multiple copy protections. You crack the first one and the game starts and runs seemingly fine. But then there is another, probably better hidden, copy protection which only comes in play later. It doesn’t stop the game from running but it slightly alters gameplay, making it impossible to win and/or a PITA to play it.

99

Also Arkham Asylum did something similar.

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100

Wow! Some of those are brutal!!