DRM done right: Puppygames
puppygames.net
puppygames.net
Though hardly bulletproof, or optimal, this particular mechanism clearly passes that test, and should be lauded.
Felt weird having a game I had paid for and installed legit that I was being prevented from playing.
A few straight from the horses mouth facts:
I sat down and worked out what our revenues are, and they work out as $750/month over the last 7 years. Out of that, we pay for hosting, advertising, accountancy, and tax, leaving about $400/month and then Chaz and I split the remainder. Chaz just about scrapes a meagre existence in Spain. I live in the UK though so I have to keep on doing a day job (I've got a family to support). So up till now Puppygames has always been part-time! It'd be nice to do it full time.
If you're wondering why we bother at all, well, it's because it's actually a monumental pain in the arse to release two versions of every game - a demo and a full version. It's loads easier just to do a full version which can be unlocked. That's all our "DRM" is, really - just a really simple way of doing unlockable demos which won't go wrong and is practically impossible to not understand.
Also, anyone who thinks that it was a "lot of work" developing the system should probably know... it wasn't. It's really trivial stuff, and most of the hard bits are built in to Java anyway like the public/private key encryption. We're already working our little fingers off making the game, can't afford to spend any more time on unlocking schemes!
It really is utterly trivial for anyone with half a brain to defeat, and even crack and release. It's Java - any fool with JAD and Eclipse can rip it out. But what we're getting at here is... what's the point? The demos are lengthy, the games are cheap, the rights we give you along with the games are exactly the rights you would expect to have and want. They're exactly the rights I expect and want from things I buy, anyway.
Lots of piratey types give all sorts of feeble excuses as to why they get dodgy copies of things but at the end of the day we basically addressed every single one of them except one which is that the games cost too much and you wanted them anyway! Which we're figuring out how to address right now. We tried in the past reducing the prices of the games but discovered they made even less money.
Any suggestions?
For me, if I'm not willing to buy it at $20, I'm probably not going to buy it online at all. Other people seem to have a threshold closer to $15 or $10.
Note that this doesn't apply in app store situations where your carrier already has your billing information. (Hence all the successful 99-cent iPhone games.)
Also, ignore the "feeble excuses" from the "piratey types"--they're just that, excuses.
The overriding reason people pirate is that they can something for free, so why pay for it?
When I was a poor student I pirated games too, but now that I'm a somewhat well payed software developer I buy pretty much every (mostly indie) game I play (and quite a few I end up not playing) because ~$20 every month or two is simply not an amount of money I will notice missing.
1) Sharing with friends and family is allowed, and encouraged
2) Your e-mail is your registration key - when you try to activate on another computer, an activation link is sent to you via e-mail, and you can do this 10 times. After that, you've just got to ask Puppygames for more activations and they'll almost always approve them (I assume the main exception would be if someone was passing around a registration all over the Internet, which is pretty easy to notice if it happens).
3) If anything screws up re: the DRM system, it errs in your favor. In particular, if you haven't registered when you boot the game and you can't reach the server, it will assume that you're good to go, and turn the demo into the full game. It will never shut you down because it can't phone home.
4) The only way the full game gets disabled is if the server tells it that you've asked for a refund (which they always honor).
5) They're aware that 3) and 4) are very easy to game (block the Internet connection once you get your refund), and that's fine, they prefer not to hassle legit users unduly.
IMO, this strikes a pretty good balance - it tends to err on the side of the user while still throwing up a tiny barrier to piracy (pretty much just enough to thwart the casual pirate). To do more is not worth it, because people that will go through the trouble of bypassing the registration process on the demo would probably just find a cracked version anyways if it was any more difficult to do.
Also, I should mention that the demos that Puppygames provides are quite substantial chunks of the full versions - if you've played enough of the demo to reach its limits, then chances are you've been liking the game enough to warrant buying it. I think this is pretty important, it's probably the main reason they have so few refund requests.
