MSNBC & Stardock Talk Piracy

Interesting video, what really should catch your attention is the last 30 seconds or so...I too hope it never comes to that but I actually believe it will. Too many people pirate games these days and publishers are taking note.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/30392391#30392391

Different than Mass Effect...that was only an authentication check...what he is talking about...and is already in the works...is server side game client calculations and code. So most of the game runs on your system, but a few key pieces are hosted on a server...you can't play the game unless you are able to connect to the server.

Cracks (unless they can somehow get a hold of the server code or reverse engineer this) won't be able to bypass this.

@naval

It's not something to remove...it's something the game needs to run at all. Like a game has a client running on your computer...it renders the graphics, sound, and some other stuff...you move to the next "level" and the server actually is what has all the scripts for monsters ect and actually does maybe combat calculations.

I hope I am explaining this right :P But if you understand what I am saying, basically it's not something the crackers can remove...it's something they will actually have to reverse engineer...either that or they will have to somehow steal the server side code. I know both are possible...but I think this will basically kill your "day one" piracy.

Doesn't that mean some sort of lag? And a decent internet connection needing to be active at all times? that's a lot of things to ask of the customer just so some publisher can increase his revenue. I doubt people will accept it.F1_2004

Probably not...most "lag" is due to positioning and actions of multiple players in a MP game...if you did a simple request to a server to retrieve a script or even a small calculation/asset it would be pretty much seemless.

Sounds like Guild Wars...except without other people being able to play with you.

Sounds like a potential solution as long it's transparent and doesn't affect the game experience.

hmm .. I do understand what you are saying , what I meant was once you have obtained all the code from server side you will have a full copy and the they can remove the check to call the the mssing code from the server and take from the harddisk (or something like that) But if they do something like ----- fetch some code from the server and the same time remove some other code from the harddisk --- so that no game has a full copy, that would be better, not sure if it is legal or not.naval

They can't fetch the code, the game on the client is incomplete basically...the client goes out and makes a request..and the server fulfills the request not with the source code but with an asset/calculation/ect.

Sounds like Guild Wars...except without other people being able to play with you.

Ein-7919

Exactly. Much of Guild Wars is actually ran on the server. When you attack something many of those calculation are actually done by code running remotely on the server.

I hope that does happen. It will stop Pirates. No more stealing games you ******* losers

I too hope that this does happen. Stealing is always wrong...

This method of antipiracy will be cracked as well.

You just cant beat piracy any more than you can beat car theft.

This method of antipiracy will be cracked as well.

You just cant beat piracy any more than you can beat car theft.

mrbojangles25

That video was very depressing and absolute disturbing. It's really a disrepute in how pirates try to defend their actions when in reality the result of piracy is making a bad image for our platform. The PC platform is becoming a tombstone for exclusive big budget games. Sigh, if that type of tech is required to exclude piracy then I guess I'm all for it, it sucks that I'm suffering due to irresponsible people.

You know what i think...

It's all a cover story to mask their failure to lunch the game right "from what i watched players had trouble connection to servers"

And think of it...in the reviews and interviews of the game they said that the game will be centered around MP...which means there is nearly nothing left for SP players to look for....it's like someone pirating a game like Warhammer online...lol what is he gonna do with it?

Fact is that one of the devlopers himslef said that they wasn't ready and they underestimated their network's demands.

Also every game get's released and get's pirated people will try to lunch MP options...but in case of Demigod...this coudn't have hurt.

The game isn't that papular so i don't what this guy saying is 100% true.

It's like saying...ohh damn...the lights wint out in the server room...so it's not our fault.:roll:

sataricon

You know, the first few times you hear this excuse it might have held some credibility...but far too many developers/publishers have spoken out now and all you are left with is an empty made up excuse.

Also, this is from Stardock...you know...the people who don't believe in DRM and their whole "gamers bill of rights" stuff.

Sigh...but yeah...forget what the people who actually develop and sell games say...they are just a bunch of lying liars who just make excuses.

Grr this makes me so angry.

It's not like stealing 50 cars.

It's like one robber who couldn't afford the car in the first place, and copying that car and giving it to 50 homeless people. Sales were NEVER lost because those 51 people never ever had plans to buy the car in the first place.

That's what piracy is.

Where they start losing sales, and where piracy becomes a problem, is when developers try to control how people own and play their games. The problem is that piracy seems like a better moption because of all the hoops developers put gamers through.

So far I haven't had a problem with DRM but there are clearly lots of people who have, and lots of people who don't have an internet connection for every computer.

