I've been getting a lot of email since the announcement of the Gamers Bill of Rights -- quite a bit from game developers who make the argument that it's easy to throw stones at what other people but what solution do we suggest for them?
For example, one of the things I've seen is that Stardock is "anti-DRM" in all cases. This isn't true. WindowBlinds, for example, requires activation. In fact, nearly all our software requires activation. Yet, you rarely if ever see anyone complain about it. Why is that? Because our activation is largely invisible, most people aren't aware of it. The beta of Demigod has activation in it too. Yet, it too is invisible to the user.
So clearly, activation, unto itself, isn't necessarily a problem. Yet clearly with Spore, people had a big problem with it. What's the difference? The difference in my opinion is the arbitrary limitations set ("3 activations" for instance). Or more generally, anything that materially interferes with a legitimate customer's ability to use their game.
So those people who were so unhappy with Spore's activation, I'd be curious to hear what specifically bothered them? What was it about Spore that causes such an uproar versus things done in the past?
Here are things that annoy me about various types of copy protection:
My tolerance may be higher than others, hence why I'd like to try to understand what caused the Spore backlash.
As others know, our games ship with no CD copy protection at all since not all users have Internet access but we require users to download our free updates from us so that we know (to a high degree) that only legitimate customers are getting our free updates. And even with that laid back system, some people still object. So we'd like to get an idea of what invisible threshold you think Spore crossed that made so many people upset.
My girlfriend doesn't have internet, so when I lent her my Spore CD she couldn't use it because it had to be activated. Now I have to find a crack just so I can use my legitimate game at her house.
NO copy protection works.
NO DRM works.
I live in the Philippines, land of the Chinese pirates, and then some. There is no game in existence that has not been pirated. Don't think that free patches work. Pirates get the updates, reverse engineer them, and issue them for sale on the black market. That, or the person buying the pirated software simply will tolerate not getting free updates.
I have owned pirated software in the past, and probably will own more in the future.
Despite that, I have two legal copies of Galactic Civilization, one copy of Sins, and several legit copies of Broodwar, Starcraft, Warcraft, and Diablo, not to mention more legit activations of applications in iTunes and Adobe.
What is it that makes me want to pay for software? That is the real issue here. Software protection philosophies assume that legal protections and software protections are "hard" protections. They're not. Pirated copies are just as much of a competitor as anyone else. They're criminals and it's illegal, that's true. That doesn't invalidate the reality that they ARE competitors.
Why do I tolerate piracy? There's a simple reason why Chinese and Philippine pirates make such a killing on the market: market adjustment. Most software, movies, and music are priced for industrialized nations. For that particular market structure, it makes sense. Converted into pesos and yuan, then add tariffs on top of that, and it no longer makes any kind of sense. For instance, one legal purchase of Galactic Civilizations is about $30 or P1500. A local salaryman could expect to make maybe P10000 a month, if he's lucky. Sometimes, he makes P4500, with a disposable monthly income of P1000 or less.
Gal Civ is bargain basement pricing. Warcraft and similar games are priced $40 or more locally. If you have P400 of disposable monthly income per month, you would really rather spend that upgrading your meals rather than buying a game. For the most part, buying legal copies of Gal Civ or other games isn't even a question. Without pirates, these users won't even consider buying the game at all.
Pirated copies adjust the price down because pirates don't have development costs. That said, pirated copies also make it reasonable to buy games when it otherwise isn't. There is no question that this is ethically questionable practices, but when the ethically questionabe practice is the only real player in town, you have no choice.
This is not a question that's isolated to software or modern times. In the past, items like porcelain and tea could only legally be gotten from China at great cost. Porcelain and tea were big targets for industrial espionage earlier in the millenium with varied success. Did the British condemn the spy who stole tea for them? Nope. He's a hero. In their defense, tea was exorbitantly priced and it's a living organism that everyone has a right to, though one could say the same for software depending on your viewpoint.
