I think that Stardock's blocking access to game updates for non-registered users is brilliant. I also think that Steam has done a great job of keeping piracy in check. But there are a couple things that I think developers and publishers are not doing to prevent piracy that they could be doing.
1. Why are digital downloads of games typically priced identically to boxed retail product? Steam is the biggest culprit in this matter. But when I can get a boxed game on the secondary market for ten dollars or less than a company sells a digital downlaod for, why bother buying direct from the company? And buying from the secondary market is just about as damaging as piracy. Keeping digital download prices competative seems like a must to me.
2. Boxed games sold at retail should be loaded with cool stuff. I love the GalCiv2 GOTY edition for the research map, soundtrack, etc. I have other "limited" edition games with the extra cool stuff. But doesn't it seem like simple logic that to make extra physical additions to a game like maps, cool manuals, soundtracks, documentary DVDs . . . anything extra to encourage a real purchase would help reduce piracy? And make these extras part of the regular game, NOT special limited editions or GOTY copies that release long after the initial launch.
What else could be done? Because aside from passing a fascistic set of laws against it, I don't think piracy will go away on its own.
I believe that guideline has been made moot by the merger of all the different Stardock forums. Off-topic is everywhere now, including the sites like Joeuser that have tons of political talk.
Sooo . . . we work on making better demos?
Truth be known, demos aren't really meant to be complete games themselves. If they were, they would take demand away from the real game. So the big question is - where is the best place to draw the line between a demo and a full game?
I would say people at that point should find an online gaming reveiw site or gaming magazine that has reviewers that have similar tastes as themselves and read what they have to say about the game they are looking at. There are a huge number of review sites our there and I am sure at least one will have a similar taste for games as someone else. The review sites or reviews in magazines usually say what the game is like without completly spoiling the story or spoiling everything about the game in general.
Pair that with demos one should know if they like it or not, because most of the review sites and magazine give their sub comparison of the demo as well. Using what they thought of the demo, then playing the demo yourself you should be able to compare your tastes to the reveiwer, then review their take on the full game.
I know that sounds like a little bit of work, but its the more "socially accepted moral alternaitve" to pirating.
Lot of people like to find reasons to "try" the game or say Demos are misleading (which I am not arguing with), but everyone forgets that there are a ton of review sites and magazines out there. I know some of them really suck, but there are some good review sites as well as magazines out there.
Quantum, I know your ideas are within reason and in some cases make sense. Coming from someone who knows piraters and was once one myself for quite a time. I kind of know what they and I were thinking. Telling them to go to review sites does not work one bit. Reviewers have already lost all credibility in the past and are looked down on by anyone who knows each game for example. It is quite easy to find flaws in their reviews. It doesn't help most reviewers have a large form of bias.Demo's on the otherhand was mentioned a couple times in here.. Demo's will fix nothing, they have lost any form of usefulness. For the most part people who play the demo's were most likely going to buy the game anyways. In some rare cases the demo is enough to get people like with left 4 dead.Really the key in my mind to limiting piracy which everyone seems to think is a horrific thing. Is good online and heavy replayability. Reason I know the ones that pirate do..is because game companies can't really be trusted anymore, they promise one thing and deliver another. There is that and the sense that..am I going to get more then 5-10 hours of enjoyment out of this?You can fix demo's and make them better, you can tell people to go to review sites, and you can throw protection on everything until your blue in the face. None of these will stop piraters. People buy good games, people buy from respectable companies. Thats all their is too it.The main reason I'm buying Demigod and the reason I applaud them is because of stardock's measure to not put protection on the games. I played Sins of the Solar Empire, I realized the game wasn't for me but I told myself the next good game that fits my playstyle comes out under their name, I'm buying it. The actions of the company and the Games they produce sold the game to me and perhaps a few others better then any demo or review could.
I give my hard earned money to companies that put out a great product. For the price they want for games the caveat is it must be a GREAT product. Not mediocre, or pretty good. It really has to be great. The pricing system is what has led a lot of people down the path of piracy, because its piracy for a company to charge 50 to 60 bucks for a half assed attempt at a game. I have in the past checked out a torrent or two, and probably will again in the future, since like it has been pointed out the demos are useless for judging what your getting and yes review sites are almost useless also. I am against drm and stardocks methods but whatever. Make a great game and ill buy, after i check it out either on a buds comp or my own. Try to deny me that all you want, i dont care. or else drop your pricing to the point where i dont feel robbed after paying and not liking what I have purchased. Make no mistake here though, I am a little bitter and angry yes, but I am honest and will always support work that I like and enjoy.
No anger is involved in this post, pedantic patronization is generously given regardless of temperament.
Quantum, were you actually attempting to make a point with that post or did you just randomly pick another subject to compare it to? I'd say it's a retarded analogy, but that wouldn't be fair to the other retarded analogies.
The developers don't work for me, they work for their customers. If I don't buy their product, I'm not a customer. There is no agreement to pay them in advance, no obligation to purchase their product. Passing on a game because it only looks interesting enough to play through once is no different than passing on any other product that you don't feel is worth the price. If they'd lose me as a customer by letting me play through the game once, they never had me.
