Ignore the pirates?

I'm aware (as a player) of how some games put inconveniences in the way of legitimate gamers that pirates bypass, and I'm aware of the stupidity of confusing "theoretical, potential customers" with "actual, paying customers." I'm also aware that the pirate I once personally knew cared less about actually playing games than building a collection of cracked ones just on principle. But is this proposal too radical?

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080320-pc-game-developer-has-radical-message-ignore-the-pirates.html

I like the idea of a minor degree of copy protection, just enough to prevent the most-casual copying, but not bad enough to irritate paying customers. There will never be a way to cut off dedicated sites, but perhaps the most public venues could be defended against. Maybe something like a long, binary key file that's too big to put on Usenet. Your thoughts on this issue, please?

I had bought many games till now, actually, over 95% of Japanese indie games(called Doujin Games) has no copy protection at all and they still sell.

It's different in countries imho, if in China, they'll crack, repack, and torrent everything regardless what protection it is(includes StarForce, yes....).

[joke]
The easiest way is to make a really bad game, and thus no one will like to copy it(or they'll regret it...).
[/joke]

Here here. There is nothing more I hate than typing in pointless CD keys. They offer ZERO protection. I can simply lend the game to somebody and there is nothing to prevent them installing and playing the game on their PC

I think unprotected games are less appealing to pirates. They off no challenge. They offer no 'bragging' opportunites for the priates to say, "We cracked it first"

If I buy games with irritating protection features, the first thing I do is look for a patch to remove the annoying protection

The most annoying thing is having to have the CD/DVD in to run the game. It's ridiculas. You install 1 GB+ of files to your hard disc and still have to have the CD to run it.

I hear that the first thing I look for is a NoCD patch to remove the protection.

Every copy protection known to man have been cracked.
It's pointless to spend money on it since people will buy the game anyway, and it doesn't stop pirates.

Thanks, guys. The print & play games that I've been selling rely on the buyers being good guys since there's no way to restrict redistribution of PDFs (well, not without being a jerk and using annoying DRM, which I never would). There's been zero piracy (AFAIK), and all I do is ask players nicely not to torrent them (while explicitly giving the go-ahead to make a few copies for friends, which seems right).

I'm happy with this arrangement. In fact, I always planned for buyers to be able to give copies of my PC games to a few friends (since friends should loan each other games, and why loan when digital versions allow copies?). I'd been considering keys only to attempt to limit the number of friends' copies and to limit multiplayer use to two simultaneous uses per purchased copy at once, but this thread (plus the PDF experience) makes that seem unnecessary. Instead, I'm now thinking of not wasting any time/resources on copy protection, and just leaving everything open (protection is one less thing to worry about breaking <g>).

I like copy protection which actually helps the legitimate players instead of hindering them. Steam, for example, where I can actually install it on four different PC's. If I lose the DVD I bought it on, no matter, I can download it again. When updates come out, I know immediately, and I can get them automatically if I want. What a constrast with Starforce and the others.

I can't see me using anything more than online activation in the future. Perhaps if Software Passport hadn't become a Nero-esque exercise in leaving customers with crippled versions which don't work on modern OS's and forcing them to pay a lot of money for new versions which don't do anything different. But Plimus have online activation now, so that's good enough for me.

Copy protection, like all rules, are made up based on the presumption that someone somewhere has milicious intent and therefore everyone has to be punished for it. As usual it ends up being the lowest demoninator that gets enforced and applies to everyone regardless of their interests.

I say you need to `decouple` the concept of sharing/access from the concept of payment. If you want your product to spread, it has to be open and shareable - it must have freedom and it must be able to give freedom to others. But this somehow needs to be allowed to occur while also being able to bring in some money from it. That's the hard part because it's kind of a mix of two incompatible minsets.

There is also protection in the absence of defence, but I can see we'll spin off into a philosophical discussion again.

Copy protection isn't a rule... it's a ... well it's not a "rule" :/


CD-Keys are slightly more effective than you think. Granted they are useless for single-player or LAN (where you can get new ones) but playing online you need different keys and known-pirated ones are blocked. Therefore me and my friends have had to buy legitimate copies of the game to play online together. *Ahem* not that we weren't going to anyway. So that's £100 extra for EA, I guess.

It's all greed. If people are stealing something, it's because it's too expensive.

I wouldn't tell people to rip windows on their new pc if windows didn't create new versions costing >100$ every couple years.

Blitz is well worth its money. We can afford it. We bought it.

No offense, but based on your logic, Windows should definitely be worth the money. The amount of work that went into Windows is probably 1,000 times greater than the amount of work invested in Blitzmax (no offense to Blitzmax of course, this is just truth), and yet Windows doesn't cost 1,000 times as much as Blitzmax.

