I'm going to miss Iron Lore, they did damn good work. Very interesting read, thanks Brad.

Piracy is just the symptom of a perverted economy where official product price does no longer reflect its actual value.

Basically there are two markets: The free market and the black market.

The price of a product on the free market represents the officially governed price, made by the producers or the government, while the price on the black market represents the true value of the product.

You want to make sure that the free market price is lower than the black market price.

In terms of Software, where the black market price is zero.nothing, you have to change the the free market price to match the black market price. Basically give your product away for free.

Now, you have to build an infrastructure around your product. Like support contracts, merchandise (e.g. sell some Drengin masks, good for Halloween) or just a plain donation button. The last one actually works very well, lots of people like charity.

I take it you're not a developer.

Linux distribution companies do not make money from end-users.  Their money comes in from large support contracts for companies.  RedHat, the prime example of this model, realized that the end-user market was a waste of time and have fully focused on enterprise customers.

With the exception of MMOs, the "give it away for free, charge for the service" model doesn't work in games.  At least not to a level that could support an actual company.  Look at any single player game.  What services could you add to a non-internet game to justify a monthly fee to a regular user?

The biggest problem with the whole idea of depending on merch, donations & support contracts is that there is pretty much 0 guaranteed return on investment.  Spend 2 years working on a game with a team of developers, and you can't even count on X number of sales.  You have to rely on an even less reliable income source.  If I can get something for free, unless it's crippled, chances are I won't want/need the "extra" service.

From reading this and the other thread here discussing IP and copyright it can clearly be seen that some people have an enormous sense of entitlement to use other peoples work without paying them anything. They would like there to be no laws governing IP.

That would mean an end to the video game, music, book and film industries, these things take a lot of time and resources to make and people need to make a living so making these things needs to be profitable anyone who doesn’t understand that is a self-deluding fools or a communist/anarchist.

Saying it’s not stealing because you are making a copy not taking anything from them is untrue; it’s like hiring someone to wash your car or trim your hedge and then refusing to pay them. When you buy software you’re paying for the time and sweat of the people who made it.

Now to be honest back when I was 13 or 14 I did sometimes pirate games for my friends and use games they copied for me (This was on 3 ½ inch disk in those days of course. But when I grew up, I came to understand the value of someone’s hard work once I had to earn a living for myself.

I now work as an IT Consultant, and I don’t work for free (on account of having rent and bills to pay), why should game developers? I can tell you a client refusing to pay for work I’d already done would have an appointment in court.

I think a lot of people who pirate software and condone it are either criminals, to young and immature to understand the value of hard work, or just on some wacky self-obsessed anarchist trip, (e.g. very immature but probably old enough to know better).

So,
What would be the correct way of involving the Feds or States in this issue is the real question?

How much time and energy (therefore hard currency) would have to be spent?

Will the end product justify the means (or cost for that matter)? Would bringing thousands of millions of "pirates" to justice help increase sales (or decrease the actual customer base)? Of course, maybe, someone smarter than I, with a marketing background in PC Gaming and Games could come up with a way to bring the "Pirates" on board... such as...

Tada! Our favorite company, and probably the only company not in the "red" in lower Southeast Michigan, Stardock has the right idea, in that their response is "Here's a nibble of the real product, Mr and Ms. Beta Tester, now tell your friends to go watch a more full blown copy on G4!"

Yes, I did DVR the episode with Brad on G4 and I have decided to purchase a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire, after watching the battle scene, even to the point of investing some hard earned cash on another gigabyte of Random Access Money...er Memory.

Stay focused Stardock, your customer base is appreciative, even if they do not always seem like it.

W/R
Kirk Smith
USN CPO(R)

aka: Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

From a purely technical standpoint, the pirates will always win. They are always one step ahead of the legacy content industry.

Even if all the hardware you could buy would only run DRM'ed software it wouldn't help. There are enough people capable and willing to build their very own computers from scratch, it is actually not that hard.

The next logical step would be to make self-made computers illegal. But as if that would help. One can still buy illegal drugs, illegal pornography, hire people to do illegal stuff and so on. A totally unregulated free market. Supply and demand, risk and profit.


What I'm saying is that there's no point to combat piracy with laws or DRM. You need to make a legal copy more valuable than a pirated one or if that's not possible, change to a different business model.

Personally I think more game publishes / developers (if they have control over this sort of thing) need to use a model similar (or even exactly the same) to what Stardock does, and I’m not just saying this because this is the Stardock forum.

That is:
1. No disk based copy protection
2. The ability to download it straight from a trustworthy source. Also no BS ‘you can only download it once’ or anything like that should apply. It is also good if you can download it a little bit at a time. This also somewhat removes the issue of certain countries getting games much later than others.
3. Have the copy protection kick in when you apply a patch (i.e. you need to enter your key and it is checked online so it can't be faked, at least on any mass scale).

