Double Buffered

As an update to my earlier post on Mass Effect and Spore DRM, EA has changed it’s mind. The new scheme for both games is online activation when you first play, and activation when you go online for new content or community features. This is a reasonable scheme, although they’re keeping the 3 activation limit. They claim to solve this with: “EA customer service is on hand to supply any additional authorizations that are warranted. This will be done on a case-by-case basis by contacting customer support.” So it’s not as good as Steam, but it’s at least moderately acceptable.

The actually interesting bit is that EA changed their mind on this. My theory is that BioWare wasn’t particularly happy with the DRM, so started talking about it as soon as possible, knowing there would be this backlash. BioShock’s DRM wasn’t talked about before launch, and they sort of tried to sneak it in, while this is the opposite. So, seeing the reaction of the internet, Penny Arcade included, BioWare had some leverage to push back on the EA corporate/legal masters to try and get a more reasonable DRM scheme in place. The needs of our armed forces were specifically mentioned (they often go overseas with no internet for months at a time). Anyway, the system isn’t perfect, but it does show that publishers are responsive to customer complaints. We as consumers need to keep up the complaints, and not let publishers get away with this kind of shit. This proves we can do something about it.

Update: EA changed their mind.

Derek French from BioWare revealed the copy protection plans for Mass Effect and Spore on Saturday.  In response, the internet erupted in indignation. Because of what I’ve said before, I’m going to join in. This is a horrible idea. If you didn’t follow it, the summary is that Mass Effect and Spore PC will use a new copy protection system from SecuROM. A physical DVD is no longer needed (yey!), but you can still only install it on a max of 2-3 computers (boo). The new exciting feature is that the game needs to talk to the SecuROM servers every 10 days or else the game shuts down entirely. Let me say that again. If you successfully install and validate your game, and then lose internet access, you can no longer play your entirely single player game. I feel very bad for BioWare and Maxis, because this is a horrible idea that will lose them money.

This is the most blatantly anti-consumer DRM yet in the gaming space. I have a laptop that I use for half gaming and half travelling. I only boot it up every month or so, and often immediatly take it on a trip where I play games on it. Galactic Civilizations 2 is great for long airplane rides. With this new Copy Protection, I would not be able to play any games on this laptop. This is exactly the kind of invasive DRM that the music industry was pushing down our throats 5 years ago. Remember when it seemed a given that ultra-restrictive spyware-ridden copy protection was the only way we would be able to get music in the future? At the time, I didn’t believe some of my software activist friends who said that music DRM could be stopped, but they were right. These days, large parts of the music industry have smartened up, and it is actually easier and more convenient to buy music today than it is to steal it (via eMusic, Amazon Music Store, iTunes without DRM, Radiohead).

Here’s what the music industry realized, and what most game publishers haven’t: tech-savvy consumers are willing to pay for convenience, guaranteed service, and community involvement. What they’re NOT willing to pay for is crippled software, technically buggy activation schemes, and guaranteed obsolescence. What does DRM do? It encourages people to use pirated software, because the pirated software is free of all the broken crap that comes with all DRM schemes, ever. The only people that DRM helps are DRM providers (yet none of them have been able to ship a solution that even vaguely stops piracy), and software pirates. It certainly doesn’t help developers or users.

There are two correct ways to approach copy protection for PC games:

1. Heavily integrate online functionality into your title, and tie copy protection to the online functionality. This is the approach taken by Valve, Blizzard, and all MMOs. Because online functionality is a key component of the game, the fact that validation is tied to it does not feel artificial and anti-consumer. You can also bundle it with pro-consumer functionality such as anti-cheating, software updates and community interaction. I have absolutely no idea why Spore isn’t taking this approach, because that game has significant online functionality.
2. Take a simple, one-time stab at protection, and then get out of the way. A simple one-time validation check like Steam does, or some sort of unlimited install-time verification, is not invasive and will stop the casual pirates who aren’t technically apt. Stardock chooses to skip this step, which is their choice but I do feel they’re losing a bit of money. But, once you’ve verified that the copy is valid, you need to get out of the way. A one-time check is not seen as intrusive and will generate no user and press ill will.

If you try to tack online validation into a single player title, it will come off as invasive, insulting, and condescending. Yes, SecuROM does basically the same thing as WoW, but it feels a lot different, because it has no legitmate purpose outside of telling players what they can’t do. I don’t want to feel like a thief, and I prefer to actually be one (for games with invasive DRM, I often buy the game, never open it, and install a pirated copy). I’m definitely not going to be installing a commercial PC copy of Mass Effect or Spore, and if you want this kind of crap to end you shouldn’t either.