I suspect, though, that most software developers in the US are primarily concerned only with Western sales. I think that that has to do with value and perception. I'm not Western so I can't say definitively, but then again, 3 activations isn't a prohibitive problem for me at all.
A very good post Roxlimn. This sort of fact begs the distinction between pirates in countries where the normal cost of such entertainment is beyond the pale for their citizens and where it is not (i.e. Europe and the West). Thanks for reminding us of such things.
I think an activation limit like 3 is fine, there just needs to be an EASY WAY(as in go to a website and takes less than 3 minutes) to free up the activations.
I think how adobe does it is fine. Online check all the time. If you use more than 2 activations it goes nope too many used byebye. But you can free them al lup and reregister 2 copies in 5 minutes.
True, although in nations that poor, I'd think they have more important things to worry about and buy than some video game. Video games are nice things to play, but in the end they're just entertainment and a luxury; one can live without them.
Problem is, as you have stated, it doesn't do any good against pirates. It's just another thing that annoys legit users. There's no good reason for it.
Agreed. Installers and uninstallers are usually something thrown together by developers without much thought. They just slap something into some popular install tool and call it a day. It's not really the fault of the OS, it's the fault of the developers for not paying much attention to their install scripts.
The only installers I've really seen that anybody poured some real effort into was Westwood's installers before they got taken over by EA. If you wanna see some really cool installers, look at the DOS versions of Command & Conquer and Command & Conquer: Red Alert .
That being said, I do think that Microsoft should change their install model insto something a bit more like the package management tools that *nix OSes have. They all have a nice centralized place for installing and uninstalling software.
Before I purchase a game I research it carefully, and then intend to play it for years. When I grow tired of it, I store it away carefully, since someday I may wish to play it again.
Limited installs would interfere with that--more importantly, limited installs just wouldn't work for the kinds of games I like anyway--long, openended, heavily modable. The Sims and The Sims 2 were just such games, and Spore looked to be that type of game also. I find it hard to believe that most people install it less than three times--I've had to reinstall it because the game itself crashed (bad coding, bugs--the most common EA tech advice is the infamous uninstall-reinstall), because Windows crashed (blue screen of death, anyone?), because I needed to update my computer, and because of computer maintenance. Oh, and because I installed an expansion pack that blew up my game (don't think that EA tests their packs very well). These things being true, the idea of limited installs is outrageous. All of these installations were on one computer, but from what i've read, that makes no nevermind with EA--If limited installs had been effect for The Sims or The Sims 2, I would have had to buy the game several times over for full purchase price. Yes I'm upset. I never pirate, I pay for all my games, and I'm a complete pushover for expansion packs and stuff packs, gladly laying out my money to add more to a game I love. I've been waiting for Spore eagerly for years--but will never buy it because of the limited installs.
As for what I don't mind--I've never minded a simple disc check. I asked my husband what was used on the very expensive business software he uses, and he said they use a dongle--I didn't really understand it--but what I understood sounded alright to me--if it added a bit to the price of the game, I wouldn't mind.
Probably been answered already, but the game's so damn glitchy for some that getting it to work is necessitating reinstallation, and the fear of running through all of one's allowed installations just to get the game working has a lot of users frustrated.
CobraA1:
You've completely missed the point. A local salaryman with $10 of disposable income per month could use his $10 to eat out 4 times in a decent local resto - or he could save up 24 such instances to buy a legal copy of GalCiv, which he has no assurance of liking or playing. If it were some other software, he wouldn't even be assured of running it! The delicious irony here is that because of DRM software, pirated copies are MORE reliable and therefore better products than the original ones. Imagine that.
This person will never buy a legal game because he can't afford it. It's not that he's worried about it or anything. The simple fact is, the pirate is offering him popular Western media at a reasonable price, whereas the legal guys are asking for an arm and a leg. He would gladly pay slightly more for legal copies, but when the legal copy prices are so beyond any reasonable grounding in the local market structure that its local sellers are mortally ashamed to quote prices, something is terribly wrong.
