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Origin of CD Keys
VaMage
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I know this has been hashed over to death but I'm still going to put my 2 cents in.
I've been gaming with PC's since 1982, and on other computer platforms before that, Star Trek on an HP 3000 comes to mind, playing with vectors was a blast, I also played MUD's on Compuserve, Geni, and Delphi. So, I can honestly say I've been a gamer for a while now.
I used to buy a lot of games, my daughter's friends say my office has more games on bookshelves then Game Stop, actually that's not hard to do now as all they have is a small rack in the back of the store. My home office has bookcases on 3 walls, most of those shelves are software, a lot of that is games, all the way back to Infocom's Zork and MS Flight Simulator 1.0, the one with the green cover that I used to use to test PC's for compatibility, because if it could run FS it would run anything.
I rarely buy games now.
What changed?
There once was a time I could go to EB and buy as many as 3 or 4 titles, if 2 or 3 of them sucked I would take them back, the ones that didn't, I kept.
The EULA's only give me, as a consumer, a warranty on the CD or DVD. I could literally create VaMages Pet Rock Software, sell it for $50 bucks a pop and have not one byte of data on the disk I would have to include, as long as the disk itself would spin up.
Then they added the no return policy. This was a license to steal granted to the GAME COMPANIES! And over the years they have used it to death. How many games can you name that you have bought that outright suck, don't work, never did work, can't work, and that you know you got ripped off for?
OK, PC hardware is not consoles, there will always be some configs that a game just can't run on for what ever reason. But if you bought the game and it doesn't run, you not the seller pays the price. So, there is no real incentive for the seller to offer anything more then 3rd rate tech support at best.
The answer to this is download the demo, which may take days if you're on a crappy pipe, and you may have to go to some pay service to actually get any bandwidth, assuming you do have the pipe, because the game company is too cheap to host it, and which if you're lucky contains enough of the game for you to find out if you like it, and that it will run, at least until the first patch, which you can't avoid if the game has an on-line component. (Intentional run on sentence because that's what it feels like.)
You can also rely on reviews. PA excluded I don't think there is a single place that has truly independent reviews, and even then how do I know that a reviewers' taste will match my own?
Today I use, reviews, demo's, check the boards for bitching, the companies rep, and my friends opinons. A game has to be pretty special for me to go to that much trouble to evaluate. I get paid very well for, on occasion, doing less to evaluate software in the real world.
( Why? Because when it comes to selling me 30,000 units for my company they BEG ME to take copies and test them, which I usually have to turn down due to some strict policies we have. So I don't have to go through vetting the damned thing, my team tests it, we let the user play with it for awhile, and then we have a Go / No Go decision point. If there are problems the vendor busts butt to get them fixed, and if I hear "next patch", the No Go point is reached there and then, fair use isn't an issue because if I can't image it and back it up it doesn't go on purchasing's approved list. )
Compare that to my '80's & '90's monthly trek to the software store, something I looked forward to doing, where I would spend at least an hour reading titles, chatting with nice sales people who actually knew me and knew the stuff they sold, talking with other regulars, and in general enjoying myself. I would end up buying at least 2 titles, and I would say on average I kept 75% of what I bought.
Now add to that, in the late 80's the software industry went to congress and got a law passed that banned the rental of PC based software. This ban did not, as we all know, extend to consoles and that change alone gave consoles a huge boost. Why should I risk $50 on a game when I can rent one for $5?
Today I could get any game I can think of, off of a Torrent, I don't because I'm not a thief. Everyone I know personally would not steal software, and every one of us has felt as if the software industry has stolen from us at least once. What we do instead is just not buy it to begin with.
I to remember the swap parties, and I would bet hard money against even 1 in 20 of those swapped copies representing a lost sale. Mostly those parites were poor starving college students, and 4 or 5 of them would go in on a game together and then use CopyIIPC to split it. The company would have gotten zero, zip, zilch, on the sale from them otherwise.