This week, the lead designer of City of Heroes announced the future addition of user-created content. I don’t have any insider information (since CoH got sold to NCSoft, Cryptic has nothing to do with it), but it’s definitely still a story worth talking about. Based on the one paragraph description and my knowledge of the mission system in CoH, basically what they’re talking about is a way for users to create and share the kind of missions that City of Heroes shipped with. So, I would expect full control over things like enemy types, general map tileset, and flavor text of all kinds. This is pure speculation, but I wouldn’t necessarily expect much in the way of complicated mission behavior or custom map layouts. You might be able to make a map entirely out of that horrible 6 level cave tile piece, but if you do no one will want to play it.

This is a limited, but essential, first step towards a fully user-created MMO. This should satisfy most of the desire to create interesting story and narrative, and I fully expect users to fill out the fiction of the CoH universe, as well as create their own crazy parralel narrative spaces. The most exciting part of this for me is that it’s kind of like fully integrated, officially sponsored fan fiction within the community context of an MMO. I thought some of the writing in CoH was superb, but some of these missions will certainly reach or exceed that level. However, most of them will be useless dreck.

There are a bunch of problems that need to be solved for user-content in an MMO to be a viable and worthwhile endeavor. The first one is content guidelines. Since this is basically fan fiction, it will be about 10 seconds before someone makes a mission involving Statesman having sex with Miss Liberty or something. What will NCSoft’s response to this be? Are they planning on manually screening all content, or depending on community policing? Manual screening has huge manpower requirements that I doubt NCSoft really wants to sign up for, and community policing suffers from the problem that, hey, maybe the community really does want to see Statesman/Miss Liberty. How will the designers and managers of CoH deal with a community that doesn’t necessarily agree with them on what is acceptable or desired? The history of CoH is about this conflict between community and creator, and I’m very curious how the new management will handle it.

Beyond that, the two other major problems are exploits and the issue of content quality rating. There’s a continuum between freedom (which leads to easily exploitable gameplay that could break the rest of the game) and control (where the user’s creative urges are restricted too much and dramatically reduce fun. ie, Supergroup Bases). The current Dev team is headed much more in the direction of freedom, so I’m curious where they’re going to end up when it comes to user missions. I think the concept is cool enough that they should really just live with the fact that someone might be able to make a power-levelling mission. As for user content quality rating, I imagine they’re just going to copy YouTube. Seems to work well enough, but there’s a lot of complication in the details, and if they screw that up, the 99% of crap that is all user content will overwhelm and destroy the good 1%. There has to be a way to get a reliably good mission experience, or else most users will never try it and the system will be a failure.

This is the first step towards a new (well, or just renewed) vision of MMOs. Because of budgetary and creative reasons (competing directly with WoW is a guaranteed losing proposition), the future of MMOs is in dynamic, changing content. What the CoH team proposed won’t get us all the way there, but I’m VERY curious as to how this limited experiment works out.

As I’ve mentioned before, I love the ease of use and community features of Steam. Valve and the publishers they get on there actually seem to WANT me to buy games from them, unlike brick and mortar publishers and other (non-Stardock) game download services. I just ran into a great example of that.

I’ve noticed lately that several of my Steam friends have been playing Civilization 4: Beyond the Sword. I picked up Civilization 4 a few years ago, and enjoyed it. I’d never purchased the Beyond the Sword expansion pack though, which I hear is quite good. I was on the edge between repurchasing the game via steam (because I can’t stand physical CDs), or just forgetting about it, when I noticed the note on the Beyond the Sword steam page: “Civilization IV: Beyond the Sword requires Sid Meier’s Civilization IV to play and will work with boxed retail versions as well as the Steam version.” Sure, that’s technically possible, but it seems so pro-consumer that I was just confused. Would it actually work to install the steam version over top my 2 year old copy protected and out of data copy of Civ 4?

