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

ríomhaire

hooradiation you claim that Steam is so successful because it made DRM palatable. But the only DRM function that Steam carries out is that it checks to see if the game is on your account when you run it and it doesn't even do that for all the games you buy on it. So if it's successful because it's good DRM does that mean that if Steam was exactly the same as it is now, but it didn't check to see if you had the game on your account when you ran it that Steam would have failed commercially?

mcmoustache

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

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.

I can't disagree with that but my posts tried to bluntly distinguish between two kinds (not all kinds) of pirate:

Pirate A who has money and is willing to spend it on games but won't put up with NO-CD, Securerom or other annoying DRM.

and

Pirate B who just doesn't like paying for stuff.

I think that Steam are targetting Pirate A and when I was posting, I was mainly speaking about them. Somehow, the discussion got a bit clouded with one side complaining about all pirates as though they were all doing it for the same reasons.

There are lots of reasons to pirate but DRM is a big enough one. If we forget the moral side of things for a moment, from the point of view of Pirate A, the rational decision for him in a microeconomic sense is to choose the pirated version without the DRM. It's a better product. Even if it cost the same as the legal version, it would make sense to buy the pirated version. Better product, same price.

On the other hand, if the pirated version fails to offer things like multiplayer, stats, matching and all those other things that we get with Steam, then it is an inferior product. For Pirate A who has money and likes to spend it on games, the decision will be to pay "extra" for the better product. Afterall, loads of games cost the same as a pint or a taxi fare and Pirate A buys those all the time.

I'm not arguing with you at all there, johnny. I just wanted to clarify where my simplistic inequality came from.

Although, for Pirate B, the asshole, the inequality looks like this:

pirated game > ad-supported COD6 for €1 with no DRM

There's no point trying to sell to him and he's unaffected by DRM. Pirate A on the other hand is a potential cash-cow and I think that Gabe/Steam know this.

ríomhaire

If I don't like a game's DRM scheme I just don't fecking buy it. It's not a reason to resort to piracy.

Also: Piracy is not theft, it's copyright violation, which is also very serious but a different goddamn thing.

LighterGuy

Don't know what Gabe Newell is talking about to be honest

Lets be real, people will always download things. The only logically way to stop them from downloading is by increased anti-piracy technology. But hell, lets be honest on that too, something new comes out someone cracks it. Look at that XGD3 update on the XBOX 360. Didnt stop crap. May of slowed some people down. Thats all though.

And as for 'price' or 'service' turning pirates around isnt gonna happen. Service dont mean sh*t if you get something for free. As for price? .. Sure if something is dirt cheap you'd buy the game rather than downloading. But I can't see any new release games being 5 or 10 euro soon.

marco_polo

LighterGuy wrote: »

Don't know what Gabe Newell is talking about to be honest

Lets be real, people will always download things. The only logically way to stop them from downloading is by increased anti-piracy technology. But hell, lets be honest on that too, something new comes out someone cracks it. Look at that XGD3 update on the XBOX 360. Didnt stop crap. May of slowed some people down. Thats all though.

And as for 'price' or 'service' turning pirates around isnt gonna happen. Service dont mean sh*t if you get something for free. As for price? .. Sure if something is dirt cheap you'd buy the game rather than downloading. But I can't see any new release games being 5 or 10 euro soon.

But pirates are people too, of which at least a reasonaby sized minority of whom feel secretly guilty and use excuses such as the existance of restrictive DRM to morally justify it to themselves. Remove that and you will convert a certain percentage of those into sales. And as was quoted earlier from a couple of publishers even a fairly moderate percentage can greatly increase revenues.

The reason DRM is largley ineffective is that people who are going to pirate anyway, will be downloading a DRM free version of the game regardless of whether it has been removed by somebody through a crack or was never there in the first place. Like the guy from GOG said in the Eurogame article "Piracy is some kind of ghost enemy, and chasing a ghost enemy is a pure waste of time and resources. The only way really is to make the whole gaming experience easy, convenient and rewarding for the users - this is the only way to fight against piracy"

Much like the war on drugs you can never stop all piracy, but what you can do are two things, not piss off legitimate customers, and removing the excuses that 'softer' (my made up term ) pirates use for a moral crutch.

marco_polo

Sorry for the double post but I came across this PC gamer article as well, which certainly should give some food for though. It is titled 'Ubisoft, piracy, and the death of reason', which seems very apt once you have read it. It particuliarly caught my eye because I have been avoiding Ubisoft titles for this very reason (Not Driver:San Fransciso becasue its ***t , but the last few Assasins Creed titles. Sure I could have bought them for my Xbox but that would only help 'prove' their point even more wouldn't it?)

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/10/07/opinion-ubisoft-piracy-and-the-death-of-reason/

Despite the fact that their "PC game sales are down 90% without a corresponding lift in console sales", the fact that there has been a "Clear reduction in piracy rates" is somehow deemed a success.

