This is a lesson that was learned back in the 80s, after valiant attempts to protect games from copying. I remember things like having bad disk sectors, which were foiled by the likes of copyiipc, and then it moved on to requiring the manual for specific passcodes, which was foiled by photocopies and people simply hacking the binaries. None of them worked because it was an eternal war of the game providers vs the pirates, but the pirates had a lot more incentive and opportunity to crack the games than the content developers had to protect them.
As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud. As long as the actual machine where the content is being run off is in the hands of the client, it can always be hacked, either through software or hardware. But things like streaming video and Louis CK are showing that people are willing to pay for content, as long as it's convenient enough and cheap enough.
> As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud.
You can protect yourself from piracy by making quality content that people genuinely want to support. You do more good by making it convenient, easy, and affordable to customers than anything else, and having an awesome game makes it even easier to hand over cash.
Convenience and affordability is where a lot of people fail.
In general I agree with you, but sometimes affordability isn't possible due to a limited market size.
Adobe Photoshop is the best example in that even if it was only $50 (instead of $2000), the market size is limited by those who want edit photos.
Adobe's answer to this was to make a student version and sell it for 15%+/- of the original price and allow those that want to edit photos but cannot afford the software still buy it for a lower price.
They further versioned by releasing Light Room.
They realized that they needed to make it affordable, but kept the DRMs in place and worked hard to make PS harder to copy. I'm sure it is still possible, but at $400 (student version) you get a lot of value and it becomes easier than pirating.
I've always thought photoshop was made intentionally easy to pirate, as an unfair competitive advantage to keep other companies out of the market (companies and serious professionals buy it--everyone else pirates it).
CS5 didn't even require a crack, you just have install the trial version with a fake serial and edit your hosts file to stop it calling home.
Maybe it is relatively easy to crack compared with games, but non programmers like me don't even know what host files are. That being said, if it is relatively easy to crack you are probably right. It would be financial suicide to compete with them since you couldn't limp in with a weak program. Great point.
But Steam is a DRM platform, so that's not entirely relevant. They do try really hard to provide value and convenience to the customer, but they haven't stepped back from the DRM position.
But the DRM is not what's protecting themselves from piracy; it's the quality and convenience of the service. Every Steam game is trivially cracked within hours of release, regardless of the DRM, yet most people still choose to buy the game on Steam.
What does "caught playing pirated games on Steam" even mean? Cracked versions of Steam games typically have the Steam portion stripped out, so one would not play them "on Steam" at all.
True; they still do a minimum to keep people honest, but all those methods, to my knowledge, are already defeated if you look around. Their stick is making piracy annoying to do, along with the carrot of a long reputation of good games.
Counter-Strike is actually one of those instances where DRM adds value to a product for paying customers. Counter-Strike is a very popular target for cheaters using client hacks like like aimbots and transparent wall hacks, and one of the ways to avoid those players is by hiding behind a pay wall. Every time a cheater is caught and banned, the only way for them to get back in is by paying $10 to re-buy the game. Adding DRM to the client ensures that this pay wall remains intact, meaning that cheaters can ruin my multiplayer experience constantly only if they are willing to inject a fair amount of cash into the system (and very few are).
Old battlenet (before SC2) could disable CD keys in multiplayer, and was a level of DRM I'm ok with. People hack, and having a mechanism to ban them made sense. It doesn't have to come with all of the "single account tied to your purchase" or "3 hardware changes" that we're starting to see.
I'm pretty much OK with CD-keys, and I tolerate Steam because it hasn't had serious problems yet, but anything else I tend to distrust.
I was a lifelong pirater of games, rarely bought any (though ironically Paradox games were bought, I loved them so much), and Steam turned that around. I don't buy AAA games at full price, which is ridiculously high here in Australia, but Steam has regular sales with significant discounts. I'm not a poor student anymore, plus Steam is much more convenient than pirating. I'll pay a few dollars to avoid spending time finding a torrent, then reading the comments to see if it's good or not, then waiting for the seeders, etc.
Partly because the benefits of Steam (infinite, fast, direct downloads; achievements and leaderboards; cloud game saves; fast patch download; occasional purchase perks such as TF2 hats) far outweigh the negatives (purchases tied to account name; only one account "online" at a time; occasionally weird/buggy "offline" support)
I actually consider everything tired to my account name a plus, as I can log in anywhere and get it. No secondary market, however, is the downside associated with that.
And offline is way better than it used to be. Is it still problematic?
I've mentioned this before, but World of Goo did everything right: great game, 90 on Metacritic, easy purchase through Steam or direct from their website, no DRM at all, and priced at $19.99. But an estimated 90% of players were on pirated versions of the game: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/.
Unless pirate players have a significant negative effect on the gameplay experience, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I can see for this game in particular, World Of Goo's makers do not care how many people pirate their game, either in absolute terms or as a percentage. All that really matters is the absolute number of legitimate sales.
It doesn't matter how many people pirate content vs buy it. What matters is whether DRM would have increased or decreased the total revenue. More than likely it would have caused it to decrease. The people who pirated it would not have necessarily been paying customers, and fewer people playing the game overall would likely have led to less publicity and fewer total sales.
Edit: a lot of game makers are adopting this sort of model as an intentional business practice by going "free to play". Having a big installed base is great if per user costs are low (which they can be if everything is digital) and can improve average perceived value for multiplayer games, all of which can make it easier to pull in more revenue from a small subset of players who voluntarily choose to pay for certain things than to attempt to charge everyone a flat fee.
> As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud.
OnLive does precisely this. It's effectively perfect as far as copy-protection goes; but it's also seamless to the user and (provided you have a decent pipe) actually has a few benefits as things like download time, system specs, or syncing saves are no longer an issue.
One exception is multiplayer games. You can still pirate them, but you won't be able to play online with the majority of players. This makes the copy significantly worse, so Blizzard doesn't have to worry much about Starcraft 2 piracy.
If game companies need to hurt their customers in order to "protect" what they think they're selling, then what are the customers buying after all?
The companies think the customers want to buy a copy of the game, so it logically follows that thus, making copies of the game must be restricted. But the customers obviously are buying something else if they feel hurt even after they've rightfully received their copy and even go lengths to "fix" the situation by turning to pirated versions.
It is my guess that what customers want is the abstract concept of ownership.
People buy games and music and movies because they think those games and music are good, and they admire them, thus they want to own these products.
Anecdotally, most of what I own is because I wanted to specifically own it. I own movies on physical DVD disks that I still downloaded from Piratebay for viewing after I bought the DVD because they have better DVD rips and it takes less time to download than to rip myself.
Whatever games I bought and my friends bought when we were teenagers were the best ones that we thought we wanted to own. We wanted to have the game, we wanted to own the game to feel good about owning something we liked. All my game boxes were like that. Monkey Islands. F1GP. Eye of the Beholder. Obtaining a pirate copy wouldn't have satisfied my need to own those titles. Me and my friends pirated stuff that we didn't feel for, and if we hadn't been able to pirate them we wouldn't have bought it.
We didn't buy games to get a copy, we bought games for ownership, we wanted to own them and cherish them. And that is exactly what DRM games don't want to give you: ownership.
As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud. As long as the actual machine where the content is being run off is in the hands of the client, it can always be hacked, either through software or hardware. But things like streaming video and Louis CK are showing that people are willing to pay for content, as long as it's convenient enough and cheap enough.