Well, I installed Civ4, and then tried to buy the expansion pack (it failed before I installed Civ 4 which makes sense). It detected my copy, and let me buy the expansion pack. I am now installing a Steamified $20 expansion pack that also makes it so Civ4 doesn’t need the CD in the drive any more. I’ll uninstall my old copy of Civ 4, and tada, I have Civilization 4 and Beyond the Sword for Steam. I’m continually surprised when software actually works in the way I would want it to, but Steam does this enough that I’m in danger of starting to trust it…

About a week ago, my monthly copy of GameDeveloper magazine showed up. Incidentally, if you sign up for an account on Gamasutra, after a few months they’ll probably send you a free subscription. I recommend it, as the magazine contains useful information for both game developers and aspiring game developers. The April issue has something particularly interesting, which is the results of the 2007 salary survey. There’s a good summary in this article, but I wanted to highlight a few specific points:

Education is not really that big of a deal within the games industry when it comes to salary. In the case of programmers, developers with an Associate’s degree make just as much as developers with a Bachelor’s. Programmers with uncompleted college work actually make MORE than those with a Bachelor’s (generally because such people get hired before graduating), and only slightly less than those with Master’s degrees. Artists with a Bachelor’s make $5k more than those with an Associate’s, and for design it’s $10k (and designers make less overall, so this is a big difference). Having a degree may make it easier to get a job doing game programming, but you won’t get paid more.

For all of the disciplines, developers with 0-3 years of experience make about 60% as much as (non-lead) developers with >6 years of experience. Developers with 0-3 years of experience make about 45% as much as lead developers with >6 years of experience. So, in all of the disciplines there is significant room for advancement as far as salaries go. In business and Q/A, leads make about 3 times as much as beginners, so in those it can pay to stay around. A top level Q/A tester still makes less than a beginner designer, though. Q/A is not the kind of job that you want to try and sustain a family on.

Here’s the rather sad table of gender and compensation:

Wow. Overall, females in the gaming industry make 13% less than males. This is below the national wage difference (although still horrible), and is somewhat reasonable in Programming, Art, and Q/A. The gaps in Design and Business (30% less!) are significantly larger, however. I’m going to go out on a limb and blame this on gender differences at the higher levels in Business and Design. I know many great female designers down in the trenches, but how many famous female lead designers can you name? I’d wager it’s way less than 8%. Same for CEOs and high-level executives of game companies. The games industry is a reasonable place for women to work in terms of salary, but there are obviously gender problems at the top.

A few days ago, John Rose from Nihilistic Software wrote a feature for Gamasutra. The basic thrust of the piece is that if you overfill a game with game mechanics, they complicate the game, confuse the player, suck development time, and dilute the game’s identity. I totally agree with this premise, and I love his concept of a “play aesthetic”. The idea of that is that a game will have a central thrust and point, and any mechanic that fails to reinforce that thrust should be struck from the game. This creates a focused, cohesive experience. So far so great. Then he decides that giving players different options on how to overcome goals always dilutes the play aesthetic and says that Bioshock suffers from too many mechanics.

Okay, that’s just crazy. Here’s the choice quote:

BioShock is an example a great game whose giant mechanic set only weakens its play aesthetic. While the title’s story and environment have set the bar for many games to come, there’s just too much to do. In many a difficult situation players are left to decide between their guns, plasmid powers, hacking, stealth, and the use of one-shot items.

There’s one very clear and specific problem with this statement: The Play Aesthetic of BioShock is player choice within an interactive environment! That’s the whole point of the game! Everything from the plot (which is clearly about choice/lack of choice), the power up system (you get to choose your own evolution), to enemy encounters (Big Daddy fights are specifically left open ended to encourage different ways of dispatching them) reinforce this central aesthetic. With every choice a player makes, they integrate themselves more fully with their character and their environment, and the game really is about building that relationship (only to have it questioned by the plot). You can make an argument that BioShock didn’t go as far as it could with this Play Aesthetic (the hacking minigame in particular sticks out as being counter to player choice, and I have serious problems with the last 3rd of the plot), but I don’t have a clue what the “Real” Play Aesthetic of BioShock is that is somehow betrayed by giving the players options. Also, Irrational/2K spent a lot of time refining their mechanics throughout development. The original design had a much more complicated ecosystem involving dynamic population of various enemies, but that was reduced to the much more focused Big Daddy/Little Sister dynamic.

In my opinion BioShock is the best game of the past 5 years to embrace the Play Aesthetic of player choice, and that’s why it’s such an awesome game. I still Think Deus Ex is the best choice-based game of all time, but that’s for another column.

