PC Gaming & Piracy

The reason for this long post stems from the new supposedly anti-piracy measure for Mass Effect PC (as well as Spore). In summary, the game has copy protection measures that will require online validation every ten days to continue working.

"After the first activation, SecuROM requires that Mass Effect PC re-check with the server within ten days (in case the CD Key has become public/warez'd and gets banned)," said Derek French in a post on the BioWare forums.

If customers do not come online after ten days, the game will cease to function. "After 10 days a re-check is required before the game can run," added French.

The check is run when users activate the game's executable file, with the first re-check coming within "5 days remaining in the 10 day window."

I for one do not believe that these DRM methods are effective. Pirates will pirate, honest, legitimate customers will be royally inconvenienced.

I enjoy replaying old games, games like Icewind Dale, Planescape Torment, Total Annihilation and much more. The original developers of these games are gone, and in some cases, even their respective publishers. If these games had copy protection schemes like the ones being included in Mass Effect (PC), what am I to do?

As for referring to EA support to resolve issues related to this copy protection measure, I am skeptical that it would be a fast and painless experience, even without EA support already assuming that the caller is not a pirate.

The following are two articles offering various viewpoints on PC gaming and piracy. I believe they can shed some light on the matter. The first one is a column written by Loyd Case of ExtremeTech, the second one is a post by a developer on the Galactic Civilizations II forum.

Piracy, Copy Protection, and the Evolution of PC Gaming

By Loyd Case, March 3, 2008

I'm a PC gamer.

There, I've said it. These days, saying that seems to have an nostalgic, almost anachronistic sound. I predict that calling myself a PC gamer will be like someone today bragging about their 8-track collection.

That's not to say that PC gaming is doomed. But the days of PC gaming as I knew it is probably coming to an end, and something very different will be replacing it. One reason is the ongoing battle between game publishers and pirates.

Piracy is rampant in PC games. Piracy also exists in console gaming, but it's far more risky. Console game pirates have to burn physical media or even mod the consoles, which can result in legal games being unplayable and the modder being booted from online services, like Microsoft's Xbox Live.

PC gaming piracy, on the other hand, is easier. Crack the game, feed it to the world using Bittorent or other file sharing schemes, and the game is available to the world. In the past, the game publishers and developers have used a myriad of schemes to combat piracy. In the old days, you had games that literally booted from the floppy disk. Other games forced you to enter text directly from the manual to continue playing. Then there were the infamous code wheels, such as those shipped with some LucasArts flight sims.

Once optical drives became prevalent, various schemes were created to check for the presence of the CD. In addition, CD keys—essentially password checks to legally install a game—have become common. As pirates became smarter and more aggressive, copy protection became more elaborate. Schemes such as Starforce and the more recent versions of SecuROM created headaches for legitimate users, introducing compatibility and performance problems. Sometimes it's just too much of a headache to get a game running.

How rampant is copy protection? It's certainly very common in AAA games. Take this tidbid, snatched from Robert Bowling's blog. Robert is the community manager for Infinity Ward, creator's of the highly popular Call of Duty 4. In his post, "They Wonder Why People Don't Make PC Games Any More", Robert notes:

On another PC related note, we pulled some disturbing numbers this past week about the amount of PC players currently playing Multiplayer (which was fantastic). What wasn't fantastic was the percentage of those numbers who were playing on stolen copies of the game on stolen / cracked CD keys of pirated copies (and that was only people playing online).

Not sure if I can share the exact numbers or percentage of PC players with you, but I'll check and see; if I can I'll update with them. As the amount of people who pirate PC games is astounding. It blows me away at the amount of people willing to steal games (or anything) simply because it's not physical or it's on the safety of the internet to do.

On a related note, Iron Lore Entertainment shut down. The reasons are complex, but part of the problem may be lost sales of Titan Quest due to piracy. Michael Fitch, who worked closely with Iron Lore, offered up his thoughts:

So, ILE (shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

…

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually paid for them.

