If Voila is what the majority of pirates are, then you don't have a problem to solve.

When I played the Heroes2 demo, I was sold, for every game in the series.  That one good sized map with tons to do and full access to the full contents of a match was enough entertainment that I spent probably fifty hours or more just playing the damn demo.  It might as well have been crack.

When H3 came out, I picked up the demo, still a teenager with no money and needed to wait to have the funds.  It was shit.  The sides were limited, the map had a short time limit.  I played it once and deleted it.

If I had played the H3 demo first, I wouldn't have any of them.  It wasn't interesting in the slightest because it showed nothing of the scope the game had.  I understand the reasoning behind demos being highly restricted, but it's just wrong.  When I see a highly limited demo, my paranoia kicks in and I wonder what they're hiding.

Games I buy without having tried first or been recommended by one of very few people, are few and far between.

To sell your product, you need to show your product.  The Sins demo should have had a large 100 planet map in there with no time limit and all three sides available.  Anyone that is played out by the time they finish that isn't a customer to start with unless they have money to piss away.  People without financial limitations are not the majority of your customer base.

First time i viewed this thread but i just wanted to put in my two cents and say that piracy sucks!!! obviously but i just wanted to let everyone know where i stand on it.  I bought this game from Gamestop the day it came out!!

-Phalnax

No problem!! And not only did I buy it the day it came out, but I was excited for it like for a year or at least since the counter at the top was at like 285 days or so. 

We digress....Pirates suck!!!! Both in game when they kill my innocent traders and in real life!!!

so many different opininos  so many flauds...  

piracy = awefull yes,    people that distribute copied games,   dont like em (altough i do support them screwing over EA)

people publishing homemade fixes (cracks)  becuase the designers were to busy making money to spend time on making it work  fully support those people, havent u ever had the problem that when a RETAIL disk is in the driver u get a popup messsage complaining u need to insert the "original" disk?? 

dammed, thats some pretty lazy work from dev's huh....     thank goodnes theres a no-cd fix, cuase if i'd send a complain all i would get is a "to bad,  your computer sucks"  even tough its them who've been sitting on the sofa, counting money rather then looking if stuff actually worked

Another big shout of appreciation for Stardock. You guys have an unparalleled reputation largely because of your ongoign commitment to the games you go with after you launch them, long term, in terms of fixing, further development and listening to your player community. Another factor is that you are one of the last to support diskless play.

All of the above produces in me and in people I know a commitment to you that makes us want  to support you more than other developers. I go out of my way to pay you for your games, even when they are available pirated.

Buying games online for download is going to grow. The monster that is Activision/Blizzard is pushing it forward and we will surely see most/all developers follow suit. It will be interesting to see what they all do to fight piracy (obviously different for MMOs).

Two points :

i) the first won't meet universal agreement - with Stardock games it would not matter to me if you regularly had the game checkonline, with your servers, if it was a registered copy. You already keep records of which accounts have bought your games online. I believe we are able to download them again, if we need to ? Does that also apply to folks who have bought hard copies from stores etc ?  I can see this kind of system becoming the norm. Regular checks to ensure only one copy of a game is out there per legitimate code, but you are able to download the game , regardless of where you bought it, at a future date if you need to.

ii) competitive advantage - the only thing I can think of, aside from the above, is to include a chunky game guide with purchase; this is something most developers are shying away from. email a copy and make a hard copy available at cost.

Keep up the good work Stardock. you have a great rep amongst your customer base and commitment from us. Thats something money can't buy. Please never drop your commitment to the PC market - it means the world to us.

He is 100% correct though. This is how it works in real world. Most things are cheaper to pay money for, than going through an effort to get them illegitimately. Again this does not involve cost on production level. But dealing with the consequences, on the law level. Which is very lacking when dealing with software piracy. 1 year in prison for piracy = zero level piracy. (ofc this is also very easy to fake..)

Anything which can be put on such a dongle can be emulated in software. And if its not, the cost for such a thing would be equivalent of getting a game console. And why would a console would want to be docked to a PC.

