The gawd-almighty merged DRM in Silent Hunter V thread

[razark]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

Let's assume what all the doomsayers are saying is true and all the servers are shut down in 2012 leaving me with a totally useless copy of SH5. You will all be able to say: "We told you so!!!". At that point, I will be forced to admit I was wrong and that all I got for my 50 bucks was a full 24 months of playing the latest SH at an average cost of $2.00 a month.......

Right. But I pay for it, I should get to use it how, when, and where I want. And for as long as I want. Without outside controls.

How many people would be unhappy if SH3 was only playable for two years?

I still play SH1.

[guynoir]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

...
Let's assume what all the doomsayers are saying is true and all the servers are shut down in 2012 leaving me with a totally useless copy of SH5. You will all be able to say: "We told you so!!!". At that point, I will be forced to admit I was wrong and that all I got for my 50 bucks was a full 24 months of playing the latest SH at an average cost of $2.00 a month.......

.....mmmm, ....tough choice....

You know, the other choice here is that if we complain enough and put our money where our mouths are, Ubisoft might back off on this and de-DRM our game.... Don't think it's just Subsim, either; Assassin's Creed 2 is coming, and then you will see madness.

It's happened with Sony's rootkit DRM, Rise of Flight's online-always DRM, and plenty of others... Treat your customers like criminals and you will get push-back.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by razark

Right. But I pay for it, I should get to use it how, when, and where I want. And for as long as I want. Without outside controls.

How many people would be unhappy if SH3 was only playable for two years?

I still play SH1.

On that we are in total agreement. I am buying SH5 in the expectation that I will be able to play it for a long time and if Ubi screws us all and shuts down the servers in 2012, I will be as royally pissed off as the rest of you and will never buy another game from UBI again.

However and again I am still coming back to my cost argument, even if in a worst case scenario, I can only play SH5 for a maximum of 2 years, I still consider it a worthwhile purchase, given its low cost of $ 49.99.

[matsterman]

The whole piracy excuse IS PURE BULL MANURE anyway. First of all, those who hack games are not going to buy the game in the first place. So, to say it decreases sales is just plain and simple bs.

Secondly, THE REASON PEOPLE HACK GAMES IS BECAUSE THE GAMES THEMSELVES ARE TOO EXPENSIVE. $20-$30 for games, noone would hack.
Why would you? They games are cheap. The reason people hack is because they dont see the value of paying $50 or $60 for a mass produced disc and a manual.

I will not bother with SHV, due to the DRM.

[Bilge_Rat]

Originally Posted by guynoir

You know, the other choice here is that if we complain enough and put our money where our mouths are, Ubisoft might back off on this and de-DRM our game.... Don't think it's just Subsim, either; Assassin's Creed 2 is coming, and then you will see madness.

It's happened with Sony's rootkit DRM, Rise of Flight's online-always DRM, and plenty of others... Treat your customers like criminals and you will get push-back.

You may be right, but again the question becomes how solid can we make a boycott. If only 5% of potential players boycott the game, will Ubi notice?

If 95% boycott the game, will Ubi say its because of DRM or because there is no market for sub sims?

The way I see it, Ubi is committed to this new scheme for all their games and will implement it no matter how much we rant and rave. I think the "scheme" will work or fail on its own merits. Either it will work as advertised and we will all heave a sigh of relief or it will turn out to be more trouble than its worth and it will not be in SH6.

Look what happened with SH3. It came with Starforce, which everyone complained about and which turned out to be a major headache for Ubi. By the time SH4 came out, it just had a simple activation code.

[Task Force]

Hmmm... not bad for a thread that has only been around for about 6 or 7 hours...8 pages

[guynoir]

Ubisoft doesn't exactly have a stellar track record when it comes to maintaining games, their DRM schemes, and customers' abilities to play those games, either...

[Onkel Neal]

No, the piracy excuse is not bull, it's real. Study after study shows huge numbers of people playing games without buying them. There was one article by a small game developer, he said that when they released a patch for their game, it was downloaded 80,000 times in the first few weeks. But they had only sold something like 15,000 copies of the game. Piracy is wide-spread. I was on break between classes today, two of my classmates were watching Avatar

Get used to the idea that game developers will be moving to the Xbox and PS3 consoles, they are not going to invest millions into games and only a few people actually pay for them.

Small game developers like Michael Fitch are leaving the industry. Can't say I blame them.

Venting my frustrations with PC game-dev
Greetings:
So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of **** on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

One guy went so far as to say he'd bought the retail game and it was having the exact same crashes, so it must be the game itself. This was one of the most vocal detractors, and we got into it a little bit. He swore up and down that he'd done everything above-board, installed it on a clean machine, updated everything, still getting the same crashes. It was our fault, we were stupid, our programmers didn't know how to make games - some other guy asked "do they code with their feet?". About a week later, he realized that he'd forgotten to re-install his BIOS update after he wiped the machine. He fixed that, all his crashes went away. At least he was man enough to admit it.

So, for a game that doesn't have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can't even be bothered to actually pay for the game. What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

Two, the numbers on piracy are really astonishing. The research I've seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia. I didn't believe it at first. It seemed way too high. Then I saw that Bioshock was selling 5 to 1 on console vs. PC. And Call of Duty 4 was selling 10 to 1. These are hardcore games, shooters, classic PC audience stuff. Given the difference in install base, I can't believe that there's that big of a difference in who played these games, but I guess there can be in who actually payed for them.

Let's dig a little deeper there. So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what's the difference in income? Just about double. That's right, double. That's easily the difference between commercial failure and success. That's definitely the difference between doing okay and founding a lasting franchise. Even if you cut that down to 1% - 1 out of every hundred people who are pirating the game - who would actually buy the game, that's still a 10% increase in revenue. Again, that's big enough to make the difference between breaking even and making a profit.