The DRM has undoubtably been a successful in terms of its primary objective, as it was pretty well unrecedented how long it took before it was cracked (a month or more as I recall). But you just rather feel that Ubisoft can't even see the wood from the trees at this stage.

Lest it needs to be said, few things annoy me more than the thought of somebody playing a game, for free, that I payed my good, hard earned cash for. But ultimately give me Gabe Newells pragmatic approach over the idealisic position of Ubisoft (where every pirated copy seems to be taken as personal insult) any time.

K.O.Kiki

Kirby

ríomhaire wrote: »

Also: Piracy is not theft, it's copyright violation, which is also very serious but a different goddamn thing.

If I could thank this a thousand times I would.

The sort of BS spin the whole "You wouldn't steal a leprechaun" brigade try and pull is actually detrimental to what they are trying to accomplish. Piracy has enough legitimate sticks to beat it with. There is no need to make stuff up to try and make it into something it isn't.

"We need to stop people Littering. I know! Call it Murder! Then people won't do it!" :rolleyes:

Idiots. And they wonder why their caimpaigns don't work.

Genghiz Cohen

Kirby wrote: »

If I could thank this a thousand times I would.

The sort of BS spin the whole "You wouldn't steal a leprechaun" brigade try and pull is actually detrimental to what they are trying to accomplish. Piracy has enough legitimate sticks to beat it with. There is no need to make stuff up to try and make it into something it isn't.

"We need to stop people Littering. I know! Call it Murder! Then people won't do it!" :rolleyes:

Idiots. And they wonder why their caimpaigns don't work.

Oh man, I would totally steal a Leprechaun...

Kadongy

The headline is a bit misleading. It sounds like he's saying the best way to stop piracy is to not use anti-piracy technology. What he is actually saying is that providing strong service is more effective than anti-priacy technology at discouraging piracy.

Blowfish

Steam isn't the only example of what Gabe is talking about.

Pretty much all MMO's have private servers around, yet they don't come even close to generating the numbers that the 'official' ones do because they are buggier, laggier, slow to be updated and run by people who have 0 limitation on what they can do as a GM.

Also, Netflix traffic is 2.5 times that of Bittorrent in the US.

People are more than happy to pay for a good service.

gizmo

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.

The service Newell is referring to in the article is Steam though. These games were on Steam and outside of the requiring on account on the publishers services for stats and game management, there was no other DRM present. Therefore in this context, how can one explain the piracy rates given what Newell is saying with regard to offering a "better" service?

My general point here Valve are in many ways an exception in the industry and not just because of Steam. Look at TF2, even Newell himself has said he doesn't have any idea why so many people buy so much stuff in it - Link. And all this at the same time as people go ape**** over being asked to pay for cosmetic items of DLC in other games, it just doesn't make sense.

mcmoustache wrote: »

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.

While I haven't looked in a few years, aren't there still no-cd cracks made for retail games?

ríomhaire wrote: »

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.

Yet this is what EA are doing with Origin and they are getting hammered for it. Sure the service isn't perfect and people are quite right to complain about it and even avoid it but my issue lies with those who don't want it or, indeed any other service, regardless of its quality. For many it's Steam or no sale which is, quite frankly, insane given people's objections to such monopolistic services on other platforms.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

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.

Quite true, however I'm looking more at the paid vs pirated figures - if 25% of people who pirated the game bought it then sales would increase 100%. Play with the numbers any way you see fit but even with relatively more conservative figures it still reperesents a huge number of potentially lost sales.

ríomhaire wrote: »

Also: Piracy is not theft, it's copyright violation, which is also very serious but a different goddamn thing.

Technically you're 100% correct but I'd imagine people regard "theft" as easier to say than "copyright infringement" and assume people understand what they mean.

Blowfish wrote: »

Also, Netflix traffic is 2.5 times that of Bittorrent in the US.

People are more than happy to pay for a good service.

Well, let's see what happens when Netflix launches over here next year then.

Duggy747

Well, one thing Steam has been done right is making sure that the latest pirated PC games can't be played earlier than their release (Same can't be said about 360 or PS3 counterparts)

The PC version of Modern Warfare 3 has been leaked (or apparently only Disc 2) but can't be played until release when certain files are decrypted from Steam. In this case it makes it incredibly rare and near impossible for a scene group to release a crack before hand.

K.O.Kiki

Follow-ups:

ríomhaire

gizmo wrote: »

Technically you're 100% correct but I'd imagine people regard "theft" as easier to say than "copyright infringement" and assume people understand what they mean.

No. A lot of people equate the two as the exact same thing. If copyright infringment is too hard on their poor tongues/fingers then there is another word to use; piracy. It is not the same thing. It's like when people insist on calling statutory rape just rape to obfuscate the issue.

gizmo

Give people a great service and they'll still pirate the hell out of your game it seems.