If I use a cracked version of anything, then to usefully test it, as I often don't have the time to test the stuff within the given time. What I like, I buy. What I don't like, I remove again, as they are not worth using then.

Worst offender in this category is Dawn of War Soulstorm. Every other Dawn of War game had either no CD in drive requirements (Dark Crusade) or it was removed early on in a patch. This is wonderful for people who travel a lot and don't don't fancy dragging their entire video game collection along with them, because they want to play a quick game.

Oh yes. Very effective. Chalk another one up for Dawn of War Soulstorm, which refuses to acknowledge the CD keys for my other Dawn of War games (you need them to unlock the other races in multiplayer), which basically leaves me to play the two races in multiplayer that are broken.

Yeah? Well it's another £x less for THQ, where x represents the price of any games they release in the future on the PC that I might have otherwise bought. Seriously if Spore won't run on my PC then Soulstorm will be the last PC game I buy. If Spore will run on my PC, it'll be the second last. I'm so tired of putting up with this stupid bullshit.

Yeah, or Total Gaming. It's a shame Stardock don't get more games I like.

No offense but you do not measure the "worth" of something in amount of man-hours used to create it. If there is no compelling reason to buy Windows it isn't worth anything, regardless of how much it cost to make. Furthermore the cost to make Windows is not a factor in it's retail price. Windows costs what people are willing to pay for it. That's why there are so many different versions of it, all priced differently.

I blogged about the topic and have nothing to add to it at the moment. People who want to pay for your product will pay for it, and people who cannot or do not want to pay for it, won't. And if the ones who don't pay want to have it anyway, they will get an illegal and probably cracked copy of it from somewhere. It's as simple as that.

So where is the justification for annoying your paying customers with copy protection mechanisms that will only affect them - and not the pirates?

Just think of DVD movies: The people who watch a ripped movie NEVER see the annoying copyright messages and corporate logos that the DVD player software refuses to skip. Only the poor bastards who have put their money on the table have to suffer through that crap, and I think something is terribly wrong with that picture.

A lot of people seem to know the mindsets of pirates really well. I think if we could conduct an honest survey of them somehow, it'd be interesting to see what they really think.

Were they going to buy it anyway, or not? Who, really, knows?

OF course a lot of people know the mindsets of pirates really well - most computer users with internet connections at home are pirates (although we always dance around this fact). The same people who complain about software piracy will no doubt have downloaded mp3s (at least!) in the past.

Buy your DVD player in Hong Kong. You can get one that's region free, and will allow you to skip FBI warnings and bollocks like that. What I don't understand is why there are still FBI warnings on region 2 and 4 DVDs. It's not like the FBI has any jurisdiction in Australia or Europe.

Occams Razor? The simplest explanation with the fewest assumptions is; people pirate because there is no compelling reason to buy.

So no. They would not have bought it anyway.

FlameDuck, when I still owned a TV (years ago), I had one of those RC-free DVD players. But that's only a work around, not a real solution, wouldn't you agree? That stuff shouldn't be there in the first place.

Nowadays, the first thing I do with a new DVD is to rip it. Or put it in the drive, turn off the volume, get something to drink and hope that in the meantime the DVD menu has appeared. Apple's DVD player has at least one nice feature (for a 'fully legal' DVD player): It'll only show you the copyright crap once; afterwards, you can always resume from the last playback position when you insert the DVD.

Thats the point where I like VLC and my silent desktop + 22" screen: VLC ignores copy protection (there are many DVDs at least in europe with annoying copy protections that prevent them from running on PCs and often on more affordable DVD players as well which should be sued as this is illegal protection practice) and lets you skip anything you like normally.

Or I do what Winni does: AnyDVD to disable the copy protection "notification" and then use Nero Recode (from Nero 7, don't know if the one of Nero 8 still refuses to encode copy protected DVDs) and make an MP4 out of it to give my 8800GTS something "nice" to work with on playback.

Oh absolutely. But in the absence of the DRM fanboys getting hit by the clue bus, I'll take the ingenuity of some Hong Kong grad student. If Sony don't want to sell me the product I want, I'll buy it from someone else. Their loss.

The only thing is Vista Ultimate does cost hell of a lot more than BlitzMax ;)

http://www.ncix.com/products/index.php?sku=22441&vpn=66R%2D00765&manufacture=Microsoft
That's $212 CAD for Vista Ultimate, BlitzMax is $90 CAD. $120 CAD (roughly 60GBP) is hardly "hell of a lot more".