Developers need to realise that the people buying the games are the honest people, or the fans, who would never pirate a game; and the people who pirate games would never buy them legitimately.

Yup, the people actually making and selling games are just so stupid. You guys are geniuses. Why aren't you running a multimillion dollar game development studio? I mean, it all sounds so easy and you guys have it all figured out!

And sataricon, you are part of the problem too. People like you who have this insane notion that *all* of these developer speaking out are just a bunch of liars. No, 85% piracy is no big deal, and the developers are just overreacting and making up excuses. Companies spend tens of thousands of dollars on DRM because they just want to hurt their real customers for fun! They aren't loosing sales! I mean geesh! Or, you could pull your head from your rear and realize this is what most developers are screaming for ages now, and they aren't making it up for their health.

And DigitalExile, you couldn't be more wrong. In fact, you are dead wrong. You think if piracy was suddenly not possible that these hundreds of thousands (millions?) would just stop playing games? No, it's insane pretend they aren't loosing sales. They are, and everybody knows it except the people in denial.

I have no problem connecting to a server either when I am installing a game or the first time I play it. But I play alot of my games on a laptop and don't have an internet connection available. I guess this would just mean alot less gaming for me.

Yup, the people actually making and selling games are just so stupid. You guys are geniuses. Why aren't you running a multimillion dollar game development studio? I mean, it all sounds so easy and you guys have it all figured out!

And sataricon, you are part of the problem too. People like you who have this insane notion that *all* of these developer speaking out are just a bunch of liars. No, 85% piracy is no big deal, and the developers are just overreacting and making up excuses. Companies spend tens of thousands of dollars on DRM because they just want to hurt their real customers for fun! They aren't loosing sales! I mean geesh! Or, you could pull your head from your rear and realize this is what most developers are screaming for ages now, and they aren't making it up for their health.

And DigitalExile, you couldn't be more wrong. In fact, you are dead wrong. You think if piracy was suddenly not possible that these hundreds of thousands (millions?) would just stop playing games? No, it's insane pretend they aren't loosing sales. They are, and everybody knows it except the people in denial.

dnuggs40

Anyways, this online play would hurt a lot of people, including me, who game on laptops. Whenever you travel, or if you're somewhere without a free wireless connection, you can't play online games. That's the majority of the time for many people.

You know, the first few times you hear this excuse it might have held some credibility...but far too many developers/publishers have spoken out now and all you are left with is an empty made up excuse.

Also, this is from Stardock...you know...the people who don't believe in DRM and their whole "gamers bill of rights" stuff.

Sigh...but yeah...forget what the people who actually develop and sell games say...they are just a bunch of lying liars who just make excuses.

dnuggs40

There is something to these excuses.

For years distributors have released games before they were done. We complain and yet no one listens. Theyare stilldoing it. And then there is the long list of games that were released "completed" but barely ran. Unreal Tournament 3, Silverfall, Temple of Elemental Evil, Grand Theft Auto 4 (PC), and Gears of War (PC) are all titles were the majority had trouble getting itto run and stay running. The list doesn't stop their either. At this point there areprobably 2 or 3 hundred titles are were released just as broken as those five.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Most can't even set-up the installation program properly. It used to be they just left stuff all over the hard drive. These days, more and more don't even give you an unistall option on the start menu. This has nothing to do with hardware configurations. Its just plain old sloppy craftsmanship.

How can you and so many others defend them when they have a long history ofcharging us full price forunfinished and broken products? They clowns have so little respect for us they rarely tell us the truth about release dates. Its very common for them to tell use it will be released next Tuesday only to have it not show up in any store until the following week. I know of no other industry that does this.

I know piracy is stealing and its hurting the industry. I don't care. After years of subpar garbage I don't see why I should. This industry has never done anything to deserve the amount of devotion and blind obedience gamers regularly show them. These games don't cure cancer or give out winning lottery tickets. They are just entertainment.

One last thing. This recent round of "priacy sucks" threads was spawned by Demigod. Its a game were multiplayer is the main part of the game. Its a mutliplayer that a lot of people had trouble getting to run.Demigod isanother game that was released broken.Doyou haveanyidea howbad you look standing there defending Stardock's server side calculations idea when they are the distributor of this garbage?

EDIT: Why does this site keep glueing my words together? Evertime I leave a long wided post it does this.