Titan Quest did okay. We didn't lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can't change how people behave... whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren't so rampant on the PC. That's a fact.


Enough about piracy. Let's talk about hardware vendors. Trying to make a game for PC is a freaking nightmare, and these guys make it harder all the time. Integrated video chips; integrated audio. These were two of our biggest headaches. Not only does this crap make people think - and wrongly - that they have a gaming-capable PC when they don't, the drive to get the cheapest components inevitably means you've got hardware out there with little or no driver support, marginal adherence to standards, and sometimes bizarre conflicts with other hardware.

And it just keeps getting worse. CD/DVD drives with bad firmware, video cards that look like they should be a step-up from a previous generation, but actually aren't, drivers that need to be constantly updated, separate rendering paths for optimizing on different chips, oh my god. Put together consumers who want the cheapest equipment possible with the best performance, manufacturers who don't give a **** what happens to their equipment once they ship it, and assemblers who need to work their margins everywhere possible, and you get a lot of ****ty hardware out there, in innumerable configurations that you can't possibly test against. But, it's always the game's fault when something doesn't work.

Even if you get over the hump on hardware compatibility - and god knows, the hardware vendors are constantly making it worse - if you can, you still need to deal with software conflicts. There are a lot of apps running on people's machines that they're not even aware of, or have become such a part of the computer they don't even think of them as being apps anymore. IM that's always on; peer-to-peer clients running in the background; not to mention the various adware and malware crap that people pick up doing things they really shouldn't. Trying to run a CPU and memory heavy app in that environment is a nightmare. But, again, it's always the game's fault if it doesn't work.


Which brings me to the audience. There's a lot of stupid people out there. Now, don't get me wrong, there's a lot of very savvy people out there, too, and there were some great folks in the TQ community who helped us out a lot. But, there's a lot of stupid people. Basic, basic stuff, like updating your drivers, or de-fragging your hard drive, or having antivirus so your machine isn't a teetering pile of rogue programs. PC folks want to have the freedom to do whatever the hell they want with their machines, and god help them they will do it; more power to them, really. But god forbid something that they've done - or failed to do - creates a problem with your game. There are few better examples of the "it can't possibly be my fault" culture in the west than gaming forums.

And while I'm at it, I don't want to spare the reviewers either. We had one reviewer - I won't name names, you can find it if you look hard enough - who missed the fact that you can teleport from wherever you are in TQ back to any of the major towns you've visited. So, this guy was hand-carting all of his stuff back to town every time his inventory was full. Through the entire game. Now, not only was this in the manual, and in the roll-over tooltips for the UI, but it was also in the tutorial, the very first time you walk past one of these giant pads that lights up like a beacon to the heavens. Nonetheless, he missed it, and he commented in his review how tedious this was and how much he missed being able to portal back to town. When we - and lots of our fans - pointed out that this was the reviewer's fault, not the game's, they amended the review. But, they didn't change the score. Do you honestly think that not having to run back to town all the time to sell your stuff wouldn't have made the game a better experience?

We had another reviewer who got crashes on both the original and the expansion pack. We worked with him to figure out what was going on; the first time, it was an obscure peripheral that was causing the crash, a classic hardware conflict for a type of hardware that very, very few people have. The second time, it was in a pre-release build that we had told him was pre-release. After identifying the problem, getting him around it, and verifying that the bug was a known issue and had been fixed in the interim, he still ran the story with a prominent mention of this bug. With friends like that...


Alright, I'm done. Making PC products is not all fun and games. It's an uphill slog, definitely. I'm a lifelong PC gamer, and hope to continue to work on PC games in the future, but man, they sure don't make it easy.

Best,
Michael

[ERPP8]

In the first DRM thread people were civilized, not they have stupid jokes as their signatures and say stuff like "DRM will ruin the game.
A game is a game, if SHV ends up being a suckish game so be it.
But if it is great, but people are predigest against it that is dumb.

[ETR3(SS)]

As immature as it may be...

IN BEFORE THE LOCK!

[ReFaN]

Originally Posted by ETR3(SS)

As immature as it may be...

IN BEFORE THE LOCK!

Seconded

[Nisgeis]

I've heard that story before and I can't believe he didn't put a 'You've had a free demo, now if you like it buy the game' instead of just making it crash with no explanation - that's a strange decision. It guess piracy does in fact spread awareness.

Also, there are lots of instances of the games being released on pirate sites, as in the baove example before it hit the shelves. He doesn't mention how that happened. Same with DVDs for cinema releases that haven't been shown at the cinema yet... so who exactly is it in the industry that is leaking this stuff - I mean that's gotta be easier to find and stop whoever it is leaking it, rather than wait for your insider to give it to a cracker, have them crack the game and then try to stop it, once the horse has bolted, so to speak.

[ERPP8]

Originally Posted by ETR3(SS)

As immature as it may be...

IN BEFORE THE LOCK!

In before the lock?

[Onkel Neal]

FYI: Guys, we have way too many topics about the same subject, I'm merging them here. No comments were censored (or sensored), no comments were lost. Just compiled into one thread.

Carry on with the SH5 death sentence.

[razark]

Originally Posted by Bilge_Rat

On that we are in total agreement. I am buying SH5 in the expectation that I will be able to play it for a long time and if Ubi screws us all and shuts down the servers in 2012, I will be as royally pissed off as the rest of you and will never buy another game from UBI again.

However and again I am still coming back to my cost argument, even if in a worst case scenario, I can only play SH5 for a maximum of 2 years, I still consider it a worthwhile purchase, given its low cost of $ 49.99.

And my point is that we shouldn't even give them the chance to do it. If they get away with this, and it gets cracked (I have no doubts it will be), what's their next step going to be?