I've never bought a cd because I listened to a song on the radio once and had heard it enough, I've never bought books from an author who's book I wasn't interested in after reading once from the library. This is normal behavior. People want to own things they intend to use repeatedly. They rent shit they're only interested in messing with one time around. Do you buy cars you only intend to drive once, or do you pick up a rental?
It's the industry that's giving us the shaft and trying to get every potential customer to be an owner. It's the industry that has made rental impossible, shuts down secondary sale, and makes demos more and more useless in an assbackwards attempt at making more money. If the industry wants to kill itself by making piracy the only alternative to a fifty dollar purchase for something that's only worth playing once, I don't give a shit. Good games sell themselves, I buy good games. The rest, fuck em. When they hit ten bucks in the bargain bin, maybe I'll remember to pick them up.
Injustice occurs when people treat every company in the industry the same, when they clearly are not.
Which is why I preordered Sins and Elemental, hell would freeze over before I did that for any of the big ones no matter how interesting the game looked. Stardock has earned my trust by going beyond not shafting me and actually giving a shit after they've made the sale.
We appreciate that too! But you may have seem some of the beating we've taken regarding Impulse where we get treated as if it's some sort of draconian DRM when in fact we're simply requiring users to get our updates from us which, seems to me anyway, to be a pretty reasonable policy.
People really need, in my opinion, to be able to make distinctions between policiees that they feel are truly unreasonable versus policies that don't adhere to some sort of utopian vision.
The only way to limit piracy is by doing things that will promote buying the product, and don't do anything that will cause people to pirate like DRMs and over priced software. If EA, Ubisoft, and every game publisher got rid of DRM piracy would go down because it takes away the one motivation for probably a large percentage of piraters. As well I believe if publishers took a more "episodic" approach where instead of making one full game they split the game into 3 parts, and sold them for 1/3rd the price not only will it mean less risk on the publishers part, but since it is cheaper those who cringe at paying $50's for a game may be more willing to pay $20 for 1/3rd of the game to see if they will like it. Obviously that wouldn't work with open world games, but it is just a thought.
I really don't get the "demos suck" argument. Most demos give me a great sense of what the game is like and leave me either wanting more or caring less. Do people expect to be given half of the game or what? If the size of demos reached expansion pack proportions then they'd be giving away free content not free samples. Besides, who wants to download huge demo files? I have a hard time finding any need to pirate because the demo sucks.
I do, however, believe that all games should release demos, even if they're just PC ports. I've been terribly curious about Mass Effect for a long time, but there's no demo available on the PC so I'll just wait until it hits the bargain bin, in which case they won't be making much money off of me by then. I can see how pirating a game without a demo would be more easily excused.
Heroes of Might and Magic 2. One really nice map, three playable positions, all sides open, easily a dozen hours of playing if you wanted to take on lots of neutrals, get cool artifacts, and have really powerful heroes. I was addicted before I even finished a single game. A perfect representation of the full game, the perfect demo.
If the demo had been the full game, I'd probably have bought it anyway, nearly every skirmish I played was that same damn map from the demo.
Heroes 3? A small map, with a short time limit, one side. If I'd started with 3, I'd never have looked into the series again. The scope was lost, it didn't represent the full game in any meaningful way. All you really got was a demo of the basic mechanics, which aren't anything special. I love the series, but the first few weeks of a game aren't even that fun. The only reason they got me as a customer was because I'd already been hooked earlier and knew it wasn't representative. The demo was shit, it made the game look lame, ridiculously so.
There are plenty inbetween, and quite a few worse. When a demo is the tutorial mission at the beginning of a campaign, it bites. When a demo is time limited so that you literally can't view the full scope of a single skirmish, it bites. It's a demo, it's supposed to show you the game, when it shows you something else, it hasn't been very useful. No one would buy a new car that didn't have seats during the test drive. No one would buy a car that only did 20 miles an hour with a two gallon fuel tank either. It's a sensible idea that you don't want to give them the full game for free, but the idea is to attract customers, not see how little of a draw you can make. On the reverse, there's a lot of false advertising in demos too, a perfectly scripted scenario for the demo and then squat for AI in the full game once you get it.
Let's pretend that you've been given the task of creating a demo for a game - what would you do?
If publishers really wanted to stop piracy in its tracks, they could just make the games require an Internet connection to play.
But that would greatly reduce the # of people who could play the game.
No reviewer works like I do, that's a simple statement of fact. I don't find a single one mentioning the disgust I feel for BioShock or Call of Duty 4, especially considering how they usually review SP only, can't play it on my system, etc. I should also point out that demos are a piece of crap. I loved the BioShock demo.. but it had ALL the content.
The methods you give of wanting to know which game is for you are massively overrated and completely inadequate. Aside from anything else, Gamespot's Kane&Lynch anyone?
