Any clue who is gonna be the European distributor?

[Madfish]

Waaaah, you killed my monster post!

But +1 for what you said,
I own Sins of the Solar Empire with all addons as well as the combo-box release Sins of the Solar Empire Trinity. So thanks for reminding me of this one as it is another good example for a game that was kind of niche but actually very successful from there without any disturbing copy protection.

I wish more game developers and publishers would actually deliver great quality and get the sales they deserve instead of whining over piracy because they produced crap and forgot about it as soon as it was released, wondering why people get mad and refuse to buy their title full price.

[Blackdog_kt]

I think all of you are correct. On one hand, we have situations like the humble bundle fiasco , where a bunch of indy developers released their games in a pack and told people "give us whatever amount you think it's fair". Well, there was about 20 games in there and a lot of people were minimal amounts, one dollar or even less.

Some people lack the disposable income, some are just cheapskates and some suffer from an entitlement complex. And piracy does cost sales and even the closing down of studios and jobs. On the other hand, the reason piracy is so detrimental is, guess who, the publishing industry itself!

For example, Troika games made the two vampire: the masquerade games before closing down, a transfer of a pen-and-paper RPG game to the PC. Small studio, cool games, they still didn't make it even though they were signed under a bigger company. Why? Because developers get paid minimal amounts compared to what the company gets and when they can't make what the company wants, the studio closes down. It's the same in music as well, where many artists take a few cents per CD sold while the recording company gets the big cash.

This story has happened before, will happen again and if you take a good look at it, it's usually studios that make great games which the publishers don't like. Why? Because the publisher's definition of a great game is different from the gamer's definition of the same. For the publisher a short, half-finished, DLC capable game with minimal replay value that will justify its high price on graphics and sounds alone is best, because it will give that "it was good but not enough" feeling, so that you can buy the sequel in as less time as a few months. For the gamers, a great game is one that is focused on the core elements necessary for the gameplay experience, leaving the rest to be improved along the way as more powerful PCs become available, having good support, replayability and a long life...just like IL-2.

The reasons are simple...when you sign up with a big publisher like EA or Ubi, you pretty much give them free reign to do whatever they want with how the end product will be presented and lose most of your creative license as a developer. Your job is to provide content, meet deadlines and deliver products that cater to as much people as possible instead of products that cater to parts of the gamer demographic but are actually focused enough to do a good job...in that order of importance if i may add. So for example, if the deadlines can't be met the content gets axed and then sold separately as DLC.

When the people who expect a certain game to belong in a certain genre, or the gamers simply don't find it compliant to the standards outlined above, the product is faulty in content, user-friendliness and functionality, etc, then the people with the most interest in having a focused game abandon it. These are the people who usually buy games however.

The people that the companies try to lure to their products in droves are not the ones who will buy games, or to put it more accurately, they have a higher percentage of pirates among them...the part of gamers that mostly cares about visuals and sounds to the expense of everything else, who go through games like t-shirts in summer and of course, they can't afford to buy that many games. The thing is that if they learn how to pirate once, they have learned it for life and now they know where to look and how to set things up. So, is it then the fault of the paying customer if games flop? Of course not.

Piracy is an existing problem. It's also a problem where the publishers share a big part of the responsibility by making their games unfriendly to the ones interested in buying them. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what happens next, does it?

It's also true that the majority of the most pirated games are also triple-A titles that already rake in millions of sales.
On the other hand, indy games like the aforementioned sins of a solar empire where also pirated like crazy because of a total lack of copy protection, but they also sold like crazy and the developers turned a good profit. It's very simple how they did it...they didn't have to pay a horde of lawyers, marketing executives and advertisement consultants because they sold their game themselves. In that sense, indy companies can afford to not be greedy and maybe even turn a blind eye to the piracy problem, because they only have their own pockets to line.

In another case Amanita Design, a small studio making adventure games in Flash, launched a so-called pirate redemption sale (actually anyone could take advantage of the sale) for a week, offering Machinarium at a price of $5 and that game is already cheap to begin with, with $15-$20 for the collector's edition.

That didn't happen overnight though, it happened quite a few months after the game was released, with sales having tappered off and the launch of the sale did a few very important things for them: gave them "cool guys" points in the eyes of the gaming community, put them back in the spotlight and enticed even more people to buy the game, people that despite the already cheap price might have been put off initially, but will drop their cash when they realize they can get an award winning game for small change. A guy from EA or UBI however, even if they ever did such clever marketing which they don't, will not be glad about getting a chance to effectively re-launch one of their games. They'll be too busy crying over the fact that those 200000 extra sales were made at $5 a piece instead of at $15 a piece and come up with a statistic claiming a 75% loss of profit, totally disregarding the fact that these sales wouldn't have happened at all with a higher price.