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Casual Games Suffer

It's not just a problem with standard PC games shipping on CD media. Even casual games suffer, as Russell Carroll of Reflexive noted in his Gamasutra column:

"It looks like around 92% of the people playing the full version of Ricochet Infinity pirated it." It's moments like those that make people in the industry stop dead in their tracks. 92% is a huge number and though we were only measuring people who had gotten the game from Reflexive and gone online with it, it seemed improbable that those who acquired the game elsewhere or didn't go online were any more likely to have purchased it. As we sat and pondered the financial implications of such piracy, it was hard to get past the magnitude of the number itself: 92%.

Not all publishers are suffering to this extent. Stardock, the developer of the Galactic Civilizations series and publisher of the well-received Sins of a Solar Empire have achieved success without using any form of physical copy protection. You do need a legitimate CD key to play online, but you don't need the physical disc in the drive. Sins of a Solar Empire sold 100,000 copies in its first three weeks—very good for an indie title with a small marketing budget.

You can argue that Stardock's games are something of a niche play, but one reason for Stardock's success is the constant pushing of fresh content for free to its legitimate users. On top of that, a substantial portion of Stardock's game profit came from direct sales through its online service, Totalgaming.net. Finally, Stardock doesn't make most of its revenue from games; its main focus and primary income are Windows utilities, such as TweakVista and WindowBlinds.

Still, this is one example of how piracy forcing PC gaming to evolve in different directions. Another direction is the increasing use of online services to manage legal content. An example of this is Valve Software's Steam. Steam helps users manage their game installations, acts as a game purchase tool for downloaded content, and provides content protection. It's not perfect, though. For Valve's own games, Steam works fine, but sometimes the content protection required by the original publisher of non-Valve games causes headaches, as occurred at the release of BioShock.

Microsoft is trying something similar with its Windows Live for Gaming, including trying to help develop standards for content protection. Valve is also moving into the arena of supplying their tools to third parties, without requiring distribution on Steam, by offering Steamworks. So it may be that online distribution and content protection through online authorization will be one way PC games evolve.

Other services, such as Wild Tangent, began as causal game services, and is now looking to move into the realm of higher budget, more traditional titles.

Of course, massively multiplayer online games essentially do this already. That idea is somewhat obscured by the monthly fees most MMOs charge, but the success of Guild Wars, which is an MMO-lite that gets its revenues from boxed product sales rather than regular fees, is another example of this approach.

Another model that some companies are considering is free. That is, the base game is free, but new content, or enhanced game play, may cost users additional money. Alternatively, advertising may play a role. EA plans on using a bit of both models with its upcoming Battlefield Heroes.

What's worrisome, though, is that even indie developers are thinking about abandoning the PC, which has long been the haven for small independent shops. Initiatives like Microsoft's XNA, as well as Xbox Live Arcade, enables small developers to participate in the console environment, ensuring greater protection and wider exposure.

This is one of the key issues that was behind the formation of the PC Gaming Alliance, but I have my doubts. But if the PCGA can force some kind of standardization for copy protection, that may be a good thing.

So the future of PC gaming is somewhat hazy. PCs will certainly remain a viable, vital part of the electronic gaming medium, but it's going to evolve into something quite different from the old boxed goods model. In fact, multiple models, such as free (with micropayments or ad-supported), online distribution and MMO-lite, may all coexist.

The monolithic world of PC gaming, then, will be dead. But instead of a single bird rising up from the ashes, we'll see multiple phoenixes, all viable, and all interesting.

Now, if I can just make my game work without having to install a new graphics driver for every hot game that comes out, I'll be happy. But that's a topic for a different column.

Piracy & PC Gaming

By Draginol Posted March 10, 2008 20:48:46

Recently there has been a lot of talk about how piracy affects PC gaming. And if you listen to game developers, it apparently is a foregone conclusion - if a high quality PC game doesn't sell as many copies as it should, it must be because of piracy.

