53 replies to this topic

[Frantz Fuchs]

It only sold 1.2 Million, so it was defiantly pirated a lot. This is why devs don't do simultaneous releases on PC

[Dick Justice]

If it had DRM, even more people would've been put off from purchasing it legally.

[Sketch]

They did release a DRM version too, the disc version was. Why is there even DRM in the first place? People pirate it. Then they say 'oh if they didn't shaft us with the PC version, I'd totally buy it' and then a fantastic PC exclusive game comes out and...they pirate it.

[Dick Justice]

Where exactly did you get those numbers in the first place?

[Sketch]

http://m.uk.ign.com/...5-million-times

And even so, they say they will not use DRM.

[Dick Justice]

Estimation, not an accurate number.

[The Tetra Spirit]

Not being a PC gamer myself, I have to ask, would it be so hard to simply require the disc to be in the PC drive to actually play it like consoles do?
Would that not completely eliminate piracy?

[Frantz Fuchs]

Cracks.

[Sketch]

Estimation, not an accurate number.

So? Even if it was only 1 million then that's almost the same as bought it! It's ridiculous, and when it comes to this sort of thing pirates have no leg to stand on.

Tetra that used to be how it was, but no-cd cracks are easy to get. The only thing that will stop them is amazing DRM that works perfectly...yeah right or if every game does what Diablo 3 did to become almost uncrackable and emulate everything server side. Which would also suck for the consumer.

[JaRDoS]

Worth noting that CD Project Red are based in Poland, where piracy is pretty much the norm due to it's shitty position in international economics so their staff probably all grew up assuming piracy was the norm and that only rich people and hardcore fans actually paid for games. I saw an interesting video on IGN (a first) where they were discussing how things like Ubisofts number probably seems high but also includes piracy from places like Poland, Russia, etc where people were never going to buy the game anyway (not because they're dishonest, simply because the relative asking price to their situation is different).

All businesses want to make the maximum profit possible off their games, but it appears CD Project Red are primarily happy if the profits facilitate them making more games and specifically the games they want to see made. Valve is also, to a certain extent run by people who are interested in making games first and making money second, a lot of big publishers like Ubisoft, Activision and EA are however run by professional executives who see their job primarily as wealth creation though creating products that happen to be games.

[Sketch]

Come on, Valve hardly make games now. It's great what they do, but they manuvered themselves into a position where they can make money off almost everyone's games. They love money, most certainly.

[JaRDoS]

Come on, Valve hardly make games now. It's great what they do, but they manuvered themselves into a position where they can make money off almost everyone's games. They love money, most certainly.

Yes, yes they do. Their executive staff are very good at making money and have set up a plethora of revenue streams as well as pioneered new ways to make money off games.

However their executive staff are also in the game business because they love games, there's a great video from Gabe somewhere where he talks about how after his tour of duty of Microsoft he was essentially in a position where he could have retired in an extremely comfortable lifestyle and done nothing. Instead he wanted to do something so he founded a games company and the company has gotten heavily involved in gaming culture.

Valve's alternative revenue streams etc come from them seeing a need in game culture and finding a way to profit from filling it.
Steam is a convenient and easy way to buy games.
Team Fortress shop allows people to express their individuality in multi-player games and compete for status
etc etc etc

More traditional and professional executives are more interested in generating revenue through straight up sales of products and management of overheads, treating the industry as a standard business model rather than a culture or an emerging market.

[Sketch]

Oh I'm sure they're great guys but I wouldn't really equate them with CDProjekt. They are guys who are fantastic at tech and completely do what they want and make ok money, but mostly make games as you said, whereas Valve are far more handoffs in the games department these days. They make business decisions, not games, but they are thankfully in a position where these decisions usually profit them and gamers alike, and it's an endless spiral of 'woo Valve' with some 'where's Half Life 3' thrown in. I think the lack of Half Life says a lot, they don't need to do it at all, ever.

[JaRDoS]

Oh I'm sure they're great guys but I wouldn't really equate them with CDProjekt. They are guys who are fantastic at tech and completely do what they want and make ok money, but mostly make games as you said, whereas Valve are far more handoffs in the games department these days. They make business decisions, not games, but they are thankfully in a position where these decisions usually profit them and gamers alike, and it's an endless spiral of 'woo Valve' with some 'where's Half Life 3' thrown in. I think the lack of Half Life says a lot, they don't need to do it at all, ever.

I more got the impression that the lack of Half Life was mostly due to Valve getting overly ambitious and then discovering that they couldn't find solutions for some of their problems as well as maintain their production schedule for other games. Between Team Fortress 2, Portal and Left 4 Dead they've been setting themselves a high benchmark as innovators and wouldn't be unsurprising to find out that one of their concepts was proving difficult to actualise. This happens all the time in video game companies.

They still have been producing regular games, DLCs and working on product improvement though so they don't appear to be doing a 3D Realms.

CD Project Red on the other hand are relatively new on the scene and didn't start with the same capital that Valve did. The Witcher as a game is really one of an already diverse franchise (there are novels, comics, etc in Poland) and they're also the masterminds behind GoG (comparable to Steam, but with cheaper games/licenses due to age). So really I think it's not unfair to compare them. At the end of the day all companies need to generate profits to remain viable, what varies is the priorities and the techniques in doing so.

[Sketch]

A lot of Valve isn't really Valve. The DOTA guys and TF2 guys are from various other companies and weren't even really Valve's IP's. Left 4 Dead or Portal either. They see stuff they like and buy it, put it out as there own. It's not a criticism but Valve - the Half Life Valve, hasn't done anything for a long while.

