DRM Thread

[Mamoulian War]

Mamoulian War, I'm well aware of instances where stuff like that happens. Ironically, people like you still seem to get pissed off about it, except in this case. That's strange. I mean, how do you know that that person isn't a legit owner of Spyro that just got screwed over!?

 

It's the same assumption as the assumption that all the people who complained about Titan Quest bugginess were pirates

 

No, the tornado is at fault.

 

Yeah... And if i put my kitten into microwave to dry it out, it's the fault of the manufacturer, that they did not put in the manual, that drying kittens in their product might kill them... LOL

Edited August 18, 2009 by Mamoulian War

[alanschu]

Mamoulian War, I'm well aware of instances where stuff like that happens. Ironically, people like you still seem to get pissed off about it, except in this case. That's strange. I mean, how do you know that that person isn't a legit owner of Spyro that just got screwed over!?

 

It's the same assumption as the assumption that all the people who complained about Titan Quest bugginess were pirates

 

No, it's not. Especially when the developer can go in and specifically verify precisely why the application is crashing.

[alanschu]

DRM, piracy bla bla - its all just running away from the real issue: if you want people to buy games, make good ones. With good games the chances that you'll go bankrupt are slim. With bad ones its inevitable.

 

Tell that to the anti-EA people.

 

Or Looking Glass Studios.

 

 

I actually think that piracy, especially in the western world, is significantly less than what it was back in the 80s. It might be higher on consoles now than in the past, but when I was growing up piracy was ridiculously rampant.

 

 

While growing up using the Applie ][ the only game I can actually confirm was a legit copy of the all my favourite games was Black Cauldron.

 

 

I know on a persona level, a large "anti-piracy" measure was simply using CDs. They were big, held lots of data, and made copying diskettes somewhat, unwieldy. Given that warez copies of games typically had a lot of the fun parts of it (like sound, videos) ripped out of it, piracy at that time was a bum wrap.

 

Though CD-Burners became more common, so that was the end of that.

Edited August 18, 2009 by alanschu

[Mamoulian War]

I actually think that piracy, especially in the western world, is significantly less than what it was. It might be higher on consoles now than in the past, but when I was growing up piracy was ridiculously rampant.

 

Then why we have so much publishers whining about piracy ?

 

and saying that EA makes good games is same as saying Britney Spears makes good music... Both sells ****loads of copies, but that's more the reason of marketing and not quality of their products... quantity != quality in most cases...

Edited August 18, 2009 by Mamoulian War

[Purkake]

Tell that to the anti-EA people.

 

Or Looking Glass Studios.

 

 

I actually think that piracy, especially in the western world, is significantly less than what it was. It might be higher on consoles now than in the past, but when I was growing up piracy was ridiculously rampant.

 

 

While growing up using the Applie ][ the only game I can actually confirm was a legit copy of the all my favourite games was Black Cauldron.

 

There's less of it because the market has expanded and now includes many non-tech savvy people. Ubisoft can make a ton of money on the Petz and Babiez games because the are cheap to make and hardly anyone pirates them, but the sales are still good.

 

Frankly, I don't see the benefit of making any games for the "hardcore" from a financial point of view.

[Mamoulian War]

Frankly, I don't see the benefit of making any games for the "hardcore" from a financial point of view.

 

Oh noes... you just caused Dragon Age to be postponed another few months to be turned into cuddling simulator...

[Purkake]

If I didn't play games and cared about money, that exactly what I'd do.

[alanschu]

I actually think that piracy, especially in the western world, is significantly less than what it was. It might be higher on consoles now than in the past, but when I was growing up piracy was ridiculously rampant.

 

Then why we have so much publishers whining about piracy ?

 

The same reason why joe blow worker complains that he doesn't get paid enough for work. I don't blame developers and publishers for getting upset at people using their software without compensation. Why should those people get to enjoy the fruits of your labour for free?

 

and saying that EA makes good games is same as saying Britney Spears makes good music... Both sells ****loads of copies, but that's more the reason of marketing and not quality of their products... quantity != quality in most cases...

 

 

So not a single game of theirs is good in any way? And all the people that disagree with you are just wrong and simpletons?

[alanschu]

Tell that to the anti-EA people.

 

Or Looking Glass Studios.

 

 

I actually think that piracy, especially in the western world, is significantly less than what it was. It might be higher on consoles now than in the past, but when I was growing up piracy was ridiculously rampant.

 

 

While growing up using the Applie ][ the only game I can actually confirm was a legit copy of the all my favourite games was Black Cauldron.

 

There's less of it because the market has expanded and now includes many non-tech savvy people. Ubisoft can make a ton of money on the Petz and Babiez games because the are cheap to make and hardly anyone pirates them, but the sales are still good.

