Comments on: Piracy, Customers, and Making Money

By: EA’s New Copy Protection « Double Buffered

EA’s New Copy Protection « Double Buffered — Wed, 07 May 2008 08:54:02 +0000

[...] 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 [...]

By: Brad Wardell on GFW Radio Podcast « Double Buffered

Brad Wardell on GFW Radio Podcast « Double Buffered — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 06:45:57 +0000

[...] by JZig on April 2, 2008 If you read my recent post on piracy, you ‘ll probably be interested in a recent Games For Windows (The Magazine and not [...]

By: Joe Wreschnig

Joe Wreschnig — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:09:25 +0000

GameSetWatch ran some interesting articles about piracy in casual games (part 2) which are interesting because they show a lot of really hard figures. The interesting thing to take away is that the biggest sales jump came when they broke "exploits" like deleting registry keys - breaking keygens and cracks had little effectiveness. That is, the changes affected no one usually identified as a "pirate". Another thing you didn't mention is the role of pirates in keeping gaming history - and thereby entire franchises - alive. Do you think Pit would've been in Brawl if people weren't still emulating Kid Icarus?

By: David Hunt

David Hunt — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:30:14 +0000

I’ve been a loyal Stardock customer since the first GalCiv. I like them, and they treat their old customers well. I bought Space Rangers 2 during its retail launch. I love that game, but it’s incredibly painful to play. It routinely took over 15 minutes to start the game because of Starforce. That’s unacceptable, especially when I only have an hour to play. Now, I’ve been thinking about buying it through Stardock/TotalGaming.net even though I already own it… just because of the lack of DRM.

By: Loredena

Loredena — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 16:28:10 +0000

I bought Gal Civ 2 in large measure because of the lack of copy protection. I love Civ4, but I wasn’t sure I’d enjoy a space civ game as much — but I gave it a try simply because I wanted to support Stardock. I really enjoyed it, but never finished it — but I bought the expansion anyway.

I’m over 40, I’ve been playing PC games since the IBM PC came out in the early 80s, and I buy my games. But I play a lot of different games, and I hate having to hunt for CDs, so the first thing I do is load them into Virtual Drive. I BUY my games, I don’t pirate them, (and since my husband and I often play together, we sometimes buy two copies!) but I’m the one hurt by the copy-protection. My husband’s CD drive actually stopped working after he installed a DEMO! with Starforce installed — let’s just say neither of us will buy a game we know uses Starforce now…..

By: JZig

JZig — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:43:07 +0000

Darius; yeah, you’re probably right about it being the publisher who demanded the DRM. Unfortunately it’s basically impossible to figure out who did what, so I’ll soften that a bit.

By: JZig

JZig — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 20:41:48 +0000

Wolfe; you seem to be right. I have apparently mixed up my pc games. Argh. I’ll correct the article so I don’t erroneously slam a competitor

By: Darius K.

Darius K. — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:52:51 +0000

I’m reasonably certain it was THQ and not Iron Lore who put the shitty DRM in Titan Quest. It’s almost always just a part of the standard publisher checklist for Gold Master Candidate: “Does the game have DRM? If not, we won’t publish it.” The sad thing is the GMC stuff is often looked at last minute, so the developer freaks out and lets the publisher put in whatever shitty DRM they want without thinking about the ramifications, or possibly even testing it.

By: Wolfe

Wolfe — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:12:35 +0000

You have a strange version of WoW. I heard you can even doawnload the whole client from Blizzard if you want to these days. Maybe you got a broken batch of CD’s with some stupid protection on them. When I started playing WoW I just updated the server list file from containing beta servers to point at the live server list and viola. No CD involved until Burning Crusade time.