Gabe Newell "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology"

ríomhaire

gizmo wrote: »

I don't understand why Newell keeps peddling this "don't put in anti-piracy tech and you'll stop piracy" argument, it's been proven on numerous occassions that it simply isn't true.

hooradiation has already pointed out the Humble Indie Bundle debacle but there was also similar incidents such as with Demigod, World of Goo and the disgusting levels of piracy for GoG content.

Hell, let's look at last years most pirated games on the PC from last year...

1 Call of Duty: Black Ops (4,270,000)
2 Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (3,960,000)
3 Mafia 2 (3,550,000)
4 Mass Effect 2 (3,240,000)
5 Starcraft II (3,120,000)

Now, four of those games were on Steam, the platform which gives "people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates" yet look at those figures. Now I'm not in any way insinuating these are lost sales, they quite clearly aren't, but when you have statements being made like this.



Then I don't understand why people can't see some form of DRM is required.

Disclaimer: I love Steam, I think it's ****ing great.

Black Ops and Mafia 2 require Steam, Bad Company requires an EA Account, Starcraft II requires a Battle.Net account. All these games had DRM so I don't see how they they show that some form of DRM is required when they had DRM but still managed to be the most pirated games.

hooradiation

ríomhaire wrote: »

Black Ops and Mafia 2 require Steam, Bad Company requires an EA Account, Starcraft II requires a Battle.Net account. All these games had DRM so I don't see how they they show that some form of DRM is required when they had DRM but still managed to be the most pirated games.

I think you're misunderstanding.
Gabe Newell believes that using DRM as a service is the easiest way to stop piracy - yet the games there all use DRM as a service solutions (Steam and BNet) and their piracy rates don't look very stopped to me.

It might seem to work for Valves games, but it's not a universal solution.

Genghiz Cohen

hooradiation wrote: »

Gabe Newell believes that using DRM as a service is the easiest way to stop piracy

Gabeinator wrote:

The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology

hooradiation

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

Steam is DRM as a service. It's not complicated.
Unless you think Gabe Newell is advocating that people don't use steam.... which seems stupid.

ríomhaire

All he said was that you need to provide a better service than pirates to win customers. He never said "use DRM as a service" and he certainly never said that you will wipe out piracy by providing a better service. People will always pirate. You know that, I know that and he knows that. He's just talking about how his company has been providing better service that the pirates and how many other companies are providing a worse service than pirates.

hooradiation

ríomhaire wrote: »

All he said was that you need to provide a better service than pirates to win customers. He never said "use DRM as a service"

Jesus wept.

Steam is the service he's talking about, Steam is DRM.
Therefore the way to stop piracy, according to Mr Newell, is to mimic the steam model where the DRM is also a service that is good enough to make people want to use it.

This is not open to interpretation.

Genghiz Cohen

hooradiation wrote: »

Jesus wept.

Steam is the service he's talking about, Steam is DRM.
Therefore the way to stop piracy, according to Mr Newell, is to mimic the steam model where the DRM is also a service that is good enough to make people want to use it.

This is not open to interpretation.

You get another

hooradiation

Genghiz Cohen wrote: »

You get another

I can only assume you're being intentionally obtuse, seeing as nobody is that fundamentally thick and still capable of using a keyboard, so feel free to continue your pantomime.

Varik

When i got the orange box i was stuck on dial up, steam at the time was worse than any current DRM relative to the time.

MOH

hooradiation wrote: »

So frankly, publishers are justified in doing whatever the hell they want with regards to DRM. Don't like it? Try growing the fuck up and just not buying it instead of pirating it.

No, they're not. That's the attitude they have, and that's the whole problem.

They're quite willing to use DRM that may cause hardware/software conflicts leaving paying customers unable to play the game, or worse, unable to use their machines for some other purposes.

But the publishers don't care about that, once they get their money. And when people encounter these issues, and complain, the general response is "ah it's only a tiny percentage, sure we can't account for every hardware/software combination out there".

Even when it does work it often requires jumping through hoops (GTA4 and the godawful GFWL).

So you pays your money and takes your chances. Or you gets a pirated version for free, which is a superior product since it's not hobbled by DRM.

That's exactly the point Newell is making. Intrusive, hobbling DRM does nothing to stop piracy, since it makes the product inferior to the pirated version.
Steam, which I've cursed a few times, including the 2.5 hours on dialup the night I got HL2, provides not only DRM, but a whole host of services that make the gaming experience better, and so does help cut down piracy. It's far not perfect, but on the whole it works.

