I dislike DRM, but piracy is a major problem for games, music, video etc. Even fan-fiction gets pirated! Drew (the author of the Oolite Saga - which is free, creative commons licensed) fights a running battle with ebook pirates who sell his ebook versions of the Saga on Amazon (ebook piracy is growing, apparently).

We hate DRM too. It's not going to be on our game for a number of reasons.

Firstly, it's completely pointless. If someone wants to crack it give it 3 or 4 days, if you're lucky, and it's a torrent download. No DRM to crack = no challenge for the cracking teams out there. The pirates have, in effect, a more functional, more hassle-free game than someone who paid you for it if you include DRM. There is more incentive to pirate it rather than pay for it.

Secondly we can't guarantee, as a small, part-time, indie studio that in three years' time if you want to reinstall the game our server will still be running for validation and you might legitimately have had to re-install it 5 times in a space of a week because you're messing around with O/S changes. (This happened to me with Mass Effect - very annoyed at that!).

Thirdly, if you go down the route of 'must be online to play' in a single player game, you have alienated most of your audience in one fell swoop. No thanks.

In game dev. terms, we've put not a lot of money into our work, but it still stands at over $20,000 which includes software licensing, model licensing, musical workstation purchases, etc. etc. and we still have to pay our voice actors. We've done this for the fun, because it's what we wanted to make, but if it only just breaks even, we'll do it again. If it makes a profit, we'll do it again but better. So.. what to do?

Easy... firstly have a demo available - 3 or 4 hours of gameplay, minimum, which the big studios who are offering only 9-10 hours of play in their single player campaign can't effectively do. If you're serving up 60+ hours of gameplay, you're giving away 5% of the game, which we can do, rather than a third of it, which they can't. Secondly, offer incentives for people to pay. If you register, you can play the online, persistent world part of the game. If you pirate the full product, well... have fun, but forget playing online or getting the free DLC.

Basically, we don't see piracy as lost sales but we're in a bit of a niche where the audience is older, a bit more mature, and is prepared to pay a reasonable price for something they like. So.. our plan is to offer a solid 3 - 4 hours of demo, a reasonable price point (does quick conversion from £ to $! - $15) and if 2000 people like it enough to pay for it, we've got a war-chest for part 2. If you want to pirate it, go ahead, but you'll miss out on the DLC which is effectively the storyline continuation and you won't get MP. If that doesn't bother someone, they wouldn't have bought it anyway.

No to DRM. End of story!

This DRM shenanigans has been going on a few years with Ubisoft and it the main reason why I simple will not buy any game published by them as I see no reason why I have to be connected to the internet all the time just to play a game.

I have no problem where you have to register a game like on steam, the only problem I have with steam is that it won't let you play a game until it downloads any updates which can be annoying.

I suppose this stems form the recent vulnerability in ubisoft's uplay platform

they looked like idiots

now it's time to blame pirates

And if you like it, you may buy it a couple of times <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//biggrin.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt='' /> (This has happened to me, with a lot of GoG games, and Galaxy of Fire 2. Although I bought two different versions of GoF2).

You might want to check this RPS link, in responce to UBi alegations

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/08/22/ubisoft-boss-declares-f2p-is-because-of-95-piracy-rates/

I have no problem with DLC, as long as the original game isn't done half-assed to then make 3-4 DLC packages. It would be nice to have a complete game that you then add on too to either expand the original story or add other features and options for the player. But don't take away originally planned gameplay to sell it to the consumer later. DRM I have a love/hate relationship with only because I like it because it does help protect the developer to give them the most profits possible, and Magnox is right if the pirates want the game cracked it will be done fairly quickly. I just don't like the fact that I need to install or maintain 3rd party software to enjoy a game I purchased. I do like GOG's method but it will take time before they get any of the newer titles.

I think the more harmful thing (least to consoles) is the game registration that Sony and MSoft will use on the nextgen consoles, so if you try to buy a game off ebay cheap you will have to pay again to activate it on your console. Yes this is good for the dev/publishers but rough for the gamer, especially the gamers that can't afford $60 whenever a new title comes out, what they will notice is that people will probably wait longer to pickup a game title. I hope that the registration system will actually bring prices down since it will 'in theory' hurt used game sales greatly.

I think those number are a bit over the top.

It reminds me about the stunt the movie industry pulled of by saying that pirating cost them a couple of billions and millions of jobs.

Later a mathematican dispelled this.

Anyway DRM is a problem- as is Piracy and DLC's.

Now see there's a problem with this whole piracy drm issue. The publishers (not the devs mind you, its almost always the publisher doing the whining) cry and moan about people stealing their games etc etc. Now that happens, yes. A lot. But see that itself is the issue. It happens a LOT. Any social aberration that steadily increases like that has a motivating factor. Finding and removing this factor is generally the only way to reverse the escalation. That isn't talked about though because the publishers know the motivating factors, and have no intention of fixing them. With games it has a lot to do with people finding it hard to justify shelling out $60 when there's a better than 50% chance the game won't work right on installation. Possibly won't work at all. Patches will fix some things but a huge amount of known bugs will just be ignored. On top of this you add DRM schemes which treats paying customers like criminals. People are fed up with it, simple as that.

