Ways To Fight/prevent Pandora Games Piracy

[PoisonedV]

that's not a commercial model and its not commercially viable
this is about commercial games that are intending to make money, not pay back the costs of the mountain dews drunken while devving late at night
also people say they are willing to donate 100 dollars but i doubt any of them will go through with it

 

[Mr.Gonzo]

Radiohead did it for their album IN RAINBOWS.
Made a shit load of money.

Whatever 100$ or not. You could save / make money that way.
Look at World of Goo. They noticed by analyzing the scoreboards that 90% of the people who had the game had a pirated copy.
Imagine for commercial games... How many people who Never would've paid 60 bucks for one ( i don't unless its fucking good ) would've gave 5$ (or more)?
Im pretty sure at least 50% more people would buy it now.

Then the Gaming industry would Save / make more money!

 

[Gilrad]

Radiohead did it for their album IN RAINBOWS.
Made a shit load of money.

Thats not the point here. Radiohead chose to take that route, and it just so happened that circumstances lined up in the correct way that that choice paid off. It is not reasonable to expect every single (or any for that matter) commercial dev to do the same thing.

I say stick with what works. Online functionality can be severed with some form of copy protection, and only with A+ blockbuster titles do people try to make online functionality work on cracked copies (Battlefield series, World of Warcraft, ect). If the Pandora gets that successful, then unofficial cracked online servers are probably not that important anymore.

 

[ion]

If there is no DRM or counter measures to prevent piracy, there WILL be. You can talk all you want about these Utopian societies where everyone loves spending their money on Pandora games and everyone gets along and what-not. But it is not going to happen. Anything that can be made can be broken down. Heck, even if there was DRM that would be cracked too. The only thing that hasn't been affected by this is the PS3 and other things that use AES Security. But even then, there are exploits to get around that.

End thread.

 

[PoisonedV]

Radiohead did it for their album IN RAINBOWS.
Made a shit load of money.

Whatever 100$ or not. You could save / make money that way.
Look at World of Goo. They noticed by analyzing the scoreboards that 90% of the people who had the game had a pirated copy.
Imagine for commercial games... How many people who Never would've paid 60 bucks for one ( i don't unless its fucking good ) would've gave 5$ (or more)?
Im pretty sure at least 50% more people would buy it now.

Then the Gaming industry would Save / make more money!

I don't think so, I think no matter what price point pirates will be pirates...
also the world of goo '90 percent pirated' is bullshit. i looked at their little 'report'

also totally different thing for radiohead.

 

[CyruzDraxs]

Radiohead Payment Model.

Allow the user to decide how much they want to pay for the game. Make it so you have to go through a 'donations' page of sorts to get to the downloa page, then allow them to download it without a credit card number when they input $0.

You'll get what the user thinks it's worth and the user will be happy. If anyone gets it for $0 they probably wouldn't have paid for it anyway if you enforced it, and you just got a mouth to pass the word around with.

 

[Svartalf]

I don't think so, I think no matter what price point pirates will be pirates...

Indeed. But there'd be quite a few less of them if the prices were "realistic", which is unfortunately not quite the case in many title's situations.

QUOTE

also the world of goo '90 percent pirated' is bullshit. i looked at their little 'report'



I've a bit of trouble buying 90% for the pirating ratio. I would be more willing to believe 70-80% as peak levels, based on what LGP has seen with it's titles on the torrent scene.

QUOTE
also totally different thing for radiohead.


Indeed.

 

[Mr.Gonzo]

That's what i'll see when i'll be richer than Capcom
* rubs his hands together while putting on a greedy grin *

...


Whatever game making is still possible with a laptop while living in a cardboard box.
just gotta find a plug of some sort for power.


On a more serious note: Well... if you don't try new stuff nothing is never going to change... EVER.

im just another peanut in the turd trying to find something to help... that will make both of the sides happy.


Steinberg a song making software company lost millions becuse of the h2o guys.
Cracking every new technology being invented for protecting the stuff.
Finally they paid the h20 people to come work for them to create something flawless.
Result = it ended up being cracked again.

Its some of the best softwares around ... but the price range of 800 to 2350 ... is a problem.

People will never change...
So the only way to do it ... is to change the way of distribution.
Lower prices will help... but still.

 

[Alpha2]

The major reason why anyone pirates is because they dont see a value to the things they're pirating. Whether it's because they think the price of the product is too high or they dont perceive it being worth the money.

The best way around this is to make sure you arnt asking for more money than the majority of people feel the product is worth. If you give a person a choice they'll say "10 cent." If you take the choice aways but dont force them to pay 20 bucks for something they wouldnt pay 10 bucks for, then you might actually make a sale at $5 if your product is generally of fair quality.

