Interview The Witcher 2 DRM and Piracy

[Terpsichore]

But it might work, nobody tried that yet except for short amounts of time (and it worked), when someone can search his pockets and find enough cash to purchase a game, he's certainly more inclined to do so.

Budget? Where exactly does all that money go? Because its sure as hell not reflected in the actual product. And not all games have the same value, i fail to see how your generic GOTY garbage FPS should cost the same as a proper ( ) RPG.


Honestly though, its a lost battle, for both sides.

Since gaming became something mainstream, its all about spending unhealthy amounts of money on advertising and not rewarding actual talent.

The world is being drowned in mindless greed.

 

[DraQ]

: x


:BROTATO:

He lives in a high piracy, low income country, so he doesn't have delusions about millions of people out there being able to afford more than a small fraction of the stuff they download. And he probably had many occasions to see pirates switching to buying originals when their incomes increased.
I knew several people who were "why buy it when it's available for free" who suddenly started buying originals when they have finished studies and got a stable above-average income.

Also this.

Guy realizes that you can't defeat piracy and that you can't compete with it in terms of price, but you can exploit it and compete with it in terms of quality offered.

BRB, going to pet my TW1 and TW2 boxes, hug them and call them George.

 

[Shannow]

Anyone know how those piracy ratios compare to some other AAA game released recently, especially those with shitty DRM?

Depends on what kind of ratios you want to make up...

My gut* tells me a ratio of 1 legal to 4 illegal copies should be roughly right for most AAA games, but ratios can vary wildly from game to game. Games not only using shitty DRM (like STEAM) but also getting bad-mouthed for it (like Origin) probably have higher torrent to buy ratio, but that depends on so many more factors that this can only be considered a very general statement.

*My gut feeling is as valid (or more accurately: invalid) as any other made up number.

 

[Infinitron]

Anyone know how those piracy ratios compare to some other AAA game released recently, especially those with shitty DRM?

Depends on what kind of ratios you want to make up...

My gut* tells me a ratio of 1 legal to 4 illegal copies should be roughly right for most AAA games, but ratios can vary wildly from game to game. Games not only using shitty DRM (like STEAM) but also getting bad-mouthed for it (like Origin) probably have higher torrent to buy ratio, but that depends on so many more factors that this can only be considered a very general statement.

*My gut feeling is as valid (or more accurately: invalid) as any other made up number.

Eh. The ratio of legal to illegal probably mostly depends on the kind of audience that's attracted to your game. If lots of teenagers want to play your game, it will be pirated like hell. Adults with jobs will pirate less.
DRM is a secondary factor if at all. Whether online 'badmouthing' of a game (for whatever reason) affects its piracy rate...that's an interesting question. I'm not sure.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Make the prices and the content reasonable.

I agree, though to be perfectly honest, for most games, the price is already pretty reasonable. Budgets these days are colossal, bigger than many films in the biggest cases, and yet games have a fraction of the market films do... you just can't expect to pay $10 for a brand-new game the same way you can with a movie. Yes, sometimes profits are huge, but for most games that only do a million or two copies, recouping that $20-30 million dollar investment is certainly not going to happen when you're selling your games so cheap. Even if you say sales go up, I don't think that's a sure thing. If publishers started charging $10 a pop for games, yes, you'd see a massive explosion in sales... for the first few months, or a year or two. But once that became the norm, I don't think you'd see those sales sustaining, at least not enough to make up for the price drop. Meanwhile, pirates would start saying "well iPhone games are 99 cents, why isn't yours?" or they'd find some other excuse to pirate anyway, because in the end piracy isn't usually about ideology, it's about the fact that paying nothing at all is a better deal than paying anything at all.

I think the prices in the West are already set for maximum profit. The problem is that the calculations from which these prices were set (8 minimum hourly wages are a decent price for a work) stop making sense outside the West. And in the West a price of 13 minimum hourly wages already is considered unaffordable/unacceptable by many, so imagine the reaction to prices like 20-25 minimum hourly wages.
That's where the whole "the games are too expensive" thing comes from.

 

[Mozgoëbstvo]

I sometimes entertained crazy thoughts about multiplatform games, etc.
First of: I believe that even if PC piracy was completely and utterly defeated, a lot of games would still dumbed down crap and not PC exclusive, because most big companies would still try to maximize profits by selling the same game across all platforms - which shouldn't be hard, because they saw it works in the last years, so why backpedal?

Secondly, it hit me when I thought of ArmAII's DEGRADE copy protection.
Usually people bitch because DRM is intrusive and annoying. The theoretical deal for companies is, it doesn't matter if it's intrusive AND effective.
But most games with any form of annoying DRM are cracked pretty soon.

As far as I know, ArmAII still hasn't a crack that defeats DEGRADE, which is thusly a 100% effective, 100% unobtrusive copy protection system.
Is Bohemia the only company who knows their shit about copy protection? Hasn't ANYONE else figured it out?