Finally, I encourage everyone to check out the game itself at http://www.puppygames.net/revenge-of-the-titans, too - Cas and Chaz have always put together really polished and fun games, and it's a shame that they haven't been able to figure out how to sell more of them (Cas was not joking at all with the self-deprecating stuff about people not buying the games, they really are only selling a handful of copies every month). FWIW, I have no relation to either of them, I'm plugging them because I've always liked their games and would hate to see them give up.
Using DRM at all in such a setup looks quite pointless to me.
I guess the big question is going to be "does this scale?"
My computer is mine. I can give others limited access on them in terms of user accounts. However, I will not give myself a user account and give them root.
The pirates can be said for getting things free. They are also more free due to less restrictions on their version of the code.
Think of it this way: DRM is effectively a way of monetizing the inconvenience of pirates. With traditional DRM, an unscrupulous person has two options: either buy the game immediately, or wait until it is cracked and then maybe deal with malware or crack-induced bugs.
The Puppygames DRM adds a third option: download the game directly from the creator (no malware or bugs) and play the full game, but with the inconvenience of only playing it offline. This makes the game less likely to be cracked at all -- there's little glory in cracking a game that practically comes pre-cracked -- and a crack is less likely to see wide distribution when the creator is a more reliable source. So maybe more people will experience the minor inconvenience of playing offline, and maybe more of them will pay to have the inconvenience removed.
It's actually a pretty good approach, admittedly lot of work for the developers.
And then they said that their demo version will be full version until it contacts the server... And you can download the demo without an account.
They defeated all of their own protections.
"It means if our DRM system breaks, like for example our server melts down with the floods of sales we unfortunately aren’t getting, or Puppygames goes completely bust because you buggers aren’t buying nearly enough games for us to survive," ... " Hint: you’re not :("
Like, now?
Kind of sad compared with minecraft that made $20k or something in a day.
Or, turning your comment on its head, Minecraft's income looks absolutely amazing compared to this!
All this is rather beside the point - according to the numbers in that post, they're selling 20 copies a month. If you're writing good, attractive games but making so little money, you have much bigger priorities than your DRM scheme. Spend an hour implementing an off-the-shelf watermarking system to give yourself basic legal recourse against wholesale piracy, then get on with the job of selling.
If this is just a hobby then fair enough, I have no right to argue, but if this is supposed to be a business then I really despair.
please don't jump to conclusions.
that's monthly salary per person, which in turn is how much they choose to pay themselves from the company's revenues, after monthly expenses, which I would assume include server and equipment costs among many other things.
Eh, as you mentioned, this post is aimed at people like us - to the normal end user that's not trying to play the full version for free, there's nothing complex at all. You just download the game, and enter your e-mail address. If you've already bought the thing, then you just have to click a link in an e-mail, otherwise you either play the demo or buy the thing, no surprises. Even sharing with friends is easy, you just enter your e-mail address and it works fine after you click the link.
The other details involve edge cases; perhaps Cas will at some point release some stats, and tell us (for instance) how many people actually activate more than 10 copies of the game. I can't imagine it's very many, and for everyone else, the scheme is trivial.
If you're writing good, attractive games but making so little money, you have much bigger priorities than your DRM scheme.
I'd tend to agree with this. The level of polish in their games makes it surprising that they're doing so few sales, so there's probably a lot that could be done marketing-wise to improve things. Of course, I have no idea what these things are, myself. :)
I'm sure Cas would be open to suggestions on this front, I know he's aware of this thread, so by all means, fire away if you've got advice...
Evidence that there is no such thing as DRM done right?
They say their demos will automatically become the full version if they can't find a Puppygames server on first run. You don't _need_ to hack the game, if you're so inclined to get it for free they've made it easy for you.
They're encouraging a culture of trust between you and them, in the hope you'll thank them for it and actually pay for the game. Not a bad tactic considering some of the piracy figures indie devs have cited. At the end of the day they realise it's more beneficial to keep their paying customers onside rather than slightly inconveniencing those who are going to pirate it anyway.