The differences in how different groups within the industry view the situation is not only obvious, but paramount to their success and failure as well

So what is the fuss all about then? The second hand market. That's the real reason the big names want to tie everything to accounts. Not one of these accounts is transferrable, at least not without a fee and some not at all. If i buy a car i can resell it, if i buy a DRM-ed game i most probably can't.

Yes, i know it's getting old with the car analogies, but let's consider the flip-side too. Suppose the companies are right and buying a game doesn't give you ownership of the items involved (physical or immaterial), but only a license of use. In that sense if i buy a game and my original DVD is damaged, my license is still valid. I didn't buy a DVD, i bought the rights to use the game and how that happens is up to the publisher, as long as my PC is within the specs. So, shouldn't the company send me a replacement DVD since my license still stands? Do you know any cases of this actually happening though?

If suddenly there was a strange atmospheric condition that corroded media discs and people starter asking for replacements because their license still stands, you can bet that all of the big publishing companies would abandon their license rhetoric overnight

[WTE_Galway]

A good summary.

I would add just one thing. A good game from a players point of view is not necessarily a good game from the marketing/profitability perspective.

Two Classic examples of this from a non-computer gaming are the Games Workshop Warhammer Franchise and the Wizards/Hasbro D&D games.

In both these cases the original games had big strong loyal followings because the games were excellent from a players perspective. However this big strong loyal following was not be translating into profits as those players already had all the books/miniatures/random stuff they needed to play indefinitely.

In both cases the games have been changed to appeal to the quick easy cash and carry "fad" market. The central long term player base is far weaker but the continual turnover of new players buying books and miniatures, playing for 6 months getting bored and tossing the books in a cupboard ensures huge ongoing profits.

The significant point is that unlike Warhammer where doting mums and dads actually do waste silly money on miniatures with the logic that "its better than Johnny doing drugs" the fad PC game market simply will play something else if they cant get it for free.

[Splitter]

Two thoughts:

If the copy protection is too intrusive and may mess up other games or render the new game unplayable, I won't buy it.

I totally understand companies wanting to protect their hard work, but I also know there are less intrusive ways to keep them from losing vast amounts of sales.

For example, the DVD that came in the box is usually not the end all and be all of the game. Most of the time, there are bugs. Much of the time, there are updates to improve the game (there better be).

The companies that support their games after release are the ones that I support with my money. I've been ripped off a number of times (cough...EA) with incomplete releases that were not properly patched and updated.

I do no think it is too much to ask of the customer that a game's authenticity be validated when it is first installed and then for subsequent updates. Any pirated copy would not be able to be updated and improved. This discourages piracy AND encourages companies to support the products they produce. Any pirated copy would then simply be a "beta" which probably includes all kinds of viruses.

Second thought: verify the authenticity of a game's files for multiplayer modes. I HATE CHEATERS. You want to cheat offline? I have no problem with that, turn on god mode. Don't do it when competing with other humans. I have participated in a few efforts to eliminate cheaters from competition and it's not easy...except for the developers. When game companies did not do enough to protect the online community from cheaters, the leagues had to develop their own special mods and watch like hawks.

If a game has "tighter" authentication for multiplayer, I am ok with that as long as it works. Here again, pirates would not be able to participate which protects both the customers and the developers.

I can't defend software pirates but I do not see the tie in to music piracy. Once you buy a song you should be able to copy that song to any format you wish (legal in the US, btw, under "fair use"). The music and movie industries have cried about piracy issues since magnetic tape became available but I see a lot of really rich artists out there. They must have figured out some way to still make a buck, right?

Youngsters have no idea lol. We used to buy albums for $10 (worth more back then!) that had maybe two or three hit songs and 7 songs you skipped over. We couldn't really buy single songs for a buck. Artists even cried back then that people were recording songs off the radio. But they adapted to the "new ways" and are raking in money hand over fist.

Poor products and anti-piracy attempts that are too intrusive actually lead to piracy. Adapt and overcome, software companies need to do the same.

Splitter

[Immermann]

My thoughts. Any publisher but UBI or Activision.
Use the same copy protection as Black Shark.

[Oldschool61]

Originally Posted by WTE_Galway

Not really.

Sins of a Solar Empire was released without any copy protection and was one of the top games of the year.

The publishers logic was DRM simply interferes with genuine sales as the people that hack take breaking copy protection as a challenge and would never buy it anyway. It worked for them.