Then it hit me: maybe companies don't give an absolute crap about making the unpiratable PC game.
They release easy crackable PC versions of crap multiplatform games to rake in the little additional cash of the loyal buyers and use piracy as an excuse to keep making crap console games, not having the problem of making a creative PC game.

Is this surreal conspiracy shit, and people of Bohemia Interactive are geniuses, or is it remotely possible?

 

[Zarniwoop]

Make the prices and the content reasonable.

I agree, though to be perfectly honest, for most games, the price is already pretty reasonable. Budgets these days are colossal, bigger than many films in the biggest cases, and yet games have a fraction of the market films do... you just can't expect to pay $10 for a brand-new game the same way you can with a movie. Yes, sometimes profits are huge, but for most games that only do a million or two copies, recouping that $20-30 million dollar investment is certainly not going to happen when you're selling your games so cheap. Even if you say sales go up, I don't think that's a sure thing. If publishers started charging $10 a pop for games, yes, you'd see a massive explosion in sales... for the first few months, or a year or two. But once that became the norm, I don't think you'd see those sales sustaining, at least not enough to make up for the price drop. Meanwhile, pirates would start saying "well iPhone games are 99 cents, why isn't yours?" or they'd find some other excuse to pirate anyway, because in the end piracy isn't usually about ideology, it's about the fact that paying nothing at all is a better deal than paying anything at all.

But isn't that the whole problem, the constantly inflating budgets, the movie star actors, all the epicness, the licensing of all kinds of crap? Why don't they just make the games cheaper to make in the first place? They're not Hollywood blockbusters, they're games. Seems like the publishers have forgotten that. No-one gives a crap if the voices are the same 10 guys they see in every other game (like they do in movies). No-one buys a game with an infantile plot involving giant smurfs with built-in USB ports, just for the special effects (in fact graphics in games not advanced, and actually regressed a bit in the last 5-6 years). (Again, like they do in movies)

They keep increasing the budgets, then they have to keep increasing sales and decreasing the actual game-parts to keep up. It's gotten so bad they're bragging about "the most majestic RPG" of all time. How monumentally retarded is the world when an RPG is passed of as MAJESTIC?

 

[sea]

But isn't that the whole problem, the constantly inflating budgets, the movie star actors, all the epicness, the licensing of all kinds of crap? Why don't they just make the games cheaper to make in the first place? They're not Hollywood blockbusters, they're games. Seems like the publishers have forgotten that. No-one gives a crap if the voices are the same 10 guys they see in every other game (like they do in movies). No-one buys a game with an infantile plot involving giant smurfs with built-in USB ports, just for the special effects (in fact graphics in games not advanced, and actually regressed a bit in the last 5-6 years). (Again, like they do in movies)

They keep increasing the budgets, then they have to keep increasing sales and decreasing the actual game-parts to keep up. It's gotten so bad they're bragging about "the most majestic RPG" of all time. How monumentally retarded is the world when an RPG is passed of as MAJESTIC?

Totally fair, and I also agree. The problem is that there are so many games with such high production values and gamers expect them to constantly improve. Competition across all genres is fierce, and those production values are sky-high everywhere you look, whether it's Call of Duty, Skyrim, or even Tomb Raider (only real exceptions are Nintendo-developed games, because of the Wii's lack of horsepower). Being contemporary and relevant is key to being successful in the games industry, and past a certain point good gameplay will only take you so far. It doesn't help that sadly, a lot of the great games out there with lower-than-average production values often do not sell enough to begin with.

You can point to something like The Witcher 2 as a good-looking, mainstream-oriented title, made on a smart budget to boot, but even it can't really compete with BioWare and Bethesda. Business, especially in the US, is all about making money, and "just doing okay enough to keep going" is not acceptable for most big publishers. In many ways it's less about the money itself and more about corporate and customer culture determining what direction games need to go. The problems are there, and need to be solved there before we start thinking about just dropping prices.

 

[flabbyjack]

I bought the Witcher 2. I have 2 more installs before I have to buy the game again! That's a feature of Securom. It's strange how they only tell you these things after you buy them(It is in the EULA - end user license agreement).

"May cause seizures? Awww fuck no." *return for full refund*

 

[Shannow]

Eh. The ratio of legal to illegal probably mostly depends on the kind of audience that's attracted to your game. If lots of teenagers want to play your game, it will be pirated like hell. Adults with jobs will pirate less.

Yep. But I never claimed differently.

DRM is a secondary factor if at all. Whether online 'badmouthing' of a game (for whatever reason) affects its piracy rate...that's an interesting question. I'm not sure.

http://www.amazon.com/Spore-Mac/product ... ewpoints=1
http://www.amazon.com/Battlefield-3-Pc/ ... ewpoints=1
Uhuh...