Amen.   It makes me very upset that I won't be able to install games like Bioshock on computers in the future thanks to these stupid DRM features.  I mean, I understand them but they are hurting me as a gamer.  I'm not too picky about DRM, though some things like "starforce" has stayed my hand before.  In fact, I'll admit that I tried pirating a game because of the starforce DRM because I'd rather be a dirty pirate then risk my DVD drive (that costs more than the game in question, thank you). 

I also am forced to take some pirating methods to play games with friends.   I'm not ashamed to say it.  Games like Age of Empires 2 and starcraft (with the 'spawn' feature) that let me play my game with my roommates or friends without them having to buy it are good.  I bought the game to play with them, not just for the single player.   So, my money's worth is not met until I've gotten some deathmatch action.  I think its reasonable as a consumer to be able to demand that I enjoy my product without the need of charging somebody else who can't afford it.  They don't have access to the single-player features in such case, so its not like they get away with not buying it.  In most of these cases (starcraft, Age of empires, and sins of solar empire) the roommates bought it as well because the games are that awesome.  Thats how you get sales!  you create a good product.  

I think if DRM was less common, there would actually be less piracy because 1. decent people don't need to find work arounds to meet reasonable expections like playing their game on a different computer/device so they won't have to be hosting pirated copies of their game on an easy access FTP server or seeding the torrent through bittorrent and 2. there would be stronger messages of giving money where money is due in society so less people would have grown up thinking its 'ok' to share things they've purchased.

I don't promote piracy by any means.  So those accusing others within this forum (few exceptions, since some here I think ARE promoting piracy, but that's their own problem/bad karma) of supporting it would be following lines of rationalization similar to Jack Tompson's understanding that gamers promote school shootings and baby soldiers.

In fact, I'm a firm advocate of giving money where money is due.  Things like DR. Horrible's sing-along-blog, Big Buck Bunny and Star Wreck are among the things I have purchased (well, I got Dr. Horrible's sound track because I don't know where I can buy it on DVD and I refuse to support itunes and their DRM machine) even though I can get them completly for free online through their official sites.  (I do the reverse as well, such as NOT buying a 'One Piece' product because I found a 4kids logo on it to suggest they would profit.  4kids: a company that I wish to burn in the fires of torment for destroying my favorite IPs for profit off of ignorant children)

Rather than complaining about pirates, DRM, or other stuff, I think we should just all vow to raise decent well educated children that we spend time while raising.  vow to teach them about things like drugs, piracy, and sex before they have developed so much that our opinion won't much change theirs (age 16 is probebly too late in my opinion, but thats just me) and be sure that they know right from wrong.

A soon to be published article from GI concerning second-hand games & DD systems being developed to combat piracy covers all the points I have made on the topic in a cogent and concise manner. You can read it here .

At the moment SD does not allow transfer of games (referred to as licenses) between users but as I posted before, I think if SD did so and charged a token fee it would be well received and generate a lot of positive news coverage for SD and maybe, just maybe, spur other publishers into doing the same thing. It would also be a serious plum in the GBR program.

Unless a paradigm shift were to magically happen in the world, then like it or not DRM will never succeed.  Never.  That's because any DRM system requires giving away the keys to the goods whenever the DRM system thinks the user is "authorized".  But the pirates will always find a way to make the computer think the system is "authorized", for example by emulating an authorized system or bypassing the authorization check entirely.  So a DRM system might be hard to crack, but it ultimately cannot win against the pirates.  Even hardware DRM.

But let's say the (unlikely to happen) scenario described in the article happens and all of the content industries decide to gang up and design the best DRM system in the world.  The problem is that the total number of people designing DRM systems pales in comparison with the total number of highly motivated, highly intelligent, and highly patient DRM hackers on the Internet.  And all it takes is any one of the DRM hackers to succeed once and put the cracked version on the net and then DRM loses.  So a (relatively small) cadre of DRM engineers have to design a system that will withstand a year (or whatever the viable commercial lifetime of a product) against DRM hackers, while the overwelming legions of DRM hackers only need to succeed once and win.  Many of the DRM hackers may reside in countries that have little or no IP enforcement.  Against such odds, its no wonder why DRM hasn't succeeded in the past and why it won't succeed in the future.

