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Comment by JonLim | Hacker News Reader

> As far as I can tell, there's absolutely no way around it except by having thin clients and running everything off the cloud.

You can protect yourself from piracy by making quality content that people genuinely want to support. You do more good by making it convenient, easy, and affordable to customers than anything else, and having an awesome game makes it even easier to hand over cash.

Convenience and affordability is where a lot of people fail.

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In general I agree with you, but sometimes affordability isn't possible due to a limited market size.

Adobe Photoshop is the best example in that even if it was only $50 (instead of $2000), the market size is limited by those who want edit photos.

Adobe's answer to this was to make a student version and sell it for 15%+/- of the original price and allow those that want to edit photos but cannot afford the software still buy it for a lower price.

They further versioned by releasing Light Room.

They realized that they needed to make it affordable, but kept the DRMs in place and worked hard to make PS harder to copy. I'm sure it is still possible, but at $400 (student version) you get a lot of value and it becomes easier than pirating.

I've always thought photoshop was made intentionally easy to pirate, as an unfair competitive advantage to keep other companies out of the market (companies and serious professionals buy it--everyone else pirates it).

CS5 didn't even require a crack, you just have install the trial version with a fake serial and edit your hosts file to stop it calling home.

Maybe it is relatively easy to crack compared with games, but non programmers like me don't even know what host files are. That being said, if it is relatively easy to crack you are probably right. It would be financial suicide to compete with them since you couldn't limp in with a weak program. Great point.

Isn't that the same position as Microsoft is suspected to have?

Case in point, Valve/Steam got it right: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/114391-Valves-Gabe...

But Steam is a DRM platform, so that's not entirely relevant. They do try really hard to provide value and convenience to the customer, but they haven't stepped back from the DRM position.

True; they still do a minimum to keep people honest, but all those methods, to my knowledge, are already defeated if you look around. Their stick is making piracy annoying to do, along with the carrot of a long reputation of good games.

Partly because the benefits of Steam (infinite, fast, direct downloads; achievements and leaderboards; cloud game saves; fast patch download; occasional purchase perks such as TF2 hats) far outweigh the negatives (purchases tied to account name; only one account "online" at a time; occasionally weird/buggy "offline" support)

I actually consider everything tired to my account name a plus, as I can log in anywhere and get it. No secondary market, however, is the downside associated with that.

And offline is way better than it used to be. Is it still problematic?

I was a lifelong pirater of games, rarely bought any (though ironically Paradox games were bought, I loved them so much), and Steam turned that around. I don't buy AAA games at full price, which is ridiculously high here in Australia, but Steam has regular sales with significant discounts. I'm not a poor student anymore, plus Steam is much more convenient than pirating. I'll pay a few dollars to avoid spending time finding a torrent, then reading the comments to see if it's good or not, then waiting for the seeders, etc.

Counter-Strike is actually one of those instances where DRM adds value to a product for paying customers. Counter-Strike is a very popular target for cheaters using client hacks like like aimbots and transparent wall hacks, and one of the ways to avoid those players is by hiding behind a pay wall. Every time a cheater is caught and banned, the only way for them to get back in is by paying $10 to re-buy the game. Adding DRM to the client ensures that this pay wall remains intact, meaning that cheaters can ruin my multiplayer experience constantly only if they are willing to inject a fair amount of cash into the system (and very few are).

Old battlenet (before SC2) could disable CD keys in multiplayer, and was a level of DRM I'm ok with. People hack, and having a mechanism to ban them made sense. It doesn't have to come with all of the "single account tied to your purchase" or "3 hardware changes" that we're starting to see.

I'm pretty much OK with CD-keys, and I tolerate Steam because it hasn't had serious problems yet, but anything else I tend to distrust.

But the DRM is not what's protecting themselves from piracy; it's the quality and convenience of the service. Every Steam game is trivially cracked within hours of release, regardless of the DRM, yet most people still choose to buy the game on Steam.

There's the fact that if you're caught playing pirated games on Steam they can easily close your account and you lose all the games you paid for.

What does "caught playing pirated games on Steam" even mean? Cracked versions of Steam games typically have the Steam portion stripped out, so one would not play them "on Steam" at all.

For example, http://www.vg247.com/2011/04/13/garrys-mod-lures-pirates-to-...

Good Old Games is more apropriate example, I think http://www.gog.com/

I've mentioned this before, but World of Goo did everything right: great game, 90 on Metacritic, easy purchase through Steam or direct from their website, no DRM at all, and priced at $19.99. But an estimated 90% of players were on pirated versions of the game: http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/.

Is there something else they could have done?

Unless pirate players have a significant negative effect on the gameplay experience, which doesn't seem to be the case from what I can see for this game in particular, World Of Goo's makers do not care how many people pirate their game, either in absolute terms or as a percentage. All that really matters is the absolute number of legitimate sales.

It doesn't matter how many people pirate content vs buy it. What matters is whether DRM would have increased or decreased the total revenue. More than likely it would have caused it to decrease. The people who pirated it would not have necessarily been paying customers, and fewer people playing the game overall would likely have led to less publicity and fewer total sales.

Edit: a lot of game makers are adopting this sort of model as an intentional business practice by going "free to play". Having a big installed base is great if per user costs are low (which they can be if everything is digital) and can improve average perceived value for multiplayer games, all of which can make it easier to pull in more revenue from a small subset of players who voluntarily choose to pay for certain things than to attempt to charge everyone a flat fee.

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