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Comment by cogogo | Hacker News Reader

I grew up playing pirated games on the Apple II 35 years ago. The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.

It doesn't prove that DRM free is not a viable business.

I also grew up pirating, but I haven't been pirating games for more than 10 years now.

A few bucks costs much less to me these days than a headache with finding a cracked version and installing potential malware on my computer. Not even talking about supporting the artists and developers.

Gabe is right that piracy is a service problem. If you have proper easy installers, easy buying, easy refunds and you are from a middle class and higher - it doesn't make sense to download random executables from the internet. And if you have low-income, you won't buy stuff regardless of DRM and just wait someone to crack it.

Yeah this - people who grew up gaming in the 80s and 90s now have significant disposable income and are time poor. A game that offers tens or hundreds of hours of entertainment is seriously cost effective when a movie ticket costs half a videogame or a round of drinks.

Malware is potentially very expensive if you have any capital (tradfi or defi) that is anywhere near your gaming rig. Even a brokerage of 5 figures isn't worth touching something that could have malware.

Most the games young players play are all service oriented games anyway

This is a valuable lesson I learned when I worked with someone, not at Elastic, but who had previously worked at Elastic. Elastic was one of the original companies who made FOSS but with enterprise licensing work well. We were discussing in a meeting at this place we worked how to design license checking into the product.

What the guy said I found very insightful: he said that you don’t really need to spend a bunch of time and effort creating sophisticated license checks, you just need perhaps a single phone call to a server or something else that can be trivially defeated for anyone with a reasonable amount of technical knowledge. Why? Because the people who would defeat it are the kind of people who make horrible enterprise customers anyway. So in a way it’s just like a cheap lock. Won’t defeat anyone determined, because it’s not designed to. It’s designed to keep already honest people honest

Totally understandable and even reasonable position, but the paying customer gets the worse treatment, which does not sit right.

I did something that was almost the same. Used to work for an educational software company that almost solely sold to schools, universities, and government institutions. Sometimes to corporate learning centers. Every sale was on a per-seat basis.

Every single customer we had wanted to be legal. Didn't want to exceed their seats or do anything which would violate their sales agreement. In the case of our government clients, such violations could lead them into legal penalties from their employer.

Despite having an unusually honest customer base, the company insisted on horridly strict and intrusive DRM. Even to the point of using dongles for a time. It frequently broke. Sometimes we had to send techs out to the schools to fix it.

I ended up just ripping all of that out and replacing it with a simple DLL on the Windows client. It talked to an tiny app server side. Used a barely encrypted tiny database which held the two numbers: seats in use & total seats available. If for some reason the DLL couldn't make contact with the server, it would just launch the software anyways. No one would be locked out due to the DRM failing or because the creaky school networks were on the blink again.

This system could have been cracked in five seconds by just about anyone. But it didn't matter since we knew everyone involved was trying to be honest.

Saved a massive amount of time and money. Support calls dropped enormously. Customers were much happier. It's probably my weakest technical accomplishment but it's still one of my proudest accomplishments.

Finally a sane approach. And quite amusing it follows the first IT rule: don't solve the administrative problems with a technical means.

I wish they had a way to transfer licenses. I have a huge steam library and my son is the biggest user. No big deal when he was 7 but now I just want to play my ancient games… and we kick each other out sometimes!

And yeah.. it’s trivial to bypass, but I’d rather have a choice not to.

You can share a Steam library with your family. https://store.steampowered.com/promotion/familysharing

That's what he does, from the comment about accidentally kicking each other out.

No, the new system allows multiple users to play the same game at the same time (unless the publisher explicitely opted out).

Does it? I thought only as many times as there are original licenses in the family. Or is this yet another mechanism?

If you want to play the same exact title, yes. But previous versions would kick you out from playing a shared game if the owner was playing any other title in their library, and they've recently removed that behaviout.

That’s awesome, thank you!

The first game I ever sold had no DRM, it was distributed by cassette tape. I did very well making games for CD-ROM, up until CD burners got cheap.

There's nothing stopping anyone from making a business selling DRM free games. I think you can get original DRM free games on itch.io. There are probably other places. GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.

If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed. Anyone here who is certain it is possible is welcome to try.

> If someone thinks they can make high production value games without DRM I hope they try and succeed.

CD Projekt RED did exactly that with both Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk 2077, which were available on GOG day #1 (and the Steam version did not have any DRM whatsoever) and while the latter had a rough start because of technical issues, they both sold very well and were positively received (after some patches for CP2077 anyway).

GOG also releases many new high production value games on day #1 too, e.g. Expedition 33 (which won a crapton of awards in recent times) was released on it the same day as on Steam. Baldur's Gate 3 was also on GOG on release date as is Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon right now, which also seems to be a high production value game with relatively well reception.

The only games missing are those by companies whose business models rely on sucking out gamers' wallets dry with microtransactions (so they need the "protection" from their own customers that DRM provides) or companies that have people making decisions based on assumptions stuck in past decades.

> GoG is great, but they don't typically sell new games.

Many big studios/publishers avoid gog indeed, but others don't, and definitely a lot of new DRM-free games come out there all the time. Maybe it is because of the types of games I want to play, I usually I have no trouble finding them there, with some notable exceptions of course (souls games, outer wilds).

