Good article, I emailed him on a few points where I don't think he accounted for all the variables, but I agree with the premise.

The problem is I think Steam may have acheived critical mass to the point where they're an 800-lb gorilla, and Stardock will have to be 10 times better to compete 10%.  That may be impossible.

If Stardock/Valve go out of business, you'll be still able to play the pirated versions.  I'm not too worried about that for that reason.

If Valve and or Stardock ever does go out of business I'm sure they would make the effort to remove the copy protection and not leave the legitimate gamers hanging. Its likely that piracy would still be an issue if the properties are bought by another company however.

I really don't get what people mean when they say that steam slows down thier computer. It uses 1% of my ram and none of my cpu power unless I ask it to do something. People complaining probably have older computers or just computers packed to the gills with viruses.

Complaining that Steam is bloated is like complaining that your locked house door is bloated because you have to put the key in the lock every single time. You could leave the door unlocked or remove it entirely, but why would you? You house would become cold and raccoons would come in and steal your cake! The man down the street with his fancy smancy keycard lock also has to swipe the key in every time to unlock his door, but he probably wouldn't refer to the experience as bloat.

Its not fair to say that Steam is "bloated" and slows down computers. My PC can run Left 4 Dead butter smooth at max detail with Steam in the background. And I do mean max detail, 1600x1200, 16x antialiasing, the whole works. I don't know about your PC but all Steam does for me is to add a 2 second delay between my clicking on the shortcut and the program starting. 4 seconds if Steam isn't already on. I don't have to run Impulse to play Sins, but I do log in constantly to check out the game store and news listings. I could argue that Impulse is actually more bloated for me because it takes a good 10 seconds for the system to log me in.

Its all relative, and it is not fair to brand either program as good or bad.

Correction, if they make crap games and don't fix them. I have enough faith in both companies that they would never put out something that is beyond hope.

I'm one of those apparently rare people who had never had any problems running games with Securerom and Starforce copy-protection, although I've used both... I don't know if it's because I don't steal games, or am just an idiotic complete imbecile, or what.  Personally, I'm all for seamless online registration required for your game, and online-only checks for patches and so forth.  Simply put, I'm willing to put up with copy-protection as long as there are several times as many people stealing games on day one rather than buying them.

I don't use steam for several reasons, mostly because I've never bought or stole a recent Valve release, from the orange box, TF2, either half-life, etcetera..  I may not like it, but if I wanted the game badly enough, I'd use it rather than steal the game.

This article is absolutely right about the main goals of copy-protection, which is to prevent day 1 and day 0 cracks, which definately kill sales, as there are people who want it now, and will buy it if no crack is available.

Where can I sign up for more effective copy protection?  Online distribution only would be a damn fine way to enforce it, but maybe the sales aren't there.  I'd also be very happy to see fewer torrents and torrent sites, but sadly, most people would rather support ad-driven piracy clearinghouses rather than the people who make games.  I guess if there are millions of people willing to download full games for free, there are few people willing to pay for the same kind of direct-downloads.

The greatest game you've never played is Microsoft's Allegiance.  That went mostly under because of yahoos who would rather have nobody play the game than follow the rules themselves, and Microsoft essentually saying 'Screw this, We're going home, and we're taking our servers with us.'  Quality of product doesn't come into it.

I rarely have problems with Starforce games too, but my father in law does. I helped set up his machine. It's not abnormal. He doesn't pirate stuff. But it just doesn't work with his drive for some reason. I can take the same disk in my computer and it works fine.

Cases like that really do exist, and they're a real problem. It drove him away from PC gaming entirely in the end, now he has an Xbox 360. When he puts a disk in that, it plays. That should not be too much to ask.

Anyway, found it to be an interesting if not perfect article. Assassins Creed actually did have DRM related problems, namely that it constantly tried to connect to a server to authenticate over and over again while the game was running, and if it couldn't for some reason it would drive performance into the ground trying.

The topic of discussion is DRM and piracy. We are however discussing a perfectly legitimate article. Bringing down the hammer at this point would only break the anvil.

An interesting article, well written and reasonably well researched.

He did kinda leave out the rather obvious fact that not every person who pirates a game would have bought it... as a kid I pirated games left right and centre... and with no income whatsoever I would never have bought any of them. My parents paid for a few here and there (one or two a year) but _never_ would have paid for anything like the numbers I played (spoiling kids wasn't in fashion yet). Modern game companies and distribution companies would have counted each of those as a lost sale, and they would be wrong.

