Have people read this article on piracy?

very intelligent well written article from inside the industry

Nice, interesting read. Thanks Anuban.

Very interesting Anuban! Thanks for the link. It was an eye-opening article.

Does anyone else get the impression that game developers are starting to sound like the RIAA?

P.S. You need to post this over at Epics forums and see how long it lasts

I've read it. Those guys are pretty smart.

I used a quote of theirs in this thread of mine.

I've read a post/blog-entry from the Stardock-developers before.
He's right that piracy isn't the biggest threat to games. It's not a fun part of the equation, but it can't possibly be the #1 threat to your software unless you are doing something very very wrong (like building developing for the Chinese ...).

But we still don't get the editorial buzz that some of the big name titles do because our genre isn't considered as "cool" as other genres.

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I blame the users themselves for that bit as well.
Just look at all the news for Starcraft and compare that to the news about SoSE.
If it hadn't been for Penny-Arcade I wouldn't have heard about it.
Meanwhile I have to make an effort to ignore the Starcraft-marketing.

It's as if 'strategy' isn't interesting to the media if it's not made by Blizzard.
I think the same applies to every genre in the game-section.
There's plenty of 'unknown' developers that build better games than the big names (The Witcher easily outranks NWN 2 IMHO), but somehow the big names get all the glory ...
The same happens in every other business though (recumbents vs ordinary bikes, Hollywood movies vs 'the rest', 'pop-music' vs 'alternative', etc)

It's funny though ... in a way he is telling developers that they should be more like EA, because that's how they operate as well. They develop games based on what is most effective use of their resources when compared to the target audience for their games.

I do think that UT3 wasn't a bad game for Epic (there's little that's fundamentally flawed with the game itself), because even though it didn't sell as much as they'd hoped it and GoW were excellent promotion for UE3. In fact I'm sure that by demonstrating the various 'work in progress'-versions of UT3/GoW to their potential customers they were able to sell quite a lot of licenses.
Not because the 'games' were good, but because they demonstrated a very effective/stream-lined set of development-tools. That's what they did when they showed that fleshy cube at the recent GDC. And IMHO it's something to keep in mind when looking at Epic's games.
As such it's been a very effective use of their resources.

// ---

Does anyone else get the impression that game developers are starting to sound like the RIAA?

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What do you mean 'starting' ?
They are even worse than the RIAA (especially if you look at the amount of control that a system like Steam gives them).
The music-industry has to invent ways to add protection (because cd-audio never was meant to be protected), while the software-industry can do so with very little effort (just add encryption and tell the customers to request their key by phone/e-mail/etc.)

JaFO said:

What do you mean 'starting' ?
They are even worse than the RIAA (especially if you look at the amount of control that a system like Steam gives them).
The music-industry has to invent ways to add protection (because cd-audio never was meant to be protected), while the software-industry can do so with very little effort (just add encryption and tell the customers to request their key by phone/e-mail/etc.)

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It's something that I just noticed recently (call it blind fanboy-ism )
I couldn't put my finger on what bothered me so much about UT3 or Epic recently. I mean UT3 is a good game. It's fun and the game play is solid. I guess it's the whole Epic/Microsoft/Console/Pirating rants. It's as if the (relatively) small game developer I have grown to love had turned into nothing more than a whinny-money hungry-machine.

I hope my post made sense but that's the best way I could word it ATM.

Anuban said:

I'm glad people actually got something out of this thread. Cool.

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It's an excellent article and I appreciate you pointing it out.

{RU}Sirius said:

It's an excellent article and I appreciate you pointing it out.

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+1

Has anyone tried posting it on the epic forums yet?

SlipStreams_65 said:

Has anyone tried posting it on the epic forums yet?

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Would be deleted for being off-topic .

Now that's surprising! No point in discussing games on a games forum!

T2A` said:

Now that's surprising! No point in discussing games on a games forum!

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Discussing other games on a Unreal Tournament specific forum. Why am I clarifying this? Seems so ... obvious.

Very interesting article indeed. I got a bit of a different feel from it though, more so of "if you made a game that got pirated too much, than you should have designed a different game." But I have no idea which games get pirated a lot or not. The thing i liked about it was an insight in their way of doing things. That is always interesting to read. (gamasutra is good for that too I think)

PS: Liked the area where he mentions pirates bitching about the product they didn't buy ... didn't I see that happen on this forum at some point? always good to tick me off.

Checker said:

Discussing other games on a Unreal Tournament specific forum. Why am I clarifying this? Seems so ... obvious.

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Actually, I thought of it as discussing games marketing. Agreed, it shouldn't be posted in the UT3 section but, they do have a general chat area that isn't tied to a specific game. It would be nice to hear a response from Epic to the statements made in that post.

Yeah this is a good article, I mean its not like its impossible to pirate on consoles or that console owners dont pirate PC games either.