For example DOOM became what is was, not in spite of swapping but because of it. I remember someone giving me a copy of DOOM, I played it, loved it, bought it on my next trip to the store. The only difference was that I didn't go to the store, buy it, try it, then return it if it had been a dud. BTW: the person who I got my "demo" from had bought it after another friend had showed it to him.
In fact, when DOOM came out we were in the golden age of PC game sales that the vendors now wax nostalgic over. What is funny is that was the period of time when CopyIIPC had caused the industry to largely give up on copy protection, I can even remember the article about it being a victory for the consumer, in Computer Gaming World, sometime in the early 90's if memory serves.
So, in sum, I think the PC software industry has wasted a lot of money protecting something from people who wouldn't have bought it in the first place, but who because they do have it increased the word of mouth sales of it and contributed to making it famous, which leads to more sales from people who do buy games, while treating their paying costumers like crooks. Perhaps using that money to make better games might better serve them.
As an alternative, keep the protection, waste that money, but let your honest customers return what they don't want. If the vendors had any real confidence in their product they wouldn't be afraid of a return policy used by 99% of all other goods. Instead they continue to get away with shoddy workmanship, selling beta code, that sometimes is never finished, and lack of tech support behind some BS piracy smoke screen.
The music and film industries are learning their lesson about what a waste of money DRM is, and it's about time the PC industry did as well.
I've been gaming with PC's since 1982, and on other computer platforms before that, Star Trek on an HP 3000 comes to mind, playing with vectors was a blast, I also played MUD's on Compuserve, Geni, and Delphi. So, I can honestly say I've been a gamer for a while now.
I used to buy a lot of games, my daughter's friends say my office has more games on bookshelves then Game Stop, actually that's not hard to do now as all they have is a small rack in the back of the store. My home office has bookcases on 3 walls, most of those shelves are software, a lot of that is games, all the way back to Infocom's Zork and MS Flight Simulator 1.0, the one with the green cover that I used to use to test PC's for compatibility, because if it could run FS it would run anything.
I rarely buy games now.
What changed?
There once was a time I could go to EB and buy as many as 3 or 4 titles, if 2 or 3 of them sucked I would take them back, the ones that didn't, I kept.
The EULA's only give me, as a consumer, a warranty on the CD or DVD. I could literally create VaMages Pet Rock Software, sell it for $50 bucks a pop and have not one byte of data on the disk I would have to include, as long as the disk itself would spin up.
Then they added the no return policy. This was a license to steal granted to the GAME COMPANIES! And over the years they have used it to death. How many games can you name that you have bought that outright suck, don't work, never did work, can't work, and that you know you got ripped off for?
OK, PC hardware is not consoles, there will always be some configs that a game just can't run on for what ever reason. But if you bought the game and it doesn't run, you not the seller pays the price. So, there is no real incentive for the seller to offer anything more then 3rd rate tech support at best.
The answer to this is download the demo, which may take days if you're on a crappy pipe, and you may have to go to some pay service to actually get any bandwidth, assuming you do have the pipe, because the game company is too cheap to host it, and which if you're lucky contains enough of the game for you to find out if you like it, and that it will run, at least until the first patch, which you can't avoid if the game has an on-line component. (Intentional run on sentence because that's what it feels like.)
You can also rely on reviews. PA excluded I don't think there is a single place that has truly independent reviews, and even then how do I know that a reviewers' taste will match my own?
Today I use, reviews, demo's, check the boards for bitching, the companies rep, and my friends opinons. A game has to be pretty special for me to go to that much trouble to evaluate. I get paid very well for, on occasion, doing less to evaluate software in the real world.