He also under-represented, I felt, the negative effects of DRM and copy protection in general. It's _always_ punished legitimate users (my parents bought me the original Pirates! in the late 1980's, and eventually these 'uncopiable' floppy disks stopped working. Luckily I'd taken several copies...) DRM and copy protection generally punish legitimate users and they do so far more than they punish pirates. In fact pirates with a cracked version generally get a better end-user experience than legitimate users. There's three groups of users who get to click, click wait 20 minutes then play modern games... steam users, impulse users, and pirates.

I personally have cracked two games in recent times that I legitimately bought in order to get them to work. I did not distribute them subsequently or anything like that, I cracked them to play them myself, having paid for them. I think the DMCA may actually make that illegal... which is interesting when you think about it. Was it really designed to protect a games distributor's right to waste my time?

Best of all he left any criticism for the industry itself right until the end, and left out the rather nasty fact about digitial distribution - it means the end of the line for many companies and jobs built on the "Cardboard boxes on shelves" distribution model. It's these "distribution" companies for games, movies and music that are fighting "piracy" tooth and nail, and holding back all three industries. The fact is that just as most people are stupid, short sighted and greedy, so are most companies. Currently distribution companies would rather have their customers arrested for refusing to use them than change their business model. Anyone who's read a one-page summary on how Capitalism works will be able to tell them this wont work, but they seem hell bent on it.

I would love to see what Stardock's actual piracy vs. sales figures are. Personally I've got to the point where I pre-pay for stardock stuff because I can be absolutely 100% assured that the product will be quality, will work when it arrives and be available for download globally the day it's released. By contrast, I don't and in fact can't buy most of the TV I would like to watch. It literally is not available for sale in my country usually for months after its been distributed illegally on the internet. The month the BBC puts it entire documentary archive up for download at one pound per episode or whatever will be a very, very good month for BBC online sales and a fairly sickening month for my own cashflow. I've been waiting for years for legitimate digital distribution of their content, but they would much rather I wait 6-24 months and then buy it on a DVD from a shop whereby they'll get a tiny faction of the money. Hmm.

I think the "truth" is somewhere in between the rabid-anti-DRM crowd and the "distribution industry" morons, and this guy's not quite got the right balance between them.

Of course pirates hurt me, they increased the amount of DRM and decreased the average quality of the games.

I must admit that personally I'm a legit-pirate, one of the rare ones.  I obtained a pirated copy of sins, enjoyed it and bought it.  The same with many games, such as halflifde 2, cod4, cnc3, ra3 and many others back in history.   The best thing software developers have done is limit the multiplayer capability of games with validation, not copy protection.   You cant stop piracy, but too many times people have bought games that turned out the be absolute s***.   Sins was a breath of fresh air for me, and it's not stupidly priced.    Multiplayer is where the fun is at, followed closely by modding, and all in all stardock got impulse right imo.  I hate starforce with a passion, securom followed closely behind.  I crack every game I buy as I totally dislike the idea of destroying the media it comes on.  I categorically will not use steam for purchasing as it's a pile of bantha poodoo.   Some might say my approach to pc gaming makes me a software pirate, but when it comes to games like Turning point, fall of liberty, I'm glad I didnt rish out and fork out 35 quid for what was honestly the worst fps I've played since hexxen.  At least hexxen played properly with a mouse and didnt feel like a second-rate clone of an xbox title.

-Standing by to be flamed to death

From page 8:

"The argument that removing DRM will result in a net increase in sales has no basis in fact based on the evidence at hand. Not only does gaming history show that unprotected games simply lead to more piracy, recent history also demonstrates clearly that simply removing DRM is not the answer to piracy. As we saw in the Scale of Piracy section, many popular games which have no intrusive DRM, such as Assassin's Creed, Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and World of Goo, also have some of the highest piracy rates in 2008. Indeed as I write this, the new Prince of Persia game was released yesterday for PC (December 10, 2008) with absolutely no DRM protection, and a quick look at torrents shows that the cracked version is available, and on two popular torrent links alone there are over 23,000 people downloading the game within the first 24 hours. The evidence is overwhelmingly clear: DRM does not cause piracy, piracy results in DRM."

Admittedly, it's mostly comparing intrusive DRM to less offensive measures, but the Prince of Persia bit is pretty indicative, don't you think? Of course, if there is no DRM on it at all, why did he point out the cracked version is available?

Using Price of Persia as an argument is bullcrap. There will always be a percentage of people who would not have paid for PoP drm or no, and there is also a percentage who would never consider buying it unless they get to play the full thing. I have seen people declare that they bought it just to support the switch away from DRM. Hell I bought Sins myself just to support Stardock and when I actually had time to play it I found I liked the game.

Not once have I seen someone say that they would not buy PoP and rip it instead just because the DRM pissed them off. I could probably google up 100 or more examples in 5 minutes if the game we were talking about was Spore.