5 ms·

Or don't use DRM at all. Instead of relying on a single instance of a product making money for years to come, focus more on new games or in-game content sales.

by Xurinos 17y ago

Or don't use DRM at all. Instead of relying on a single instance of a product making money for years to come, focus more on new games or in-game content sales. Better yet, focus more on positive features and bugfixes/polish for present games than on ways to defeat crackers. Knowing your limitations, try social solutions for social problems. Make your brand the trusted good source for awesome games of your niche. More elaboration on that last tip: Warez and hacker sites have a deadly mix of people wanting to share things and people wanting to take advantage of sharers. Sure, you can get some game for free, or you can apply some patch that allows you to OPK people in an FPS, but you have to blindly trust whoever submitted that game/patch to have your best interests at heart. You have to ignore how, for example, some people playing the game of Combat Arms unknowingly spam their server chat with advertisements for the hack site. You have to believe that no one would put a backdoor on your system through your game and have access to any account and credit card information you may have stored via that game or on your computer. In other words, the system is about trust, and if your brand matches or exceeds its customers' expectations, you will earn and maintain their trust and their loyalty. Sure, some people may be cheap, but at the same time, they can be bought with a certain amount of guarantee of security. People are concerned about their things. Educate people more about these completely real and ongoing dangers -- most people have no idea they are part of a botnet, thanks to a little sneaky thing they thought they could do -- and litigate less. One makes you a hero, and the other paints you as a villain. One makes you an expert, and the other turns away customers.

twinwing 17y ago
I think that their target audience is already educated, and there's no way of generating trust from those who do not wish to pay. For many - myself included in my high school years - Linux is all about free as in beer.
- _delirium 17y ago
  I don't see any particular aversion to buying games among Linux users, at least more than among Mac or Windows users. Linux users actually account for substantially larger proportions of indie-game sales than Linux marketshare would predict: http://www.koonsolo.com/news/linux-users-show-their-love-for-indie-game/ http://www.koonsolo.com/news/linux-users-show-their-love-for...
rick888 17y ago
"Or don't use DRM at all." It's too late for that. DRM was invented as a result of rampant piracy. You should be blaming the pirates rather than the company using it. "Instead of relying on a single instance of a product making money for years to come, focus more on new games or in-game content sales." Now I know you have never tried to sell software. No product anyone sells works like that. There is support, bug fixes, updates, and features. If you don't keep this up, you will sell less and be forced to make changes. This is how the market works. I LOLd at the part where you said they should concentrate on "new games". If their old games are getting pirated and making it difficult to support legitimate customers, how would making a new game be any different? "Better yet, focus more on positive features and bugfixes/polish for present games than on ways to defeat crackers. Knowing your limitations, try social solutions for social problems. Make your brand the trusted good source for awesome games of your niche." This doesn't work. No matter how hard you focus on new features, if you are losing customers left and right because they are downloading it for free (or because the people downloading it for free are making it increasingly difficult to support your existing customers and they leave), you will go out of business. "In other words, the system is about trust, and if your brand matches or exceeds its customers' expectations, you will earn and maintain their trust and their loyalty. Sure, some people may be cheap, but at the same time, they can be bought with a certain amount of guarantee of security. People are concerned about their things." If something is free, it can be found easily with little or no risk, people will find a reason to download it over spending their hard-earned cash.
- tetsuo13 17y ago
  It's too late for that. DRM was invented as a result of rampant piracy. You should be blaming the pirates rather than the company using it. People were sharing programs long before p2p became popular. Only difference in recent years to accessibility to the copying mechanisms. Blame it on the Internet taking off and creating a world where bits are no longer a scarcity, where purchasing a physical media containing those bits is becoming legacy. With the Internet making it easy for anyone to copy anything suddenly those that made those physical copies weren't needed as much. Certainly their value has been questioned. DRM became widespread as a way for the content distributors to maintain their status quo without having to change their business model in any way.
novas0x2a 17y ago
My responses will focus on the PC market, mostly. The console market is a different beast altogether. > Instead of relying on a single instance of a product making money for years to come, focus more on new games Sell it at a loss, make it up in volume? Right. > or in-game content sales. That's exactly what I DON'T want. Dragon Age has a guy in your camp with the "I have a quest!" marker above his head. Except it's a paid quest. And you can't make him go away. Die. And what, exactly, is supposed to prevent someone from pirating in-game content sales? DRM sucks. But so do people. LGP is a small company fighting the good fight. They have clear evidence that piracy is taking place. There are only a few things they can do about it: - Suck it up and take it. This is the route that most indie/small companies take. Estimates at the piracy rates from other indie devs seem to be about 80-90% [1][2][3]. - Build DRM like 2k games, using SecuROM and like technologies, that make users despise you. This option is expensive in both money and reputation. - Build DRM like Steam or Stardock's Impulse, where the pain of DRM is offset by the community aspects and other perks. This option is expensive in money, but the reputation damage is minimal. - Do something quick and simple. LGP seems to have implemented this option. I posit[1] that DRM does reduce piracy. It cannot stop it, but it can reduce it. Most vendors try to come up with a 100% solution that turns out to be an 80% solution while screwing the legit user over. LGP has chosen to aim for an 80% solution, and I bet it will be just as effective as the other DRM schemes (which is to say, maybe 10-20% of people who would have pirated won't. It only has to pay for itself, remember!). The LGP solution isn't described in much detail, but if it works the way they claim (no internet connection, etc) it seems to fail open. How common is that? I really hope this works for them, because evidence that this works would be a great precedent. Due to this scheme, when LGP says they're giving you a license for the game and not the game itself, they really mean it. They're giving you the benefits of a license-based scheme rather than just the usual punishments. This sort of scheme is exactly what I want the RIAA to implement; I want my collection in the cloud, and I want to be able to download and play the music on any computer I want, as many times as I want. 1) http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 2) http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/ http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/ 3) http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/25809/TapFu_Developer_Claims_90_iPhone_Piracy_Rate.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/25809/TapFu_Developer_Cla...
- 17y ago