But as long as most DRM is based on the attitude that "our money is more important than the customer's" it's just going to push more people toward piracy or out of gaming.

Actually, that's an interesting point - you say don't use it as an excuse to pirate, just don't buy it. Which is a perfectly fair statement. But that's as much a lost sale as piracy - even more so, since you're someone who was willing to buy the game, but didn't just because of the DRM.
But that's a factor that never seems to be even considered in the # downloads = # lost sales equation.

Overheal

GFWL didn't use to piss me off but now every time I try to play Fallout 3 it keeps asking me to re-input my cd key. that is annoying.

mcmoustache

ríomhaire wrote: »

All he said was that you need to provide a better service than pirates to win customers. He never said "use DRM as a service" and he certainly never said that you will wipe out piracy by providing a better service. People will always pirate. You know that, I know that and he knows that. He's just talking about how his company has been providing better service that the pirates and how many other companies are providing a worse service than pirates.

Very well put.

One reason that people pirate (not the only reason, just one) is that the pirated version is often better. The NO-CD versions are a common example of this but the following argument could also be made about other DRM schemes.

The pirated version doesn't require me to insert a cd to play the game. That makes it more valuable to me than the legit version. This idea of hobbling a game for the people who go and buy the cd when the pirates have no such problems is retarded.

I know that there are people who pirate because they are cheap feckers who want stuff for free. That's not being disputed. It's just that there are plenty of people like me with plenty of disposable income who pirated games because we didn't want the version that needed the cd to be in the drive.

I am more than willing to pay for games and I've demonstrated that with my wallet. I've got about 20 games in my Steam account right now and I've only had Steam for a few months. For a lot of us it's not about the money. It's about the product.

Gabe Newell knows this and when he speaks about reducing piracy, he's talking about turning people like me into customers by offering a better product than the pirates. He isn't talking about all those kids who download because they don't like paying for stuff.

He's not against DRM either. He's against the kind of DRM that makes the legitimate product worse than the one that pirates offer. By making sure that Steam's products are better than those of the pirates, he's eliminating the reasons that people like myself have for using the pirated versions. This makes us buy the games instead.

His idea works and my wallet can prove it.

ríomhaire

hooradiation wrote: »

Jesus wept.

Steam is the service he's talking about, Steam is DRM.
Therefore the way to stop piracy, according to Mr Newell, is to mimic the steam model where the DRM is also a service that is good enough to make people want to use it.

This is not open to interpretation.

He never claimed Steam was the best or perfect solution. He never said everyone do exactly what we're doing. He pointed out the mentality you need to succeed and shared the story of what they have done and the success they have had with it. He did not say "copy us our way is right". In fact he quite clearly said they're still experimenting in lots of ways. Why do you experiment? Because you don't know what the most effective way to do something is.

They also did not have success because Steam is a DRM. That's retarded. DRM systems are generally hated by game customers but Steam is held extremely highly by many. It is held highly because it provides very good service. Does it provide a good service because it is DRM? No, it is DRM by virtue of the way it functions as a game service. DRM as a service is not his message. His message is service as a service and the service his company provides happens to have very light DRM due to the way it functions.

You might as well say Steam has a grey colourscheme. Gabe is pointing out how successful they've been with Steam. Therefore Gabe is saying you should sell grey as a service.

Also, as I already pointed out, Steam does not act as a DRM for all of the games it provide. Many Steam games do not require Steam to be running in order to play them.

Retr0gamer

gizmo wrote: »

"Make no mistake," said SEGA this week, "if one quarter of the people that usually pirate [Football Manager] switch to purchasing Football Manager 2012, the sales of the game worldwide would more than double."

Then I don't understand why people can't see some form of DRM is required.

The problem here is that companies like Sega think that 25% of the people that pirate their games will actually buy them if the game wasn't available to download. I've no proff but I'm willing to bet the figure is much lower than that.

I like Steam because even though it's DRM it doesn't interfere with playing games. At the moment my parents got some cowboys to install an alarm in the house which cuts off my internet connection intermittently which means Ubisoft games would be unplayable for me but games that just use Steamworks are fine. There's a big difference between ****ty DRM and DRM that doesn't make it hard for a genuine customer to enjoy the game and provides a worse service than the pirated version.

