[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

What a surprise. One of the most successful and innovative PC games maker and distributor doesn't rate PC piracy as very important to them:

"When you list the things that we worry about in our business, piracy is not one of them,"

"We've got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate," he said. "And more importantly, the service value of having an ongoing relationship with us is high enough that it causes people to not be very interested in piracy.

"Rampant piracy is just unserved customers."

IMO, this is just more fuel for my theory that good games sell, and bad games don't, but devs use piracy as an excuse for a poorly made product that sell badly into an ever more savvy PC games market.

[Demirug]

I am not sure if this is the secret of success here. For me this sounds more like a commercial for Steam: “If you don’t want to worry about piracy distribute with Steam.”

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by Demirug

I am not sure if this is the secret of success here. For me this sounds more like a commercial for Steam: “If you don’t want to worry about piracy distribute with Steam.”

Steam titles are quickly cracked though. Their point is that Valve make good games, distribute them all over the world at the same time, give users added value, and build relationships with their customers. They provide their games and services for paying customers, and don't hurt their customers by implementing things that (fail to) affect pirates.

Steam/Valve is successful because they spend time worrying about the quality of their products and how to deliver those products to paying customers, instead of worrying about those people who don't pay up for their games.

[suryad]

Agree with Bouncing on his comment.

[cychris]

I love Steam myself, i love the fact that i can install in all my PCs without any limits, hell i do give my details to my brother to use them as well but i could do the same with an old game on a CD!

I do hate the fact that Bioshock is limited to 5 installs on Steam though, and thats why i am not going to buy it and am waiting for a PS3 edition. DRM sucks, i want to install a game that i own in as many machines i have, noone should dictate that to me.

Valve has something good with Steam, maybe the market can learn something from them.

[AlphaWolf]

Looking back to the days before the release of Half-Life 2 makes the thread title seem somewhat amusing.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

Looking back to the days before the release of Half-Life 2 makes the thread title seem somewhat amusing.

From Valve's point of view, was Steam ever about piracy, rather than cutting out the distributer/publisher middleman and taking that profit for themselves?

There's no money cutting out the pirate - he's not giving you his cash under any circumstances. Taking the money that would otherwise go to the distributer/publisher/pressing/printing/packaging/shipping? That's a lot of profit margin there that Valve has transferred from someone else's pocket and into their own.

[AlphaWolf]

Originally Posted by Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.

From Valve's point of view, was Steam ever about piracy, rather than cutting out the distributer/publisher middleman and taking that profit for themselves?

I'm just referring to how upset Valve was about the presence of their games source code existing outside of their offices.

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by AlphaWolf

I'm just referring to how upset Valve was about the presence of their games source code existing outside of their offices.

That was hacking, stealing and releasing unfinished source code rather than software piracy as they are referring to in the linked interview, and so not really what they were talking about.

[digitalwanderer]

Actually that was still a kind of software piracy BZB, just a different one than the one they're talking about.

Or maybe it was cyber TERRORISM!

[willardjuice]

Actually that was still a kind of software piracy BZB, just a different one than the one they're talking about.

Either way AlphaWolf was discussing something that BZB wasn't alluding to; you're nitpicking.

[digitalwanderer]

Yes, your point?

[willardjuice]

Originally Posted by digitalwanderer

Yes, your point?

Don't make pointless posts?

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Here's a more detailed write-up from the Valve event.

PC gaming is changing. Digitally distributed game sales are picking up, more Western games are implementing microtransaction models popular in Asian territories, and massively multiplayer online games are gaining more and more popularity. Yet there's still no reliable method of tracking all this. Traditionally we've trusted numbers from market research firms such as NPD to give us a reliable picture of platform sales, but with fewer and fewer consumers buying physical product at stores, those numbers simply don't tell the whole story. Just ask Blizzard, which is making somewhere in the vicinity of $120 million dollars every month with its immensely successful MMORPG World of Warcraft.

"Essentially they're creating a new Iron Man... every month in terms of their gross revenue," said Valve co-founder Gabe Newell at a press event in his studio's offices this past Thursday. "Any movie studio that was doing that would be shouting it from the rooftops, but it was essentially invisible when you look at how it was being aggregated and reported."