by Xurinos 17y ago

twinwing 17y ago

I think that their target audience is already educated, and there's no way of generating trust from those who do not wish to pay. For many - myself included in my high school years - Linux is all about free as in beer.

_delirium 17y ago
I don't see any particular aversion to buying games among Linux users, at least more than among Mac or Windows users. Linux users actually account for substantially larger proportions of indie-game sales than Linux marketshare would predict: http://www.koonsolo.com/news/linux-users-show-their-love-for-indie-game/ http://www.koonsolo.com/news/linux-users-show-their-love-for...

rick888 17y ago

"Or don't use DRM at all." It's too late for that. DRM was invented as a result of rampant piracy. You should be blaming the pirates rather than the company using it. "Instead of relying on a single instance of a product making money for years to come, focus more on new games or in-game content sales." Now I know you have never tried to sell software. No product anyone sells works like that. There is support, bug fixes, updates, and features. If you don't keep this up, you will sell less and be forced to make changes. This is how the market works. I LOLd at the part where you said they should concentrate on "new games". If their old games are getting pirated and making it difficult to support legitimate customers, how would making a new game be any different? "Better yet, focus more on positive features and bugfixes/polish for present games than on ways to defeat crackers. Knowing your limitations, try social solutions for social problems. Make your brand the trusted good source for awesome games of your niche." This doesn't work. No matter how hard you focus on new features, if you are losing customers left and right because they are downloading it for free (or because the people downloading it for free are making it increasingly difficult to support your existing customers and they leave), you will go out of business. "In other words, the system is about trust, and if your brand matches or exceeds its customers' expectations, you will earn and maintain their trust and their loyalty. Sure, some people may be cheap, but at the same time, they can be bought with a certain amount of guarantee of security. People are concerned about their things." If something is free, it can be found easily with little or no risk, people will find a reason to download it over spending their hard-earned cash.

tetsuo13 17y ago
It's too late for that. DRM was invented as a result of rampant piracy. You should be blaming the pirates rather than the company using it. People were sharing programs long before p2p became popular. Only difference in recent years to accessibility to the copying mechanisms. Blame it on the Internet taking off and creating a world where bits are no longer a scarcity, where purchasing a physical media containing those bits is becoming legacy. With the Internet making it easy for anyone to copy anything suddenly those that made those physical copies weren't needed as much. Certainly their value has been questioned. DRM became widespread as a way for the content distributors to maintain their status quo without having to change their business model in any way.

novas0x2a 17y ago

My responses will focus on the PC market, mostly. The console market is a different beast altogether. > Instead of relying on a single instance of a product making money for years to come, focus more on new games Sell it at a loss, make it up in volume? Right. > or in-game content sales. That's exactly what I DON'T want. Dragon Age has a guy in your camp with the "I have a quest!" marker above his head. Except it's a paid quest. And you can't make him go away. Die. And what, exactly, is supposed to prevent someone from pirating in-game content sales? DRM sucks. But so do people. LGP is a small company fighting the good fight. They have clear evidence that piracy is taking place. There are only a few things they can do about it: - Suck it up and take it. This is the route that most indie/small companies take. Estimates at the piracy rates from other indie devs seem to be about 80-90% [1][2][3]. - Build DRM like 2k games, using SecuROM and like technologies, that make users despise you. This option is expensive in both money and reputation. - Build DRM like Steam or Stardock's Impulse, where the pain of DRM is offset by the community aspects and other perks. This option is expensive in money, but the reputation damage is minimal. - Do something quick and simple. LGP seems to have implemented this option. I posit[1] that DRM does reduce piracy. It cannot stop it, but it can reduce it. Most vendors try to come up with a 100% solution that turns out to be an 80% solution while screwing the legit user over. LGP has chosen to aim for an 80% solution, and I bet it will be just as effective as the other DRM schemes (which is to say, maybe 10-20% of people who would have pirated won't. It only has to pay for itself, remember!). The LGP solution isn't described in much detail, but if it works the way they claim (no internet connection, etc) it seems to fail open. How common is that? I really hope this works for them, because evidence that this works would be a great precedent. Due to this scheme, when LGP says they're giving you a license for the game and not the game itself, they really mean it. They're giving you the benefits of a license-based scheme rather than just the usual punishments. This sort of scheme is exactly what I want the RIAA to implement; I want my collection in the cloud, and I want to be able to download and play the music on any computer I want, as many times as I want. 1) http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=17350 2) http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/ http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/ 3) http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/25809/TapFu_Developer_Claims_90_iPhone_Piracy_Rate.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/25809/TapFu_Developer_Cla...

17y ago