Retr0gamer

hooradiation wrote: »

I can only assume you're being intentionally obtuse, seeing as nobody is that fundamentally thick and still capable of using a keyboard, so feel free to continue your pantomime.

hooradiation try to keep comments like this to a minimum please.

hooradiation

MOH wrote: »

No, they're not. That's the attitude they have, and that's the whole problem.

Actually yes they are.
Games companies owe you nothing. They can put out any DRM they feel like, as long as it's currently legal.
You as a consumer have the right to buy it or not buy it.
That's it.

ríomhaire wrote: »

He never claimed Steam was the best or perfect solution.

Which seems at odds with the constant self-promotion of how well they've done throughout the article, but lets pretend that the man who's behind steam is talking how wildly successful that system has been for the sheer hell of it.

ríomhaire wrote: »

They also did not have success because Steam is a DRM.

The success of steam is all down to making the DRM system palatable to normally kleptomaniacal PC gamers. That's it's.

If you can make silly comparisons to grey colour schemes all you want, but it won't make a difference.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

hooradiation try to keep comments like this to a minimum please.

That'll depend entirely on how stupid people feel like pretending to be.

mcmoustache

hooradiation wrote: »

The success of steam is all down to making the DRM system palatable to normally kleptomaniacal PC gamers. That's it's.

You're half right. The DRM scheme is certainly quite palatable.

The bit that you missed is all the other stuff that Steam gives you.

Combining all these things makes gaming on Steam a better experience than pirating. It's really not that hard to understand:

To someone with a disposable income and no problem paying for games, the inequlaity looks like this

Steam > pirating > Ubisoft

Simples.

johnny_ultimate

mcmoustache wrote: »

Simples.

If only . The harsh reality is that, no matter how generous a developer is, some people are and always will be stubborn assholes who feel they deserve everything for free. Unfortunately, an awful lot of these people are PC gamers, and the only people who suffer are the ones who are willing to pay.

Steam is a wonderful service, almost perfect in implementation (compare it to Games for Windows Live). It's certainly one of the few things keeping PC gaming alive. It's the library and community features, as well as the sales, that have helped it gain deserved dominance (Valve's games certainly helped, though). But there'll always be pirates - there are plenty playing hacked Left 4 Dead out there. TBH, unless you offer them the game for free - hardly viable in all cases - nothing you do will ever win over those who just want **** for free.

MOH

hooradiation wrote: »

Actually yes they are.
Games companies owe you nothing. They can put out any DRM they feel like, as long as it's currently legal.
You as a consumer have the right to buy it or not buy it.
That's it.

I'd seriously question whether they have the right to sell me a product which I'm unable to return, featuring restrictions which aren't displayed anywhere on the packaging or point of sale, which prevent me from using it when I've otherwise met all the publicly stated requirements. Of course since the average gamer doesn't have the resources to take them to court, that's unlikely to be tested. Furthermore, whether they have the right to install software on customer's systems without informing them which can prevent them working properly, and pose security risks, seems a bit doubtful.

Obviously though I'll have to bow to your superior legal knowledge in these areas.

The success of steam is all down to making the DRM system palatable to normally kleptomaniacal PC gamers. That's it's.

I'd suggest you use Steam a bit more. And maybe look up the definition of kleptomania while you're at it.


You're also missing the point that whether someone chooses to pirate the game or just not buy it makes absolutely zero difference to the publisher. They're getting no money either way.
But hey, let the publishers continue to push out whatever DRM they want. As you point out, if they want to alienate their customers, they're quite entitled to.

marco_polo

Good recent article from Eurogamer, with a few contrasting viewpoints on the subject, which touches on many of the point of debate on this thread.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-30-how-bad-is-pc-piracy-really-article.

Retr0gamer

hooradiation wrote: »

The success of steam is all down to making the DRM system palatable to normally kleptomaniacal PC gamers. That's it's.

It's not just PC gamers. If consoles were just as easy to pirate you'd see the same thing. Just look at the DS. There's not a kid out there that doesn't have a flashcart and it effectively killed third party support on the machine.

Spunge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdeY1v6jC7Q

MOH

marco_polo wrote: »

Good recent article from Eurogamer, with a few contrasting viewpoints on the subject, which touches on many of the point of debate on this thread.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-09-30-how-bad-is-pc-piracy-really-article.

Good article, thanks. This really sums it up for me:

If the legitimate user is ever going to have a more negative experience than a pirate, you've done something wrong.

ríomhaire

hooradiation wrote: »

The success of steam is all down to making the DRM system palatable to normally kleptomaniacal PC gamers. That's it's.

