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tl;dr:
A pretty good series of games gets shelved because of piracy. :[
Thread Truncated. Click to see all 150 replies.
If you can't think of a way to protect your game from being pirated DONT FUCKING MAKE IT.
As developers, we can think of literally millions of ways to protect our games from being pirated. However, there is a trade-off here. We have to balance ease of implementation/stability, cost of the protection itself, and the needs of the consumer.
We could ship a USB dongle with every single version of our game, but dongles get cracked easily, have an abnormally high failure rate, cost an arm and a leg, and most of the dongle protection suites require additional license management software installed on the client rig to boot.
We could integrate with an ESD solution like Steam, but then have to worry about the wonderful day-0 warez monkeys...(voice of experience talking)
We could require a special driver be installed on your machine that verifies the media, but as a side effect disables any removable storage and degrades performance on your system (StarForce), but you as the consumer rightfully wouldn't stand for it.
Ad revenue? Ha. Because of privacy laws, not only do developers have to warn about the ad software in certain states, but the cost of implementing the damn ad software in some cases exceeds the earnings we get off of it. (Generally, the publisher gets about $1 per unit over the lifetime of the product...the developer gets shit.)
Not all games support a subscription model, online integration is only as good as the amount of time you can afford to spend hackproofing it before it has to ship...in short, we KNOW about piracy, but in the end, aside from trying to appeal to the ethics of the few people out there who still have them, THERE ISN"T SHIT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT!
Those of us who have tried to do something about it have been cast as shysters trying to blackmail the consumer into actually buying something, or rich whiners upset that we aren't going to be able to afford our third Porsche when most of us were having problems making ends meet in the first fucking place.
Truth of the matter is that finances in the games industry suck harder than Kevin Federline's "rap" career. Unlike movies and music which have multiple income streams (theater, DVD release, cable; CD sales, concerts, radio), with games, we have our first shot and our load is spent. You say "tons of devs are successful," but as a result of this one-shot nature of our industry, only 15% of the games that are released each year are profitable. That's it. Those games have to pay for the other 85%.
Unfortunately, people are so used to justifying their piracy that even when we appeal to their sense of common decency, it doesn't do a fucking bit of good.
We have to put up with people playing the grammar game ("it's not piracy or theft, it's intellectual property infringement") or the suck game ("I warezed it to try it, but decided it sucked after playing it to the end") or the poverty game ("boo hoo...I don't have enough money to spend $20 on your game after spending $1,500 on my new machine and $800 on crack") but anything we do to put a stop to that comes across as a slam against the legitimate consumers who actually bought the fucking thing!
We tend to try two seperate means of getting the customer without fucking them over. First, we lower our price, but that just means that the customer looks at out $20 game, and thinks that the $40 game next to it is twice as good, so we end up in the shit bin. Second, we make the games that *we* want to make as works of art ("Okami," "ICO," etc.) and because games don't have a decent way of letting an "art" game make back anythin, we don't sell enough units to even cover the duplication costs and we end up having to close the studios that make the amazing shit.
So guess what companies are doing to get away from piracy...they're starting to work on games that the pirate's don't care about. They're going into the casual game market because no pirate worth a damn gives one flying fuck about the next Tetris or Bejeweled, but your grandma does, and that's what she's buying. They're moving to MMO's because the cost of running your pirated server is generally high enough and risky enough that it generally isn't worth it. Or they're closing, because the fucktards who pirate only see their ill-gotten gains, not the humans who get kicked out in the fucking street at Christmas time because finances just wouldn't cover them for another month.
So in short, piracy is driving developers to develop games that won't get stolen, or driving them out of the market altogether.
tl;dr: Piracy is your way of telling game developers that you want them to tell you to fuck off.
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