Last week, I linked to the GFW Podcast. This week, Games for Windows: The Magazine is no more. I’ll admit that I haven’t particularly enjoyed the magazine over the last 3-4 years (although apparently it got better recently), but I used to love it back when it was Computer Gaming World. It was one of the first gaming magazines I ever read, and I mourn it’s passing. The podcast lives on (and they kept all the editors for online stuff), but the legacy of CGW is basically at an end.

In memorial, I pulled out the oldest copy of the magazine I have: Computer Gaming World, March 1993, Issue 104. The cover featured Spectrum HoloByte’s The Iron Helix, a game I don’t even remember. Based on the article, it appears to be one of those exciting CD-ROM FMV games that were popular in the early 90’s. The quality of the magazine is pretty shitty, thus proving that I was not very considerate of of my personal posessions when I was 10 years old. I’m amazed the cover is still attached, actually. Here’s assorted highlights of awesomeness:

• Page 12 features an ad for a play-by-mail (snail mail) game called Portinium II. “Receive over twenty double-sided pages of high-quality Laser Graphics output per turn. $10.00 per turn. 3-week turnaround.” I remember thinking to myself that this sounded like a really stupid idea.
• Page 14 is an overview of the exciting new world of CD-ROM FMV games.
• Page 31 is an ad for Wolfenstein 3d. “More like an interactive movie than an arcade game.”
• Page 33 is an ad for GEnie, and features a picture of an incredibly stupid-looking guy with the title “this one wants to rip your lungs out.” Online gaming ads haven’t changed much.
• Page 36 is a review of Star Control 2, and features an awesome picture of a Shofixti. “Star Control II has been placed on this reviewer’s top ten list of all time”. Still true.
• Page 60 is a review of Eric the Unready, a fun parody text adventure that fans should pick up. The page featured a picture of a pig.
• Page 78 features a horrible review of Stunt Island. It’s structured as an interview with a fictional movie director. Wow, what a bad idea.
• Page 84 complains about the lackluster endings of the majority of PC games. Yeah, that hasn’t changed.
• Page 102 is a company profile of Bethesda Softworks. “For example, one finds more expensive towels in the shower room at Bethesda’s offices than one finds in most hotels.” This article praises the management practices of the company, but it made me think that Bethesda would never get anywhere, due to it being an incredibly boring place to work.
• Page 104: “The solution for piracy is just around the corner with CD-ROM software.”
• Page 124 is a review of Comanche Maximum Overkill. Voxels!
• The last page is an add for Subversion 1.0. It’s a submarine strategy game.

I miss the 90’s era of PC gaming. It’s not the same these days. Also, get off my lawn.

If you read my recent post on piracy, you ‘ll probably be interested in a recent Games For Windows (The Magazine and not Live or really Microsoft in any way) Radio Podcast. Brad Wardell, who’s the CEO of Stardock games is the guest on the April 2nd podcast. The Brad-heavy content starts around the 40 minute mark, and the next hour is basically an interview of Brad. If you’re interested in jewish stereotypes, crazy religious RTS players, or Mythos (which does sound pretty cool), make sure to not skip the first 40 minutes. I find it (as well as 1up Yours) to be solidly amusing and informative podcasts, that I often listen to while playing games.

Anyway, on to the relevant content. Brad talks about everything, from the death of PC gaming, to piracy, to their next games, to Games For Windows, to competing with Steam. Here’s some highlights for those people who are deaf or lazy:

