As seen in the latest iteration of the Gamer's Bill of Rights Stardock has been working with trusted partners to come up with a framework that would give PC gamers a better experience while still having a realistic chance of being adopted by publishers.
One of the issues that keeps coming up is IP protection. What we keep being told privately is that "Sure, your games don't need copy protection because your demographic is less likely to pirate but even if we agreed with your philosophy, we will never be able to sell DRM-free games to management".
This eventually leads to the issue that the alternatives for intellectual property protection are limited.
So what alternatives do developers have today?
SecuROM. This is what has been used by Electronic Arts in Spore, Mass Effect, and most other titles. Ubisoft uses it as well such as in Far Cry 2.
Pros: Makes developers feel their IP is well protected. It is quite effective at slowing down cracking of games, especially to on-line features (Spore was leaked day 1 but only the unprotected versions of it, you couldn't make use of on-line features). Cons: Apparently installs a device driver that stays behind. Developers have used it to hard-code a limited number of life-time activations (3 in Spore initially raised to 5 more recently).
Pros: Makes developers feel their IP is well protected. It is quite effective at slowing down cracking of games, especially to on-line features (Spore was leaked day 1 but only the unprotected versions of it, you couldn't make use of on-line features).
Cons: Apparently installs a device driver that stays behind. Developers have used it to hard-code a limited number of life-time activations (3 in Spore initially raised to 5 more recently).
Steamworks. Valve protects its games and offers to third parties the ability to protect their titles and gain the feature benefits of Steam.
Pros: Proven 0-day protection by installing the last bit of the game upon installation. Includes a ton of other features such as hardware tracking, updates via the Steam client, and more. Cons: Requires Steam (the client) to be installed with the game. Requires the user to create a Steam account.
Pros: Proven 0-day protection by installing the last bit of the game upon installation. Includes a ton of other features such as hardware tracking, updates via the Steam client, and more.
Cons: Requires Steam (the client) to be installed with the game. Requires the user to create a Steam account.
Starforce. Starforce is pretty well known in the industry.
Pros: Quite secure at making games harder to crack. Cons: Installs drivers on the user's system. Reported compatibility issues.
Pros: Quite secure at making games harder to crack.
Cons: Installs drivers on the user's system. Reported compatibility issues.
There are a number of others but those seem to be the most prevalent right now.
My opinion on the matter, reflected in Stardock's position on copy protection is that anything the inconveniences legitimate customers is unacceptable. The goal should be to increase sales, not stop piracy. Focus on the people who buy games and make them want to buy your game. Don't make them feel like chumps for buying your game (such as having them jump through hoops to get it to work while a pirate can just get a torrent).
One of the major philosophies of Impulse has been to try to change the way licensing works. Today, licensing tends to focus on the PC rather than the user. This makes the user feel like they're renting a game. If I buy a game, it's MINE. I paid for it. I should be able to use it on my machines as much as I want as long as only 1 copy is being used at once (unless it's a Stardock game where we allow multiple people on a LAN to play from a single copy).
So what could we make that might help gamers but still be acceptable to publishers?
I think, for starters, is that any IP protection should correspond with some user benefit.
Here are some examples:
a) Publisher wants Internet activation in their game. Okay, label that you require that but give the user the ability to re-download it.
Publisher wants to provide 0-day protection to their game. Okay, but be clear about that but also make sure you're giving the user the latest/greatest version so I don't have to hunt for patches on day 1.
In many respects, Steamworks takes care of a lot of this. But it requires the Steam client. A game that uses Steamworks can't be on Impulse or be sold in other channels where the website/store/distributor doesn't want to be distributing a competitor's store to people or having their customers create a Steam account. I have a Steam account and I like Steam but I don't think it would be a great thing if there was only 1 vendor. Particularly if the one vendor could potentially (and likely) be acquired by one of the major publishers down the line.