But ok, DRM has probably little to no effect on torrents since the pirates aren't affected. I got a little mixed up there with purchasing and pirating.
Badmouthing on the other hand kept me from trying DA2. (I've now recently tried it anyway and like it much better than DAO... ) So I do think badmouthing can affect piracy, too. But probably in both ways: People who never planned a purchase might not even try it anymore. --> Piracy goes down.
But people who did mean to purchase it might be pushed to an extended demo. --> Piracy goes up.
Which group is larger in the end is probably again different from game to game.

 

[Majestic47]

I bought the Witcher 2. I have 2 more installs before I have to buy the game again! That's a feature of Securom. It's strange how they only tell you these things after you buy them(It is in the EULA - end user license agreement).

"May cause seizures? Awww fuck no." *return for full refund*

....?? Didn't they release a patch to remove all DRM already?

 

[dragonfk]

I bought the Witcher 2. I have 2 more installs before I have to buy the game again! That's a feature of Securom. It's strange how they only tell you these things after you buy them(It is in the EULA - end user license agreement).

"May cause seizures? Awww fuck no." *return for full refund*

....?? Didn't they release a patch to remove all DRM already?

Yes they did, a week or two after release.

Pay attention flabbyjack

 

[Norfleet]

Which brings us to what may be the ultimate solution to piracy. Come up with a storage medium much larger than a DVD, fill your game with tons of uncompressed fluff, and sell it on that. Let's see the pirates download 100GBs per game.

That didn't work back in the old days of CDs and 28.8k, either. What happened is that the pirates COMPRESSED the fluff, or just removed the fluff entirely, and put it up as a rip. As far as I can tell, piracy is basically responsible for the adoption of the RAR format, used because it had a superior compression ratio to ZIP.

People who never planned a purchase might not even try it anymore. --> Piracy goes down.
But people who did mean to purchase it might be pushed to an extended demo. --> Piracy goes up.
Which group is larger in the end is probably again different from game to game.

As a developer, I would honestly be concerned if piracy actually went down. The way I see it, piracy is sort of like air resistance: It may be slowing you down, but you can't fly without it...and if your drag force is decreasing, it probably means your plane is losing speed, and if you don't why this happened, something is wrong.

 

[Monocause]

BRB, going to pet my TW1 and TW2 boxes, hug them and call them George.

And sit on them so that they never, ever feel lonely?

 

[DraQ]

People who never planned a purchase might not even try it anymore. --> Piracy goes down.
But people who did mean to purchase it might be pushed to an extended demo. --> Piracy goes up.
Which group is larger in the end is probably again different from game to game.

As a developer, I would honestly be concerned if piracy actually went down. The way I see it, piracy is sort of like air resistance: It may be slowing you down, but you can't fly without it...and if your drag force is decreasing, it probably means your plane is losing speed, and if you don't why this happened, something is wrong.

BRB, going to pet my TW1 and TW2 boxes, hug them and call them George.

And sit on them so that they never, ever feel lonely?

Why of course.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

People who never planned a purchase might not even try it anymore. --> Piracy goes down.
But people who did mean to purchase it might be pushed to an extended demo. --> Piracy goes up.
Which group is larger in the end is probably again different from game to game.

As a developer, I would honestly be concerned if piracy actually went down. The way I see it, piracy is sort of like air resistance: It may be slowing you down, but you can't fly without it...and if your drag force is decreasing, it probably means your plane is losing speed, and if you don't why this happened, something is wrong.

What do you develop?

 

[DalekFlay]

You can point to something like The Witcher 2 as a good-looking, mainstream-oriented title, made on a smart budget to boot, but even it can't really compete with BioWare and Bethesda. Business, especially in the US, is all about making money, and "just doing okay enough to keep going" is not acceptable for most big publishers. In many ways it's less about the money itself and more about corporate and customer culture determining what direction games need to go. The problems are there, and need to be solved there before we start thinking about just dropping prices.

Indeed. This has been brought up on the Bioware forums actually, where people ask them why they don't just make more hardcore titles with a smaller budget since they insist their mainstreaming is due to climbing development costs. The response they give is usually: "why make 10 million when you can make 100 million?" This is corporate culture, where profit is not the goal, immense profit is the goal.

Also throw in the fact that American office workers are lazy and spoiled. It will take an American corporation a thousand man hours to do the job an indie developer could do in 100. This drives budgets up considerably, then you also throw in marketing. These corporations are releasing annual sequels that use the same assets, engine and mechanics and still budget 50 million or more to them. Insanity.

When I read about a big budget soulless corporate product losing money I kind of smile, because their culture was asking for it. On top of all that, they try and fuck me over when I give them money with trashy DRM, horrible license terms and bas customer support. Fuck them... who cares. And while I don't turn that into piracy it certainly doesn't surprise me that many do.