• The old “Publish a physical game to retail and then one expansion pack” model is dead, because of the hard limit on number of PC copies you can sell, and the rising costs for “Triple A” games.
• “I try to make games that cost less to create than they generate in revenue, and this is radical”
• Because most publishers are publicly held companies, they’re obsessed with Gross (sales) instead of Net (sales - cost) income. Wall street doesn’t give a shit about profitability, only size. As a result big publishers will only even try to make games that can sell a million copies, instead of making more, smaller, and more profitable games. (This is why I never want Cryptic to go public)
• As an example, Atari wanted Stardock to make Master of Magic 2 and Star Control 4, but Atari decided that they wouldn’t sell a million copies, so they wouldn’t go forward with the probably extremely profitable projects.
• NPD numbers do not include either digital distribution, or Wall Mart, so the sales numbers have very little to do with actual sales.
• Master of Orion 3 contained a flyer for Galactic Civilizations. So, everyone who bought MoO3 and realized how much it BLEW CHUNKS, they went go buy GalCiv, and now Stardock has lots of money. (So I guess MoO3 was not in fact the worst thing ever)
• They’re working on a new fantasy strategy game, which is basically Master of Magic 2 (but not branded). “You design your own units, you have all kinds of cool spells… when you zoom out it turns into a cloth map… players can create their own content and submit it, it’s part of the game” (Awesome)
• “The idea is that you make a game, and you then sell it to people who want to play the game. And so if you make the people who buy your game happy, they’re more likely to buy your next game”
• Stardock takes direct player input and suggestions via forums, but they’re assholes about it and ignore most of it. (Works for Cryptic too)
• He reiterated his argument on piracy from his forum post (which I talked about before), so I won’t bother recapping.
• Making your PC game a “Games for Windows” game involves submitting a game months in advance for approval. You also aren’t allowed to make a launcher executable, and aren’t allowed to add to the start menu (unlike MS’s games). They didn’t consider Games for Windows Live because MS wanted to charge for everything distributed by the service (ie for new content). On the positive side, getting branded as Games For Windows gives you a good amount of free advertising, and significant help in getting retailer promotional support.
• Stardock is apparently going to launch a Steam competitor, called Impulse (to replace TotalGaming), and will be making a big push to become the #2 digital distribution platform. He talked a lot about how he thinks PC Players want a choice of distribution networks. (I actually sort of think he’s wrong here, and want Steam to win just because of the community features. Having a #2 around in case Steam starts to suck would be nice though)

“Think outside the box” is one of those catchy phrases that management-types like to throw around so much. The idea is that to come up with new and creative ideas, one needs to throw away all preconceptions and start with a blank slate. Unless you’re solving puzzles in a great game like Professor Layton (where it’s needed to solve probably 50% of the puzzles), this advice is basically worthless. It’s like handing someone a crayon and saying “draw something”. Unless that person already had something in mind, you’re probably going to get some incredibly boring scribbles. That’s not creativity. The human brain does not generate new, interesting ideas from some magical font of inspiration, they come from other ideas.

Whenever we do a brainstorm session at work for some game system or other, we always start out by listing some Principles. These principles are the Box from within we start our work. It’s easy to start filling out the obvious ideas that are implied by the principles, so we do that. Then come the variations and clarifications, where each person adds in ideas that are reflective of their own personal experiences and ideas. Random personal anecdotes from one person are combined with the game that another person played last night, and a crazy idea that combines them comes from a third person. Eventually, we realize that 2 of the principles we came in with were flawed, and we remove them. By the end of it we have a bunch of stuff that is exploding out the original box, and enough ideas to start making a game. This is creativity, and this is exactly how every great rock band or classical composer works. It can be a collaborative process between individuals, or one within a single person’s brain, but it works the same.

But there’s no guarantee that thinking within a box will ever generate new, creative ideas. Sometimes, it just results in incredibly focused iteration on a core concept, and never changes direction. In fact, smart people working on a problem will solve it in this way unless they can’t. The key is some sort of disruption to the focused iteration. In rock bands of 20th century, this disruption often seemed to be drugs. For the classical composers, I imagine it was often the whim of their patrons. In my example above, it was the interaction between disparate individuals in a group. And for much of the history of video and computer games, that disruption has been Technology.

Early arcade games were interesting because of the technical limitations, not in spite of them. Space Invaders is about aliens because planes were too hard to render, and the aliens speed up as you kill them because the game had to compute fewer aliens. Mario was red and had a mustache because it provided better visual contrast. The proliferation of character stats and levelling in PC RPGs compensates for the failure to bond with your player character through more direct means. Inability to represent motivations artistically led designers to add more complicated and interesting behavior to non-player characters. Striving against technical limitations drove all of the innovation in the 3D space and kept things interesting through the PS2 generation.

So why are games less creative and innovative these days? Well, we’ve basically destroyed all of the technical limitations, and are now in the “focused iteration” part of the creative process. There’s not enough disruption in the industry to create the real creativity needed to move us up to the cultural level of movies or music. Going forward I see two promising routes: Indie Games, and integrating ideas from outside the industry. Indie Games drive creativity in the exact same way as music and movies, by being limited in terms of resources. When you have very little money, you come up with creative solutions to problems. Also, there are many ideas from other media that are yet to be effectively integrated into the medium of games, and there is much fertile ground there. But, we can’t rely on the cycle of technical improvement to disrupt us from our boring but satisfying process of optimizing for the faithful.