 

Frankly, I don't see the benefit of making any games for the "hardcore" from a financial point of view.

 

 

I agree. I don't know if the miniature giant space hamster would agree, but a large amount of the growth of video games has been because of the inclusion of the mainstream market.

 

However, two things are for certain. The cost of making games has skyrocketed, and the cost of buying games has remained relatively static (adjusted for inflation, it's actually gone down). This means that economies of scale must come into play for games to be profitable. This means that games will tend to be more conservative and less risky in their design.

 

I don't think that the games industry is choking itself due to sequelitis or uninspired gameplay. I think it's just sitting at statusquo, which is actually still pretty good growth (things may be different with the "Tough Economic Times" going on right now).

[Purkake]

Will you stop the irrational EA hate, Mamoulian War? Not only is it getting old, but EA pulled their stuff together and put out Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, both of which were considerable risks. EA has improved a lot over the last few years.

 

If you really need someone to hate, hate Activision. They are pretty much the definition of sequelitis, not publishing the Ghostbusters game because the "franchise wasn't annually exploitable", sueing EA so that they couldn't publish Br

[Mamoulian War]

Will you stop the irrational EA hate, Mamoulian War? Not only is it getting old, but EA pulled their stuff together and put out Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, both of which were considerable risks. EA has improved a lot over the last few years.

 

If you really need someone to hate, hate Activision. They are pretty much the definition of sequelitis, not publishing the Ghostbusters game because the "franchise wasn't annually exploitable", sueing EA so that they couldn't publish Br

[Purkake]

You must really hate Ubisoft then. They put out like 3 Petz/Babiez games per week.

[alanschu]

I start to hate them as soon as they start putting 3-times only activation shovelware in all other aspect hey are same as EA, but so far not one of the games i was ever interested with Activision logo had such ridiculous DRM...

 

And as soon as games as Mirror's Edge and Dead Space start to be more common than 1 good game for 25 shovelware... i'll start to believe they might change... not a day before

 

 

So do you just download pirated copies of EA games to boost the download stats and "stick it" to EA? Because that just seems like a silly venture to me.

[Zoraptor]

Then the pirates are continuing to be an even bigger disservice to legitimate gamers. EA seeing how many people downloaded their game doesn't make them squirm in their seats.

It does, when SecuROM's much vaunted system resulted in more downloads than something like Fallout 3 which effectively didn't even have a disk check, and it garnered a lot of negative press. Probably the biggest problem though was the enormous support load it was generating. Using EA's own figures around 20,000 people had 'bricked' Spore within a couple of months of its release (with around 20% of buyers having 1 or fewer activations left), and the support load was still increasing.

 

Electronic Arts continues to post billion dollar revenues, even as their DRM gets more restrictive.

EA's lost money hand over fist for the last few years. They're not in imminent trouble though their cash reserves have dropped around 70%, and their share price had dropped around 70% as well. Revenue itself is irrelevant. Last (?) quarter 2008 they lost a huge amount (~800m USD, iirc) though that did include some one off costs.

 

Then the PC Game development houses, like Looking Glass Studios, end up going out of business.

LGS is a poor example.

 

LGS did not go out of business because of piracy, nor even because of poor sales. It went out of business primarily because of its own bad business decisions, mostly going back to the decision to self publish Terra Nova. All of LGS's late, main line PC titles (Thief 1/2, SS2) were solidly profitable, though due to a poor deal with EA they never saw much of SS2's money, and Thief 2's came too late to be of much help.

[alanschu]

It does, when SecuROM's much vaunted system resulted in more downloads than something like Fallout 3 which effectively didn't even have a disk check, and it garnered a lot of negative press.

 

Which game?

 

 

EA's lost money hand over fist for the last few years. They're not in imminent trouble though their cash reserves have dropped around 70%, and their share price had dropped around 70% as well. Revenue itself is irrelevant. Last (?) quarter 2008 they lost a huge amount (~800m USD, iirc) though that did include some one off costs.

 

Clearly revenue itself is irrelevant. That's why public companies mention it (in addition to profits/losses). Which company do you think is in better financial shape, one that has a net loss of $2 million, and $1 billion in revenues, or one that has a net loss of $1 million, and $0 in revenues.

 

 

With the sharp drop in the economy, as well as some capital gains, yeah there was some big losses posted. Some of the numbers are deceiving though, as some times people only post the GAAP losses for instance. Fortunately for EA, they're sitting on roughly $2 billion in liquid or near-liquid assets at the moment.

 

 

As for EA going bankrupt, I still figure they'll cease PC development long before they're a genuine threat to go bankrupt.