Statistics Valve pulled from the Gartner Group said over 255 million new PCs were purchased in 2007 and that more than 260 million worldwide use their PCs to play games, indicating there is a huge untapped potential with the PC platform. "In a single year the PC has much, much larger volumes of scale than the largest console ever did over its entire lifetime," Newell said.

"You're missing opportunities if you define yourself as a wrapper around a set of graphics hardware, which sometimes it seems like some of the console guys do," Newell said. "Graphics are certainly good, but if you're not trying to figure out how to connect your customers together and generate a community and social aspect...

Valve maintains the PC platform is the breeding ground for technological innovation as competing hardware manufacturers continuously drive change. "If Intel stumbles for a while AMD steps in and solves their problems. If Nvidia slows down in terms of pushing graphics technology ATI is sitting right there to take as much of their business away from them as they can. We see that more and more it's the open PC platform that's driving the basic media standards, data standards, connection standards, graphics standards, compute standards that are being incorporated into consoles," Newell said. "Consoles are really just becoming step-children of the capital investments that are being made."

[function]

"We've got great facilities that make it very hard for people to pirate," he said. "And more importantly, the service value of having an ongoing relationship with us is high enough that it causes people to not be very interested in piracy.

He's not saying piracy isn't a problem for PC games, he's saying it's not a problem for them because of their anti-piracy measures and because of added value that makes people not want to pirate.

He is saying that you can successfully WORK AROUND piracy, not that piracy isn't an issue, or else they wouldn't be talking about their successful methods of countering piracy!

Note: he is ADVOCATING (good) DRM and talking up its success!

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by function

He's not saying piracy isn't a problem for PC games, he's saying it's not a problem for them because of their anti-piracy measures and because of added value that makes people not want to pirate.

He is saying that you can successfully WORK AROUND piracy, not that piracy isn't an issue, or else they wouldn't be talking about their successful methods of countering piracy!

Note: he is ADVOCATING (good) DRM and talking up its success!

1. All Steam games have been cracked (at least for offline play), so their anti-piracy DRM isn't working except for online multiplayer, and they know it.

2. If you read the first post I made when I started this thread, you can see where Valve explicitly state they don't worry about piracy. More because they view it as a missed sale opportunity rather than something they can combat with (non-working) DRM.

3. Valve make their money by selling good products that people want and building a relationship with their customers, rather than treating all their customers as thieves, and blaming them when a poor product makes low sales (as many other devs do).

[willardjuice]

1. All Steam games have been cracked (at least for offline play), so their anti-piracy DRM isn't working except for online multiplayer, and they know it

Actually the larger point is that all Steam games get cracked after their official release. That's a big selling point of Steam; since all games are encrypted before their release, it's nearly impossible to get a working copy off torrents (or the internet in general) before the game's official release. I know of some people who plan to purchase games, but because they can get a copy off torrents a week or two before the game officially launches, they no longer want to pay for a game they already beat. So in this "area of DRM", Steam works pretty well.

[function]

Originally Posted by Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.

1. All Steam games have been cracked (at least for offline play), so their anti-piracy DRM isn't working except for online multiplayer, and they know it.

Just because a system of DRM is cracked at some point it doesn't mean it has (and has had) no effect on piracy and that therefore it's pointless. It's not a binary on/off switch (or one that covers all points in time).

Deterring casual piracy over the lifetime of the product, and especially protecting the first few days worth of sales will have a potentially enormous positive impact on sales. Also, considering how many games have an online component even if it only helped protect online game sales (it doesn't) that'd be a HUGE win for their DRM.

2. If you read the first post I made when I started this thread, you can see where Valve explicitly state they don't worry about piracy. More because they view it as a missed sale opportunity rather than something they can combat with (non-working) DRM.

You'll also see where they state that they believe their DRM helps (hence them continuing to use and develop it)...

3. Valve make their money by selling good products that people want and building a relationship with their customers, rather than treating all their customers as thieves, and blaming them when a poor product makes low sales (as many other devs do).

According to Valve their DRM also helps. They said that. You even quoted that!

There are several factors to Steam's success, but DRM is one of them. And actually they DO treat all their customers like thieves (their servers were unreachable and so Steam automatically wiped my saved password and locked me out of all my games until it could connect a few hours later*). I was pissed - if ever any peice of software treated all it's customers like potential theives it's Steam, it just does it in a (usually) nice way.

