The Final Answer For What To Do To Prevent Piracy [of Indie Games] | Hacker News Reader

The Final Answer For What To Do To Prevent Piracy [of Indie Games]

jeff-vogel.blogspot.com

135 pointsab926 comments

The other important point:

Every minute you waste on the specter of piracy is a minute you're not spending making something useful. Given the choice between spending time on people who are paying you versus the people who never will, the choice seems obvious.

No one is going to crow to their friends about your awesome anti-piracy mechanism. Make their life better? That would be something worth sharing.

Piracy is inevitable, loyal users aren't. Put effort into the fight you can win.

The author makes the quote:

> Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big mistake.

Which is absolutely 100% correct. Because your goal shouldn't be preventing people from pirating your game. The number of people pirating your game is basically irrelevant. What matters is the number of people buying your game. Reducing piracy is only relevant if you're converting those pirates into paying customers - if you're not, then you haven't actually achieved anything.

You can't reduce piracy per se. You can just make your product more worth buying and as a side-effect piracy may go down a little, i.e. some who used to pirate it will instead buy it. Or then more people are buying and more people are also pirating it: that'd still be an improvement.

Trying to reduce piracy will just give you a void and you still have to fill that void with buying customers. So starting from the latter part in the first place makes more sense.

Quite so – my view has always been that making something so valuable that people will steal it is a great problem to have.

I have not heard of a single protection scheme that could not be broken. Not from the laziest homebrew 'protection' to the schemes used to protect 5- or 6-digit sale price engineering software, passign through every game in between.

If you plan on implementing a protection scheme, here's what I would want you to do. Think of the best and worst things it could do to these two classes of people: legitimate customers and pirates.

Pirates. Worst [for you] case: it inconveniences them for an hour. Best case: it inconveniences them up until two weeks after your release [two weeks is the usual goal for a game, Spyro was legendary in a way, and lasted two months http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirat... ]

Customers. Best case: it inconveniences them for five seconds. Worst case: Depends on your scheme. Make it one where worst case is a one-day support e-mail away. Not where they lose all their files, are left cursing your name and treated like trash because they just wanted to move to a new computer.

There are more than two types of people though. Back when I wrote about the subject I came up with four shade, though there might be more.

http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/09/05/everything-you-need-to-k...

To misquote a Chris Rock line, there exist at least some people who are as honest as their options.

I love online software over downloadable software for many reasons. One is it makes piracy virtually impossible. Another is that the conversion rates are much higher. Those might be totally unrelated, but hey, accounts in my DB means I don't even have to care. (Gamers are voting for this future with their wallets.)

Games are slightly different, for example with WoW there are plenty of people playing for free on private servers people have setup, you don't see this at all with SaaS apps. Although if your game is an MMO and popular enough the network effects mean the vast majority of players are going to want to be on the legit servers.

Steve Jackson Games has a similar approach to protecting their ebooks:

http://e23.sjgames.com/faq.html#protected

> Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

> A. No. That would interfere with your use of them.

Anyone knows Company of Heroes? It's not an indie game but a game from THQ. The developers decided that adding mechanism to it to prevent piracy is wasted money. And they were right because everybody I know bought it and the is/was a huge success.

Mechanism to prevent piracy are so expensive that it is not worth the money. Plus in the and the game will get cracked anyway and that means all the money you put into it was just useful for a short time.

Another thing about preventing piracy methods is that in most cases the paying customer are losing. I buy a game for 50 bucks from Capcom and can't play it cause they wanted to prevent piracy with a phone-home DRM. This is ridiculous.

Please tell this to big game developers that make you have a persistent internet connection to play, or only allow the key to be used 3 times etc.

Things like that only punish legitimate players, if it's pirated, those safeguards are removed and aren't a problem.

Having frequented large amounts of game forums over the past 10 years, I can assure you: The big game developers get told exactly this hundreds of times a day.

I was actually just playing Assassin's Creed 2 a few minutes ago.

No internet connection required.

It was very convenient.

I disagree a bit:

"Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big mistake."

There's one way to end that sentence that isn't a mistake:

I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to... Make it such a good game that they want to pay for it.

It actually works! Some pirates aren't convertible because they are complete jerks, or don't have money, or any number of other reasons that make conversion impossible. But quite a few are actually decent people who have needs that aren't being met. They -will- pay for a product that has value and meets their needs.

This article is a good example of failing to meet those needs. His piracy prevention tactics actually make it easier to pirate the game than buy it!

True story: I have a friend who bought some software and liked it. Then he reinstalled Windows and it wouldn't install. He contacted tech support and tried for 2 weeks to get them to fix the problem. He gave up, pirated it, and then emailed them telling him that he pirated it instead. Yes, a product he already owned. The next day they sent him a new registration code that fixed the problem. Ridiculous.

Valves approach is best- Try to make the multiplayer experience worth paying for.

Unfortunately, The market is being forced by execs to move to a platform that is "internet connection required" for playing single player games and the tools to do this without piracy being a issue are going to be here soon ( onlive ) - Yes, occasionally a source will leak to the public but for the most part this new system is going to be worse across the board for the consumers.

Sometimes 'progress' sucks.

I'd also say that steam's more convenient than piracy. And the drm is usually painless. And you throw in their sales, and games will go for 5 or 10 dollars. To me the convenience alone is worth the money.

Not every game can have a multiplayer aspect. And for those games I'd prefer to pay for games that are multiplayer designed from scratch rather than the functionality being bolted on.

I thought Jeff Vogel made rpgs anyway, so no dice for him there.

I actually had a similar situation more recently (but with mobile apps, not games). Also asked a user to enter program-generated key when making a purchase. I don't think it's a huge problem if you explain where this key is shown inside the app. Speaking of distraction-free "buy now" webpage a reasonable solution I came up with the following solution: just ask for user e-mail (it's already provided by systems like PayPal anyway). Generate a random "user id" (better make it numeric) and send it to the user's e-mail along with activation instructions. Then user must go to another webpage on your site and enter 3 pieces of information: e-mail, id and the program key (the last one must be shown by the application). This page, if all goes well (the info is checked against the database records), generates an activation key to be entered to activate the program, which is also e-mailed (not just displayed on the webpage). This way you can control the piracy issue (because everything goes via e-mail, and also know/conrtol # of activations per user, since last step can be performed multiple times).

I kind of agree with this philosophy, to a point. However would you leave your house without locking the front door?

He still has a serial key system, so he has a lock. He's just not bothering with the bear traps, electric fences and guard dogs.

Fair enough, and agreed.

No, that would leave me open for robbery.

This is where the distinction between copyright infringement and theft becomes important.

No, but would you sell the homes you build with locks that require you to be present to open them?

Why the [of Indie Games]?

Because that's the context of the article and HN users might want to know that. It's not clear in the original title.

I don't think corporates rely on "loyal costumers". I can't imagine a manager at some big company agreeing to this line of thinking.

I mean yea, theoretically this applies to everything (games, music, movies, etc), but .. I have a hard time believing that big companies will someday realize this.

I disagree. When they make XYZ 7, they are counting on loyal XYZ customers to buy it just because it's the next one. I'm sure they also try to make a great game, but the budget for development and marketing were based on the sales of XYZ 6 and that many of those customers will be back for the next one.

Brand loyalty is real and companies do count on it.

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