Now, I don't like piracy at all. It really bugs me when I see my game up on some torrent site just on the principle of the matter. And piracy certainly does cost sales. But arguing that piracy is the primary factor in lower sales of well made games? I don't think so. People who never buy software aren't lost sales.

Is it about business or glory?

Most people who know of Stardock in the gaming world think of it as a tiny indie shop. And we certainly are tiny in terms of game development. But in the desktop enhancement market, Stardock owns that market and it's a market with many millions of users. According to CNET, 6 of the top 10 most popular desktop enhancements are developed by Stardock. Our most popular desktop enhancement, WindowBlinds, has almost 14 million downloads just on Download.com. We have over a million registered users.

If you want to talk about piracy, talk about desktop enhancements. The piracy on that is huge. But the question isn't about piracy. It's about sales.

So here is the deal: When you develop for a market, you don't go by the user base. You go by the potential customer base. That's what most software companies do. They base what they want to create on the size of the market they're developing for. But not PC game developers.

PC game developers seem to focus more on the "cool" factor. What game can they make that will get them glory with the game magazines and gaming websites and hard core gamers? These days, it seems like game developers want to be like rock stars more than businessmen. I've never considered myself a real game developer. I'm a gamer who happens to know how to code and also happens to be reasonably good at business.

So when I make a game, I focus on making games that I think will be the most profitable. As a gamer, I like most games. I love Bioshock. I think the Orange Box is one of the best gaming deals ever. I love Company of Heroes and Oblivion was captivating. My two favorite games of all time are Civilization (I, II, III, and IV) and Total Annihilation. And I won't even get into the hours lost in WoW. Heck, I even like The Sims.

So when it comes time to make a game, I don't have a hard time thinking of a game I'd like to play. The hard part is coming up with a game that we can actually make that will be profitable. And that means looking at the market as a business not about trying to be "cool".

Making games for customers versus making games for users

So even though Galactic Civilizations II sold 300,000 copies making 8 digits in revenue on a budget of less than $1 million, it's still largely off the radar. I practically have to agree to mow editors lawns to get coverage. And you should see Jeff Green's (Games for Windows) yard. I still can't find my hedge trimmers.

Another game that has been off the radar until recently was Sins of a Solar Empire. With a small budget, it has already sold about 200,000 copies in the first month of release. It's the highest rated PC game of 2008 and probably the best selling 2008 PC title. Neither of these titles have CD copy protection.

And yet we don't get nearly the attention of other PC games. Lack of marketing on our part? We bang on the doors for coverage as next as the next shop. Lack of advertising? Open up your favorite PC game publication for the past few months and take note of all the 2 page spreads for Sins of a Solar Empire. So we certainly try.

But we still don't get the editorial buzz that some of the big name titles do because our genre isn't considered as "cool" as other genres. Imagine what our sales would be if our games had gotten game magazine covers and just massive editorial coverage like some of the big name games get. I don't want to suggest we get treated poorly by game magazine and web sites (not just because I fear them -- which I do), we got good preview coverage on Sins, just not the same level as one of the "mega" titles would get. Hard core gamers have different tastes in games than the mainstream PC gaming market of game buyers. Remember Roller Coaster Tycoon? Heck, how much buzz does The Sims get in terms of editorial when compared to its popularity. Those things just aren't that cool to the hard core gaming crowd that everything seems geared toward despite the fact that they're not the ones buying most of the games.

I won't even mention some of the big name PC titles that GalCiv and Sins have outsold. There's plenty of PC games that have gotten dedicated covers that haven't sold as well. So why is that?

Our games sell well for three reasons. First, they're good games which is a pre-requisite. But there's lots of great games that don't sell well.

The other two reasons are:

* Our games work on a very wide variety of hardware configurations.
* Our games target genres with the largest customer bases per cost to produce for.