 

 

 

As for Looking Glass Studios, it was more a reference to the fact that PC only development houses either make shifts to consoles, or go under. As for the success of their games, I'm not privy to a lot of their numbers unfortunately. I can't comment if System Shock 2 sold "solidly" or not, outside of the post-mortem that anticipated that System Shock 2 should break even or make a profit in the long term (Ref). As the post-mortem says, the industry is exceptionally volatile.

Edited August 19, 2009 by alanschu

[Gorth]

If it had said that, people would have understood that it was because of their pirated copy and not gone to the official forum to bitch about it en masse. Instead they would have waited for it to get cracked as well.

What you are saying is: dishonesty, hypocrisy and stupidity goes hand in hand

[Purkake]

What I'm saying is that maybe some other companies can learn from that, act differently and not go under.

[Zoraptor]

It does, when SecuROM's much vaunted system resulted in more downloads than something like Fallout 3 which effectively didn't even have a disk check, and it garnered a lot of negative press.

 

Which game?

RA3 (and Far Cry2, though obviously that wasn't EA, picked over 2008 download king Spore because those three were released almost simultaneously) both had similar piracy amounts to F3, despite F3 selling considerably better. Hence their piracy rate was considerably worse than for the non-protected F3. Figures were from the TweakGuide to piracy, and actually showed exactly the opposite from what the author intended.

 

 

That's why public companies mention it (in addition to profits/losses). Which company do you think is in better financial shape, one that has a net loss of $2 million, and $1 billion in revenues, or one that has a net loss of $1 million, and $0 in revenues.

Obviously it's the company which makes a profit rather than a loss. Revenue is irrelevant if you cannot turn it into profit.

 

EA also isn't sitting on $2 billion. I actually read their quarterly report with the multi hundred million dollar loss, for my sins, and their cash reserves are well into the hundreds of millions (still good, of course, but way down from $3 billion a few years ago). They aren't going to go bankrupt, especially since some of that cash has gone on things like buying Bioware albeit at a(n IMO) grossly inflated price, but they're hardly sitting pretty and most significantly most of this loss happened before the US economy really started tanking.

 

I can't comment if System Shock 2 sold "solidly" or not, outside of the post-mortem that anticipated that System Shock 2 should break even or make a profit in the long term (Ref). As the post-mortem says, the industry is exceptionally volatile.

I usually quote Desslock's PC Data 2000 figures and Ken Levine from Usenet post 1 and post 2 and sometimes to articles showing that the threshold for profitability was around 100k copies at that time. SS2 did not make LGS much money because of their deal with EA- in contrast, Irrational's next game was 2 years later and self published (in NA) at least implying they did pretty well from their only previous game.

[alanschu]

RA3 (and Far Cry2, though obviously that wasn't EA, picked over 2008 download king Spore because those three were released almost simultaneously) both had similar piracy amounts to F3, despite F3 selling considerably better. Hence their piracy rate was considerably worse than for the non-protected F3. Figures were from the TweakGuide to piracy, and actually showed exactly the opposite from what the author intended.

 

I couldn't find the PC sales for Fallout 3, just that as of November 6 it had shipped 4.7 million units on both XBOX 360 and PC. As for the Tweak Guide you refer to, Spore is downloaded more than Fallout 3. Though from what I can tell, Spore is a very popular PC game, in spite of the evil draconian DRM that came with the game. It blasted to 2 million sales (PC only) in just 3 weeks. I have a feeling this is more than the PC sales of Fallout 3. Probably by a significant margin.

 

The sad thing is that the Pirate's Bay was encouraging people that it was the "right thing to do" to download the torrent. So, they profited off the ad revenue of those that wanted to "stick it" to Electronic Arts by visiting their site. And in that tweak guide, Bethesda comments about how significant chunks of their tech support go towards those that couldn't be bothered to purchase the game, with problems that are isolated to pirated copies of the game.

 

 

Obviously it's the company which makes a profit rather than a loss. Revenue is irrelevant if you cannot turn it into profit.

 

Errr, in my example, neither company made a profit. One lost less money, but I guarantee that one of those companies is going to do a lot better from an investment standpoint than the other company, and it's not going to be the company that posted $0 in revenue. There's a reason why companies don't just post profits/losses in their quarterly reports, and it's not because they just want to make themselves look better.

 

I actually read their quarterly report with the multi hundred million dollar loss, for my sins, and their cash reserves are well into the hundreds of millions (still good, of course, but way down from $3 billion a few years ago).

 

I read it too. Here's a quote from their most recent quarterly report: "The Company ended the quarter with cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments of $1.8 billion." Electronic Arts is a publicly traded company, it is exceptionally risky for them to be deceitful about this sort of information.

 

 

SS2 did not make LGS much money because of their deal with EA- in contrast, Irrational's next game was 2 years later and self published (in NA) at least implying they did pretty well from their only previous game.