Even Blizzard, who spends much longer than any other developer creating games, releases products with bugs. Go look at the first few Diablo II patch notes. Go look at WoW's first month out of the gate. How long has Vista been out, and it still has some pretty significant bugs/issues? XP was pretty bad until SP2. Fallout 3 has crashes. Mass Effect had major issues with it's steam release. The list goes on. Does this not set off bells in anybody else's head? I really have to wonder if any of you actually understands what goes into creating software, and how you can never truly test every game on every configuration. This is before you even get into the monetary aspect of everything and the politics of the developer/publisher relationship.

Anyways, only PC gamers can look at a 88%piracy rate and tell you with a straight face that nothing is wrong and the developers are just lying thieving babies. I am amazed at the absolute level of denial that can make a person pretend the fact that 88% of the people interested in a game stole it isn't a real issue. That's an astronomical rate of theft...

Maybe Epic is right...lol...it's sad but it's true.

Doesn't that mean some sort of lag? And a decent internet connection needing to be active at all times? that's a lot of things to ask of the customer just so some publisher can increase his revenue. I doubt people will accept it.F1_2004

Yeah, **** that.

If they want to kill PC gaming, that's a sure way to do it. A world without LAN games.

Cloud computing is quickly becoming a reality...how much longer do you think developers/publishers will look at 88% piracy rates and continue to do business as usual?dnuggs40

There's no business in exploiting paying consumers.

I'm amazed they'll do anything at the slightest chance that those 88% of people will actually buy the game. I also wish they gave the context of the 88%. 88% appear on torrents? Means nothing unless they say how sales have been lost, which can't be proven since pirates won't necessarily buy it. 88% of people pirate every single game? Load of crap, I'd call them out on that one. 88% of people have pirated a game? Sure, older games most likely, ones you can't get your hands on anymore. That doesn't mean they steal every game.

Constant internet connection and limited installs are the worst kind of DRM. They might as well be kicking the consumer. I can stand CDchecks and internet activation, but expecting the consumer to be constantly connected to the internet is way over the top. I'd pick up a console LONG before I purchase a game with that DRM.

I too hope it never comes to that but I actually believe it will.dnuggs40

Same here, I hope it doesn't come to that, but it would seem to be a reasonable progressive step towards cloud based gaming --- something I'm personally not particularly looking forward to as I enjoy the current hardware dependent aspects of PC gaming.

At any rate, if it could possibly enhance the gamer's experience beyond what would otherwise be possible on their machine by offloading some pre-processing to the server at key points for example, that would be great!

Along with great games at reasonable prices under this model, potential future patch to remove the server dependency and server processing at the point where the cost/benefit ratio and "shelf-life" of the game make sense removing it, and the actual possibility of effectively reducing piracy --- there would be concerns of course but I wouldn't be entirely opposed to this! ;)

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"]Cloud computing is quickly becoming a reality...how much longer do you think developers/publishers will look at 88% piracy rates and continue to do business as usual?Swiftstrike5

There's no business in exploiting paying consumers.

I'm amazed they'll do anything at the slightest chance that those 88% of people will actually buy the game. I also wish they gave the context of the 88%. 88% appear on torrents? Means nothing unless they say how sales have been lost, which can't be proven since pirates won't necessarily buy it. 88% of people pirate every single game? Load of crap, I'd call them out on that one. 88% of people have pirated a game? Sure, older games most likely, ones you can't get your hands on anymore. That doesn't mean they steal every game.

Constant internet connection and limited installs are the worst kind of DRM. They might as well be kicking the consumer. I can stand CDchecks and internet activation, but expecting the consumer to be constantly connected to the internet is way over the top. I'd pick up a console LONG before I purchase a game with that DRM.

You know what i think...

It's all a cover story to mask their failure to lunch the game right "from what i watched players had trouble connection to servers"

And think of it...in the reviews and interviews of the game they said that the game will be centered around MP...which means there is nearly nothing left for SP players to look for....it's like someone pirating a game like Warhammer online...lol what is he gonna do with it?

Fact is that one of the devlopers himslef said that they wasn't ready and they underestimated their network's demands.

Also every game get's released and get's pirated people will try to lunch MP options...but in case of Demigod...this coudn't have hurt.

The game isn't that papular so i don't what this guy saying is 100% true.

It's like saying...ohh damn...the lights wint out in the server room...so it's not our fault.:roll:

sataricon

They're trying to mask the failure caused by pirates overloading the sevrers? Ya-ok. I haven't played Demigod but I don't understand why they didn't just require validation to play online? He said like over 80% of people failed the authentication process. How were they even able to play? And shouldn't Gamespot be held accountable for releasing the game early, or was it like a special pre-order deal or something?

