In light of all the recent news regarding TPB, it seems that the new title from Gas Powered Games, Demigod, is being heavily affected by piracy. Demigod Day 1 Status Report There were ~120,000 online connections, but only ~18,000 of those were legit. It meant that the servers were completely hammered and their entire online infrastructure melted. This resulted in at least one poor review (Gamespot), and we all know how much game reviews can affect sales. The game was published by Stardock, the same people who wrote the "Gamer's Bill of Rights" and took a stance to avoid DRM. As much as I hate to say it, this seems to validate the companies who do use draconian DRM - or at the very least, shows that a DRM and copy-protection free game won't work. I've heard that argument that pirates are mostly harmless because they wouldn't have bought the game anyway; but in this case, if they're hammering your infrastructure and using your support, they are costing you real money. As far as solutions go, I can't think of any. Draconian DRM didn't work (eg. Spore). Now it's been shown that being a trusting, nice guy will also get you screwed. Maybe this will merely serve as more justification for developers to abandon the PC platform.

When he said there wouldn't be any DRM, I didn't expect that to mean that they wouldn't even check for unique product keys connecting to their servers. That kind of copy protection is a non-problem for the paying end-user, but would stop the problems they had here before they even started.

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or at the very least, shows that a DRM and copy-protection free game won't work

Not really. The point of being DRM-free is to not annoy paying customers with poorly made DRM and have those paying users encourage others to buy the game. After all DRM has never prevented piracy, it just encourages paying users to find a cracked copy to play how they want. You're never going to "defeat" piracy, DRM or no DRM.

Anyway as has been discussed many times, you just can't make money off sales any more, you need to also provide a service. That applies to all media industries. People aren't going to go out and pay for hard-copies when they can get an electronic, DRM-free copy for free without leaving their computer.

Quote: Original post by BeanDog
When he said there wouldn't be any DRM, I didn't expect that to mean that they wouldn't even check for unique product keys connecting to their servers. That kind of copy protection is a non-problem for the paying end-user, but would stop the problems they had here before they even started.

My thoughts exactly. I can see the argument for ignoring piracy, but if you put yourself in a position where piracy will actively hurt your paying customers then you're in trouble.

For example, this case has shown me that it's not a sensible idea to distribute a complete single player game that acts like a demo until you enter a password (no further download required). If I do that, pirates who get a fake key will download the software from my[ server, directly costing me money.

What I don't understand is that they are able to detect pirated clients, yet they don't have a system implemented that will reject these connections early on. Perhaps they couldn't have predicted this sheer number of concurrent users, but I would expect such obvious functionality to be in place at the release.

If there's anything that can defeat piracy in a consumer friendly way, it's by providing a service rather than a copyable product. But they didn't get that right (yet).

Quote: Original post by Scet
Anyway as has been discussed many times, you just can't make money off sales any more, you need to also provide a service. That applies to all media industries. People aren't going to go out and pay for hard-copies when they can get an electronic, DRM-free copy for free without leaving their computer.

Actually, there's a few full time indies making a living off their sales of DRM free games. They don't make a fortune, but there's enough people willing to support them. Generally though you need to be niche enough for there to be supporters, you need to keep development costs way down, and you need to make the sorts of games that John Q. Pirate aren't particularly interested in. If you're making games that only appeal to the average teenage boy, then you're just asking for trouble.

Quote: Original post by WanMaster
What I don't understand is that they are able to detect pirated clients, yet they don't have a system implemented that will reject these connections early on. Perhaps they couldn't have predicted this sheer number of concurrent users, but I would expect such obvious functionality to be in place at the release.

I don't think they're "detecting" them. They just look at 120,000 connections and a sales figure of about 18,000 and it's pretty obvious the rest are pirate copies.

When I first saw this story, I thought of what BeanDog is saying. Why didn't they include a random serial number with each legitimate copy of the game? Typing in a serial number is not DRM (at least, not in the sense that "DRM" has come to be known) and I'm sure legitimate customers are happy to do that. Especially if it stops this kind of thing from happening.

The traffic that clogging up was stuff like pirates checking for updates, not pirates playing the game online for free.

As far as I understand, they do have serialnumbers.

>>Now it's been shown that being a trusting, nice guy will also get you screwed.

Its still way to early the say whether or not non-drm has worked for the title
(Ive got a small feeling it will, i.e. sell ~ a million copies due in part to (*))
if it does it will be a massive success (based on game reviews its not a hugely positive rating game, with not much hype(*) or heritage), if this was a DRM game it would sell ~100k


(*) :) 90% of the hype/talk about it comes from the non-drm

They designed a system that sucked and it only took them a couple of days to write one that doesn't. This suggests to me that it's less a problem with piracy and more a problem with people who should know better than to design a system that can't handle a player base.

Especially when you're releasing a full version of one of the most popular mods out there that has a giant player base!

It's not that I don't feel bad for them, and it's not that piracy isn't harmful, but they've managed to deal with the problem so why didn't they deal with it to begin with?

And if they were only expecting a few thousand people to be connecting at once then I have to assume that 18 000 is not bad sales for them and there really isn't much of a problem here. They have a small core audience who is going to have a functioning game in a day or two and then they'll slowly grow and piracy really hasn't changed any of that.

As for the Gamespot review... well it's Gamespot. The fact that people still take that site seriously is a tragedy. Most games have connectivity problems at launch. For a AAA title they would just include it as a footnote but because it's a smaller developer they take points off the score. 1up has done the same, but actually say that they will re-review it (in which case it's dumb that they didn't just wait till Monday).

So to conclude:
-People still design online systems that always crash at launch.
-GPG still seems to be selling what they planned on.
-Gamespot still sucks.
-Piracy still isn't the biggest problem here.