The recent fascination with DRM is simply the result of too many accounting and lawyer types who tend to be control freaks conniving their way into executive positions in big corporations

I have pirated games in the past and those were games I wasnt really interested in and never really played them much and would never have even bought them in the first place so the publisher never lost anything anyway. Any game I really wanted I purchased because I knew that any online play with a pirated copy usually never worked.

As far as i have read, ubisoft had not the best sales with their DRM contaminated games.

So where is their advantage?


The fair minded purchaser of a game which has DRM is the loser.
The pirate is the winner, well he didn't give money for sure but the point is that the pirate doesnt have to struggle with DRM issues.

Publishers should invest their money "they waste on DRM coding" in persecuting the pirates on the p2p plattforms and others.

That doesn't negatively effect the sales like DRM does, because it's not against the purchasers, but lowers the pirate rate.

[Bobb4]

Originally Posted by Immermann

My thoughts. Any publisher but UBI or Activision.
Use the same copy protection as Black Shark.

Okay who has not downloaded a cracked copy of Black Shark?
Mods - Just kidding
Seriously copy protection is not a major issue. Could not care which one is used. The always on Internet is however.
Ubisoft and EA games all burnt their fingers with always on Internet drms. Look at Command and Conquer 4. A few months after release it is for sale as a cheap classic title?
Always on Internet DRM has bombed.
But with Blizzard following the same example with Starcraft 2 one has to wonder. The game (Starcraft 2) was more expensive at release than any other game. Obviously designed to catch the young suckers that will accept the drm and then it will be sold cheaper later with drm removed for the ordinary folk. They sold a million games on day one and another two million since release
A win for the DRM I think. But also proof that sales are starting to taper-off.

[chimp306]

Hi

i have been lurking here for a while, looking forward to any news about SOW.

This little DRM chat has persuaded me to thrown in my pennys worth to the debate.

DRM is bad, i have had bad experiences with it and most people that i know who have a knowledge of these things will avoid it like the plague.

So, if they issue a game with DRM, certain people wont buy it.. i normally wait as quite often it appears without DRM later on.

I do however have friends who cant wait, they want the game but they wont buy it with DRM.. so they download the pirate copy which has the DRM ripped out of it.

on a similar note another friend of mine downloads nocd cracks for all his games, because he hates the noise of his dvd drive.. i kid you not.

there is a lot of piracy on the pc, but the pandemic is growing on consoles now too... i for one condone piracy, i like to consider myself old enough to know better, i dont believe that it can ever be stopped, there will always be someone who works around what ever DRM is in place, there will always be someone who will download that work...

Personally i think publishers and developers need to understand that the games market has evolved. there are many new games every month, and many people cant afford to buy every game they want.

Punishing the honest with invasive DRM is not the right way to fix it, it pushes them away and the pirates will work around your DRM regardless.

personally, although flawed as it was i think the right level is the "cd key" system as used in the COD series etc..

just my 2ps worth anyway...

[Blackdog_kt]

I was on the Starcraft 2 beta test and some of my friends have bought the game. I'll buy it too at some point, i'm just taking my time. There's quite a few things that could have been done better for SC2, but the actual activation is kind of mild compared to other games.

You don't need to be always online to play. You just need to activate the game once after you install, just like with a new installation of windows. The only reason to be online is achievement tracking in single player and while i agree it's stupid to prevent it from working unless a user is logged in, it's by no means detrimental to how the single player works. So in summary you can play offline just fine, you just won't get the annoying pop-ups and the shiny badges while doing so.

SC2 is expensive and it comes in 3 installments that are probably all going to be full price games, but it's also a case of getting around 30 missions for the single player campaign in each episode (that's 3 times the amount of maps of the first game) and a game that will be played online for years, so the price is somewhat justified. Plus, because it's a game with a big competitive online scene there's none of that DLC nonsense, since it would unbalance things a lot in multiplayer if people could pick and choose between DLC units for their armies.

What was worrisome was the way they treat stuff like publishing of user created maps and how exactly will the next episodes function. Nobody knows if they will add new units for multiplayer with them and if for example, someone who wants a unit from episode 3 will have to buy episode 2 as well as a pre-requisite for the installation of episode 3, but this is still speculation pretty much.

The only annoying thing so far is that you can't have two people playing multiplayer on one installation with their stats being kept separate. I'm not the kind of guy who frets over stats and achievements but when the match-making system (and by consequence, getting matched with players of your skill level in multiplayer matches) is based on that, it's kind of stupid to tell me that me and a brother/sister/roommate have to buy the game two times just to be able to keep our stats separate.

You can still logoff and login with another account for multiplayer, but that account needs to be tied to a purchased game as well. It's strictly one nickname per account, which sucks, and one account per cd-key. If it was one account per cd-key but each account could have more than one nicknames, it would be just fine.