Frogboy: You can make the game require an internet connection to play, but then, pirates will just edit that part out and play it offline anyway. Additionally, people pirate games with a good connection. This would solve nothing.
I am going to maintain that the only feasible way to make a game unpiratable is simply to run the entire thing on a server, and simply stream the video back. This would be much easier in terms of install/uninstall and HDD space and system requirements and similar, and you simply cannot access the server and copy and paste the code. The unfortunate side is high bandwidth requirement and loss of access if there's no Internet.
I don't think you're understanding.
You would have the key game data be server-bound. No data, no game. Nothing to "edit out". You would require validated CD keys to play.
We're not talking about some sort of data check.
Even in World of Warcraft the data is still local which is why you can set up virtual servers.
To use GalCiv as an example, if all the XML data in the game was server based and sent over an encrypted stream where it never existed on the disk, it would essentially be a server-only game. I have no idea how one would get around that other than trying to somehow reverse engineer all the XML data in the game which would likely be impossible.
If the game was popular enough, in time someone migth cobble together something that worked but certainly not in the first few months.
As someone who's cracked games (for personal fun, I don't share what I crack) for decades, I feel safe in saying that piracy can be stopped provided that publishers were willing to force users to be connected to play the game.
I just don't think publishers are willing to do that at this stage. But I think it's only a matter of time before online computing is so ubiquitious that publishers start requiring a net connection to play. I think that time is still years off though.
That's essentially what he meant, not just a simple log-in to play. IIRC he once mentioned (as a hypothetical means of protecting GalCiv) simply leaving the AI programming on the server. Every time you hit turn it would require the game to send data to the server, have the AI process its move there, then send data back telling the game how to move ships, etc. Assuming they could keep the accounts secure, that would be totally unbreakable.
*EDIT* Gah, Frogboy posted first.
I think you talked about that in another thread, (I think it was the gamer's bill of rights one) where you used a soldier that couldn't have a reliable connection to the internet as an example.
I hope to god that it doesn't happen anytime soon either. Quite frankly I don't have a %100 reliable connection to the internet at all times.
I sure the hell won't buy a game that requires that I be connected, unless I was playing online but that would be a diffrent story.
Clearly Frogboy and I were thinking along the same lines, my mistake of misinterpretation.
Luckman is correct.
For an rts, full game options with a map or two that showcase the engine, not some dinky shit. No twenty minute timers, or training level campaign missions. A real skirmish map that lets people dick around and actually see what the game is like. I can handle not seeing all the sides when a game has 12 or something, but hiding features is only intelligent when there's something wrong with them. When a three faction game demo comes out and only one side is in it, my first thought is that something is severely wrong with the balance, my second is that all three sides play exactly the same.
No screwing with settings either, the demos I've hated the most were ones where some ass stripped down the gui so I had to edit a config file to change the resolution.
For a tbs, I'm a little more forgiving depending on the style, one game of civ would basically be the entire game. If they're based around a campaign, they need to follow the rts rules, if they're based around a sandbox, push it as far as you can. The more I see, the more likely I am to give a shit after I've played the demo. The less I see, the more likely I am to wonder if that's all there is.
For rpg's it all depends on the format, the start of the campaign is never a good idea though. I hate tutorials, unless you break the mold and skip that annoying shit, making it the demo means it has a lifespan of about thirty seconds after I finish playing through the tutorial. Starting somewhere in the middle is almost always a better idea, I've even been suckered into an rpg I hated, and I don't like most rpg's to start with, but the demo was entertaining enough that I gave it a shot. Once I bought the game, the start was so fucking boring I never got to an entertaining part... Give an obvious, non spoiler portion filled with what makes your rpg relevant, usually gameplay and atmosphere are at the top of the list.
Fps, naturally I want to blow shit up. Weapons are a key ingredient, give them. Some people like plots, some people like sneaking around, some people just want to blow shit up. You've designed your game with an emphasis on these for a given market, advertise it. Deus Ex needed a demo that exemplified the upgrade system, Half-life 2 needed a demo that showcased their in game interaction with objects and people, Doom 3 just needed to shove freaky shit at you through the walls so you could rip it to pieces with your boomstick. No gay tutorial levels, no first level intro with dick for weapons access and the lamest badguys in the game.
If it's multiplayer ready, give us a fucking map and server access. Not that I can play them with my 2k ping, but it was a requirement when I was.
I have no opinions on the other genres, I don't like sims, puzzle games, whatever.
Above all else, all of them should be honest. If the Hitman series had come with a fast paced action packed demo, I'd have bought it. It would also be the last Eidos game I'd ever buy. I don't like being a sneaky bastard, I like suicidally rushing into the enemy and being the only thing alive at the end of a level. Or dying, which was often the case in multiplayer. Showcasing the strength of your game means showing them what they can do with it, not taking ten minutes out of a four hour game that happen to be particularly active. When you lie to them, all you're doing is grabbing the wrong audience and pissing them off. As far as I know, selling one game your entire life isn't the goal of the typical developer. The demo should reflect that.
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