The reason I suggest this because as I consumer I want:
1. Not to have to go look for and put in a disk every time I want to play for no other reason than it needs to check a few lines of wasted space.
2. Not to have to worry that I will potentially waste my money because the power fails at the worst possible time (i.e. I know I have life time access to the game no matter what)
3. In at lot of cases I like to try before I buy.

I also believe this is the best path to follow because it is less likely to lead people into piracy in the first place:
1. If there is disk based copy protection (which in my experience is broken 9/10 within a day or two of a games release, if not sooner, and certainly within a week) then people will be driven to seek out a no-cd crack, which are generally not hard to find, or even make yourself if you know how.
2. If they can simply download it from an official site then why waste the time learning about how to use bit torrent etc. to get some copy that my not even work, or worse, my just be some virus or porn video, even if it is ‘free’.
3. I know the purpose of demos is to give people a taste of a game, but most demos these days are so big (mainly due to textures I guess) that you my as well almost download the full version anyway, not to mention that demos tend to come out about the same time as most full version, if not later.
4. If you support your games (like Stardock does ) and make it very hard, if not impossible to patch your game without a legitimate key, but very easy to do with one, and don’t require them to verify each time, or launch some ‘third party’ program each time (i.e. steam) then you give people a strong incentive to actually buy your game, even if they did pirate it to begin with.

Obviously this is going to work better for some games than for others (namely high re-playability games vs your more play and throw away type games), but on the whole I think a lot of the reasons for piracy (or at least the main reason I have done it) is that it was simply easier and most times faster to download a pirated copy of a game and get a crack and than it was to buy it legitimately and probably end up cracking it anyway.

One thing I've learned from economics.

The difference in choice between $2.00 and .01 is much smaller then the difference between $1.99 and free.

People tend to light up at free.

As for Stardock customers being different. Perhaps GCII customers are more affluent and therefore the opportunity cost of purchasing legitimately is lower?

I thought that argument was a load of BS myself. I play FPS and RPGs as well as RTS and TBS, the reason I've bought Stardock's products is a combination of them having great games, having great support for those games and being anti-copy protection.

I honestly doubt that strategy gamers are more affluent/more honest/less tech savvy or whatever crappy reason people are trying to blame Stardock's success on. Stardock is successful because they have a great product and they support and respect their customers AND potential customers.

I didn't play any of ILE's games but from reading the reviews I highly doubt they reached the same level of depth and originality as those from SD, to quote the first review of TQ I read: "There's no way around it: Titan Quest, like its source material, is all about clicking on monsters until they die and seeing what flies out of their bodies afterwards". I can't remember reading anything this negative about Galactic Civ.

On top of this, they have copy protection working against them by both inconveniencing their existing customers and scaring off potential customers.

It's always sad to see a game developer go under, but in the end it's not just the industry that's to blame.

I don't believe those statistics on piracy for a second. I don't know a single person who pirates PC games. I'd be surprised if it was even 10%. I know quite a few with chipped consoles though.

That number is distinctly less than credible, at least in the first world. I understand piracy is rampant in Asia and eastern Europe, though.

There is so much misinformation here, it's terrifying.

My background: I have been a cracker privately and very briefly for a large cracking group. I published a paper about cracking winzip on fravia's site, back when it was all about reverse engineering. I have legally cracked software for which my company no longer had the source in order to deal with a y2k issue. Sometimes I just crack something that's free just to see what kinds of fun things I can do by changing the machine code.

I am not a guru in this field, but I know my way around olly and IDA fairly well.

I pirate things. Many things. I pay for most everything I like, and I don't pirate anything that's easier to get legally. For me, it's not a bit about price vs. worth - it's about price vs. convenience. I bought the Orange box from valve because I could download it instantly. Torrents are slow as hell, especially for something that's still new. Easy sell for me. I subscribe to Netflix because the wait is about the same for downloading a movie, but I have guaranteed (or nearly) good quality, plus the new instant watch selection of TV isn't awful. I don't buy any music at all, but I legally listen to pandora.com because it's convenient and of decent enough quality.

I heard about the original GC when I was on a civ 3 forum bitching about the crappy AI (I pirated civ 3, then bought it when I liked it, just for the record). So I pirated GC1. I liked it, so I bought it. When I heard about GC2, I pirated it again. It didn't impress me terribly, but I noticed their policy was STILL to not have copy protection. So I paid $70 for 10 tokens and got the GC2 + DA combo and later TA. I grew to really enjoy GC2, which came as a surprise to me, because I bought it primarily to support a company that was doing the RIGHT THING. Not punishing the customers with BS copy protections. I will likely never pirate anything else from SD, because I trust their reputation.

Is piracy "right"? Definitely not. Is it a form of stealing? Absolutely. But we do it because we are lazy or we just don't trust that a piece of software is worth $50. When you remove those two factors, us middle-class pirates stop pirating.