Even DRM systems that are "renewable" or "updateable" (see: AACS, BluRay copy protection) have been cracked in short order.

I'm not a fan of piracy, but I'm not a fan of DRM either because it hurts legitimate users but has little or no effect on pirate users.  And no amount of pleading by publishers will get hard core pirates to stop either... they've already decided that they can maximize their own personal gain by not compensating the developers; any theoretical problem about "incentives to create" and "making a living" are simply Not Their Problem.  However, where the developers lose is when legitimate customer swho normally buy products decide to get a crack because the DRM of a lawfully purchased product interferes with use.  When DRM gets more and more intrusive, then that person may decide either PC gaming is no longer "worth the hassle" or "the pirated version is superior to the real version".  In either case, the developer loses.

Lastly, I firmly believe that the pirates are simply a convenient scrapegoat to blame for DRM, but that DRM was going to happen anyways, even if no one pirates any software.  The reason is that corporations are profit-maximizing entities that will attempt to sell you as little as possible for your money.  Why sell you a product that you can play forever when they can "license" you a product that needs to be renewed every month (hence, lead to recurring revenues?)  Why sell you a movie that you can rewind and review or lend to a friend, when these "extra rights and features" are add-ons that demand a little bonus payment?  Pretty much anything can be "monetized" when it comes to IP, but in order to get "pay per use" and "rental" models to work, an effective DRM system is needed to prevent people from getting a free ride.

The big disconnect is that copyright is a legalized monopoly, and developers believe they are entitled to charge any price and attach any terms of use on software.  But despite the legal fiction, the market for copyrighted goods is similar to other free markets: Developers can really only charge what the market can bear, and onerous terms of use will be summarily ignored or bypassed.  Piracy is simply a market correction from the artificial monopoly to reality.  Developers may prefer not to consider pirates as part of the "market", but because pirates make use of the product in question, pirates are (in an economic sense) part of the market.

Hello all,

First post here, and my first read too. Touchy subject. *pokes*

DRM is a restriction on the use or copying of files, imposed by the copyright owner. Where I live I am legally entitled to create a backup of what I buy. Whether it be a DVD movie, PC game, software, console game, I am in my right to create a copy for myself. Back in the days when I had gone out and bought a game the first thing I would do was to go home and create a backup, and use that for installation and playing. Later on came the NoCD fixes. "You don't need a CD to play anymore? Awesome!" and it still is.

I gave up on making backups of my games a long time ago.

I am a strong supporter of NoCD's and backups. After all I have purchased all the games I have ever liked, why should I be treated like a criminal? Cars don't have equipment that makes it impossible for you to break the speed limit, although they probably will have that one day. I see insurance companies giving away cheap policies if you agree to have a "black box" installed that records up to the last x amount of time until it detects a crash. All good, but you agree to this.

I never agreed to anything when I purchased Spore at my local EB Games, and I wasn't able to agree to this fully before I had taken the game out of it's plastic wrap, thus relinquishing any chance of returning it, and even then, the DRM in Spore was... Evil. Corporate you might say. It's borderline illegal. I can accept DRM, but it has to be obvious that I might not be able to play the game on my own PC. 

When I buy a game, I want to be able to install it and then play it, as many times as I want on as many different PC's I want. I should be able to change the graphics card in my PC 100 times a day (if I so desired) without any software telling me I cannot play what I paid for. I don't want to have to spend hours reading through all sorts of posts in different forums and waiting for several days for customer support to "fix my game". Out of purely selfish reasons, I could've digested the Spore thing better had it been a problem for ALL buyers and not just a handful.

