Apathy and refunds are more dangerous than Piracy

[Ancalagon44]

LoL seriously? That's clearly not what I was talking about first. Most games don't intentionally introduce bugs when pirated anymore. Losing online content is the current choice. I guess you could consider that a bug if you like. Then it would be nearly all of them.


Expect for a small handful of people DRM issues are rare. Those mostly can be attributed to the wide range installed resident software, driver issues, etc, etc that in inherent on the PC platform. You'll never get software to work 100% on the PC.

Holy cow, you are right!

Everyone who is still having problems with Sim City - its not the servers, its your computer! Quick - reformat!

I wish someone had told me that when I struggled to play StarCraft 2. Heck, Blizzard could have used that information when D3 came out. And EA, when Spore came out, and UbiSoft, when, well, quite a few of their older PC titles, including Far Cry 2 and at least one Assassins Creed game, came out.

Fancy that - not DRM but other installed software? Never would have guessed.

 

[SlitheryDee]

Only if you think that DRM is supposed to totally prevent piracy. The real purpose it to delay it and make casual piracy difficult. It will never make the hardcore pirate change his ways. However the guy on the edge who can't find the new game for a month on torrent may break down and buy it. If they find they can't play on normal servers with their friends, they may break down and buy it. DRM is about converting edge cases. Gamers aren't black and white in terms of buy vs pirate.

It probably does have the desired effect on some potential pirates, but that's a fraction of a fraction of all pirates. Even that tiny number of sales has to be counted against the cost of implementing the DRM, which I assume gets more expensive as it gets harder to break, and the cost of lost sales due to customer dissatisfaction. That customer dissatisfaction effect is cumulative as well. They are missing sales from customers who have had bad DRM experiences on previous games by the same publisher and are holding a grudge as a result, as well as missing sales from customers who are reading about DRM woes for whatever the current game of note is.

All this seems like so much spinning of wheels. Expending enormous effort and money for what seems to be a break-even result at best.

 

[Jaskalas]

I think he is completely right, except for this.

The average consumer is just too stupid for such negative experiences to impact sales of future titles.

UbiSoft introduced always online DRM, didnt stop their games from selling well. Blizzard followed up with SC2, was a cluster*$&*, didnt stop Diablo III from selling well.

Bit of a misnomer to suggest the "always online" would stop Blizzard's online games from "selling well".

 

[Charles Kozierok]

The key post in this thread is #50. Ever since reading that, I laugh to myself a bit when people make grand proclamations about how much money DRM is costing these companies in lost sales, when there is no more way of knowing that than knowing how much the piracy is costing them in lost sales.

It's a trade-off; a business decision based on analysis and estimates.

 

[ImpulsE69]

The key post in this thread is #50. Ever since reading that, I laugh to myself a bit when people make grand proclamations about how much money DRM is costing these companies in lost sales, when there is no more way of knowing that than knowing how much the piracy is costing them in lost sales.

It's a trade-off; a business decision based on analysis and estimates.

It's a much more quantifiable number because the people are much more vocal about it. I agree it's not at all accurate though. The point of the article is alienating your paying customers and them asking for refunds is going to hurt you in the long run much more than the money you didn't or wouldn't have got from a pirate.

The big picture here is more about quality assurance and the obvious lack of it in the software industry. I'm not about to say that it's something new, but when you are dealing with a much larger customer base than in the past, you need to actually start showing some tiny bit of respect to your customers. The many many failed launches in the last 2-3 years is evidence that these products are rushed and very little actual thought put into customer happiness. Working in IT though, generally the people who would catch these potential issues and care enough to bring them up are either a) never in the loop in the first place or b) told that it'll be dealt with if an issue arises and that the timeline is what's important.

There has been an obvious shift in company attitudes that they simply don't seem to have any respect for their customers. I'm not just talking about software companies either. I see it all over.

 

[Midwayman]

Holy cow, you are right!

Everyone who is still having problems with Sim City - its not the servers, its your computer! Quick - reformat!

I wish someone had told me that when I struggled to play StarCraft 2. Heck, Blizzard could have used that information when D3 came out. And EA, when Spore came out, and UbiSoft, when, well, quite a few of their older PC titles, including Far Cry 2 and at least one Assassins Creed game, came out.

Fancy that - not DRM but other installed software? Never would have guessed.

Go go gadget strawman.

Yes there have been a few games with legit DRM issues. However compared to the number of titles released a year its a minor number. Metracritic lists 185 titles released in 2013 so far alone. Yet we have only 1 that has had substantial DRM issues. Sounds like a pretty good record to me.

 

[lxskllr]

Go go gadget strawman.

Yes there have been a few games with legit DRM issues. However compared to the number of titles released a year its a minor number. Metracritic lists 185 titles released in 2013 so far alone. Yet we have only 1 that has had substantial DRM issues. Sounds like a pretty good record to me.