Same thing with the phone industry. New smartphones get churned out like hotcakes at ridiculous prices and riddled with bugs that never get fixed because... why bother? We're releasing a new one next month anyway. I've had 16, count em folks 16 smartphones in the last year. Not ONE works properly and none of them had the majority of those known issues fixed before support was dropped. Just the old carrier says it the manufacturer / manufacturer says it's the carrier dance till the next model came out. Sound familiar? We can't help you that's the developer's issue, we'd fix it but the publisher won't let us.

Well guys, if you want to act like robber barons ; better be glad all you have to deal with a couple Robin Hoods. Think it's bad now? Just wait till the torch and pitchfork brigade shows up at the castle. AskInterplay how well that one goes.

Edit:

Now don't get me wrong. I'm all for Devs getting paid.... and I guess publishers too. I even buy multiple copies of games I like. Like if I lose the CD I'll buy it again sometimes even when I have the ISO of my first copy, just cause I like it. My wife has re-purchased just about every game she owns off GOG. Because she likes not having to fiddle with them to get them running on modern systems. Once upon a time I even rabidly pre-ordered games. But in today's gaming market. I wouldn't pre-order anything. I just don't trust the companies any more. That's the core problem. Trust. There is none, and no reason to give it.

Raithe does bring up a good point about game stability and readiness for the market. A lot of games are just that, not ready. And usually its not the developers fault, they probably really wanted to fix and tweak the game more but the publisher wants to make the money so they ship it any way. Hoping that the launch is somewhat successful and not too much egg gets on their face. I will admit, I don't pay $60 for a game often and if I do its usually from a developer/publisher that puts out good games. Besides that I wait until the price drops to what I think the game is worth or enough patches have been released to stabilize the game. I have wondered what may happen to all my purchased games on GamersGate and Steam 10-15yrs from now. No one can say for certain what will happen and if you can always retrieve your game 10 yrs from now.

Back in the early 90's I was a huge Origin System's fan (still am) but I threw my money at their games, why? They usually put out good ones, maybe that is what publishers need to do is put out good games and the gamers will take care of them with their wallets. Remember gamers do have memories and you can only sell us crap a few times before we blacklist you from our PC's. So do us a favor and put out good games.... nudge to Blizzard, D3 was and still is a joke. This is why the indie developers and kickstarters are so important these days is because hopefully the gamers and the developers are after one thing... a good game. Support them so they can make more, the big publishers will get the hint eventually.

I completely agree. Bioware/EA are on my blacklist now and despite very fond memories of the original Baldur's Gate series, amongst others, they now fail to deliver market-ready products and use heavy-handed DRM. I cannot install my original copy of Mass Effect because I've hit the '5 installs' limit. The pirate who got their copy via torrents has no such restrictions.

I go back to my original point - if it doesn't offer a good length of demo, if you don't get value from buying, people will pirate. Indies don't have publisher deadlines and we can't afford to push out something that is substandard if we're asking for peoples' money. That's why I firmly believe you have to offer something to genuine buyers over and above what you could get from firing up uTorrent and grabbing yourself a freebie.

I definitely agree with your opinions on demos Magnox. I love space themed games a lot, but unless I have really researched a game or developers themselves release a flood of info on it I will not buy a game until I try it or a member here recommends it highly. And it has been only the past few years that has built this wall in my buying games. The publishers/developers have done this to me. I used to just buy games that said the right things or showed off what I was looking for and I have been getting more and more disappointed because either the feature(s) were lacking completely in depth or the game was so short or missing substance that getting into the game was impossible. I think people really do pirate games 50-80% of the time to just try them before they buy them. It's just demos are a dying breed, yes your game needs to have substance for a demo and isn't a flash trailer. Because people will download a demo and spend time with it and if it good, most of the time you just got yourself a new buyer. I have always liked the approach that Evochron games took with a 60-90min time period to the full game and if you like you purchase an unlock code. Most people play demos for about that long so your not giving up much and if you are getting through 5-10% of your game in that timeframe you need to rethink your game <img src="' http://spacesimcentral.com/forum/public/style_emoticons//icon_e_smile.gi f"' class='bbc_emoticon' alt=':)' />

That statistic is absolute garbage, not that many PC users know they can pirate software like that..

Besides, he never mentioned how many pirates turned around and bought the game because they enjoyed the game and wanted to support the company.

I've noticed franchises that used cater to core gamers but have been streamlined and aimed at a casual audience, have the highest piracy rates. My theory is that core gamers pirate these video games in order to try them (especially when no playable demo is available), only to learn that they're not for them any more.