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One huge misconception here is the idea that "most" cracks have trojans and spyware in them. A cracking group has a reputation to uphold. They do not take kindly when a member releases a crack with a virus or malware of any kind. They will boot that member if something like that occurs, possibly even the first time (depending on severity and whether the malware could have been an accident). The "scene" will stop trading with the group if the group is releasing bad cracks. The whole scene teams up to share pirated stuff - there are the suppliers, who get protected stuff up before it's available commercially, the server guys who run the FTP servers and supply bandwidth, the crackers, the DVD rippers, etc. Each one belongs to the "network" as a whole, and gets all the free stuff they could want in return for their services. A given cracking group needs to be releasing quality "goods" in order to stay on the network. It is not good for a group to get the boot. The group does not want this. It is in their best interest to release good stuff.

This is not to say software cracks don't go out with trojans in them - of course some do! But the vast majority (80-90%) do not.

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90% of worldwide users are pirates? BS, I say! Of course I cannot show evidence to refute this statistic, but let's think here. Say a game like The Sims 2, which sold around 13 million copies worldwide (so says Wikipedia). A game that popular and (dare I say it) that easy to crack, is likely to be on the higher end of piracy stats, so 90% works for me. This means that that game was pirated by nearly 120 MILLION people. To me that's a pretty outrageous figure for any game.

Additionally, there is literally no way to measure piracy. Pirates don't fill out "What did I pirate recently" on a census form. Torrent downloads can't easily be tracked as far as I know, and even if they could, they are fairly meaningless, as a single person may pirate the same thing three times in his life if his computer changes or hard drive fails or whatever. By the same token, those of us who download and later pay are technically pirates, but definitely not a lost sale. I stole Civ 3, liked it, and paid - that download may have looked like piracy, but a week later I was a paying customer.

And you can't always be sure of piracy. I played Knights of the Old Republic 2 all the way through, but never bought it - a friend loaned me the original CDs he purchased. That's a "lost sale" by the same definition as piracy is. If a survey were taken of how many people played KoToR 2 vs. how many bought it, my figure would look like piracy. But it was 100% legit. By the same token, my friend loaned me some TV shows on DVD, but I preferred my computer for viewing (call me nutty, but really I'm just terribly lazy), so I torrented them even though I had the legit DVDs sitting on my desk the whole time. Is that piracy? I have no idea.

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Another misconception is that stardock customers are somehow "different" than other customers. Not at all true. The success of valve's steam should be an indicator to anybody who isn't whining about their failure of a company that FPS players are keen on paying for quality games if it's convenient. If a game is released today on Steam, I can get it today. Waiting for a crack may take several days, and I'll pay rather than wait, if I'm actually interested in the game.

And Titan Quest... come on. That game failed because it was just another D2 clone. Nothing special about that game, at least in terms of the initial impression it gives, and reviews (both critic and "normal" people). I couldn't even bring myself to spend the time downloading. May not have been a bad game, but it just wasn't something that the market was craving.

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Piracy helped Iron Lore close down? BS! I don't know any of my pirate friends who were any more interested in their games than I was! The studio just wasn't producing anything groundbreaking, and in the harsh game development world, you have to do something that's going to get attention!

Stardock has the most in-depth 4X game I've ever seen. And their copy protection model has attracted a ton of free attention. PR is good, so doing things that surprise people always helps. I bet SD wouldn't be as successful if they did the traditional copy protection model.

Additionally, if IL was writing such devious copy protections into their games that they would just do a crash to desktop, they paved the way for their own funeral. Copy protections of all sorts have proven time and again that they "detect piracy" in the honest people from time to time. So some of those "pirates" the article talks about almost certainly were legitimate customers. And by making a few legit users' lives hell, they deserved the backlash of angry pirates whose complaints were perfectly valid. Remember, software engineers are very far from perfect. We make some of the stupidest mistakes. We are some of the most absent-minded people. If a simple game like GC1 can be buggy on 1-2% of the install base, imagine how buggy the really "clever" copy protection schemes can be.

The CD protections of the late 90s were so bad, some companies actually GAVE AWAY a no-cd patch (Firaxis on Civ 3, for instance) on request.

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Piracy will not stop through a "please respect us" effort. It will not stop through triple-layered DRM. There is no way to stop a pirate. Hardware can be bypassed, software can always be cracked. Nothing can stop piracy, and the only thing that truly slows it down is convenience. The majority of people I know who pirate things (say 10 or so who I actually talk to about these issues) have a hard time justifying a weeklong torrent download if a little cash will get them what they want instantly. Steam, SDCentral, iTunes, etc.

Note that Amazon.com is selling DRM-free music now. Pirates love that. Not to help us pirate more stuff, but because we value our "rights". Kind of perverse, eh?