Impulse has the Impulse Reactor platform. The Political Machine, Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1, and Demigod use Impulse Reactor for multiplayer match-making and a variety of additional game and software functionality. Impulse Reactor has the benefit that it's free and is simply a DLL that users include with their game.
We could integrate IP protection features for developers who want to protect their IP and do it in such a way that is just as effective as other methods but a lot less intrusive. Because while Stardock itself can and will continue to release its retail games with no CD copy protection, other publishers have different needs and as a practical matter, they are going to use something. The question is whether they should have more alternatives?
What do you think?
I'm not a full gun on security. Nor am I a lawyer, so no idea how this works against the GBR.
But would it be possible to have Impulse authenticate the user to the game. i.e. logon to Impulse (as we do currently) and register the game - this would need Internet access to active I assume. When the game starts up, it makes a call to ImpulseSecurity.dll (similar to how the Impulse Reactor dll works) and it tells the game if it can run or not. Sure someone can hack the code to make it jump around the code that does the check, but anyone who reverse engineers a program could in theory do that.
The idea is that it would work a little like logging onto Windows when connected to a domain. You are authenticated against the domain, but you have local credentials cached. This would allow people to work offline in the same way I can take a machine away from the domain, but still log in locally as it has a copy of my profile.
And when the user goes online to play MP, it forces the check against the central server. And maybe expire the credentials every 90 days? (People won't like this, but it IS better then 14. Would allow people to go away for a week/month for business/camping etc... and be able to play single player mode)
Summing up
1) You cannot stop piracy for single player games as the person is working in an isolated environment that it not tied to a proprietary platform (e.g. Xbox 360, Playstation 3).
2) You CAN make it harder for them. If you provide a way that requires authentication, it might stop some average Joes (NB some = best you can hope for. Torrents exist - live with it gaming industry!!!!).
3) Put more online content into the game so people WANT to play online and that's where you do your check(s) - similar to logging into ICO.
Oh, plus release new content etc... that requires them to get it from a central platform. Oh yeah - Impulse does that altready I am not treated as a pirate and pirates cannot get the new stuff easily.
But the management that need to be convinced to use it might be persuaded that a free DLL isn't something secure. It will be hacked, meaning that the whole protection scheme is voided. When your are adding any security, you want it to be not easily found. If your are using a DLL that can be easily identified and changed to alter only the security functions, that won't really protect IP.
Basicaly, the technical aspect won't solve the IP protection problem as it will be cracked. As stated in the OP, a value must be given to the user. But the user must know this value when doing the purchase.
For example, for the current Stardock policy where updates are only avalaible to first hand user, the box should states something like:
"only one e-mail can be used to register this game. Game needs to be registred for getting updates or online functionnalities. Registring allows lifetime download".
Make the DLL strongly named and load it in the GAC
Frogboy,
My instinct tells me that there are big players whose beancounters will never be able to move away from the infantile concept that they must be in absolute control. To a degree then it might be a waste of time to try to convince them. What developers are telling you behind the scenes is the truth, and I submit a validation of Ironclad`s/Stardock`s philosophies. Its nice to hear. Whether this philosophy can be acted upon industry-wide is a question of what is possible.
(Politics=art of the possible)
I might counter infantilism with the reality that Impulse still controls online access... so DRM is still there. You just do so far more elegantly and respectfully.
Beyond that I think pursuit of less leashed/chained/beholden developers is the way to go. Eventually perhaps the big players will begin to seriously ponder *why* they are hated, and why companies like yours are beloved (can a company be beloved?!? Anyway...). In the meantime you`ll have to headhunt new titles before they get snatched up & locked down by the big players; having your audience not only enjoy your game but respect and like you has to be a big bonus next to profit to alot of developers out there.
Worst case scenario: you continue to reap enormous benefit from your unique distribution model, while the big boys do not. Your market share & audience grows, theirs dwindle. You remain small and unburdened by the enormously bloated bureaucracies of the big boys, while they struggle to maintain basic structure.
