DRM and Piracy

Remember the good old days where all you had was a cd-key or even one of those "enter the password on row and whatever column" to play? Nowadays people are going lunatic over the idea that their shit is getting pirated that they put in retarded DRMs to stop pirates. Newsflash, pirates don't have problems getting past the DRM. Its the people who buy it that suffer. Really when has there been a game that DRM worked in stopping pirating? Answer is none. The only people who suffer from this is the people they want. The actual paying customers.

Pirates aren't hurting sales as much as big game companies like to believe. You always hear them bitch and moan that 60% of their "potential" sales or even upwards to 90% of them were lost to piracy. No. It didn't. If they couldn't pirate they wouldn't play it. End of story. Would you rather people not play your game at all? Probably out of spite. But even pirates, if they never paid for your games, can give positive word of mouth and spread the game more. Yet if you made a game which is unplayable unless you pirate it then the people who would actually buy it wouldn't. You'll lose more. Obviously this isn't how it works but this is what I personally feel. Pirates don't like spending money. Lets face it, they wouldn't pirate if they had the money to throw on these games. Especially when you have no idea if a game was good or bad. Yeah people say you can watch videos online and/or read reviews, but those are biased to shit. Companies pay money to have them give a good review. EA themselves say review sites get bonuses if the game rating was 8.0 or higher. Put a demo out, if people like it they'd buy it. Look at Recettear, a nameless indie game on steam. They put out a demo people flocked to play it found it was amazingly addictive and spread the news. Turned out they had massive sales on the game. And it was easy to pirate as well as having no DRM. Google it and you can pirate it. They didn't have some kind of retarded DRM where you get penalized for being a good gamer.

A good article that I agree with is here.

They point out a lot of good things. You'll have to ask yourself. Why are there so many pirated copies of games. Is it because they're out of control? No, almost all games share the same amount of pirates. Some get pirated more some less, but in the end they wouldn't have bought your game anyways even if they can't pirate. Maybe because your game sucks? Maybe because they're boycotting your DRM? Maybe because a better game of the same kind is out on the market? There are a ton of variables yet the one that gets blamed the most is piracy. There is an example, in Witcher 2. They said they weren't going to put in any kind of DRM. When the game was shipped they added in DRM saying, it wasn't going to hurt the game if it was we wouldn't use it. In the end people were getting 10-30% less fps and other annoying issues because of this. What did CD Project Red do? Honored what they said and removed it.

"CD Projekt’s approach to countering piracy is to incorporate superior value in the legal version. This means it has to be superior in every respect: less troublesome to use and install, with full support, and with access to additional content and services.

We felt keeping the DRM would mainly hurt our legitimate users.”

Isn't that the best way to counter piracy? People nowadays wants games, and they want it now. If it was easy to download a game at a click of a button then more people would do it. Look at something like iTunes. In a click of a button you can download music. They're making money so obviously music pirating isn't killing them. People are lazy if you can find a way to make it easier to play than to pirate then it might lessen the piracy rate. I'm sure its not that easy but at least its an attempt at a better solution. Look at Steam. Its easy to use, it organizes all your games and you can download it at will without having to go to a torrent site with billions of leechers slowing the torrent down to shit to download and then crack it. It zooms fast, it auto patches, and it does everything for you. Digital distribution is the future of game distribution.

Bottom line is stop making your game suck. Game developers hate making games on the PC because of the fear of piracy. Consoles get games pirated all the time too. Sure not as much as the PC but its still there. They claim they don't get enough profit from PC because of piracy. No dipshits. Its not piracy its because of all the stupid little things you do.

Things like these.

Recently though, everyone seems to be jumping onto the Always Online bandwagon. If your internet has a hiccup you get kicked from the game. Even in offline single player mode. Too bad, get better internet. Is this necessary? Blizzard's SC2 did it. Yet soon after its release, single player offline mode was cracked and people could pirate it. Guess that didn't help after all. Its less of a pain to just crack your legit copies of the games so you can play offline to save yourself the hassle. People are crying that D3 wouldn't have offline mode but I would have to agree with blizzard on this one. D3 plays more like an MMO. Like WOW it would be a better game online. You're missing out on so much of the game playing single player. Rather than making a single player mode they should just focus on the multiplayer aspect of the game. You can't play WOW offline, neither should D3. But for games that only have single player and be forced to be "always online" then its bullshit. Theres no way to justify that except they're paranoid of pirates.

Thats it. That the root of the problem. Paranoia. Because of this gigantic "fear" of pirates, PC games will forever be shittier than their console counterparts. It will always treat the buyer as a criminal. And it will always be the same. Nothing will change. Pirate are out there they're unstoppable. Its as easy going to piratebay and typing in a name of a game. When Piratebay was sued what happened? Nothing. Nothing at all. Even if they die, theres a million other torrent sites where you can pirate shit. When Napster was shut down did that stop music pirating? No. Its not going to stop them now its not going to stop them ever.

Developers needs to stop using piracy as a scapegoat for their shitty games. If it sucks its not because of pirates, its because your game sucks. Stop blaming pirates. Every game has their share of pirates. And if we finally get to the point where we have a way to stop pirates then you'll find something else to blame it on. When you release a game go, is this game worth 60 bucks? Is there a way where people would know if this game is good or not? Chances are if its not a AAA title or a franchise series then people won't know. Thats why you have to give out demos. Put some gameplay videos anything. Holy shit I don't get why games don't do this. You get a significantly higher % of buyers with a demo than without. Unless you are so unconfident that you assume your game sucks horse balls and you hope that people will stupidly blind buy your game and find out its a piece of shit you barely spent time on because you had to rush it out before the next WoW title came out so they'll buy yours instead of the WoW expansion. Oh wait a lot of games already did that. Guess what? They failed. First impressions are lasting impressions. Spend some time on a demo and its going to make people want to buy your shit.