( Why? Because when it comes to selling me 30,000 units for my company they BEG ME to take copies and test them, which I usually have to turn down due to some strict policies we have. So I don't have to go through vetting the damned thing, my team tests it, we let the user play with it for awhile, and then we have a Go / No Go decision point. If there are problems the vendor busts butt to get them fixed, and if I hear "next patch", the No Go point is reached there and then, fair use isn't an issue because if I can't image it and back it up it doesn't go on purchasing's approved list. )
Compare that to my '80's & '90's monthly trek to the software store, something I looked forward to doing, where I would spend at least an hour reading titles, chatting with nice sales people who actually knew me and knew the stuff they sold, talking with other regulars, and in general enjoying myself. I would end up buying at least 2 titles, and I would say on average I kept 75% of what I bought.
Now add to that, in the late 80's the software industry went to congress and got a law passed that banned the rental of PC based software. This ban did not, as we all know, extend to consoles and that change alone gave consoles a huge boost. Why should I risk $50 on a game when I can rent one for $5?
Today I could get any game I can think of, off of a Torrent, I don't because I'm not a thief. Everyone I know personally would not steal software, and every one of us has felt as if the software industry has stolen from us at least once. What we do instead is just not buy it to begin with.
I to remember the swap parties, and I would bet hard money against even 1 in 20 of those swapped copies representing a lost sale. Mostly those parites were poor starving college students, and 4 or 5 of them would go in on a game together and then use CopyIIPC to split it. The company would have gotten zero, zip, zilch, on the sale from them otherwise.
For example DOOM became what is was, not in spite of swapping but because of it. I remember someone giving me a copy of DOOM, I played it, loved it, bought it on my next trip to the store. The only difference was that I didn't go to the store, buy it, try it, then return it if it had been a dud. BTW: the person who I got my "demo" from had bought it after another friend had showed it to him.
In fact, when DOOM came out we were in the golden age of PC game sales that the vendors now wax nostalgic over. What is funny is that was the period of time when CopyIIPC had caused the industry to largely give up on copy protection, I can even remember the article about it being a victory for the consumer, in Computer Gaming World, sometime in the early 90's if memory serves.
So, in sum, I think the PC software industry has wasted a lot of money protecting something from people who wouldn't have bought it in the first place, but who because they do have it increased the word of mouth sales of it and contributed to making it famous, which leads to more sales from people who do buy games, while treating their paying costumers like crooks. Perhaps using that money to make better games might better serve them.
As an alternative, keep the protection, waste that money, but let your honest customers return what they don't want. If the vendors had any real confidence in their product they wouldn't be afraid of a return policy used by 99% of all other goods. Instead they continue to get away with shoddy workmanship, selling beta code, that sometimes is never finished, and lack of tech support behind some BS piracy smoke screen.
The music and film industries are learning their lesson about what a waste of money DRM is, and it's about time the PC industry did as well.
VaMage on
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"Remember, if you are playing a pirated copy of Doom II, you are going to Hell. Buy it and avoid an eternity with all the other freeloaders!"
Can trade TF2 items or whatever else you're interested in. PM me.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
Honestly there is never going to be a foolproof copy protection method no matter what a company uses. If someone really wants to they will always find a way to pirate stuff. Rather then wasting millions of dollars on retarded DRM and all sorts of harmful copy protection they should spend that on just advertising or heaven forbid development.
I never asked for this!
I always got a kick out of Infocom's copy protections. Most of them had to do with some awesome little piece of swag you got in the box.
It is strange the direction some companies are going with copy protection. With games like Spore getting released and fully cracked days before release, the pirates are the only people not being hurt by DRM. It kind of reminds me of the region locking with Sony's console (at least the PS1, not sure if this continued to the PS2). Sony started cracking down on people with modded consoles back in the PS1 days, and if you bought a game from Japan (Final Fantasy 8 is the first game I can think of that did this), and popped it into the playstation, it threw up a screen saying your console was modified, and the game wouldn't play. Pirates? That got stripped out the moment the game was thrown up for download, so again, and it would play on those same modded consoles just fine. The only people, again, that it hurt was the audience that actually paid for the product. It's just silly.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
I am imagining sexy male androids stealing my womens.