I could've liked software like Steam and Impulse. It's easy and simple, but not everyone has internet connections. How on earth would I have been able to update SOSE to 1.12 if I had not been connected? I would not even be able to download it to a pendrive at my neighbour, I would have to bring my entire computer. Dark Messiah of Might and Magic is a game I bought with the discs. I need Steam to update that, SOSE is a game I bought with discs, and I need impulse to update that.

I do think I understand why developers choose to integrate DRM software into their games. The biggest initiative to do this I would think is income, but it is in this process, to secure that income, they seem to forget who supplies the income. It is not their own hard work and hours spend up at night, but the customers that buys that game. Without the customer they would not receive their income.
I also understand that to increase that number of customers you make it increasingly hard for the game to be "pirated" (which I by the way think is a horrible term as they don't sink your ships and leave you to be eaten by sharks), hopefully making it alot easier to just go out and buy the game instead of downloading or whatever.

"Piracy" is the biggest cause for PC gamers not being able to return their games after opening the wrapper. Not the only cause though, retailers make more money that way.
Speaking of retailers, don't they sell second-hand games? Does the developers benefit from that? Not that I am aware of (honestly), but if they don't, isn't that "piracy" too on a huge, ginourmous, gargantuan scale under the cover of legal business? After all, I'm not even legally allowed to lend my game out to a friend of mine, and we all did that at least once. Boo, bad boys. How many here can honestly say that they have never played a LAN game without someone not having the legal version of the game, and still enjoying themselves, thus actually supporting it? I bet some of you have thrown fits and tantrums at friends who "pirated" as well, but most of us has probably been in the same room as one, playing the same game, knowing he didn't own it, or you maybe even lend him your CD's. Pirates! All of us! Or at least supporters. 

Almost every gamer today who purchases a game today, does so knowing that he's in for a lot more work than just installation. Everyone seems to be ok with this, and so am I. As long as it's at least possible to play it after activation. 

DRM's will continue to grow and they will become stronger, but they will always, always be broken by someone who's bored or needs a coding challenge. Some people actually don't do this just to "pirate" a game but does it because of the challenge. The purpose of the release, of this broken/rewritten code can be discussed, and flagged as "pirating" (which it is regardless of the reason), or a person who flaunts his E-peen. To be very honest, if I had the coding knowledge I would attempt to break it myself just to play without the damn discs! And I would share it with friends who I knew to have purchased the game as well. After all, I bought the game I think it should be up to me to decide what happens now as long as it stays on my PC. Is that so wrong? Some will say it's changing the IP, but I really couldnt' care less. I once bought a VW Golf in the factory produced red, and I wasn't fined or arrested for painting it blue, after all I own the car regardless of who made it, and it's mine to share with my friends if I want, when I want.

The day that DRM becomes a cooperation between different partners, OS' and game developers being one combination, is the day that I see Linux seriously gain some ground. It is not impossible to achieve this "symbiosis", but it is a bad step, and regardless of what you think, it's not the pirates decision, but I will agree that they will be a big player in the corporations decision-making process. But this will again be broken or cracked as they say. The only possible way that you can ever protect yourself entirely against piracy is non-excistent with the current laws of the different countries, what is legal in one country is illegal in another regardless of what you put in the EULA.

I do hope that one day pirated software of all levels will be gone, but I doubt it. Today the gaming industry has turned into a very large revenue machine and many games that are being churned out are only half way complete, or just utter dogs bollocks. The best games by far are those made by gamers for gamers, with the purpose of creating just that all-important thing: A good game.
The standards for what a good game is has certainly been lowered over the last decade. MMO's are becoming worse and worse and more incomplete than ever. Bugs are inevitable of course, but oftentimes I wonder what the game would've been like had all the money for marketing and advertising gone into the development of the game instead of that.

I would like to thank ANY maker of ANY game that was made by gamers for gamers. Those are the best, and Stardock and Ironclad, you are on my list.

EDIT: Wall of text hits you for 62,468 Damage!