There will always be pirates that want everything for free, you cant stop that. If it exists at all, there will always be someone trying to find a way to give it to you for free, it's so true that it should be "Rule #35" right after the one about porn. But the key is to create an environment where people are more likely to want to pay for it rather than steal it on the principal of thinking that it's not worth the asking price. The more prohibitive you are the more people will want to steal it just out of spite.

 

[PoisonedV]

what do you mean 'change the way of distribution'?
make it free?
if they make it free, the companies dont exist
also, the company wouldnt have lost millions because the people cracked it. almost all the people pirating it would never have been able to afford it in the first place, and if they had they still probably wouldnt have. they may have just released a product with not enough professional demand
the problem with the world of goo thing is very large- first of all, maybe not everyone is connecting with high scores- maybe only mainly pirates are interested in it, or maybe only registered people so it could be a swing in either direction. also, there are dynamic IP's, different PC's, etc- they make up some technobabble about using the subnets and the intertubes and interpolating them but its garbage

 

[Mr.Gonzo]

That's the first thing that comes into your mind when i say Change the way of distribution?
How creative of you.

 

[PoisonedV]

thats what you already said- make it free. letting people pay for it doesn't make it not free.
I guess it's not very 'creative' of me to take what you said and apply it to something else you said

 

[Mr.Gonzo]

never said to make it free el duderino. One of my solutions was to let the buyer choose what he thinks its worth = may be better for smaller teams.
Or put on some reasonable prices = Better for big companies.

And I think you're just being grouchy because you hate Christmas.

 

[truekaiser]

No, allowing people to have the CHOICE to develop DRM'd software and to USE DRM'd software is EXACTLY what makes it free.
besides. what does this have to do with Steam?
also, how else are you going to download 'multi gigabyte files'? what other method is tehre to get it?

it's called a dvd.

and if you read the thread, steam was brought up as a version of 'good drm' a oxymoron btw.



edit:

If there is no DRM or counter measures to prevent piracy, there WILL be. You can talk all you want about these Utopian societies where everyone loves spending their money on Pandora games and everyone gets along and what-not. But it is not going to happen. Anything that can be made can be broken down. Heck, even if there was DRM that would be cracked too. The only thing that hasn't been affected by this is the PS3 and other things that use AES Security. But even then, there are exploits to get around that.

End thread.


Actually the ps3 drm has been circumvented. to the point that one can install custom firmware on it and that the first proof of concept code of getting around the vm that protects the gfx chip from access by third party's.

 

[PoisonedV]

never said to make it free el duderino. One of my solutions was to let the buyer choose what he thinks its worth = may be better for smaller teams.
Or put on some reasonable prices = Better for big companies.

And I think you're just being grouchy because you hate Christmas.

I love Christmas- after all, I just got 'el duderino' on dvd...

truekaiser: you have the option of buying it retail

 

[audovoice]

For all those people that love steam or hate it. Realize that only the people that bought the game have to deal with the DRM crap. Pirated versions of Halflife and Portal work off line. That's what is so stupid about the contemporary wave of DRM, it only inconveniences people with legitimate copies, once the DRM has been circumvented a single time that cracked version can be spread to every one. Every contemporary DRM method is exploitable. The new wave of DRM is hardware based, and I am morally opposed to it.

One effective way to prevent file sharing is the person who holds the rights to the game to be a mad mother fucker with cease and desist orders and pass em out like candy to tracker sites like bitjunkie and isohunt, and direct file sharing sites like rapidshare and mediafire. From what I understand they get such notices all the time and are very responsive in pulling content. That may sound mad, and it probably is, but I know of one case of that actually working. It was an adult game so I won't post the name here but the creator constantly does this and is effective in making his games hard to get. All he needs to do is put more effort into finding the games then the average person would. Try it, look for some relatively obscure game torrent on all the torrent tracker sites that you are familiar with. It will probably be about one or two on each site and that is all for a game like, Aquaria. Probably a few more for a game like WOG, but still not dozens. And the best part is that if the torrent name is to coded for the game developer to and take down, it is also too difficult for many people to find.

Also conventional DRM would be more effective for a smaller market like Pandora. There are relatively few people who have the know how and use that knowledge to crack games. As I said before this does not matter because once something has been cracked it can be distributed by torrents with no problem. The difference would be that there would be a smaller population (the Pandora community) that is drawn upon and so the subset of the population that would crack games is also smaller. Also when a new patch comes out the crack must be done again for the patch to be usable by people with pirated copies. Many mainstream games are only usable with a pirated copy that is either un-patched or patched to only some of the version numbers. I think that the first DRM title to come to Pandora would be cracked almost immediately (unless the unfamiliar OS environment proved to be a hindrance), but in that situation someone tied to the project could take it upon them selves (possibly someone from Pandora) to pass out the C&Ds to tracker sites. This does not stop the torrent but it does prevent many people from getting the tracker file that lets them connect to the torrent and download the game. If many games were coming to the Pandora, making a fairly small but reliable amount of profit, then there would be some games that would never get cracked, others that would not get seeded, and any patched version of the game would be unlikely to also get cracked, except for very popular titles. And as the popular titles should be making more money, the fact that they are likely to have a cracked version is irrelevant.