Of course, most of these DRMs are just wrong-headed to begin with. A lot of people in business assume that most everybody will steal you blind if they can. A lot of their competitors would, certainly. Customers, particularly decent paying customers, are not like that. Customers know that they must support their companies with money if they want these companies to continue to make product. Even in honor-system payment schemes, the non-paying portion of the economy is less than 15%, usually, so the margin for making that less is not that much, considering that most of the last 8% of that are hard-core software criminals who won't pay for software if their lives depended on it.
Potentially severely alienating 85% of your market base in order to chance getting 5% or less more is not a sound market gamble.
Good products make people want to thank the creator - in money if called for. Putting out a good product is better anti-piracy than DRM.
... Said the folks who play...
Thats akin to people with money saying money is unimportant. We live in a media age - people want to have fun. A lack of affluence doesn`t correlate to a primitive culture, and when many of these same cultures labour for us to create the media we enjoy, no wonder they cultivate an interest in it as well. Why not?
We had entertainment long before the invention of the computer, and we have plenty of forms of entertainment today that are not video games. I personally enjoy exercising on a mechanical device known as a "bicycle," and I have friends that enjoy throwing around oddly shaped brown balls. Yes, there is entertainment outside the world of computing.
I will never be able to afford a Bugatti Veyron. Doesn't mean I go around stealing them. A reasonable person accepts the fact that there are just some things you can't have because you can't afford them.
In all honesty the amount of corruption in poor countries contributes to them staying poor. You can't sustain an economic system if it's based on theft. It doesn't work that way. The integrity of the transaction is vital to a functioning economy.
^^^ Very well said Cobra!
Corporations in rich countries that understand and exploit the local corruption in poor ones don't help either. It's still pretty easy to get sweat-shop products at the average US mall. Tennis, anyone?
That's a false analogy. A Bugatti Veyron costs signiifcant amounts of capital simply to make and each instance of the product represents hundreds of man hours of work and time. Software and music products are not the same. Besides which, you only really say that because technology stealing through retro-engineering is rampant in motoring today anyway. It's not like the cheaper versions of cars we have don't contain similar kinds of advanced tech we see in much more expensive cars. Don't fool yourself. You're benefiting from the efforts of industrial spies and pirates just like everyone else. You just don't know it.
While its true that theft and particularly intellectual property theft has serious detrimenal effects economy-wide, software and intellectual property piracy across countries and markets is another thing entirely. For instance, Americans bemoan music, movie, and software piracy from China, but comic piracy through subbing and dubbing by manga and anime is curiously acceptable for some reason - mainly because there's no other reasonable way to get at these products.
You want manga? Learn Japanese AND order from abroad.
See that? Those are unreasonable costs, just as asking for 6 months of disposable income for a game is also an unreasonable cost. These people are not otherwise going to patronize manga, so there is no loss in sales there. A game like Civilization is never going to sell to the average salaryman for $40. There is no loss of sales there. No loss of primary resources either.
The best copy protection the US ever made for China and the Philippines would be to sell their products at a reasonable price, relative to the local market structure. Once you have reasonable options for the honest person, piracy can be marginalized as an ethical outlier.
Putting it another way, Prohibbition doesn't work!
So all "we" (i.e. the rich West) want is for *them* to manufacture all our pretty toys for us... but I`m so so sorry little third world man - no no no, you can`t have any! No no no! We value your contribution to our good & just society, and in appreciation of that here is a soccer ball: go amuse yourself in that wooded field over there.
If the roles were reversed you would be insulted.
Replace the media of games with film. You would stand before these people and say they ought to be deprived of that art simply because, as another poster eloquently and accurately put it, corporations refuse to compete in their marketplace with fair pricing?
That is simply unjust. Unfair.
Besides, if most revenues are already derived from sales in first-world countries, discounting legitimate sales in poorer nations would simply create *additional* revenue. There is no loss. Control smuggling and you`re ahead, rather than fostering the black market.
