GoG on Piracy (DRM causes it?)

I found this article today and figured I'd share it with you guys to see your thoughts:

Personally, I thought it was a really good point and I totally agree. Now I need to look into using GoG occasionally.

 

Nice article, I also agree with this.

 

Didn't a company once release a game DRM free and in response 75% of the users were pirates?

 

Imho, that's what Steam is for.

EDIT:
Which means I guess I don't totally agree with the article. However, who knows if those same pirates would have purchased the game if they had been 100% unable to pirate it.

 

I just bought from EA when they had one of their many recent sales, NFS Hot Pursuit for $11 new. And yup i'll be first in line to use a fixed exe to it. I hate DRM, but I have never used it as an excuse to pirate. What DRM has done for me is to play more games on the PS3 and 360 instead of my PC.

I started buying a bunch of cheap Steam games during the last Holiday sales thinking they would use just Steam activation and most of the games used two types of DRM and one or two games had like three DRM checks, insane.

It was Ubisoft with Prince of Persia for the PC and they basically said they wanted to test if people would buy the game with no DRM. It was heavily pirated instead.

 

Minecraft grosses ~$33M....for selling an unfinished product??

who would have thunk???

 

It also has its own form of "drm" (online activation). Besides, the developer himself offers a free version for those who wanna try it.

 

I think I own half the games on GoG anyhow.

But MineCraft isn't intrusive or cause issues in any way. It's a one time activation afaik.

 

Dragon Age: Origins DLC Authentication Servers down....

still down since April 9.

who would have thunk???

 

@Rich - What do you mean by that? They removed the DRM? Or you can no longer access it because you can't authenticate?

 

That means customers purchased the game cannot play since the game requires server authentication.

 

Authentication = Activation = DRM. It's all the same.

 

The DRM in Spore actually prevented my wife from playing the game until I used a crack. Any game with a "disc in drive" type DRM is also immediately cracked. I'll put up with online-activation type DRM until it causes problems, then it gets cracked as well.

Steam hasn't caused me any issues so far, though I don't buy unless the game is massively discounted.

 

I think if a new release was $30 instead of $60, people would be less likely to pirate games...



It also helps if they a released on a wednesday on a full moon



(AKA) if you want the game, your going to get it one way or another...

 

Agreed, $20-$30 is my usual price point for things I really want. Until they fall to that level, I've got plenty of stuff I bought for under $10 during the last Steam Christmas sale to keep me busy.

Still don't have Crysis 2 yet

I guess I'm a cheapskate when it comes to software, but at the same time I've got several thousand tied up in just the three machines in my sig. Oh, how I wish my desk was big enough for a second and third monitor .

 

I think there was another game four, five years back (sorry, the name escapes me). Had a great rapport with the community and released its game free of DRM. Sold remarkably well, from what I remember reading.

Anyways, I'm not someone who pirates, but I certainly don't share the general thought that piracy seems to be the equivalent of moral decadence---I don't think I'd lose sleep at night, so I just don't understand the guilt. Just as people learn to cheat others, companies will find a way to make money.

Getting back, there may be some truth to the idea that people who play pirated games were more or less unlikely to buy it in the first place. And if you treat your customers like thieves (it's a heavy presumption with DRMs), you shouldn't be surprised if people did resort to piracy.

 

Referring to my second paragraph above, about companies finding a way to make money, I was quite impressed by League of Legends' business plan. It's not new, but it seems to work well for them. It's a system that doesn't try to hold on to the status quo, but rather evolve along with it. It's not as pathetic as companies spending more money into useless DRMs that can be bypassed with a quick Google search.

 

I personally dont pirate games, but in some cases i think its ok. For example, here some months ago i bought Stalker CoP in german. And i dont understand german good enough to play the game, so i downloaded it from torrentz. As a mater of fact i dont think its illegal. Because i do own the game and use regular serial code.... but anyways the DRM has never bothered me in a game... but i do think the DRM should not be removed.

 

DRM doesn't cause piracy. It just makes the problem worse while pretending to be a cure, much like homeopathy.

The real trick is to realize that people pirate for many reasons. Some because they just do that. NOTHING you will do will make them pay for the game, so they're not worth worrying about. Others do it because it's out of their price range. And still others do it because you don't give them a legal channel to buy it. With DRM, you have created yet another class, people who would buy it or DID buy it, and need the cracked version just to make it work. Keeping the DRM on just tells them that it's not worth buying your product.

 

The nice thing about gog.com is that I have a lot of older games on CD-ROM. The cracks out there are questionable and sometimes laced with viruses or worms or spyware. Many of them are false positives but still I don't like taking that chance. So hopefully gog keeps adding games to their library that are in mine. I'm literally buying the game twice then, but I don't care, because at least I have a good working copy that doesn't require CD.

Speaking of which, I just wish all publishers would release an official "No-CD" patch after a while. Granted these days its different because most is available through Steam or other online means, but the older stuff it would be nice.

 

Personaly I love how steam does it... one login check and able to play any of your games even offline... yet people are always complaining about how steam never works and is a piece of junk.... people need to get something faster then dial up then their shouldn't be a problem... steam even downloads at near line speed for me so I am always getting about 4-8mb down... As with otherforms of drm I don't mind games checking the release date before they let you play the game...but what I do have a issue with is that they force you to use their random authentication server (ie. Dragon age) to check if you have a good copy then allow you to play... that's just BS If I bought a game I want to own it..not just lease it from the publisher

On another note I forgot which dev said this but one of them were talking about how pirating actually helps sales... for example he stated that if one person pirated the game and then told/showed his friends how cool the game is then 3 of his friends went out to buy the game,

On a different note again.. one major reason why I some times pirate games is because devs don't understand how to make decent demos... they come out with these preview realses that are not the full game or buggy versions and hope that you will like the game.. For me I need to actually play the real game to see if I like it... about an hour or 2 after i play it is when I decide if its worth my $xx of moneies and usually its not (thank you Crappy console ports!) I still uninstall the game and just store the download on my media nas incase we have a lan party and someone forgets their disk and needs to reinstall then I have the copy ready to go

Edit: I just herd that gog just made a deal with lucasarts for their games.... I will be first in line for any and all x-wing games