The problem is not a permanent hostage situation...

Lately gamers have gotten dissatisfied and the distribution system isn't the ideal one to suit todays demands, thats where the problems begin.

Pirated games are easier to get hold of, quicker to get down and with the latest DRM and in the last few rounds I have started to side with the pirates due to agressive DRM software.

Spore is an excellent example of this, a lot of people have started to take pride in pirating that game to just get around SecuROM, StarForce suffered a similar fate in the past and now the company have lost a lot of huge customers and personally those games Ubisoft now passes out that interests me and that lacks the newly dreaded SecuROM is worth buying.

Another sad part that creates pirates is BUGS and lack of proper beta testing, it is the pushy publishers which in MY OPINION should have been liquidated and declared bankrupt long ago for the good of mankind.
They steal so much of the game price, a price that when cut would make games more attractive, changing to an electronic distribution system is definitly easier and cheaper and cuts them out of the loop, however they fight this due to the dreaded red ink in their books.
Nobody wants a game that after purchase they have to wait 2 or 3 patches to make it playable, a game should FUNCTION with ZERO crashing bugs or at least 1 crash per 2.5 hours of gameplay is the MAXIMUM tolerable and even that is poor.
In the past Pre Alpha testing was Pre Alpha, Alpha was Alpha and Beta was Beta.
Today this phase have been shifted thanks to the publishers which have NOTHING good to say about, Pre Alpha software is now Alpha software, Alpha software is Beta and Beta software gets pushed out as a final release.

Another aspect and problem with the whole ordeal that promotes pirates is customer support shot to hell.
As an example of how it is not to be done, I will give you 2 horror examples from the industry, one being my own personal experience that made me boycott a whole company and another a "legendary" or as gamers would classify it, "Epic Fail".

My personal experience with a company who I think will want to remain anonymous for obvious reasons shows you how customer support is NOT supposed to operate:
I had a computer game that refused to work, and in this case I had bought it retail and all that and paid good money for it too and fed their publisher.
It didn't run, it crashed upon loading no matter what I did so I thought: "What the heck, I got this game fully legally so unlike those who have pirated this game I should be entitled to customer support, right?"... WRONG.
I wrote a detailed email to their support crew, containing system specs, full description of the problem, remedies I had tried etc etc.
And the reply?

"Please buy the Gold edition of the game." Quite naturally I was FURIOUS and that tech support person should be glad he wasn't in the same room as me otherwise I would have given him a real beating.
Suffice to say, that made me do a personal boycott of that game developer if I see their name on the box it is boycotted and never purchased, if I had to try it I would play it illegally, if they don't want to give me support when I need it I am certainly NOT supporting them.
An eye for an eye.

Second and the worst support failure in gaming history is going to be mentioned by name so everyone can have a laugh, and some of you might remember the whole ordeal as well because it is still going.

Last year Eidos "Proudly" released a very "hyped up" game by the name of "Kane & Lynch: Dead Men"
The game featured annoying multiplayer technology, a flawed Microsoft one known as Games for Windows, but that was just the tip of the iceberg.
Upon release there was a mass hystria over Gamespot's review and firing of the reviewer over a butchering of the game, I will not go into more details regarding this as you can check that one out for yourselves.
But the biggest problem was that even if your system met the game requirements BIG TIME you still had a random roll to run the game.
Only 20% of those who had bought the game and paid honest money for it and even meeting the requirements were able to run the game AT ALL.
The rest? They crashed to desktop after 3-4 seconds.
Everyone expected a patch to fix this, console players had problems too, and the multiplayer area was empty due to a faulty MP mode as well as game faults.
2-3 months passed, patch was announced to be in the works and people waited.
March came and passed, May came and went, Same with June and still no patch except assurances from the heads at Eidos.
The forums they had were in an outrage and is like that even today, and now 1 year after there is STILL NO PATCH for the game.
Eidos have gone down in the history books with this, and not in a good way either.