*If there is no internet connection Steam will run in offline mode for a few days. If it finds an internet connect but can't reach the Steam servers it deletes your saved password (prompting you to re-enter it each connection attempt) and locks you out of EVERY SINGLE PISSING GAME you spent money on until it can guarantee you aren't a thief.

When this happened to me I wanted to reach into my PC, pull Steam off the hard drive and stamp on it. [Insert angry smiley face here]

[Lidve]

I agree, games like Sins of Solar Empire have no protection whatsoever, and still sell well - because they are good games

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by Lidve

I agree, games like Sins of Solar Empire have no protection whatsoever, and still sell well - because they are good games

Which is still just a fraction of what it could sell. Stardock has shown some stats from one of their releases, shortly after release that showed orders of magnitude more pirated copies of the game trying to connect to their servers than legit purchased games.

Now imagine what they could do if they got even a fraction more people to purchase rather than pirate, and what kind of games they might greenlight or added features (IQ or gameplay) they could add with better funding.

It only works for them because they severly limit their budget to maximize the potential for profit with lower sales. One reason they'll never become a AAA dev, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Regards,
SB

[obonicus]

Originally Posted by Silent_Buddha

Which is still just a fraction of what it could sell. Stardock has shown some stats from one of their releases, shortly after release that showed orders of magnitude more pirated copies of the game trying to connect to their servers than legit purchased games.

The story's slightly more complex than that. Also, it's probably not a 'fraction' of what it could sell. We have no idea how many pirated copies would convert to a sale.

Honestly, look at what Brad Wardell says. He's possibly the most open person in the entire industry, when it comes to numbers. For instance, he's never said piracy is irrelevant. Instead he's said:

a) PC gaming never was a venue for real blockbusters, of the sort you find on consoles.
b) Make games that target the demographic that actually buys games. Which is his pattern with GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire. Don't make Crysis.

[Silent_Buddha]

Originally Posted by obonicus

The story's slightly more complex than that. Also, it's probably not a 'fraction' of what it could sell. We have no idea how many pirated copies would convert to a sale.

Honestly, look at what Brad Wardell says. He's possibly the most open person in the entire industry, when it comes to numbers. For instance, he's never said piracy is irrelevant. Instead he's said:

a) PC gaming never was a venue for real blockbusters, of the sort you find on consoles.
b) Make games that target the demographic that actually buys games. Which is his pattern with GalCiv and Sins of a Solar Empire. Don't make Crysis.

PC has the same potential for a blockbuster, but it also suffers from massive pirating which reduces your chances for a blockbuster even if you make a compelling game. The Sims and Diablo II are a couple off the top of my head. Perhaps Oblivion or Fallout 3.

But blockbuster =\= AAA dev as I was indicating. The budget small with games with a relatively small scope (IE - no significant single player campaign) can certainly net you modest profits. And as I said there's nothing wrong with that. While I like the Stardock games, they are of limited value to me since I primarily buy games for the single player now days. Thus I liked the relatively mediocre C&C Red Alert 3 over the IMO superior Sins of a Solar Empire purely because they had the budget to do a proper single player campaign, something Stardock doesn't quite have the luxury (or desire) of doing.

Regards,
SB

[Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.]

Originally Posted by Silent_Buddha

Which is still just a fraction of what it could sell. Stardock has shown some stats from one of their releases, shortly after release that showed orders of magnitude more pirated copies of the game trying to connect to their servers than legit purchased games.

How many of those games were downloaded, run once or twice, and then deleted as "not for me"? I'd be interested to see what their "pirate connect" numbers were a couple of weeks after release. I'd bet it's a lot, lot lower.

[swaaye]

Sins has protection now. I used to be able to download it from Impulse and just share the folder on the network so friends could get it so we could all play together. But now it asks to activate.

Honestly we don't like the game that much anyway though so whatever lol.

[trinibwoy]

Originally Posted by Bouncing Zabaglione Bros.

How many of those games were downloaded, run once or twice, and then deleted as "not for me"? I'd be interested to see what their "pirate connect" numbers were a couple of weeks after release. I'd bet it's a lot, lot lower.

Yep, the percentage of pirated downloads that are actually played is probably quite low. But it's hard to argue that DRM in Steam isn't part of Valve's success. Of course Steam has a lot of added value as well that attracts honest customers.