 

What was the deal with Electronic Arts?

 

It's anecdotal, but the thing that pissed me off about SS2 was just how commonly pirated it was in my experience. At University one of my friends ran a Warez site and SS2 was his most popular download for several months, even beating out Half-Life on occasion.

Edited August 19, 2009 by alanschu

[alanschu]

What I'm saying is that maybe some other companies can learn from that, act differently and not go under.

 

 

The disappointing thing is that, as schedules seem to be tight enough as it is, it seems we now are also holding development studios accountable for spending even more resources to have proper error responses to those that pirate the game.

 

 

The thing about Mamoulian's link (which was an interesting read), was that setting up that copy/crack protection scheme wasn't just the flip of a switch. It posed serious complications for the project.

[Hurlshort]

No, the tornado is at fault.

 

Yeah... And if i put my kitten into microwave to dry it out, it's the fault of the manufacturer, that they did not put in the manual, that drying kittens in their product might kill them... LOL

 

This is really a terrible analogy.

 

First off, you leave a cow grazing outside and it gets killed by a tornado. That is the tornado's fault. Sure, you could place SOME blame on yourself, but you could also blame the cow, or the grass for being in the path of a tornado. You did not create the tornado.

 

Then you put this microwaved kitten analogy out there. In that situation, the manufacturer would be akin to the developer, the kitten is the game, and the person is the gamer. How does that support your point about developers and DRM?

 

And how does any of this apply to your cracking issues?

 

edit: I just noticed Purkake was the cow analogy. I'm beginning to hate analogies.

Edited August 19, 2009 by Hurlshot

[Mamoulian War]

I start to hate them as soon as they start putting 3-times only activation shovelware in all other aspect hey are same as EA, but so far not one of the games i was ever interested with Activision logo had such ridiculous DRM...

 

And as soon as games as Mirror's Edge and Dead Space start to be more common than 1 good game for 25 shovelware... i'll start to believe they might change... not a day before

 

 

So do you just download pirated copies of EA games to boost the download stats and "stick it" to EA? Because that just seems like a silly venture to me.

 

 

oh so you are now accusing me of pirating aswell...

[RPGmasterBoo]

Will you stop the irrational EA hate, Mamoulian War? Not only is it getting old, but EA pulled their stuff together and put out Mirror's Edge and Dead Space, both of which were considerable risks. EA has improved a lot over the last few years.

 

If you really need someone to hate, hate Activision. They are pretty much the definition of sequelitis, not publishing the Ghostbusters game because the "franchise wasn't annually exploitable", sueing EA so that they couldn't publish Br

[Mamoulian War]

First off, you leave a cow grazing outside and it gets killed by a tornado. That is the tornado's fault. Sure, you could place SOME blame on yourself, but you could also blame the cow, or the grass for being in the path of a tornado. You did not create the tornado.

 

Or you could put the cow in your Barn, before tornado hits your field, and hope the tornado would not be strong enough to blow the barn away... in this scenario it was not your fault, bacause you put all possible effort to try to help the cow to stay alive in hostile environment... If you just run off and let the cow out in the field, it's your fault for not caring about her life...

[RPGmasterBoo]

I agree. I don't know if the miniature giant space hamster would agree, but a large amount of the growth of video games has been because of the inclusion of the mainstream market.

 

That's probably correct.

 

However, two things are for certain. The cost of making games has skyrocketed, and the cost of buying games has remained relatively static (adjusted for inflation, it's actually gone down). This means that economies of scale must come into play for games to be profitable. This means that games will tend to be more conservative and less risky in their design.

 

That's also obvious and logical.

 

I don't think that the games industry is choking itself due to sequelitis or uninspired gameplay. I think it's just sitting at statusquo, which is actually still pretty good growth (things may be different with the "Tough Economic Times" going on right now).

 

It might not be choking itself financially (because there are always new gamers coming) but creativity is in short supply. I'd say that todays games get boring too quickly and are often too derivative. This

will probably have a steady negative impact on sales and help piracy to grow, because people simply feel that the games are not worth their money. Who wants to buy the 50th sucky Diablo clone? Most people don't. But they crave to play that sort of game for the lack of anything better. So they just get the pirated version, get their fix and delete it. The reasoning might not be sound, but its what actually happens.

 

i should have clarified that, I meant the PC games industry. Its in a sorry state over the consoles as it is, and derivative games/console ports wont help it regain its former role. Entire genres are on deaths door like flight simulators, managment games, adventure games, third person action comes almost only in the form of console ports, unique cross genre titles are beyond rare, RPG's have come down to one or two good titles a year...

Shooters and strategies are the only ones holding their ground and that's only because of control issues on consoles.