Pirates Vs. Publishers

1up is running a piece looking at the fight between pirates and publishers in the games industry. They use StarForce, and their frustrating copy protection scheme, as a basis for their discussion of both sides of the issue. From the article: "The goal isn't to encourage people to be honest, or to drive innovation in the hacker community, or to be an irritant because you've lost your CD and want to play. The goal of a publisher in picking a copy protection service is to make more money by selling more copies. The logic is that if it's impossible to pirate the game, then people have to buy it if they want it. Why doesn't that work? If your copy protection is StarForce, then it doesn't work because people are boycotting your copy protection. StarForce, which installs a hard-to-remove driver onto your computer, has an unproven but generally accepted track record of causing computers to slow down -- at best. Some reports have complained of permanently damaged physical drives or hard drives."

What I think

[brkello]

The typical Slashdot response to one of these articles is that they pirated the game, found they liked it, and then shelled out money for the game. They justify this by being screwed over by some terrible game in the past, having limited gaming funds, or preferring the copy protection free software. That's fine if it gives you a warm, happy feeling, but you are still breaking the law and there are plenty of ways to avoid this. Find a game reviewer that you trust, and select your games based on their opinions. Or if a developer puts out quality games, stick with that developer. But let's be realistic, people are always going to pirate, and they are always going to come up with some dumb justification for it.

The thing is, if no one pirated games, then the overly restrictive copy protection would not exist. Now they add copy protection. Copy protection would not be so horrible if they just did what they were intended to do: make it difficult for others to copy and distribute their games to others. Unfortunately, we have copy protection that infects our system causing it to slow down the game, the system, and sometimes even make parts of it fail to function. All that copy protection does is cause more people to go down the pirate route.

Ok, so this next part is important for the game companies: THERE IS NO COPY PROTECTION, NOR WILL THERE EVER BE, THAT CAN STOP PIRACY. They will always be able to crack it or find a way to get the source. They will then distribute it. I am going to say something that won't be popular to Slashdotters now: copy protection is necessary. Because people will always justify their piracy, they need to make it hard enough so a casual user is unable to take their discs and stick it online. They do not need to license some expensive, over-bearing copy protection that install drivers or root kits. Just something cheap that prevent a casual user from doing it. Why do I suggest this? 1) If you put no protection on it, you are guaranteed to sell less units 2) It's going to be pirated anyways, so spending money on licensing expensive copy protection is pointless 3) A simple scheme will make it hard enough so that Joe User will have to go buy it, but unobtrusive so that it will not turn people off from the game.

But really, not much will change as long as we don't prosecute the pirates. The Internet is still very much the Wild West...anything goes. Until authorities actually go after people pirating software (and I am betting in 10 years, cyber crimes will account for the majority of fines and penalties), people are going to do it. Using what I stated above is the best "in the middle" approach that I can think of.

Re:Pirates make a superior product

[PhrostyMcByte]

I had waited with much anticipation for Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. I went out and bought it the day it came out, so you can imagine my surprise when it refused to run! Why? Because I'm on XP x64. The copy protection wanted to install a low level driver and it didn't come with an x64 version, so it wouldn't let me play. So I went through all the fun of returning an opened game. A little over a year later a crack was released for it and I finally got to play the game. Thank you, RELOADED, for letting me play the franchise I love. And shame on Ubisoft, which I held in very high regards before that experience, for tainting their software with such crap.

I tend to immediately rip any software I buy to HDD, and mount it with Daemon Tools when I need it. This created an extra problem for many other games, which will refuse to run if it detects any virtual drives. Thankfully Daemon Tools tends to keep ahead of them.

Publishers should pirate their own games

[Astarica]

It is clear piracy is strictly beneficial and helps publishers sell more games and make money. A publisher can outpirate a pirate if they wanted to because all a pirate do is remove whatever anti-piracy stuff a publisher put in, which the publisher can do by just not putting it in in the first place. So if a publisher is to pirate their own games, they'll reap all the benefits of piracy, get a great name from the gaming community, and earn a ton of money.

The reason why this has never been done is because it doesn't work like that. If piracy is always helpful, people would've figured this out by now and pirate their own games. Piracy is almost always strictly harmful to the publisher. The only question is that does your piracy countermeasure costs you even more money than the amount lost to piracy? Clearly if your piracy countermeasure is horrible, it'd turn off legitmate buyers from your game and you'd lose more than you gain. But this case is also hardly universal.

old methods work bettter

[grapeape]

Why not go back to the days of looking up phrases in the manual or code wheels. Yep they are a pain in the neck but not nearly as much as having to have the cd in the drive when you would rather listen to music or having contact phone home and starforce type protections bogging down your system. I would have to think that the old school methods were at least as effective as the new ones and a heck of alot cheaper. Print a manual in a low contrast color scheme to make it hard to copy and integrate the protection into the games storyline. Spending millions on methods that actually result in easier pirating makes no sense. At least with the manual lookup you would have to find a way to copy and print out the entire book, today with the current methods all you have to do is download a crack.

You are Blizzard's bitch

[MMaestro]

If Blizzard does fsck up my machine, I have legal and social recourse.

Have you ever read World of Warcraft's EULA? THEY have full legal and social recourse AGAINST YOU if you violate ANY of their rules.

no one can build a trustworthy reputation for removing such defects.

Deviance, Fairlight, Hoodlum and Reloaded are all VERY famous/well known inside and outside of PC gaming pirate circles. Razor 1911 is probably the most famous group of them all if only because they were (for a time) completely and utterly shut down after a Department of Justice raid.

Re:Pirates do simultaneous world wide releases

[Anonymous Coward]

I *will* give THQ/Relic credit for two things:

1. NOT using Starforce. I believe they use Securom, which while annoying, doesn't crap up your computer.
2. After a few months, at least, they removed the copy protection from Dawn of War and Winter Assault with the 1.5 patch. A comment from one of their team was: "SecuROM is great for that first couple months, but after that, it's just a pain. CD-Keys are absolute, so we still have a form of copy protection."

From what I understand, their newer game, Company of Heroes, didn't have any Securom on it out of the box, so there's rumor that Dark Crusade won't, either.