hey hey! I NEVER have claimed to be reasonable. Or logical...I did like
the part about rantings and ravings. Just as an aside...do you recall SF
informing users of their files until AFTER we screamed ***y ***?
dave henrie
hey hey! I NEVER have claimed to be reasonable. Or logical...I did like
the part about rantings and ravings. Just as an aside...do you recall SF
informing users of their files until AFTER we screamed ***y ***?
dave henrie
Again I notice you don't give a reason *why* it's ***and *why* you don't
want it on your system...
Links? Proof? I'm genuinely interested in what problems it can cause...
Hmm, I'm guessing you won't be buying a console any time soon...You're right
about rFactor though - even though it installs some stuff on C drive at
least it's possible to make backups. The V8 mod WIP shots look very
promising indeed.
Things don't work like that, as we all know. When I download a game off
some file sharing proggie, we're not talking lost revenue at all, since
I'll buy the game if it is *any* good at all. Most of the time I'll try
it, and ditch it 2 minutes after that, but you can't call that lost
revenue, since I would not dream of buying the game in the first place.
Same thing with movies. The movies I download from time to time are
movies I would not see in a theatre, or even less likely buy a DVD. Why?
Because I will not pay for crap! The movies I would get and see for free
are movies that I'd never pay for!
I wish game houses would rather spend their energy on making a game as
well as possible instead of protecting they property based on false lost
revenue assumptions made by people who have no clue whatsoever. The way
the business is protecting software these days seems to me to be
fighting for the ability to make heaps of money out of people who will
realize too late that their software is ***straight through. I would
be up for protection of software property if you could proove that it
would directly affect sales, but this is very rarely the case.
We're not talking protecting software worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars, we're talking about protection of something costing 39.99! I am
*pretty* sure most companies use copy protection based on their
economists false assumptions, and not the common sense often seen in
game programmers, who has a more natural approach: "The more people who
tries my piece of software, the higher sales number".
If you turn things around you could say that illegal copying of games is
a veritable potential money-maker, since a lot of people will buy a good
game if it is good.
---A---
>>>I'd say you hit the nail on the head Todd ;) One time where honesty does
>>>pay.
>>>Mitch
>>That's my problem with Starforce. I am honest. I don't pirate. I
>>don't like that the developers treat me like a pirate. I do not want to
>>encourage them to continue to put that ***in their games. Therefore,
>>I will not buy any game/sim that has Starforce, no matter how badly I
>>want that game. I passed on GTR and Silent Hunter III because they
>>employ Starforce.
>>Voting with my dollars.
>>--
>>Yippee38
> That's understandable and certainly your right to do so and really is
> the best way to go about it. Personally, I wouldn't take issue with
> Starforce in particular (unless it goofs up your system of course when
> you weren't doing anything wrong, then that's a problem.) The fact of
> the matter is devs really do need to use copy protection if they expect
> to make any money at all.
> I'm one of the developers of Virtual RC Racing, an RC car sim download
> where the game with two tracks is totally free. After that we
> primarily sell tracks as add ons. Naturally we have a copy protection
> system there so people can't share the tracks, but one of the things we
> started out doing was allowing I think three different installations so
> if people had a laptop and a desktop or they got a new computer it
> wouldn't be such a hassle for them to get going again.
> The amount of abuse was unbelievable, according to the boss who put
> that policy in place in an effort to make things nice and easy for the
> users. He reported that the numbers of people who were attempting to
> activate the same tracks on one account hit seven to ten or more times
> within days of the account activation was very frequent indeed, which
> is obviously due to people trying to share accounts. Because of that
> in V2 he sadly had to go down to allowing only one installation. Of
> course, that upsets people, but the amount of sales lost is quite
> significant according to him. I haven't seen sales records in awhile
> so can't really verify it personally.
> If it isn't Starforce, it's going to be something else. You'll most
> likely wind up boycotting yourself right out of sim racing entirely
> rather than having any significant impact. The boss' view from looking
> at the sales numbers before and after the changes is that we lose a ton
> more sales by having the less restrictive protection we had before due
> to account sharing/piracy than we do with the current system where you
> only are allowed one installation, which means file sharing is quite
> common indeed. And in the end, he's got a lot of money invested in
> this he needs to recover so that's unfortunately got to be the bottom
> line...
> Unfortunately that means the honest guys like you suffer and are
> inconvenienced quite a lot. I see it in our forums and it bothers me,
> but we can't do it both ways :-(
In our particular case with VRC, when I said there were 7-11 downloads
of a track, I don't mean it was installed on the same machine that many
times. We don't know how many times you install the software, add on
tracks, or whatever else. However, when you sign up with us and
activate the game (really you're activating the first two free tracks)
some hardware ID and software key data is sent to our servers. When
you start buying tracks and then want to activate them, that key better
match up or else it won't activate.
What we did initially is allowed tracks to be installed on three
different machines per account. We were trying to be nice and figured
the vast majority of folks were honest and wouldn't abuse the system by
setting up VRC on their friend's systems. We figured a lot of people
have a desktop PC and a notebook, and maybe some students have a
computer in their dorm or some folks have one at work to play with on
lunch breaks and so forth.
When I said we were getting all these downloads, that means we very
frequently had people trying to install John Doe's tracks on other
computers. I.e., when you see an alarming amount of instances where
one account owner is trying to install his purchased tracks on 5-15
different computers, we have a serious problem on our hands.