Basically, it pissed me off. This guy has come up with a truly ingenious market niche, with some truly great game concepts and a business model that works wonderfully. For him. And his specific product. But he acts like all digital media should be marketed this way, and that's just ridiculous.
I work at a software company that develops very advanced data analysis tools for use in our program. That is, we have physicists, mathematicians and statisticians working on programming tools for spectroscopy analysis, calculus, Fourier transformations, everything under the sun, from the ground up. This requires a huge outlay of initial capital to keep those highly talented people employed, and a significant outlay of capital to pay people like me to test and provide support for the product. There's a very marginal amount of added value that comes from having a large userbase and telling them how to code in the underlying language of the program so they can make add-on modules themselves, but these tend to have very niche applications and certainly aren't going to be the features that convince someone to essentially donate to keep us going. Further, is it even really right to put out a bit of code, let people develop with it, and then ask for donations to our company, the people who did virtually nothing to develop the app? If he wants to ride on the back of the user content, that's great. EA is doing the same thing with Spore and it's certainly working.
There's nothing wrong with this guy's business model, but he'll never produce a game like Bioshock, because such endeavors require a huge outlay of capital and, most of all, can't be run as a web app. Puzzle Pirates works because there's half a game there for free, and you can interact with other players. After a while, people get interested and they buy a subscription or game card to play the rest of the stuff, which only has any value because other people are contributing content. How in the hell are you going to make the free users the product when you're trying to create an engaging single-player experience? How are you going to create a movie where the other people watching it on their computers hundreds of miles from you are "part of the product?" Sure the model needs to be updated, but how do you market something people are expected to watch once or twice as "free to try?" I try it, and then I'm done. There's no reason to keep spending.
I'm not about to go into the casual/hardcore BS. I'm talking about games that are more than just interesting web-based social experiments which move into the realm of, well, serious art. New graphics or physics engines require programmers and designers. Getting a game that "feels" real requires highly skilled artists to do concept work and highly skilled art directors who can actualize those concepts. Highly skilled programmers and artists don't like working without a salary. They don't like hearing "well, we're not earning any money now, but as soon as this thing goes viral we're going to be loaded!" If they hear that, they walk straight to a company that sells games for $50 a pop and can guarantee them a salary right off the bat.
There is nothing wrong with this. There's nothing wrong with Daniel James' model, either, but it's not the answer to everything. The answer to the problem of "there are thousands of people essentially stealing our product and refusing to pay for it" isn't "well, maybe your business model is outdated." I know hundreds of people pirate my company's product. You can download it and have it running in a matter of hours. It sucks, especially when it's probably mostly students who want it on their dorm computers and they don't realize we have a student pricing option that will get it to them for next to nothing compared with a commercial license. The thing is, we're not about to go out of business. The company is doing quite well. It's just that we've got a perfectly good product well worth the money we're asking and some people choose piracy not because they can't afford it, but because they don't want to pay for it. It's personally insulting. Besides that, we provide a product that is used primarily by commercial clients to produce analysis of research and any client data or what have you. If the program was shareware, we'd never see one one hundredth of our actual revenue from a single one of those customers. (despite the piracy!) The IT guy at Chevron doesn't give a damn about whether the people he installs the program for love it or not, he cares about going to his boss and saying "oh yeah, I could have installed MatLab, but this works just as well and is shareware, so I figured I'd save us a couple thousand dollars." His boss doesn't make a donation to us because he's so happy his IT guy got him a deal, he gives his IT guy a raise.
And no, I don't think we've ever retained a lawyer or lobbyist to protect ourselves. (those poor pirates getting sued because they broke a copyright!) But we've got a fair reason to be angry when someone buys a single-user license and then passes it around the office. We've got even more reason to be angry when those others are audacious enough to call us asking for tech support. The world needs companies that make proprietary software, music, and movies. You just can't get certain things done on the model Daniel proposes, and so long as consumers who are willing to buy them keep asking for those things, the old model isn't going to change much. EA certainly isn't going belly-up any time soon, and neither is Warner Brothers.