Some kinds of DRM I think are OK but other kinds are an invasion of privacy. I am not sure if the M-shield built into the Pandora's processor is exactly the kind of hardware reinforced DRM I am thinking of but I think it is and I hope it is not used.

 

[jakewastaken]

Well that's just like.... your opinion, man.

 

[audovoice]

All right...

any DRM other that Serial number Keys is going to be tricky to implement and cost money to develop. Even the Serial number Keys will probably cost a little money if the original program did not have that feature.

Someone is going to try porting to Pandora. If it sells well and makes a profit then it will encourage others.

If it does not sell well there will be speculation on such points as
-was it because of the game (not a good game, not a wide audience, not the same audience as Pandora's users, market flooded by free and similar games, not a good port or well suited to porting to Pandora)

-Was it heavily pirated

-Were sale expectations to high given the number of Pandora units in existence.

-Will my game fair differently.

Ultimately I think a few people will try. Mostly small independent developers with small games that would not normally reach a wide audience but maybe a big developer will port an old title too.

If they collectively do well, all's fine and dandy. If not then there will be few controversial ports to Pandora.



It may be relevant to point out that there is currently a glut of small games for the iPod Touch and iPhone. Most games are selling for $1 and the highest are selling for $10. Most go to $5 or less after a few months or so and also have sales by the developer. Black Friday had a lot of sales and so had people hunting online looking for bargains. It is a good business model (having a central place for every one to browse games, no hunting on the net). But as a direct result of the current glut of small games we might see some of the games making there way to Pandora.

 

[Spirit]

I would not give money for any game with any form of DRM. I am annoyed enough of games that require me to insert their CD/DVD just for checking. If I pay for something, I expect to be treated like a king. And I sure as hell want to be able to copy, backup, install as often as I want, install offline, play with emulators etc.

 

[valhalla]

After reading articles on this I am just going to say DRM or no DRM the game will be pirated just as much, (...) DRM doesn't work and never will.

fully agree: DRM works only in making life harder for your customers, while the pirates have it the easier way.

QUOTE
Now lets look at Pandora and what they could do. Basically no matter what the Pandora team does, works or not, Nintendo, Mircrosoft, Sony, and others will tell people it doesn't work and will back that up with money so the developers will put their media on their hardware.


I'm afraid that that is too optimistic: Nintendo, Microsoft and Sony probably won't even acknowledge the existance of pandora, and even if they did, they don't need to pay developers to choose their consoles, they get paid by the developers for the privilege to do so.

(...)
steam validates every time the game is loaded if they are connected to the internet. if offline mode is selected, then the game wont be able to play online, and after a few days, must be re-validated. (...) considering the fact that wifi is almost EVERYWHERE except in highly rural areas, or the woods and stuff

and outside of the USA: here in Italy we can't have open wifi because of a retarded law that requires registration; some moderately rural areas don't even have internet access beyond 56k and GPRS

Anyway, if I buy I single player / local network game I would like to be able as long as I own an appropriate hardware / emulator, not just as long as the company that made it decides to manage a validation server.

(...) but if you're making a game for a system that will likely be playing torrented movies, MP3s and ROMS 80% of the time it's on for most people, and your game finds a way to never be pirated... ever? Then you're either the luckiest guy in the world or you make crappy apps.

parts of the pandora target are made of linux and homebrew enthusiasts who are going to use it mostly for legal stuff, even if mostly gratis, and aren't going to pirate a game that they can buy easily and for an appropriate price.

No, allowing people to have the CHOICE to develop DRM'd software and to USE DRM'd software is EXACTLY what makes it free.

That's correct. Of course I also hope that there will be enough non-DRM alternatives to prevent people from buying enought DRM-riddled games to make them worth doing, but that must come from the customer choices, not from an upstream decision.

If there is no DRM or counter measures to prevent piracy, there WILL be. (...)
End thread.

And if there is DRM to prevent privacy it gets broken, and there is piracy anyway. The logical deduction would be to stop wasting money on DRM, accept the hardcore piracy (people who wouldn't be customers anyway) and try to get to as many paying customers as you can (of course, this is the hard part, DRM or not, piracy or not)