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Comment by snitko | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I believe people shouldn't be pirating videogames at all. And most gamers actually don't. So nobody's going to hate them. On the other hand, I think no one's planning to do the same thing for MS Office in the nearest future, that would be insane.

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No, the hate will come from 2 directions: One is the pirate crowd that are mostly angry that they can't get the game for free. The other is the people that bought the game and now the damn thing doesn't work because the servers are down or there's a connection issue or they're trying to play the game they paid for on their laptop somewhere where there's no internet.

Don't forget my direction - a guy who always buys his games, but has been deeply disillusioned by the way games have been "consolified" of late, hence has spent less and less on games, and has built up a level of resentment of publishers who think that reduced game sales is owing to piracy, rather than crappy ports.

Just give in a buy a console; that's what I did. If the developers are going to develop console-style games, there's no point in playing them on the PC. And since the PS3 hasn't been cracked, there's no ridiculous DRM.

I don't have a TV to attach a console to, and I really couldn't be bothered with having to manage with multiple physical tokens for each game - I don't pirate, but I do use nodvd cracks and the like. And the games I enjoy, primarily first person shooters, work best with keyboard and mouse.

I think you miss a point in your thoughts: People will hate it because they've payed for the game. First they invest money and then they find out that due to an draconian protection scheme they are unable to play the game at their discretion. And after that happens - and now they will hate Ubisoft - a significant portion of them will probably find out that there is a pirated version out there which does not have this problems. A version which can simply be played. And then Ubisoft has lost many customers. Maybe forever.

One would think the software industry / computer games industry has learned something from the fates of the music and film industries. When their sales declined they put DRM into their products. When that didn't help they made the DRM systems more draconian. And, unsurprisingly, the customers hated it and their sales declined faster. But the software industry / computer games industry seems to be unable to understand this lesson.

Agreed. DRM in music becomes annoying eventually - when you want to copy your files or use them in a different player.

But DRM that makes your game suck whenever your internet connection is flakey - that's going to make paying customers very angry, very quickly. It's a terrible idea.

The reason they will be hated is aptly summarized in this (though that's for DVDs, but same principle): http://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/piratedvd.jpg

RE: MS Office...

Office, and plenty of other desktop software will nag you relentlessly until you "Activate your copy online".

This is especially annoying for people like me, who spend months at a time off in the sticks where there may be occasional generator power but there certainly is no internet.

Just a few weeks ago, I "activated" my copy of CodeSmith with 5 days to spare (out of 30). If I had had to make a special trip to a city just to do it (which from the pacific coast of Colombia would have required a flight), I would have been pretty upset with that company.

I had to use a pirated copy of SF4 to be able to legitimately play online using the key that came with the copy I purchased due to an install error.

Do you have anything to back up that statement? The article says that 90% of all copies of popular games are pirated, but he also doesn't back it up.

However, it's important to always remember that a pirated copy doesn't equal a lost sale. Many people download a game, but never install it or play it. Others download and play it, but if they couldn't have downloaded it, they would never have played it. And finally, there's a percentage of downloaders that would have bought it if they hadn't gotten a pirated version first.

It will be interesting if this experiment by Ubisoft can determine how large that percentage is. It's definitely not 100%, and it's definitely not 0%. I would guess that it's a single-digit percentage of the people that would normally pirate a game that could go and buy it instead.

However, this new DRM is so vile, that they will also lose sales on it, and I wonder if the sales they gain from delaying the pirating of it is larger than the sales they lose from having a horrible DRM.

The 90% figure is based on the scant amount of information released by a few indie studios.

http://www.joystiq.com/2008/11/13/world-of-goo-has-90-piracy...

There's also a (likely small) percentage of people who pirate games they have already bought in order to "simply play it." I can't tell you how many NoCD hacks I've used, which while different from outright piracy, is very similar in concept and likely prone to inflating piracy figures.

Lastly, there is also the (likely small) category of those who pirate and later buy the game once the price comes down. Many games drop to $5-$10 on Steam after a year or two, which is rather enticing even to a pirate.

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