Sorry for the hueg poast, but this is important, damnit.
Too many people would come back to the store after playing through the entire game and get their money back.
I like demos, they're great in theory. But I just find that the current method companies employee with demos to be really insufficient. Like Aoi said, you'll get a demo that's a few gigs large, and then only five minutes of a game. Hardly anything to base... well anything on. Except maybe your PC's performance and handling capabilities of the software.
Anyway. Demos are better than nothing.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Something like this wouldn't happen today.
I'd have to say DRM or anything to that effect stops nothing. The only thing you stop is a few people that install the game on a few computers, or that share games with a friend and go "hey try this". Okay, how much would your company spend in a DRM scheme? Does it ensure a huge amount of net profit over not even spending it and losing a few thousand sales?
1.) Produce the engine and a small part of a game. The first episode, if you will. Give it away for free. Works best with pre-made engine.
2.) Start making the second episode and hype the hell out of it. Hold it ransom until a specific sum of your choosing is met.
3.) Release said piece and start another piece if ransom is met.
4.) Repeat until money stops coming.
Someone should try this.
Step 4 will happen before step 2 here.
If you accept you're only putting DRM on to combat casual piracy, you can make it so that normal users will basically never run into it. Such as online check that defaults to success if the servers aren't there. Sure, you could unplug your network connection every time you start the program up, or put something in your hosts file, but by then you probably should have just downloaded the thing if you wanted an illegal copy.
I'm absolutely fine with this kind of lightweight DRM.
Well, the software for the (extremely rudimentary) DRM we use was all written in-house (except for the stuff we use for huge site licenses with hundreds of users, for which we use FlexLM) so a couple of hundred paying a few programmers in China and then perhaps a few thousand per year on labor costs associated with catching those people who are trying to misuse a single user serial number but didn't understand the license. Considering the number of times it leads them to say, "oh, really? Well, let me speak with the sales department" I'd say it's making up for it easily.
Basically, the DRM we use is there for exactly that purpose. To be a little stumbling block for people using it illegally and to be a tiny hindrance to people using it legitimately so that we have records of how many computers they use it on and who they are when they call in for tech support.
Whatever, you seem to be raging on him a fair amount, but your post is fairly well written and it's pretty apparent you feel this is really important, so whilst you're telling us how wrong you think he is, why not drop him an e-mail with the contents of your post telling him exactly why he's ticked you off so much.
d@piedjames.org
Heck, drop Tycho one too, as an applications developer, it might make for an interesting counter-point to his.
(Page 242)
Fuck you too, MoO
I'm sorry, but that answer is incorrect.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
In short, the demo was a great game in and of itself, but I still wanted to buy the full game because it was an even better game. That's how demos should work. None of this nonsense where you download a 1+ gig demo and are done with it in 5-10 mins.
Steam ID : rwb36, Twitter : Werezompire,
In the original unpatched version of MoO one of the questions asked is which one of these ships appears on the pages 24-24, and there are two of them in the choices. One of them is right.
You get three shots, and since I lent my manual to my uncle the day I got the game, I had to memorize them. I can still do it without a hitch.
*Cough*Cough*SpaceSiege*Cough*
Yeah, I felt the same about the Crysis demo, it really sold me on the game. Only the first level, but that level was half an island to wander around, and the gameplay is designed around the open ended possibilities of tackling the scenario. I must have played that demo through 3-4 times before I could get my hands on the game, and each time I went through differently than the time before. It was a great taster of things to come, and I wanted more of it straight away.
My brother and I believe that its possible to release a demo soo good that it actually hurts sales of the final product.