That's a terrible record. The figure of one is debatable, but even if that's exactly correct, a feature that gives nothing to the consumer, but blows up in his face is egregious. Perfectly functioning DRM is bad from the start, and when it blows up, it makes a bad situation intolerable.

 

[ALIVE]

okey lets see this
i have a game i bought legally and after years the cd goes bad
i call the company that made it maybe still on business maybe not and tell me they have abandon the game
so me as a legally user who want to buy a new copy of that game for the memories what are my options?!??!?!?
none ohhhhhhh wait go to buy pirate copy
now who is refusing to buy my money???

or sometimes i get a demo of a game or told from someone else about a good game only to find out that is no longer for sale.
i have contact the company and said the game is phaced out so i can no longer buy it.
so again what would cost the company to make an iso file so i can download from the net burn it into a disc or even better can run the image and work!?!!?
why at the same time companies refuse to take my money cry over piracy???

i have some times in my life i had no money thus my pc was held back at upgrading. so that meant to try to find old games to buy to play something new but with not that heavy requirements to find out that i could not buy anything any more. some time i was lucky to have some old game resold in collections or something

but the bottom line when it will cost them nothing to sell a digital copy the companies refuse to do that

I AM SO PISSED

 

[OverVolt]

Everyone knows the RIAA and DRM are full of shit already. Some guys blog won't make a difference because the RIAA also has something he does not: money!

If it makes you guys feel any better EA lost its shirt on DRM with Sim City re-released.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416756,00.asp

Sim City tanked in sales because of DRM. Guess what? Its all about the money. Stop paying for music, and also stop downloading pirated music so you don't get sued = victory.

 

[olds]

 

[ImpulsE69]

Now wait just a minute...the THQ screen/sound is sometimes the best thing on the movie!

 

[OverVolt]

Now wait just a minute...the THQ screen/sound is sometimes the best thing on the movie!

I thought the same thing but let it slide. It should say "Wohoo this sounds awesome" followed by "I already know this is a WB movie I don't need to watch 30 seconds of the WB logo"

 

[lxskllr]

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5

 

[Golgatha]

Good read, and I think he's spot on. The market has shown that people are willing to pay reasonable prices for good products provided in a convenient way. There will always be pirates, but if you take draconian measures to combat piracy, they will inevitably hurt legitimate buyers, and losing legitimate buyers is much more dangerous than a pirate stealing a game.

This really isn't rocket science, but somehow the folks like EA have a hard time with these concepts. This latest debacle at EA with simcity just reinforces why I'll never buy an EA product.

Here's some anecdotal evidence. I've purchased every Humble Bundle that's come out to date. EA has gotten exactly $0 from me for the few years now.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I always loved that, because it's SO true. If I could buy a movie in the same format as a pirated movie and it was priced reasonably like 5-10 bucks, I'd probably buy them.

http://www.defectivebydesign.org/no-drm-in-html5

Ok now that is just VERY scary. This crap is going WAY too far. When are they going to learn?

So guess HTML5 probably wont work in Linux then if this it the case... usually anything with DRM in it can't be open sourced due to the very nature of it, which is why Netflix does not work in Linux.

What's sad is the amount of population that cares about this stuff is too small because most people arn't informed. So yet another stupid BS thing that will pass.

 

[Spungo]

This is pretty much how I feel about it. Leave out the DRM, make it convenient to get, and you'll be getting my money all day long.

I no longer buy games unless they are on Steam. It's annoying to need to crack every damn game just to play it. Imagine buying a car that you need to hotwire because the key doesn't work. That's most games right now if you get the normal DVD/CD version. Steam is unstable garbage and it has constant connection problems but it's still a lot easier to use.

I always loved that, because it's SO true. If I could buy a movie in the same format as a pirated movie and it was priced reasonably like 5-10 bucks, I'd probably buy them.

I bought a blu-ray player and the DRM is so bad that I've given up on buying blu-ray movies. I'll just pirate them from now on. Remember how a DVD would have 1 .VOB file for each video? Even if you didn't want to transcode the thing, you could still copy that VOB file to your network drive and play it. Blu-Ray movies are made of maybe 100 small video "stream" files and the play list on the disk decides the order of them. I was trying to rip Source Code and the damn thing had like 20 play lists. 1 of them is real and the other 19 are to screw with you. This shit is incredibly hard to use just because I was dumb enough to pay money for it.
A torrent version would be 1 file. Run that one file and the movie plays perfectly every time.

My other DRM frustration is iTunes. I bought a TV show on iTunes and the damn thing sucks. iTunes uses 100% CPU to play it and it lags. It pauses and skips. I can't try using VLC or Media Player Classic because it ONLY works in iTunes. I can't lend it to anyone, I can't play it on the PS3 and it doesn't play on my "smart" television. The pirated copy uses standard codecs used everyone, so the pirated copy will play on the PS3 and it will play on the smart TV. This is mind boggling. Who thought this was a good idea?