I don`t think I`d offer DRM in the typical sense through Impulse if I could help it - Impulse can garner a reputation as a trusted DRM-free zone on the Interlag/market, and that in itself can help popularize it.
My thoughts at this point.
But what if the goal isn't necessarily to popularize Impulse with the people who don't like intrusive DRM, but to try and move the market away from intrusive DRM?
Well, let's put this in perspective. Sins sold half a million copies in about 6 months, give or take. Spore, with its thousands of 1 star Amazon reviews and horrific DRM, sold over a million in the first 2-3 weeks. Stardock is successful, but they have nowhere near the income of EA, they just have proportionately fewer expenses.
Ultimately, I don't think things are going to change at least in the near future if everyone remains in their bubbles. If Stardock doesn't create their own protection through Impulse Reactor, the main options will still be SecuROM, Starforce, and Steam. We'll still complain about <insert cool game here> being released with crappy protection that everyone hates. But what if Stardock comes out with their protection scheme that's both appealing to publishers/developers, and not intrusive to the gamers? It won't be an overnight switch, obviously, but even if slowly the market will still move away from the DRM schemes we all hate. And any movement away from them is better than one.
One thing I must respond to asap Annatar11, is the scaled profit EA reaped from Spore - a bigger number, sure, yes, but look at the monolithic bureaucracy they have to support with it! EA is now in a position where they MUST reap ridiculous numbers in order to break even. They`re too big. Everything has to be a grand plan for them - they have no flexibility. If you insist on viewing success from a perspective of proportion (and we should), I`d say Stardock is better off (just don`t get BIG!!!).
Good point perhaps with the goal of Stardock and DRM, but then again doesn`t the popularization of an admirable platform like Impulse indeed move the market away from DRM? Perhaps too slowly, I might concede.
I have an inclination to let some of the DRM-champions out there die a miserable death, to not let them partake of and get their hooks into a better scheme, such that they do indeed die. However...
Well, the relative gain vs expenditures of companies aside, my point was even with the DRM that everyone hates, Spore outsold the DRM-free Sins by miles, so the market share/audience comment you made earlier doesn't hold up too well.
Realistically we shouldn't compare EA and Stardock directly because they are very different companies - the point is that EA is hugely successful, making billions a year, even though it uses protection everyone hates. It's in no real danger of losing a significant chunk of market share, or audience sadly.
Well, Frogboy made this point for me: some publishers/developers just aren't able or willing to go DRM-free. Without any alternatives, Impulse will not grow very quickly. Even now, it isn't getting very many new and high profile games. Sins is popular, but compared to the following for The Orange Box( HL2/TF2 in particular) for example, it's still tiny. The three hottest games it has to offer are basically Sins, Demigod, and Witcher: EE. These games will attract many, while the rest are much smaller markets.
Unless we start seeing very high profile games released DRM-free, Stardock and Impulse will always be the underdog for the more niche crowd. And unfortunately, the high profile games are the least likely to go DRM-free, because they can count on millions of sales regardless of protection scheme. Not to mention that most developer studios are owned by big publishers that have no real reason to take a plunge to DRM-free releases. That's why I think meeting somewhere half-way will help the industry much more than keeping to the small DRM-free bubble. Ironclad and Gas Powered are unique in that they are independent and can choose to sign with Stardock - most can't.
its a bit offtopic but, I sometimes wonder if it was more efficient to have a video where the developers of the game explain how hard they worked on it and that they do it for a living which shows up on pirated versions before the actual video which you get after beating the game instead of the usual "game will not run (without a crack)" scheme for illegit copies.