Back to this, this whole EA approach puts EA in firm position to make a *JUDGEMENT CALL* on when ***I*** am done playing my game. That is not their call to make, be it in the form of authentication servers, install trackers, or any other scheme.
That is exclusively my call.
I am not leasing or renting their product. I am buying it. If they wish to try to rent or lease, then they can make that pitch - conducting themselves openly and honestly - and I will most assuredly decline.
Got it! Even its predecessor was a slick product from WestWood which filled up a number of my evenings back then.
Most Installer problems are with the portability of the targeted OS (incl. lifespan) & can actually conflict with soooooo many different systems that i'm not surprised our registries get flooded until slowdowns occur, booting gigs worth of superfluous active_X, broken calls & bazillions of references to (we may think) uninstalled 'junk'.
Total chaos. Maintaining folders of InstallShield(s), MSI(s), backporting all according to THEIR ideas of proper takeover of my precious drive space.
And, then came the x86 patterns.
Just my brand new 500g is becoming 'small' after three months of regular normal use.
Someone should start questioning how this industry handles its activities or the infra-structure provided to us continual buyers of optimized 'setups'.
I don't go around stealing cheaper vehicles made on assembly lines either. My analogy holds. In fact, the amount of capital and investment is totally irrelevent to the argument.
They're cheaper and easier to steal, therefore stealing is right? Am I supposed to believe this is some form of logic?
Let's assume that's true. I still don't agree with theft. I don't change my beliefs about morals and ethics based on the actions of other people.
Yes they are. Stealing is still wrong.
Sure they can have our pretty toys. They can buy them, just like everybody else does.
If the roles were reversed, I'd be working harder to make money, and I'd be demanding more honesty from my employer and more accountability from my country and culture. I'd be going to the source of the problem rather than asking for free handouts. Don't go around telling me what my own emotions would be. Because it's obvious you don't know me.
Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Teach a man how to fish, and he eats for a lifetime.
Proactive solutions beats free handouts any day. My suggestion is to boycott unfair prices. That includes boycotting the black market. The only thing the black market is accomplishing is driving the prices further upwards.
Unless the fishery is destroyed by natural disaster or unchecked greed. (I like the line in principle, but the metaphor is getting shaky these days.)
But, seriously, I'm really fascinated at the passion with which so many people who worry about government excess and declining liberty all agree to pretend that intellectual property is somehow "the same" as physical property. It just isn't. You can say that you want to treat it the same way, but you need to admit that you want to base an entire market on nothing other than agreements to submit to state power to regulate the distribution of ideas and expressions.
Someone illegally copying a piece of software takes *nothing* from the (c) owner; it just violates his, her, or (more likely) its expectation of profit. We can democratically agree that such a violation is wrong, but to me, it is a great philosophical wrong to call a crime like that "theft." Calling (c) violation "theft" demeans everyone who has lost a sentimental item, inventory their business needed to succeed, or food that they needed to survive. Calling systematic (c) violators "pirates" is even worse, what with all the terribly real raping and murdering that goes on to this day (I'm Floridian; we're partly founded by pirates). I'll easily agree they're criminals--my members of Congress have voted for quite a few laws on the subject, even though I sometimes asked them not to. But this overheated rhetoric is sounding more and more like unconscious defensiveness that's slowly becoming conscious as people keep mulling over, perhaps against their will, the basic question of whether copyright is wrong.
Part of the fundamental rhetoric behind (c) and patent is that so-called intellectual property systems help fuel innovation--new and revised ideas--which they arguably do better than older patronage and guild systems. But, copyright itself is an idea, an innovation--not a force of nature. There's no reason at all to assume that it will not change so much that it would be unrecognizable to us today or simply go away completely. The very questions that Brad is asking himself in public (bless his heart) seem to support my view here, even though I seriously doubt I'll ever persuade him to change his mind. At least, unlike *everyone* else I read about in the proprietary software business, he understands that this is an ongoing discussion, not some quick run in a machine shop that will yield The Only Tool We'll Ever Need.