I'm against limited instals and requiring internet authentication to play a SINGLE-PLAYER game ala Mass Effect, Bioshock, etc. What happens if the servers are down, what happens if your internet is down, what happens if you have no internet, what if you want to go back and play the game 10 years from now and the servers are no longer online? These are all valid concerns with having single-player data server-side instead of client-side as a means of anti-piracy as well.

Unfortunately that's the road we're heading down now, and the first ones to **** about it will be the pirates themselves. If you cant afford the game, wait for it to go on sale. If you dont like DRM, dont buy the game. There is no valid excuse for piracy.

to me that wouldn't be that big a deal. If you have broadband nothing would really change. adrake4183

There's no business in exploiting paying consumers.

Swiftstrike5

People who were never in the air-port might not know this..but If you purchase any flying ticket and trying to go into the port,

the air-port security will force you to

1) take off the shoe

2) take off your belt

3) take off the back side of t-shirt ( I dunno why)

(if alarm happened and your t-shirt is off, they will then "ask" you to take off your pants.

4) open all your backpacks and belongings

5) take away your water bottles.

if you are a first timer, this might be very humiliating, but they must do it to EVERY customer to prevent terrorists who abuse the air-port for their ill will.

Yes, you paid lots of money (to some people's standard) and you must go through certain painful method for air-port's own security.

It may not come to having server side single player game play. If publishers were to convince nvidia and ati to make video card drivers to be able to disable the card if it detects a pirated version of a game. Using software and hardware to help prevent piracy could possible. Im not saying will happen. Currently, DRMs currently having zero effect over piracy we will see something drastic from publishers, while legitmate buyers have to hassle what ever comes because of piracy. Even Stardock will start using anti piracy since they would have no choice or decide to go under.Jd1680a

I have a small assumption that ATI and Nvidia might not like stopping the piracy, since most of the pirates still have to purchase their products anyways.

If they follow your decision and join the anti-piracy campagin with their product, and lets say the pirates stopped buying their graphic cards...

the companies are there to make money. I bet that corporation's standard weights Money a lot heavier than Morale.

Fact is that one of the devlopers himslef said that they wasn't ready and they underestimated their network's demands.sataricon

[QUOTE="Swiftstrike5"]

[QUOTE="dnuggs40"]Cloud computing is quickly becoming a reality...how much longer do you think developers/publishers will look at 88% piracy rates and continue to do business as usual?johnny27

There's no business in exploiting paying consumers.

I'm amazed they'll do anything at the slightest chance that those 88% of people will actually buy the game. I also wish they gave the context of the 88%. 88% appear on torrents? Means nothing unless they say how sales have been lost, which can't be proven since pirates won't necessarily buy it. 88% of people pirate every single game? Load of crap, I'd call them out on that one. 88% of people have pirated a game? Sure, older games most likely, ones you can't get your hands on anymore. That doesn't mean they steal every game.

Constant internet connection and limited installs are the worst kind of DRM. They might as well be kicking the consumer. I can stand CDchecks and internet activation, but expecting the consumer to be constantly connected to the internet is way over the top. I'd pick up a console LONG before I purchase a game with that DRM.

[QUOTE="Swiftstrike5"]

There's no business in exploiting paying consumers.

chapman86

People who were never in the air-port might not know this..but If you purchase any flying ticket and trying to go into the port,

the air-port security will force you to

1) take off the shoe

2) take off your belt

3) take off the back side of t-shirt ( I dunno why)

(if alarm happened and your t-shirt is off, they will then "ask" you to take off your pants.

4) open all your backpacks and belongings

5) take away your water bottles.

if you are a first timer, this might be very humiliating, but they must do it to EVERY customer to prevent terrorists who abuse the air-port for their ill will.

Yes, you paid lots of money (to some people's standard) and you must go through certain painful method for air-port's own security.

If you insist on using that analogy, I'll use my own. Internet Activation is like airport security. You do it once, maybe twice during the whole trip.

Constant internet connection to access game content is like having a guard assigned to you. He handcuffs you and escorts you for your entire trip. You can't do anything without asking him first.

Different than Mass Effect...that was only an authentication check...what he is talking about...and is already in the works...is server side game client calculations and code. So most of the game runs on your system, but a few key pieces are hosted on a server...you can't play the game unless you are able to connect to the server.