With developers like this, I don't find it the least strange people either have turned to consoles or go pirate.
Why pay for a product that may not work? Sure there are demos but we all know those are made to look great and lately doesn't affect the real product in terms of how it will run.
Sadly the industry is rapidly derailing and quality goes downhill, for my example I have lately gone back to playing old games and hunting out mods to get more entertainment.

DRM will never be the answer, I expect it to die out rapidly or if you start integrating it even more you will start to see people doing it the way they have done with consoles, chipping them to bypass protections.
Although I hope that doesn't come to my PC I do not want to sit soldering my motherboard or burning off selected parts of my processor to be able to use my computer the way I want it.
But if this keeps up, hell I might as well ditch Windows and go Linux totally as WINE have shaped up pretty well lately for usage with older games.

The old rule still applies, if you want to have control of your software you have to be the best provider of it.
That means you have to keep the costs down and bet on a lot of people being interested, multiplayer options that will strike everyones fancy for an example a coop function often helps in that regard and making it easy to get a hold of.
It means working overtime and killing off the publishers, let them go bankrupt or start to develop games, a simple choice to give them, because like recent reports have shown, of a game that costs 50 USD the publishers run off with over half of that price, I would guess 75% goes in their pockets instead of the developers that really deserves it.

This is what I am telling everyone, if I get a game package costing around 20 USD I may be tempted to snap it up if it keeps quality and what I want, but if it costs 50$ USD my quality expectations instantly rise, I want to feel like a valued customer not just somebody that have just purchased a very expensive newspaper in poor condition.
Because the main problem with software is that you NEVER feel like you own it, and even EULA's stress a right to use.
Granted that is ok but do make the customers feel like they own the game and can do whatever they want with it, presently there isn't with SecuROM and the rest.

If you make them feel like they are part of something you will get loyal customers, and thats the line developers should follow, and not treat them as milking cows like the developer in my personal example did.

This type of DRM will not happen in our litigious society.  Antivirus vendors already encounter false positives on files but at least they give the user the option how they want to handle the virus removal.  But can you imagine if program "A" had a false positive for piracy detection and disabled every legitimate copy of program "B" on every computer worldwide?  To make matters worse, what if the vendor of A refused to assist the victims of their software undue the changes that they made?  Or what if they refused to correct the bug and continued to disable legitimate application "B" despite appeals from the developers of application "B" to desist disabling their software?  Another bad scenario, what if a developers own software had a false positive on someone else's software and class action lawsuits were filed against the vendor not for their own coding but due to a fault in the software of their DRM vendor?

I strongly believe in consumer protectionism.  Legal code has a long way to catch up to technology but I feel it can eventually get there.  Laws should be passed to define certain damages as a criminal offense.  For example, if a software developer disabled a competitor's software, and they didn't correct the bug in a reasonable period of time, shouldn't it be proven to be intentional sabotage/vandalism/destruction of property so that some individuals would go to jail?  Of course many issues will need to be addressed such as who in the company should be liable for criminal allegations, what period of time is considered reasonable to repair the bug, what penalties are appropriate, etc.  But this is something that I thing should be in place because companies get away with far too much and they should be held to a higher accountability.

So where does this leave DRM?  I believe that most digital content will be subscribtion based much like World of Warcraft is to games, Netflix is for movies, and iTunes is for music.  Future games would require an internet connection, include a server component run by the software developer, and a client software that gets installed on your PC.  Since the server component isn't installed on any end user PC then it wouldn't be possible to crack it locally.  Ideally the consumer could get a subscribtion to a website that offered all kinds of games to play all for a standard monthly fee.  This way if a consumer spends a lot of time with one game, or they like to dabble in quite a few, they are charged the same fee regardless.  Since games vary so much in cost, it might be that a website has different tiers to their subscriptions (i.e. free games, basic games, premium games, and ultra premium games).

Wow I didn't notice the reply before mine was from December.  This was one of the newest threads in the dev journals area so things must move slowly here.