That demo was the Beach MP level of RTCW. By the time it became tricky to find a game on that demo ET was released and completely free.
Not to mention, a return policy like that would be abused and used as a free rental service.
Awesome pre-order bonuses, or more convenient ways to buy.
Mirror's Edge? So bought. Why? That fucking bag is the shit, man.
I may just do that. I will probably edit it a bit for salience... and rabidness.
My point as regards movies still stands, though... the number of people watching it has no effect on the value, so his model doesn't make sense.
I suppose I went a little off the edge there because of this line:
Which I think is just patently false. When your game is Puzzle Pirates, sure, the API is open source and widely distributed and the programming is better the "thinner" it is, the bits are pretty much equal in value. When you've got to dump $10m into a graphics API you think could become the next HalfLife2 engine, I think it's kinda fair to tell people they have to pay for your product.
Second part is valid, first part is not. I can do that with pretty much any other consumer item.
Hell, even FOOD usually has a "Send the leftovers back to the maker if not satisfied" label on it.
EDIT: and MrMonroe, three things:
1. There are often open-source versions of many business applications (even MatLab), so that isn't an entirely valid defense
2. Businesses usually are MUCH easier to find and deal with re: piracy
3. Most importantly, the fact is that most DRM- and ALL of it on consumer level software- doesn't work. Even the best usually only delays things for a week or so. And the worst doesn't do anything (see: Spore on BT before it was out in stores).
Given 3, adding highly restrictive DRM is a tad odd. You're spending extra money and not getting anything out of it. The only value I can see is possibilty making the pirates easier to track down.
Canonical makes money. They are pumping out a huge piece of software with lots of tiny little bits that rely on a lot of smart people. They distribute this software for free.
How do they stay in business?
Why, they charge for support!
I have yet to find a box of food that says they'll send you money if you send them a bag of shit.
Are they still doing that with regular pre-orders? I noticed that the bag that comes with the $100+ SE looks exactly like that they were showing with the older pre-orders.
Except for being a different style, color, and having a picture of faith on the inside?
Yes exactly.
The SE bag is completely different.
Though, I used to work at grocery stores. We took food back all of the time in various states.
Just wondering, could you sound a bit more cranky about it? Just checking.
The last picture I saw, other than the color, they looked a lot alike, and as far as the color thing, it's been so long off, it's not terribly odd for details like that to change.
Steam / Bus Blog / Goozex Referral
Yeah, in all honesty back in the 90s I'll flat out admit to using my local Waldensoft like a god damned library because of their easy return policy. It was just too easy to return a game if I didn't like it, if it was too short, etc. I wouldn't do it today, and I'm guessing they stopped because they ended up having to toss the returned games out like used for a cheaper price (our local PC store Micro Center did the same thing and caught on a LOT quicker, especially when people started doing it with Ultima Online). But the racks of returned and marked down software at these places were huge. It just didn't work out well for the stores at all since the original buyer got the full price back, and the store had to sell it at a marked down price.
Dude, we took back food from our deli because the customer said it didn't "taste right", for instance being "too vinegary"...
If only people returned games that didn't work for them they wouldn't have the problem. It's that people would use them as a free rental service. Although, retailers could start charging a $10 restocking fee.
This method makes the most sense to me. It's already been proven that no matter how complex you make your DRM, people who really want to pirate a game are going to do it. Just stopping casual piracy is the best we can hope for I think, without resorting to all kinds of copy protection-nazi bullshit.
If someone is committed enough to find a game, torrent it, burn it, etc then chances are they probably never intended on paying for it anyway and any layers of checks and verification you put on it will just delay them for a little longer while pissing off people who actually pay for their stuff.
You can do the same thing with a TV that won't run because you installed shitty wiring. Lot more than $50 there. I used food because it was the silliest example I could think of.
For example, part of Best Buy's return policy:
So yes, returning a game because it doesn't work SHOULD be an option. It is with almost everything else.