Those metacritic ratings did it for me in the comments, you can see the user ratings vs the critic rating being lower on PC's. I thought I might have expected more than console gamers in some respects, I know which titles could have been taken further (well I would like to think that) but bioshock vs system shock 2 is a prime example. Going on I would say like what SupCom is to TA is what PC gamers would be looking for.

The thing of it is, perhaps even dual gamers expect more of a PC title so when they see a game which is very similar (like UT3 for eg) mods might not factor in at all (although its possible on PS3 somewhat) so they choose which platform is easiest for them. Someone did mention this is the comments and I thought it was a pretty objective point for a change and can understand that reasoning.

Its certainly possible to get a game selling well across multiple platforms, pirates or not, but I think effort has to be put into both sides. One way to open things up on titles which are almost identical on different platforms would be cross platform play especially for multiplayer titles. Games like NFS carbon are prime examples of titles which could work well in that regard, sure control options are going to give you an advantage one way or the other but its not like there isnt support for the right control options on all platforms. I dunno what it is but I can forgive the NFS alot of its console quirks easier than I could an RTS game or Shooter.

There is also the point of making a game for a market, Shooters have really become a dime a dozen, FPS or TPS take your pick basically anything with action and a shooter takes alot from other games already. I think thats where GTA has always done well or say a game like mafia, they are action shooters in some sense but theres more to it than that. Even recently people were talking in offtopic about tom clancys games and there future, people sounding like they dont like the direction, which does make sense especially when other titles have alot of those same gameplay aspects covered an better so the things which made such titles stick out were removed making them more samey.

Freeform is certainly something lacking in todays games but perhaps that has alot to do with assets and how much longer things take in the art pipeline now. Then again when you consider you dont have to aim ultra top end then you could save some costs there, infact you could save alot of costs there and that could be one area where RTS games do well.

Theres certainly swings in the industry to which ever genre's, I mean fantasy kinda came from nowhere to take the cake for awhile.

I do kinda look at the slasher film industry, even being a subgenre somewhat itself, in the past they have made alot of money from low budget titles but they still offer some level of quality while being rather appealing (well to me atleast, mainly talking effects here as well ). Sure there are ones with bigger names than others but back when they were first coming out and still today they dont get the same amount of editorial space as you could expect from a movie with a few oscar nominations.

I agree pretty much on all points of this article, good find anuban

I agree with this article and I have also believed in this ideology before. As I own a very young development studio, one of the key aspects of our work, is simply 'Lets not to be too evil'.

We're allowed to be evil in our game design (i.e very hard levels), but let's not punish our consumers. The way I see it, we need to reduce the 'work' it takes for a game to be up and running to just three steps [and even one of those steps is optional!]

- Download / Buy from store
- Install (optional)
- Play

Now granted that our games are much smaller than Epic's, let's not forget that if extra time / hassle is included, regardless of size ... it just makes things much more painful. For example,

- Download / Buy from store
- Install
- Watch movies (which you can later turn off with a program command)
- Enter CD Key (one time only)
- Generate GameSpy account, only to have it fail due to GameSpy servers going down
- Logging in, only to have it fail due to GameSpy servers going down
- Play

Those extra steps can get really frustrating, especially when the game is dependent on other services being online, for most people. In fact, I wrote UWindow2 to also bypass the GameSpy online verification (unless of course, you want to play online). I know there is also offline verification, but UT3 doesn't give you the option as it tries to log in online by default.

Anyways, another step to include could also be CD/DVD protection methods, especially if they don't work in various drives. And after all, why use known methods of CD/DVD protection when they get cracked in a few weeks, when the general outcome is that people who legitimately bought the game suffer? Sure you may argue that the first few weeks of the game is critical, but for those people who never had the intention to buy in the first place will wait anyways for the crack to be released. Meanwhile, people who's drives fail at trying to read these discs simply return their purchase or play some other game while waiting for tech support.

I suppose what I am trying to say is, let's not just assume that people who play our games are going to be pirates. Let's assume, that the person playing the game is our consumer.

I really enjoyed reading this. They basically pwn Epic, and throw their excuse for poor sales out of the water!

No, I don't believe piracy has anything to do with it. I'd blame it on a ****ty demo and pc gamers' fatigue with the UT series in general. Piracy is indeed a big problem with pc gaming though. Sure, people illegally copy console games as well, but because the console industry is so huge and the number of people who possess the know how to obtain games through warez or whatever is so small, it doesn't hurt the consoles so much. But if you assume that average pc gamer knows a lot more about computers than the average pc user (which I think is safe to assume when I factor in how much computer gaming has taught me about hardware and the internet) and is therefore more capable of pirating games, then you have a bigger problem, one that has hurt the industry for years, no doubt. I remember pirating games when I was a teenager. Nowadays, besides the obvious moral objections, I don't pirate games, simply because the pc has become more and more of a niche platform for gaming, and I don't want to see it disappear as a platform.

CoD4 is getting the sh*t pirated out of it, yet it consistently makes the top-selling lists. Piracy didn't kill UT3. UT3 killed UT3.

I'd post links of proof, but I don't think hal would like that.