You're right about GoG though, I'd forgotten about them. Either way CDProjekt get kicked in the nuts by pirates and it's really shit.

Edited by Sketch, 24 August 2012 - 09:02 PM.

[Acid_Operative]

"We release the game. It's cracked in two hours, it was no time for Witcher 2. What really surprised me is that the pirates didn't use the GOG version, which was not protected. They took the SecuROM retail version, cracked it and said 'we cracked it' -- meanwhile there's a non-secure version with a simultaneous release. You'd think the GOG version would be the one floating around."

Source

[JaRDoS]

A lot of Valve isn't really Valve. The DOTA guys and TF2 guys are from various other companies and weren't even really Valve's IP's. Left 4 Dead or Portal either. They see stuff they like and buy it, put it out as there own. It's not a criticism but Valve - the Half Life Valve, hasn't done anything for a long while.

That's partially true but kind of a misconception. Valve uses a very dynamic business model where every developer is multi-skilled and many are essentially capable of solo game development themselves. So when they buy an indy studio like those that started on Counterstrike, Left 4 Dead, Portal, TF2, etc they put other staff on the project who assist them to elevate the product from a small indy studio release to a full blown Valve product.

Gabe has stated that he hires to a standard, not to a quota, so essentially when he adds the indy studio to the staff pool they join and become part of the team and get assigned other team members to assist in the projects. This allows them to refine and polish their product. There's apparently a joke in Valve that everyone's desks have wheels at the bottom because so many staff are always moving from project to project to lend expertise or simply help out where the workload is provided.

For a long time there was a lot of speculation that the reason Half Life 2: Episode 3 hadn't been released was they were (as the link to Portal indicated) going to include the portal gun (or something similar) in the game and were running into game balance issues that you naturally expect when you combined Portal puzzles with FPS and gravity gun puzzles.

In cases like this, where you have a busy studio with a lot of creative projects on the go and have hit problem solving burnout it's quite common for people to put a project on the back burner to allow the staff time to find better technology, have a Eureka! moment or think of a clever way around the problem. While people are doing that, you can't have them sitting around the office drinking coffee and doing nothing so they get transferred to help the new guys with modelling terrain, playtesting, designing NPC models, incorporating tutorials into the game etc.

Since the long delay between episode 2 and episode 3 has kind of broken what Valve was expecting with episodic gaming and the company has found other more innovative products to work on (through purchasing indy studios) and put a low priority on continuing Half Life. That's just business. It's more or less the same was what comic publishers like Marvel and DC do when they find a title is going stagnant or the writer refuses to commit to another contract etc. They put it on the shelf and resume when they feel it's right.

It's just business and it's how small independent creators work too. It's better to work on projects you can complete and keep momentum than it is to stew over a project that's out of your reach for long periods of time. The latter causes your skills to atrophy, your judgement to shift, your perspective to become alien and your obsessions to start to take over.

Then you make Duke Nukem Forever or Daikatana.

[Captain Steve]

What would you do to combat the third type of pirate there?
Also;Fuck Timmy. Just because he can't afford to buy a game doesn't mean he's entitled to pirate them. I guess his situations explains his reasons, but it doesn't excuse them.

Timmy isn't entitled; but you're not going to eliminate Timmy. He doesn't have the rationale to understand what he's doing is wrong. He needs better parenting, but with as complicated as software and whatnot has become, there's a good chance his parents don't even realize what's going on. His parents teach him not to steal, but if his parents don't even understand what a torrent is they can't teach him that it's stealing.

As for the actual thieves, there's not much you can do to them that won't end up hurting regular users as well. There's gentle DRM practices that are tolerable: The serial numbers, the one time on-line activation, or (at least I thought until Max Payne 3) using online services like Steam for distribution so a game is registered with an account when it's installed.

For people who think all DRM should be destroyed, just think of the DRM you put up with in your daily life when you go shopping: There are tags on clothes that the cashier takes off when you buy them, the bank has security cameras that monitor and log you when you walk in, a Verizon cell phone requires activated and an AT&T phone needs a SIM card. These are all real life DRM to prevent people from stealing things. None of them are 100% effective, but we understand that 100% isn't possible. We need to understand that we can't stop 100% of piracy either, but we can curtail it by simple protection. The general rule needs to be that if it's going to hurt the paying customer more than the pirate then it's too intrusive.

That isn't to say that DRM is the only solution. The video game industry has started releasing half finished games that require massive 0-day patches, they release games that are so short they hardly fit the $60 price tag, and they promise the world in marketing to only find out that half the things they mentioned are hardly in the game. This all goes back to the demo thing earlier; your game needs to sell your game, not your marketing team. If people start to get wise that they're being sold snake oil then they're less likely to actually pay for stuff that is good.

I understand that development costs on triple-A titles is outrageous, and that Angry Birds style games are taking away pieces of the market, but you can only sell your product for what people are willing to pay for it.

[InterPanger Commerce]

Evryone agrees piracy will eventually win. It's like trolling,the more DRM and annoyace,the more piracy. Even my signature agrees.

[music is math]

For people who think all DRM should be destroyed, just think of the DRM you put up with in your daily life when you go shopping: There are tags on clothes that the cashier takes off when you buy them, the bank has security cameras that monitor and log you when you walk in, a Verizon cell phone requires activated and an AT&T phone needs a SIM card. These are all real life DRM to prevent people from stealing things. None of them are 100% effective, but we understand that 100% isn't possible.

They might not be 100% effective, but they're sure as hell a lot more effective than DRM. Also, they don't inconvenience legitimate customers the way DRM does.

The bottom line is that honest people are always going to pay for their games and pirates are always going to find ways to pirate them.