Does that mean lost sales? I understand your point about how you might
try something that you wouldn't have bought anyway. That's not really
an excuse, but I understand where you're coming from. And yes, a
certain percentage of people probably did just that. I find it
unlikely though because we give the sim away for free along with two
free tracks. That's plenty for someone to fire it up for a couple of
minutes and decide it's not their bag, so why are they going and
installing someone else's tracks without paying for them if the sim
sucks so much they'd never buy anything? That doesn't compute,
although perhaps it's happened.
However, you must admit that in addition to that group of people, there
is also another segment of folks that will simply do whatever they can
to avoid paying. On top of that, there is another group of people that
will simply boycott you and not bother because they hate copy
protection and want to make a statement. Making any statement at all
about whether, in purely the financial sense, a developer should put in
copy protection, and if so, at what level of intrusiveness and
inconvenience, really boils down to the percentages of people in those
groups. There are competing forces here and really the only folks that
have a good feel for the final equation are the developers/publishers.
The ones with the investments at stake and the sales/downloads and
other figures staring at them in the face when they proceed to make
decisions to maximize profits as any business aims to do.
1) If you have no copy protection at all, you will gain some sales
from the massive distribution you'd get. (However, if you have a demo
available, it's questionable whether or not you're really getting more
exposure, and if you are, is it significant?) At the same time you
will lose sales from the group of people that would have bought it had
they not been able to get it easily for free, especially with the
publisher's blessing. In addition, a portion of the group of people
that hate copy protection will go ahead and buy your game now. So the
question there is, how big are all these contributions? You lose sales
from some groups and gain it from others. Developers that have
released software (or musicians or whomever that release work via the
internet) and have tried it with and without copy protection along with
a demo will all tell you that sales go up when you put in the copy
protection.
2) If you have copy protection, then it goes without saying that you
are losing sales among the folks that hate copy protection and boycott
anything that uses it. However, you are gaining sales among a certain
percentage of the group that wanted it and would pay for it, but would
have taken it for free instead given the chance. Again, the decision
is made based on which of these dollar values is bigger.
In our case, it's safe to say that we vastly underestimated the
percentage of the population that would simply avoid paying if they
could do it. We have placed in more stringent copy protection by only
allowing one computer per account. The result of this policy change
has definitively, unquestionably been an increase in overall sales.
Your theory would be correct if the "avoid paying for it if I can get
if for free" crowd was much smaller than it actually is.
The truth of the matter is that this portion of the population VASTLY
outnumbers the "copy protection boycott" crowd. Copy protection is not
going away. If only 1% of the population out there was "dishonest," so
to speak, we could do away with copy protection entirely and indeed
probably get an increase in sales for the very reasons you describe.
However, the percentage is high enough that the theory does not work.
At least in our case that's precisely what we found. Sad, but true.
Believe me, I don't like it any better than you do. I think our lead
programmer literally spent about three or four months doing nothing but
anti-hacking/cheating and copy protection stuff. That's a hell of an
investment and didn't make VRC come out any faster. We have to pass
that cost right along to you guys in the end, which is sad. Again, the
honest folks wind up paying for the piracy. It's somewhat ironic that
a good portion of them are now striking back at the developers for
protecting themselves. It's sort of a double whammy for us, really,
but the need to protect VRC far outweighs any loss we get as a result
of people being upset that we only allow one computer per account.
Anyway, this is an idealistic view, really. It's easy for someone to
claim that they would have paid for a bootleg game if they liked it,
but it's much easier still to put it off indefinitely or find an excuse
not to do it. Logically it really doesn't make sense anyway to do it
so to me sounds like a sorry excuse. That's why we make demos. It
gives you a chance to try before you buy.
The way
Tell you what, I've spent over five and half years on Virtual RC
Racing. I've earned every dollar that comes my direction. You can
imagine me with horns sticking out of my head with a red face and
goatee if you must. ;-)
I am
What good does it do ME ? If it wants to use up my resources, what's in it
for ME ?
-Larry
For starters, it doesn't use your resources. Ultimately what's in it for
you is higher quality sims since piracy is reduced. If you don't believe
that goes on then check out Todd's example in this thread.
>>What good does it do ME ? If it wants to use up my resources, what's in
>>it for ME ?
> For starters, it doesn't use your resources. Ultimately what's in it for
> you is higher quality sims since piracy is reduced. If you don't believe
> that goes on then check out Todd's example in this thread.
<sarcasm mode off>
I actually have had one Starforce related problem: a cheap (Aus$10) game
I bought for my 5 year old had Starforce (who knows why) but didn't
include the key (yes, it was a legit disc). Back to the shop it goes ...
--
Mr Q
-------------------
There are ways around Starforce but they are very inconvenient and
difficult. There haven't been any 'NoCD' cracks for most Starforce games.
My main point in all of this is that I don't blame game developers for
wanting to stop the rampant ripping off of their products. It might be a
battle that's unwinnable but I don't blame them for trying and I can't
believe how quick some people in this group are to side with pirates.
> There are ways around Starforce but they are very inconvenient and
> difficult. There haven't been any 'NoCD' cracks for most Starforce games.
> My main point in all of this is that I don't blame game developers for
> wanting to stop the rampant ripping off of their products. It might be a
> battle that's unwinnable but I don't blame them for trying and I can't
> believe how quick some people in this group are to side with pirates.
:-(
Todd