I don't like the sound of that for reasons I'll get into below but Ambrosia's awesome in many ways. I just love the Escape Velocity series and they've been something of a pal to the open source community as well if you put Aquaria and Maelstrom into consideration. I do wish more of their backlog was OSX compatible since I got so much enjoyment out of their games back during a time when I had no method to pay for full versions and many of the games I'd consider purchasing have been rendered incompatible with any modern platform. After the initial OSX transition, only Escape Velocity Nova really interested me enough to buy thanks to its similarities to the first E.V. albeit I'd still rather have the original. (Port Authority has a small number of changes which makes it "not count," so to speak.) I'm highly tempted by Aperion X at the moment though.
Don't get me wrong, I hear what you're saying. I firmly believe that DRM does (relatively) nothing to thwart piracy and everything to be a thorn in the side of law-abiding consumers who do the right thing. That being said, having a "Chicken Little" outlook to the whole thing isn't helping anyone, and it won't change anything. I'll keep supporting developers with my cash (just bought Halo Reach Legendary Edition and LBP 2 Collector's Edition last night), the pirates will pirate, and we'll see where it ends up.
Once we have faster broadband speeds and deeper penetration, I think we'll start to see a download only/connected at all times model. Won't hurt people like me per se because I buy my stuff legit, but it will be a pain in the rear for those times that I'm not near an internet connection.
I'd agree that DRM ultimately does little to nothing but before we start proposing solutions to the problem, I feel it's prudent to realize why. I personally believe it's not because the DRM methods currently under employment are too weak: I don't believe the better majority of people could pick the better majority of these digital locks all on their own.
Rather it's because the capacity of people so inclined to commit piracy to do so is far too strong. If even so much as one person cracks the code, the ease at which people can copy data and share information in this digital era is so great that copies of your program can spread across more or less the entire world, kinda like a wildfire sparked from an improperly disposed of cigarette.
This scenario is worsened because the natural assumption behind not using the honor system is that the better majority of people are put up against you. I feel that's more or less an accurate description of th scenario at hand when it comes to copyright infringement. However it's also somewhat short sighted because with the entire world against you, if there is a way somebody can figure out how to defeat your methodolgy, the odds that there will be a person who does defeat it will be too great.
The combination of these factors means the only truly effective DRM is completely infallible DRM, which might be very much the impossibility since you have to have some method of allowing your customers access. All a hacker would have to do is figure out how the system works and mimic it. If the data that allows us to our software comes from online, it may be possible to crack the code by examining the datapackets that're sent back and forth from server to client to reverse engineer the missing bits of game. Difficult? Yes. Implausible? Perhaps. Outright impossible? I doubt it.
Aside from the probable ineffectiveness of any methodology, if businesses frustrate legimitmate customers like myself too much, you could deter them. As you've mentioned, any situation where I'm stuck offline could be a situation that leaves me unable to access the game, potentially leaving me bored at a time when I've paid for the
entitlement to be entertained.
Also what happens if the company drops the infrastructure required to validate/complete the game due to various factors of economic inviability? Say for example if the company decides to drop support for their more "obsolete" titles or perhaps even more relevantly, if they go out of business. I do not want to buy a copy of any given media only to eventually be treated as if I do not own that copy.
Dagless said:
Exactly. When I shut down my studio last year I dropped fixed prices and added a "pay what you want" system. You could pay a penny and it accepted Paypal, debit/credit cards, and a few other Paypal-like systems. But piracy actually went up (I figure because of the press attention the sale caused).
Well yes and no. Your story reminds me a lot about the
Humble Indy Bundle which was basically the same sort of deal, performed mostly just for the sake of experimentation. I think you might take a personal interest on their article concerning
piracy of the bundle, which provides some interesting speculation as to why people might do such a thing. I think you'll find this combination links provide rather provokative statistics and events that show the deal was a huge success thanks to the volume of sales made, even in spite of obscene amounts of piracy and cheapness. So much so that they got in five more developers in on the deal to peform an act 2.
Admittedly these statistics are somewhat skewed by in part the fact that they got charity involved, which puts generousity and guilt into the equation, and in part by the fact that the tend to sweeten the pot along the way. As such, your statistics might be less biased. Would you mind sharing them, assuming you still have them? Things like the volume of sales, speculated piracy rates and average price point. Also what was the name of your company and purpose of the software? I do think it would be a highly interesting point of reference to contrast against the Humble Indy Bundle where none currently exists.