Downloading a crack doesn't make people feel bad about pirating, there is no emotions tied to downloading a crack. People don't like to feel about their actions so you have to emotionally confront them with the people behind the stuff they pirated.
another Idea:
what about giving developers who publish their games without DRM on impulse a bigger share. Its obviously a rather crazy idea but when DRM really reduces the amount of sold copies you should let them benefit from it. It bears lots risks to get silly coverage about that like stardock supporting piracy etc, but it would give developers a measurable economic reason to not use DRM over some unmeasurable loss because of potentially more pirated copies
I firmly disagree. You simply don’t know that. It is as EA's president stated most people are ignorant of practices and uneducated about the industry - pure and simple. However this is changing a rapidly. Many people like myself have gone far out of our way to educate the public and to call attention to the shitty practices engaged in by EA, Ubi and similar ilk and we will continue to do so and hopefully every day one person is added to the list of the informed. To me it is clearly a matter of time until the giants suffer and maybe even fall if they fail to change.
You can disagree, but be realistic. EA is the #1 publisher in the US. It makes ~$3-5 billion a year (net revenue was $3.665 billion for their fiscal year ending March 31st '08, which was higher than the previous year). It had 15 games that sold over 2 million copies each.
Honestly.
Talking about EA suffering is like talking about Microsoft suffering.
http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/IROL/88/88189/Q4Release.pdf for EA's financial report.
EA, Ubisoft, other big publishers who use restrictive DRM aren't just going to go under one faithful morning because of it, leaving Stardock the king of the hill and lone survivor of the publisher-apocalypse
Another thing that nobody seems to take into consideration is that these mega publishers own a very large chunk of the industry's developers. If they start getting into financial problems, you know what they're going to do? Start shutting down and laying off their developer studios. Less profitable ones first, but not even BioWare is immune from that. Now despite the stupid decisions of the company higherups and their DRM choices, a lot of talented people work in those studios, and it doesn't do the gaming industry any good for developers to go out of business or get laid off. Hoping for EA/Ubisoft/whatever to go bankrupt and close down is counter productive to the gaming industry as a whole. The solution should be to get them to use better methods of protection, not to hope they go bankrupt so the few independent developers are the only ones left.
So what?
That's called capitalism.
Demand for games is relatively stable. And as long as you have a demand you'll have a supplier. If EA and all its developers would vanish through magic, that wouldn't mean the end of the computer game market. You would have a lack of supply for 1-3 years until other developers have risen and filled the niché.
Let's take Sins. There weren't much real time space strategy games coming out in the last few years. But as we've seen with the success of Sins, the demand was there. And as long as you have a demand you'll eventually have a supplier. I mean the whole success of the StarDock games division lies in finding a niché in the market that hasn't been filled and exploit that.
Why should it be bad for the games market if unproductive suppliers don't survive? If they don't fulfill the needs of the customers they don't survive. There'll be other companies that'll produce what's in demand and will hire those people who have lost their job in companies that didn't deal adequate with the markets demand. (If those people are qualified enough.) Bad companies don't have a right to survive.
Also if all big publishers would go bankrupt, a few years later you'll have a new generation of big publishers. It's the way the industry works (most industries actually). So the only way to really change the philosophy of the games industry is to change the market by changing demand to other products. And you won't change demand by buying their products while complaining about them. As long as you buy it, they won't care. Only a decrease in revenue would make them change their philosophy (but that would probably then be blamed on pirates anyway).
You proved my point
I wasn't even talking about the "suppliers" (publishers). I was talking about the developers. The people actually creating the art, the models, writing the code. These aren't the people who box the games, or stick SecuROM on it. These are the people who'll get laid off when a big publisher starts tanking. The higher up brass will try to save themselves, and kill off everything else that can be killed off. *That's* capitalism.
If EA kills BioWare, you'll never get another BioWare RPG. I'm sure some of their guys will remain in the business and get jobs in other studios, but it will be the end for BioWare. When the next big company rises to take EA's place as the #1 publisher.. you still will never get BioWare back.
Creativity doesn't really fit very well with laissez-faire capitalism, does it? The idea that ''demand" produces good games is pretty funny.
Oh will you people KNOCK IT OFF about DRM, jesus!
For starters, Securom does NOTHING. The publishers are not stupid. They know it doesn't do anything, but they are forced to include protection due to idiot shareholders.