We also don't make games targeting the Chinese market

When you make a game for a target market, you have to look at how many people will actually buy your game combined with how much it will cost to make a game for that target market. What good is a large number of users if they're not going to buy your game? And what good is a market where the minimal commitment to make a game for it is $10 million if the target audience isn't likely to pay for the game?

If the target demographic for your game is full of pirates who won't buy your game, then why support them? That's one of the things I have a hard time understanding. It's irrelevant how many people will play your game (if you're in the business of selling games that is). It's only relevant how many people are likely to buy your game.

Stardock doesn't make games targeting the Chinese market. If we spent $10 million on a PC game explicitly for the Chinese market and we lost our shirts, would you really feel that much sympathy for us? Or would you think "Duh."

You need a machine how fast?

Anyone who keeps track of how many PCs the "Gamer PC" vendors sell each year could tell you that it's insane to develop a game explicitly for hard core gamers. Insane. I think people would be shocked to find out how few hard core gamers there really are out there. This data is available. The number of high end graphics cards sold each year isn't a trade secret (in some cases you may have to get an NDA but if you're a partner you can find out). So why are companies making games that require them to sell to 15% of a given market to be profitable? In what other market do companies do that? In other software markets, getting 1% of the target market is considered good. If you need to sell 500,000 of your game to break even and your game requires Pixel Shader 3 to not look like crap or play like crap, do you you really think that there are 50 MILLION PC users with Pixel Shader 3 capable machines who a) play games and b) will actually buy your game if a pirated version is available?

In our case, we make games that target the widest possible audience as long as as we can still deliver the gaming experience we set out to. Anyone who's looked at the graphics in Sins of a Solar Empire would, I think, agree that the graphics are pretty phenomenal (particularly space battles). But could they be even fancier? Sure. But only if we degraded the gaming experience for the largest chunk of people who buy games.

The problem with blaming piracy

I don't want anyone to walk away from this article thinking I am poo-pooing the effect of piracy. I'm not. I definitely feel for game developers who want to make kick ass PC games who see their efforts diminished by a bunch of greedy pirates. I just don't count pirates in the first place. If you're a pirate, you don't get a vote on what gets made -- or you shouldn't if the company in question is trying to make a profit.

The reason why we don't put CD copy protection on our games isn't because we're nice guys. We do it because the people who actually buy games don't like to mess with it. Our customers make the rules, not the pirates. Pirates don't count. We know our customers could pirate our games if they want but choose to support our efforts. So we return the favor - we make the games they want and deliver them how they want it. This is also known as operating like every other industry outside the PC game industry.

One of the jokes I've seen in the desktop enhancement market is how "ugly" WindowBlinds skins are (though there are plenty of awesome ones too). But the thing is, the people who buy WindowBlinds tend to like a different style of skin than the people who would never buy it in the first place. Natural selection, so to speak, over many years has created a number of styles that seem to be unique to people who actually buy WindowBlinds. That's the problem with piracy. What gets made targets people who buy it, not the people who would never buy it in the first place. When someone complains about "fat borders" on some popular WindowBlinds skin my question is always "Would you buy WindowBlinds even if there was a perfect skin for you?" and the answer is inevitably "Probably not". That's how it works in every market -- the people who buy stuff call the shots. Only in the PC game market are the people who pirate stuff still getting the overwhelming percentage of development resources and editorial support.

When you blame piracy for disappointing sales, you tend to tar the entire market with a broad brush. Piracy isn't evenly distributed in the PC gaming market. And there are far more effective ways of getting people who might buy your product to buy it without inconveniencing them.

Blaming piracy is easy. But it hides other underlying causes. When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.

In the end, the pirates hurt themselves. PC game developers will either slowly migrate to making games that cater to the people who buy PC games or they'll move to platforms where people are more inclined to buy games.

In the meantime, if you want to make profitable PC games, I'd recommend focusing more effort on satisfying the people willing to spend money on your product and less effort on making what others perceive as hot. But then again, I don't romanticize PC game development. I just want to play cool games and make a profit on games that I work on.