WarlokLord, something that puzzles me: how is it that someone who makes $10 a month in disposable income can afford a computer at all, let alone one capable of running newer computer games? If buying a game costs 6 months of disposable income, buying the computer to run it must have been a 10 year investment!
All too often here in the US I see people who "can't afford" health insurance, or car insurance, or whatever other necessity they are doing without - yet these same people make more than I do, live in a better house, and drive better cars than I do. Frequently, people define expenses to be necessities when they are not - they simply choose not to reduce their standard of living in one category in order to raise it in others. I'm not saying this applies to you in particular or your country in general, but it does apply to too many people over here. They'd rather keep the nice things they have and bitch about the others until the government steps in to help the "needy".
Howdy,
Good point. I`ll offer some counter-argument in a moment, but first I am compelled to say I am Canadian and not in the financial boat I have constructed/depicted in my recent posts. I *do* however have a lesser sense of what it is like in such a circumstance. My work is part-time but I seem to be pulling full-time hours, so there I am fortunate enough to have the income necessary to support my own capable PC rig. Prior to such fortune however, and prior even to such employment, I endeavoured to devote 95% of my meager finances to maintaining my primary hobbies: gaming and music. I endeavoured to at least stay functional in the face of new PC fare, because I enjoy it so much. I am not pressed at all to accept that a good many students (to suggest a specific category of folk) find themselves in a similarly peculiar predicament, wherein despite great debt and meager incomes, they manage to prioritize a new computer system or at least a new computer system component... possibly at some critical expense (Kraft Dinner anyone?...). But truly this is both normal and understandable sacrifice given the modern Media Age in which we live. I would parallel this to the time when owning your own vehicle was a grand thing for a teenager/student; I cannot imagine most younger people trying to get by without a computer in modern times.
Abroad, many countries populations are impoverished by our standards, and yet many gravitate to some of the more extravagant trappings of western society, such as aforementioned automobiles. I doubt anyone would claim that a typical Chinese factory worker is quite in a position to purchase a new automobile, and yet car ownership is on the rise. I submit such purchases *are* as you say far more critical to them - you can`t simply "cut & paste" an iso/archive of a car - and yet still within the realm of modern reason. I can easily envision a computer purchase of say something you and I upgraded from in the last 2 years as being a possible feasable target for a *family* or household to acquire.
That said I concede absolutely that there is a point regarding the means one must have to play, for example, Crysis. If one cannot afford the game, surely one is hard-pressed to afford the hardware that runs it. A tempering thought. On the other hand, look at the pace of technology markets and how quickly prices fall: my old Q6600 Quad core cpu is now selling for less than half of what I paid for it a number of months ago.
I must reiterate a point, and maybe make it more eloquently. We are essentially driving through foreign mechanics' garages with our limousines daily, advertising to the world how wonderful limousines are, and then we are surprised when the mechanics who help our limousines run develop a taste for them.
Regarding foreign boycotts of goods, I argue that western producers simply discount such populations. The primary revenue streams are not predicated upon whether or not any third-world consumer respects an honour system, they are derived from 1st-world markets. I think what I`m trying to say here is that any substantial vendor of software doesn`t care what goes on in a third-world country`s marketplace, so long as their activities don`t serve to foster consumer advocacies here in our 1st-world countries.
CobraA1, your comment about working harder to improve one`s lot is a truth only in a non-globalized economy. In an ideal capitalist system, unplundered and unconsolidated, I agree there are opportunities, but today we are not a frontier anymore. We compete in close & vicious proximity to each other, and often our way is carved out of the capacity of someone else. I contend it is a drastic simplification to say that by working harder one can overcome the colossal market forces at play - there are now after all over 5 billion of us, all interconnected and aware.
In my own circumstance I piratted my OS: Windows XP. I swore when I had the means to do so I would go legit. XP was necessary to everything else I needed to do: work and play. I could not afford $300 for a backbone component. Yes that was a judgement call, but one made in the face of many other reasonable considerations. Now that I have been working, garnering a wage substantial enough, I did what I had vowed to do, as I always intended. I bought a copy of XP, and it sits here in my room. It took some time, but you do what you have to do when you have less funds rather than more.