It seems all I ever see on here anymore is DRM crap. Give it a rest. DRM does NOTHING. It's pointless. All it takes is one enterprising individual to crack it and VOILA! That's it, all over. That is why Spore was cracked and on the net before it was even released in some markets.
And you're description of Starforce is woefully inadequate. That's like blowing someones head off and reporting "minor bleeding". I know MULTIPLE people whose systems were damaged by Starforce, my own included. The driver came in via a demo, and from then on when I burned a CD, it wouldn't verify, throwing up tons of errors. I figured it was a bad batch of disks and threw the failures away. It was only when I first heard about Starforce that I realised what the problem may be, and started checking disks on another computer, and found they were fine.
Of course that didn't compensate me for the $25 of blank media I threw away assuming it was bad. (And before anyone leaps to their defence saying perhaps it was a bad drive, this was on multiple burners, including a brand new one.)
I removed the drivers and still had the problem, for over a year. Ultimately I discovered that the changes Starforce makes and the problems it causes are NOT rectified by simply removing the drivers. To "reset" your drive chain back to normal, you have to go into the device manager and remove all IDE devices and let Windows reinitialise them. Only then is the damage that was caused fixed. I did that, and all of a sudden I could burn CD's again correctly.
But I got lucky. My friend actually lost his DVD drive to Starforce. The problem it caused ultimately damaged the drive.
Only DRM I trust is Steam. It's right there, it doesn't hide anything etc...
The likes of EA, it's at the point now where I feel I may as well pirate everything given the lack of respect EA, Ubisoft etc... show us. Treat someone like a criminal long enough, eventually they'll become one.
Here are my biggest issues with most modern DRM:
#1 I DO NOT LIKE FEELING LIKE A CHUMP FOR BUYING SOMETHING. Makes my blood boil any time I have to beg for more activations on something. It's way worse on non-games btw. Yea, I switch machines a lot and have a lot of computers. But *I* bought the software, not the computer. If you want activation, it better be smart enough so that it can tell a legitimate user from a pirate. It can be done. How often do you hear about WindowBlinds users or Object Desktop users having to beg for additional activations? Basically never.
#2 I WON'T STAND FOR SOFTWARE PUTTING HIDDEN DRIVERS ON MY MACHINE. My production machine is just that, my production machine. I try to keep up with every device driver, service, etc. on my box. I realize I'm a minority in that but a publisher/developer does not have the right to install device drivers without my permission and knowledge.
Those two things are my big pet peeves (besides the obvious having to keep a CD in the drive).
I think you won't have a shortage of people agreeing with those peeves.
To me, the limit on activations is a very heavy handed system. What I think it's trying to accomplish is to prevent people passing the game around to multiple others. But just having a flat low activation limit hinders regular users too much.
A much smarter system would measure activations in a certain time period. I think most who protest say Spore's 5 lifetime activation limit won't have a problem if it's 5 activations per week limit, for example. It's much more likely that 5 activations in a week is a pirate, than 5 activations in a month, 6 months, or a year. Granted, I don't know how exactly your activations function, it might be an even better system.
As far as CD in the drive, I think when it comes down to a choice between hidden drivers/software and having the disc in the drive, most would choose disc in the drive. This could actually be combined with 'net access. In offline mode, you could require the disc. Online, you could just authenticate the SD account with your servers rather than use the CD. After all, most gamers are used to using CDs for years, so it's no gamebreaker - mostly a matter of convenience.
Go say that to the people who got their C:\ drive infiltrated & disrupted by SPORE's "advanced" version of SecuRom !
Reading the rest of your post, I get your drift : SecuRom-protected games can be easily cracked ... but some EA customers who wanted to play a legit form of Spore were shocked when a lot of weird things started to happen to their computers after having installed a legit, SecuRom-protected Spore.
I wanted to buy the game ... but I valued my C:\ HDD much more. Even if there was only a 5% chance that the SecuRom "rootkit" could cause havoc in my computer, I was not ready to spin the roulette and hope that it would do "NOTHING".