 

[Berryracer]

I think he is completely right

 

[JujuFish]

I never said complained the price drops. I only post about them on my blog. I do feel remorseful for the early adopters because there was a pre-order promo for the game and it was implied the game wouldn't be on sale for a cheaper price for some time. Maybe a week later it was already 75% off.

Except it wasn't a week, it was a month, and it wasn't 75%, it was 33%. Oh, and it was a Black Friday special.

 

[Gunslinger08]

I'm one of those folks who thinks that piracy isn't justifiable. I can maybe see a case if something is completely unsupported now (ex. an NES game from a developer that went out of business and didn't have their IP purchased).

I've never really had a problem with DRM, as long as it isn't screwing up my computer (ex. rootkit). The big issue these days seems to be "always on" DRM, which is even rumored to be in the next Xbox. As long as it's stated clearly on the box/product information for the game, I don't have a problem with it. My gaming computer doesn't go offline. If it did (ex. traveling or service outage), I'd just find something else to do. Sucks? Sure. End of the world? No.

I think the argument that DRM will be cracked anyway is a dumb one. No DRM developer thinks they've made something that will be uncrackable forever. There is a dedicated group out there that feels IP/copyright is bad and will spend all of their time trying to crack it. DRM is intended to keep the casual pirates at bay. These are the people that may not even realize what they've done when they rip/copy an album from a friend/the library or copy a game disk. The people who really don't want to pay for stuff and have the technical savvy will bypass your DRM eventually, regardless of what you do. Still, DRM stops a good amount of people, I'm sure.

The argument that you wouldn't have paid for the content is also moot. If you want to enjoy some piece of content, you should pay for it. It's the equivalent of sneaking into a movie theater. Yeah, you might not have paid for the content at $10 and your use of the content didn't deprive anyone else of it (unless the theater was at capacity), but maybe you would have at $3 for a rental/sale later on. Maybe you wouldn't have. Regardless, you have no right to see the movie/TV show/play the game/hear the music/read the book without paying what they're asking.

 

[Sonikku]

I pirated Knights of the Old Republic on my PC once. I'm not afraid to admit it. I bought a retail copy but when I tried installing it the disc refused, citing that my NEC dvd burner was doing something it wasn't supposed to. After a lot of back and forth with customer support I finally just broke down and downloaded the damn thing. I remember later buying Bioshock only to find it installed spyware on my machine that persisted even after removing the GAME. I kinda lost faith in legit purchases after that.

 

[Tweak155]

Everyone knows the RIAA and DRM are full of shit already. Some guys blog won't make a difference because the RIAA also has something he does not: money!

If it makes you guys feel any better EA lost its shirt on DRM with Sim City re-released.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2416756,00.asp

Sim City tanked in sales because of DRM. Guess what? Its all about the money. Stop paying for music, and also stop downloading pirated music so you don't get sued = victory.

Haha. Ironically their solution to the debacle was to give away a game.

 

[M0oG0oGaiPan]

Except it wasn't a week, it was a month, and it wasn't 75%, it was 33%. Oh, and it was a Black Friday special.

you're right it was a month later. but it was 75% off.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1665275

I think this kind of post is what most people had an issue with:
http://supermeatboy.com/47/A_Gift_to_the_fans_/#b

So, recently we have been talking to MS about eventual sales and the future of Super Meat Boy, we wanted to be able to do something special for Xmas, but it felt like a sale only 2 months after launch would be a kinda shitty thing to do to the fans who just bought it.

 

[OverVolt]

The argument that you wouldn't have paid for the content is also moot. If you want to enjoy some piece of content, you should pay for it. It's the equivalent of sneaking into a movie theater. Yeah, you might not have paid for the content at $10 and your use of the content didn't deprive anyone else of it (unless the theater was at capacity), but maybe you would have at $3 for a rental/sale later on. Maybe you wouldn't have. Regardless, you have no right to see the movie/TV show/play the game/hear the music/read the book without paying what they're asking.

Its the people for whom payed for the content AND IT DOES NOT WORK BECAUSE OF DRM ISSUES.

For example this current computer has no sound because when I overclocked it the DRM had a shitfit with the sound card. The actual sound card works, but ya know, vista has shit listed it now.

So many instabilities of new computers are from DRM. If the server connection gets messed up in simcity you LOSE YOUR CITY. Don't you understand that?

As a paying customer you have to jump through hoops TO PLAY THE GAME YOU ALREADY BOUGHT. It is EASIER to play the pirated version. DERP.

 

[lxskllr]

Here's a good presentation by Cory Doctorow.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gbYXBJOFgeI#!

 

[JujuFish]

you're right it was a month later. but it was 75% off.
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1665275

I think this kind of post is what most people had an issue with:
http://supermeatboy.com/47/A_Gift_to_the_fans_/#b

You're right, it was 75% off. Still, that was a month after release and during Steam's biggest sale event of the year. Hardly worth complaining about.

A better example is Botanicula, which went into a pay-what-you-want Humble Bundle literally the day of release.