I honestly believe that and agree with those who say DRM does more harm than good. Companies should focus more on quality of product and quality of service rather than on mechanisms of marketting & market control, which is when you boil it down a sad and culpably detestable gimmick surrogate for said qualities.
CobraA1, Willythemailboy, btw, good discussions. Any further thoughts from Ironcladsmen or Stardockians at this point?
Unfortunately, that's exactly what would happen. There are a lot of people upset that such discounting goes on for prescription drugs, which are sold at far below market price in developing countries. People over there can't afford what we pay, and the people *here* who can't afford what they must pay don't see that as very fair. If a game company started selling their products for $10 in china and still charged $50 here, gamers would lynch them - figuratively, hopefully not literally. Most likely it would result in boatloads of *legitimate* $10 chinese copies for sale on the black market here. I guess that's better than outright piracy, but not by a whole lot.
Hardly, they already do. Why the hell do you think regional restrictions are used? The idiocy is when some guy in South Africa can't play his game because an idiot producer had it region locked to the US, or another industrialized country with higher pay scales. This has been going on since the days of VHS.
As far as the drugs go, I don't think I've heard anyone bitching about charity work in the third world. Aside from me anyway, and that's for entirely unrelated reasons. What pisses me off are all the industrialized nations practicing their price setting in an effort to not collapse under the strain of their ballooning cost problems due to socialism. Our wonderful drug companies going along with it, making us pay for all the R&D when they can bloody well afford it just as well as we can if they'd only stop aiming for 30% unemployment.
This is becoming a social critic based on assumptions i can't even begin grasping the entire scope; although, i might admit that in a global sense - equity of both the living costs & expandable revenues is an oxymoron.
Balance me a world full of diverse economies and i'll give you sharp restrictions over all aspects of 99% of people's livelihood.
Lucky us - we still have some freedom & the decisions (or reasons) that this precious personal power allows.
I just know that whatever i own today is a direct consequence of my hard-working years and, somehow, from an ability to make wise choices on spending.
I think however that illustrates the reality of how you and I (we westerners) have the *luxury* of being concerned with such lofty sentiments & ideals. We are more affluent, therefore it is easier for us to make the arguments in favour of good commerce. Where commerce is not so good overall for folks... I do understand that you strive to improve the country/economy in which you live, eliminate crime & corruption etc., I just sympathize with them to a degree that causes me to also accept that despite one`s best efforts, sometimes the reality is simply beyond one`s ability to improve. Perhaps that is a reprehensible level of cynicism on my part.
Zyxpsilon,
On some level it would be nice if we all had the same standards of living, but even simply individual achievement will always imbalance that and give rise naturally to a more chaotic cycle of have & not having. Also I think, without that societal financial contrast (trailing standard of living, low wages compared to affluence) a free marketplace couldn`t work - it`d be a temporary unnaturally sustained/subsidized thing at best. And I agree, a truly free market is the best invention for general culture thus far.
Capitalism is a game we play. If we have winners, we must eventually have losers. Minimizing serious connotations to that loss, but more importantly fostering the stream of capital flow (money gained must be spent, it should not be hoarded - hoarded wealth benefits very few) is a worthwhile thing to strive for. I think this sentiment serves us well when pondering the dilemma of black markets, DRM, and software here. Some kind of balance should be achievable.
Commerce yes. Capitalism, unbridled and untempered by reason and humanity, no. Thats my grand theory.
It's also a utopian abstraction that probably can never exist in the real world, just like real (non-authoritarian) communism.
All markets inevitably depend on state power being used at some point to define ownership of material assets, and, increasingly these days, non-material assets. The closest thing to a truly free market that I've ever read about were the anarcho-syndicalist communes in southern Spain, but, IIRC, they ended up having to "sell out" and become part of larger European labour movements.
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