But how could its success have anything to do with being DRM when it's an utterly terrible DRM? Every Steam game is cracked almost straight after release. It's a rubbish DRM. The success of Steam is all down to offering a really good service.

anonymous_joe

Adyx wrote: »

Not having an Internet connection when it came out (and not having done my homework), I couldn't play it for 6 months or so after I bought it.

Heh, I remember my mate's gaff had a 'family' computer with the dial-up and the computer he and his brother used for gaming. (Imagine the days you could play games without internet) and the sheer logistics of moving **** through the house to get to Steam.

ríomhaire wrote: »

Oh god yes. I'm a huge unashamed Valve fanboy but when I bought HL2 I was on dial-up (in fact I was still on dial-up by the time the Orange Box came around) and Steam was such a huuuuuge pain in the ass. At that point it was pretty much only a shop and update service and because Valve update so often and my interent was so bad if I accidently started Steam while connected to the interent it would start updating and offline mode won't work again until it was finished. It was all pretty damn painful.

Heh, horrible stuff tbh. Thank God things improved.

stevenmu

I think what he's talking about is how to reduce piracy and tempt people away from it, while accepting that there will always be some level of piracy and not punishing your customers by trying to eliminate it completely.

There will always be some level no matter what. Some DRM systems are trying so hard to eliminate it completely that they are punishing legit users, and still not stopping pirates, making piracy a more attractive option. Valve are not trying to eliminate it completely, which would just fail anyway, and instead are focusing on making legit purchases more attractive.

Seems like a sensible approach to me, the only way to completely eliminate piracy is to never release the game, like with Half Life 3

hooradiation

Retr0gamer wrote: »

It's not just PC gamers. If consoles were just as easy to pirate you'd see the same thing. Just look at the DS. There's not a kid out there that doesn't have a flashcart and it effectively killed third party support on the machine.

I hate those fucking children so much.

ríomhaire wrote: »

But how could its success have anything to do with being DRM when it's an utterly terrible DRM? Every Steam game is cracked almost straight after release. It's a rubbish DRM. The success of Steam is all down to offering a really good service.

And every time the steam client is updated you have to go through it again. That also depends on the type of DRM you opt for. Bog standard steam DRM just needs to check the license and that steam is running and you're logged in. CEG is a lot tougher to deal with.
There is a reason that valve make a big deal about it when selling steamworks as a solution.
It's not perfect but it's not "rubbish" either.

MOH wrote: »

I'd suggest you use Steam a bit more. And maybe look up the definition of kleptomania while you're at it.

I've used steam plenty, much more than most. And I know what kleptomania is, it's the reason I used that word.
I'm not in the habit of using words I don't know the meaning of, it strikes me as foolish.

MOH wrote: »

You're also missing the point that whether someone chooses to pirate the game or just not buy it makes absolutely zero difference to the publisher. They're getting no money either way.

However in one scenario someone cared enough to take their product without paying for it, indicating that while some pirates may just have some bizarre variant of ADHD most have some interest in the title they're pirating.
Therefore with the right DRM they can convert some of those into sales.

MOH wrote: »

But hey, let the publishers continue to push out whatever DRM they want. As you point out, if they want to alienate their customers, they're quite entitled to.

Seems to be working for them, remember the "boycott MW2" thing? Remind me how that worked out.
Gamers are pathetic when it comes to taking a stand of any sort and would rather steal than actually try and affect change.

So, yeah, they can and will do it. Not only because that's how capitalism works but also because the target audience will let them away with far more than any other market I can think of outside of people with addictions.

ED E

Wish Newell would go over to EA and smack some sense into them and get BF3 on Steam. Not a hope of me installing origin.

Overheal

However in one scenario someone cared enough to take their product without paying for it, indicating that while some pirates may just have some bizarre variant of ADHD most have some interest in the title they're pirating.
Therefore with the right DRM they can convert some of those into sales.

Some people are going to pirate regardless of cost or barrier, evidenced by the humble bundles.

marco_polo

Overheal wrote: »

Some people are going to pirate regardless of cost or barrier, evidenced by the humble bundles.

True but what I like about ceg-protected Steam games though is that unlike other far more intrusive DRM experiences at least it is the genuine users who get seamless experience and the pirate who gets the inferior version and has to work hard to get/keep the game running.