Stardock Software developed and published one of my favorite games of the last few years, Galactic Civilizations 2. If you’re not a fan of totally awesome turn-based space conquest games (and if you aren’t you should be), you may have heard about their stance on DRM. Specifically, they’re against it and ship all their games without it. Starforce (a leading DRM provider) decided it would be nice to encourage people to pirate Galactic Civilizations 2 in order to send a message. Classy that. Anyway, Brad Wardell (CEO of Stardock) recently posted a great essay on Piracy.You should go read it now, it offers a really interesting perspective.

As Brad outlines, the PC Gaming industry’s insane focus on anti-piracy comes from a fundamental misunderstanding of the marketplace. The basic business plan of PC gaming is two phase: Get as many people as possible to want to play your game, and then get as many of them as possible to pay for it. The concept of “Conversion Rate” in the casual gaming space is an example of this sort of process. DRM makes perfect sense in this context, because it limits the number of people who can play your game without paying for it. Surely the increase in sales totally justifies paying some shady software company or large conglomerate high rates for DRM protection.

If only that worked. Copy protection is always beaten, and fairly quickly. In the most important point in the essay, Brad argues that you should make games for people who will buy your game. The absolute number of people who play your game is important for developer ego and bragging to our relatives, but it doesn’t necessarily make you money. The solution Stardock has is to make games within a profitable genre. There may be fewer fans of turn-based space conquest games, but almost all of them are willing to pay for their games, as opposed to FPS or RTS fans. Stardock also makes an explicit effort to cater to the needs of their paying customers as opposed to potential users. This is the same reason that the subscription-based MMO model works. Our job in the MMO market is to serve our customer base and give them something valuable and unique for the money they give us. Our job is not to sell packaged goods to people who don’t need them. Some people will steal your game, but basically you’re better off just writing them off as a lost cause.

It’s not safe to totally ignore pirates, though. Pirates perform one important task relative to your game: they talk about it on internet forums and to their friends. Early adopters in the PC space are often pirates, and they can be effective for word of mouth advertising. There are other ways to get this kind of publicity (demos and free trials are just as good), but pissing off pirates will just make them angry and spiteful. Michael Fitch, head of the recently closed Iron Lore Entertainment, posted his own essay about piracy. It’s an interesting read and offers a counterpoint to Brad Wardell, because they basically totally disagree. One of the points Michael made struck me as absolutely insane though: the copy protection on Titan Quest caused random crashes on pirated copies and didn’t inform the pirates of why it crashed. Let me make this clear: This is the worst idea ever. Apparently pirates started talking about their crashes on forums and the game became known as unstable. Michael blames the pirates for this, but I’m going to have to say that I blame whoever mandated this decision (probably someone at the publisher) for killing their own word of mouth.

The last important point Brad makes is that all of their games purposefully target lower system requirements. World of Warcraft also does this very successfully, and I strongly believe that the days of targeting only high-end systems is now over. It turns out that people who buy expensive high end systems are early adopters who all know how to download cracked games from bittorrent sites. They’re also the kind of people who don’t tolerate the restrictions of DRM. And there aren’t that many of them. So if you’re targeting higher-end systems, you are targeting the small set of users who have those machines, have enough money left over to buy games, and who are willing to jump through hoops to buy instead of download your game.  This is totally obvious from a business standpoint, but it’s still hard to convince many in the game development community to buy in. The whole industry is still addicted to shiny new toys.

On a personal note, CD-based copy protection is basically the stupidest thing ever. You know what I do to every single game I purchase? I immediately download a no-CD crack and install it. I then return the CD to the packaging and never touch it again. Sometimes this fails, so I basically only download games from Steam these days.

In conclusion, trying to convert pirates into paying customers is basically always going to fail. Why would I buy and reinstall a game after I’ve tried it out using piracy? DRM is based on the theory of preventing people from being able to pirate in the first place, but this doesn’t work. Blaming pirates for the failure of your game is a waste of time, because the vast majority of them wouldn’t have bought your game anyway. The way to make money in the PC gaming industry is either to get as many initially paying customers as possible (by focusing on market segments with a lower rate of piracy and providing convenient download services like Steam), or by setting up a business model that is NOT about shipping packaged product. PC Games are not cans of Soup, and never will be.

UPDATE: I originally had a section about how it’s stupid that WoW has copy protection on it’s Cds but I appear to have confused my PC games. I should remember to check this stuff before blogging…