The problem with this is that the video would be lifted from the game. It is quite common for games to be cracked and distributed without the videos/cut scenes included.
The issue is that unless you can connect back to a central authentication server, it is VERY hard to determine if something has been altered from its original state...
I come back to headhunting/projecthunting. If the actual talent that produces games is already in line with our way of thinking, then much of that battle is already won. The next hurdle is having them split off from faceless conglomerates (which already happens when they are purchased by said conglomerates), form their independent studios, and see that they secure financing for independent projects which they are then free to make publishing choices about. Is that necessarily Stardock`s responsibility? No. Is it Stardock`s interest? I think so, to everyone`s benefit.
For example, once Alan Wake is retooled by Remedy Ent. (hopefully!...) to run on XP now that Vista has been declared an MS mistake, maybe they might have other thoughts about conventional publishing roots. Talking through my hat here (I think they already benefitted from some sort of publisher financing), but hey... .
Eventually the big players will conspire essentially to deprive themselves of the very means by which they do business. They can buy & trade & wheel & deal all they want, but if there is nothing left under the shells of the shell game, they ultimately have nothing but marketting. Sounds idealistic I am sure, but then again who knows? People in this day & age still respect honesty and integrity - good commerce.
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Speaking of activations, I would ponder - if activations are something someone feels the need to secure - I like the idea of activations per 'X' period, something reasonable to accommodate an unpredictable consumer circumstance (you never know how things may go, PC hardware failures, driver errors, etc.). I would make it an affirmative action however: give the User the ability to deliberately "login" and activate or reactivate/reset activation limits. Placing this control more in the domain of the user can help us either *feel* or *be* more in control and comfortable over a realm wherein so many people elsewhere want to dictate terms to us about our fair usage.
I think a good type of activation limit would be as many activations as you want on 1 IP address (obviously you have a problem if you get 1,500 installs from the same IP, and should look into it). Most people keep their computers connected to the same Internet anyway, so that would be a good compromise. There would need to be some mechanism for moving, however (set number of IP changes per year?).
The flipside of course is that Impulse can be a great platform for many games... . I understand that you do not want to make decisions that cut you off from other titles, and that restrict Impulse`s growth. The trick of course is to insure that Impulse continues to grow into the beneficent monster you want it to grow into, rather than having it sabotaged or corrupted by the very agents that forced its existence.
Just off the top of my head, endeavour to ALWAYS establish a crystal-clear distinction between your own 'DRM-free' releases, with boxed copies etc., and those which are of lesser statures.
I suspect if given the choice to do so, many of us would choose to utilize Impulse instead of any other digital medium to purchase product that *had* a measure of DRM, if only to insure a small bit of fiscal support further goes to Impulse/Stardock/Ironclad/GPG and the philosophies we adhere to & value. Perhaps you cannot cure others of their psychosis, but you may be able to comfortably subsidize thereby a host of other worthwhile developments which ARE in line with better commerce. And better gaming(!).
Hmmm. So am I now that I reread my own writ! Hmmm. Perhaps (hastily makes something up to convey more sense to his previous utterance) you have the option of registering a 'usage' with a company central server, at your discretion. Perhaps you will get e-mails after automatic registering of a product, after 'X' period of time has gone by, where the company inquires as to why you have not yet registered a usage. I`m honest - I would register such.
( I tried... nightshift... tired...)
I've never liked Steam, but it is becoming a dice roll to determine whether or not they look the other way with publishers still wanting their own DRM on top of Steam. Case in Point - STALKER Clear Sky - online Steam version still has activation limits imposed by Deep Silver.
2) The company would need to be given your e-mail, which would by definition require registering.
3) We again encounter the problem of, in effect, letting the user choose their own activation limit.
4) If you're going to have automatic registration (I think that's what you said up there), user input becomes needlessly complicated.
5) I like picking on tired people. Just putting that out there.
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