Cracks (unless they can somehow get a hold of the server code or reverse engineer this) won't be able to bypass this.

dnuggs40

This would require the servers to somehow recognize that your copy of the game is legit. That would require something like a CD key. I don't think I need to explain any further why this proposed method is extremely redundant and poorly thought out. Unless publishers are going to turn to a purely direct distribution model a la Steam, I don't see this working.

Steam can be played offline, anywhere, anytime. This is saying you have to be online all the time (because it has to access content). It'll essentially be like an MMO. Load up a level, get some information from the server, continue playing. Next they'll start charging monthly fees for single player games.Swiftstrike5

I'm not sure why, but everytime these posts come up im a little shocked by the refusal of a lot of people to even acknowledge that having 10 people illegally use a product for each paying costumer is not a big deal and shouldnt matter, that it's groosly unfair for the people making that product to try their hardest to stop people from illegally use their product.

If we're still talking about Demigod, that's mainly an online game, innit? Kind of like pirating CS:S just to play with bots... not much of a game to be had there, unless you buy it. There's probably less than a day's worth of gaming to be had in the single-player. so I'm sure anyone who liked it bought it.

Also, unless I'm mistaken, this was 88% of the connection attempts at the first release of the game, back when it broke release date and few people could get it legally while it was all over the torrents. Understandable that at that point in time there could be very few legally paying customers and the majority of the pirates would attempt their first connect. Saying "Demigod is experiencing 88% piracy" is wrong and very misleading. I don't think anyone's denying piracy adversely affects the devs, but the other extreme is saying "omg 9 in 10 people are ripping off stardock" which is just as wrong.

And DigitalExile, you couldn't be more wrong. In fact, you are dead wrong. You think if piracy was suddenly not possible that these hundreds of thousands (millions?) would just stop playing games? No, it's insane pretend they aren't loosing sales. They are, and everybody knows it except the people in denial.

dnuggs40

If I have two cars to sell, and one person buys one and "pirates" it and now I see that 30 people have this car. Oh poo! I just lost 30 sales.

30 sales from 2 cars.

How did this happen? Did I have 29 extra cars that I forgot about?

No, 29 people got a different car. It may be the same as my car, might even be an exact copy of my car right down to the tiny coffee stain on the passenger side seat, but these people were never going to buy my other car because I didn't end up selling it, as evidenced by the fact that it's still sitting in my yard with bird poop all over it.

It's mostly likely that if that first person had bought my car no-one would have bought the second because no one wanted to buy it in the first place.

Those extra 29 people got the car because they saw it for free and decided to give it a whirl.

Same goes for retail games. If there are 10,000 retail copies, and only 5000 of those get sold, yet there are 80,000 playing online, did the company lose 75,000 sales? How could they lose that many sales when they didn't even have that many products.

Bare minimum your argument hold is that they lost 5000 sales (the 5K they didn't sell) but those pirated copies don't count as lost sales.

Now, if piracy was somehow stopped you'd either see extreme attempts to crack it, extreme attempts of boycott or a loss of sales (because people would no longer feel safe buying games because "word of mouth" would be cut down). Sales would probably increase, but I think it's "dead wrong" for you to assume that sales would magically increase by massive numbers. By your logic the companies would only have 10,000 and would sell those and have another 70,000 people slamming them for not making enough copies.

If you know pirates you'll know they they do it because they can.

They don't care about the games. They aren't gamers. If there's no games to pirate they'll try and pirate something else until there's nothing left to pirate then they'll go back to whatever it is they do when they're not cracking software.

You know, there is one good thing that came out of this whole 'Demigod got pirated to H#$@ and back' issue: I was on the fence about buying Demigod, but after all this press, I went out and bought my copy today to show my monetary support of Stardock.

So, allow me to say 'thank-you' to all those pirates. Thank-you for giving people like me a reason to buy an already good game.

Maybe so few people bought the game because it sucks? Crysis didn't have problems with sales did it? Neither did The Witcher. Make better games please, pirates filter the garbage.amekhov

You did know that Cevat Yerli specifically called out that piracy deeply affected sales of Crysis, right? He basically stated that"the ratio between sales to piracy is probably 1 to 15 to 1 to 20 right now." I'd call 22.5 million potential sales a "problem with sales." So you can't say that people aren't buying a game because the game sucks. Have you played Demigod? Can you attest to the game sucking? There is another reason why a game such as Demigod has so few people buying it: maybe the game belongs in a niche genre. Crysis is a generic (genre-wise, not referring to quality) FPS. Demigod is a DotA-style RTS...a subsect of a subsect of the RTS genre.