My point is that if your DRM is going to be so minimal anyway, why bother? It doesn't seem like this approach is likely to convince very many people to buy the software who wouldn't otherwise, and it surely takes time and resources to set up and run.
They're saying, "We've made DRM, but we don't want to inconvenience our paying users, so the DRM will be incredibly forgiving and infact can be easily circumvented by someone with little technical skill".
I think their potential customers would look at that and be more inclined to buy the games, because it appears they've been done more of a favour when a company cuts back on DRM, even at the expense of their potential income, as opposed to if they simply released the game for free.
Lots of people would have no problem registering the game to "Sir Pantsy Higginbothom <pantsy@throwaway-email-provider.com>" and then what good does their little name screen do?
If they always reset your registration count no questions asked, there is no point in even having that there.
It seems like they're trying to strike a balance but I just don't see the point. There's still extra hassle involved here, interestingly much of it is on the publisher himself, and there's no particular benefit for anyone. The publisher gains nothing from these measures because they are so easy to circumvent and they'll just creep out / bother users that registered the copy in their real name. Users gain nothing from these measures because they are almost not there and there's some slight intrusion made after buying 10 games. They don't add anything to the experience, unless you like your name flashing up as one of the intro credits.
So there's really no point to any of this. They should just rip it out and then they could put shiny "DRM-free" buttons all over.
if it introduced even a slight inconvenience in pirating the games it would probably already shave off a nice amount of pirating.
PS: Puppy Games is just one guy trying to make a living from his games, it's not really much of a "company".
If those don't deter people, a little flash of a name isn't going to deter people. The people who consume pirate media are just going to wait for it to pop on the torrent, just like anything, and crackers will have it out in a jiffy (assuming there's an audience that wants it...) specifically because there's nothing to crack. You just register the game as "1337 h4x0rs group", or better yet, go into a hex editor and replace the name of the person to whom the game is really registered.
If people aren't deterred from cracking out SafeROM etc., they are not going to be deterred from cracking out a little name flash. They aren't even going to bother with it, probably, and will just put the game out there. So what's the point? I don't get it at all. Who is deterred by this?
Big-name games get pirated more and more and
their attempts to "minimize piracy" are much
more intrusive. If those don't deter people,
a little flash of a name isn't going to
deter people.
In this particular instance, I think the fact it's a small fish game actually helps, since it will be harder to find well seeded torrents of it compared to the latest and greatest AAA extravaganza.
And do you think he'll automatically renew "1337 h4x0rs group" 10 keys limits after getting 1000s of requests to register the game under any single name?
I hope Cas will post some stats about how this worked out for him (assuming he can compare piracy rates between this and his previous games), I'd be very interested to find out how it fared.
Unless the DRM can somehow stop everyone from the first group (in this case it won't), the second group will not be affected at all. For them, what DRM is used is irrelevant.
However, there are presumably many not-quite-expert crackers who may not even realize the game has DRM beyond displaying a name and e-mail address. These people will register the game with a suitably anonymous credentials, maybe test it on a couple more machines, then upload it. They won't know the "crack" is ineffectual until they get an e-mail asking them to reset their ten registrations. And unless they keep replying to this e-mail for every ten downloads, their upload will stop working.
Two key questions: How many wannabes are there for every expert? And how many times will someone download an ineffectual crack before giving up?
Also, PuppyGames are the people responsible for LWJGL[1], which IMO is the best way to go for making games in Java.
There might be someone else working with him, I couldn't really find anything about it.
EDIT: apparently there are 2 people, Cas & Chaz:
http://www.javagaming.org/index.php/topic,23005.msg190715.ht...
Oh, that depends very much. Some other reasons include limit resale/kill secondary market/otherwise control distribution, track users/usage, be able to force update/patches/deactivations/etc on users, your publisher is an idiot.
I assume that like most places, they register a separate name that you provide, not necessarily linked to your card.
You can pirate it easily enough, but it forces you to admit to yourself that you are doing something ethically dubious in the process.