Both clair obscur and Baldur's Gate 3 (goty 2025 & 2023) were in gog since the beginning (bg3 already since its beta). They both definitely sold very well, despite(?) that. All Larian and Obsidian games get there as they come out, as are quite many CRPGs in general, not even counting CDPR's ones. A lot of great/popular indie titles appear in gog around the same time as they do on steam in the last years.

GOG is not just for old games.

Similar here. When I pirated I did not have the extra money to buy the games anyway, so I would not have bought them. I would also rent a bunch from a video game store, when this was actual a thing back then, which was much cheaper. And a couple that came with pc magazines. Not sure how that worked in the context of the video game industry, but anyway downloading a full game over these internet speeds was a pain.

Once I was more economically stable, I did not download pirated games anymore, and I even bought a bunch that I had played and really liked, even if I barely played them again.

I am not putting any moral stance on this, I was not entitled to play anything without money to pay, but my point is that for me a lack of option to pirate these games would not have implied me paying for them. Probably I would have done something else with my time.

People pirate Steam Games anyway. Stating that people pirate too much to make it viable is purely opinion and not based on numbers. Sure, for AAA games you get 2 to 3 months without a cracked version, but this stops afterward. For non-AAA games, the steam version is usually crackable from day-1.

Seriously, for cracking steam games, all it takes is to drop a single DLL inside the game's folder. It can't get simpler than that.

Yes, that obviously only works for offline games, but yeah, cracking Steaam games is as easy as cracking any other game, maybe even easier

That is cracking, but one still has to download the files from somewhere before they can crack it. Finding legitimate files is still time consuming.

Yeah, but you just need anyone who bought the game on Steam, a friend or co-worker for example, not some shady website.

You want to avoid shady websites for the game download, and shady websites for the crack download. You can do both of this with Steam

>The fact that many people pirate is not an opinion.

That's not the opinon part. That pirating is the reason a game business isn't viable is.

Would you have bought every game you pirated? How much money did you spend on gaming because you got hooked because you could play more games than you could afford otherwise?

If the Apple II had something similar to Steam do you think you would have pirated as much? Ignore the fact that the tech wasn't ready yet and imagine a world where buying Apple II software was as frictionless as buying a Steam game. Also imagine that the software went on deep discounts regularly that allowed you to build up a big backlog of games to play. Do you think you would have been motivated to seek out the seedy underbelly of the software world looking for illicit copies to add to your backlog? Certainly there are some people like that, but they might be a fairly small minority. And then suddenly DRM isn't really helpful because even if it might stop a minority of people who weren't going to buy your game in the first place it always costs you in frustration for paying customers.

“Many people pirate” is a different statement than “too many people pirate games to make that a viable business”.

It's because the poster assume that each pirated copy ought to have been paid for - which if they had been, then a previously failing game would've been viable.

But this doesn't make the statement true - because the assumption that each pirated copy would've been paid for had there been no piracy. This is the same incorrect logic that music/movie copyright holders use to count pirated works' financial "damages".

It's an opinion that "Most" people pirate games and it's also an opinion that pirating games translates directly to lost sales. As Gabe said and I agree with him piracy, if it's anything a service related problem. You don't need DRM to overcome that. You just need to make a good product and respect you audience. The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.

>> The people that pirate for the wrong reasons will do it anyway and you don't gain much from restricting copies.

That is also an opinion. Also-- as an aside-- I am curious what you think the "right" reason is for piracy. DRM free games is not a new idea. They have always existed and people have tried different models with them like including advertising. Do you remember the Ford driving simulator? The skittles game. there have been other models and there is a huge universe of DRM free games for decades.

If you don't gain much from restricting copies, please explain to me why it is so common in the best games?

Have they actually tried releasing those same games DRM free?

Just because everybody does it is not really a convincing reason

Also many DRM games are cracked quite quickly after release. How does that help sell more copies?

Are you confusing the absence or presence of copy protection with how a game is supposed to make money?

> why it is so common in the best games?

What best games? It's common in design by commitee predatory crap like EA/Ubisoft titles.

Thing is, a pirated copy isn't a lost sale. It's more like free marketing. It's possible that the above assholes would make more profit if they stopped spending on copy protection and advertising and just made and sold games.

In a world where it would be impossible to pirate software, I bet they would have at best 25% more sales. No one can afford to pay for every game, especially at launch price, so they'll just make do with fewer of them.

Linky about marketing costs:

https://www.trueachievements.com/n53671/aaa-game-development...

Juicy quote:

the CMA says that "this publisher also submitted that for one of its major franchise’s development costs reached $660 million and marketing costs peaked at almost $550 million."

> The skittles game.

Oh, Darkened Skye? Funny how it's just a fairly bland fantasy 3rd-person action-adventure game and then you get to spellcasting and it's skittles. Also, when I think of video game advertising, I think Cool Spot.

A 'right' reason for illicitly obtaining a video game would be if the game is unobtainable because of licensing shenanigans. Project Cars 2 has the best single player career mode of any existing circuit racing game and it being unavailable because the licenses to the cars (and maybe also the tracks?) expired is a shame.

Games are cracked at day one, sometimes hours after. Apparently DRM is not a solution here. If pirates know that, people at Valve certainly do.

Piracy is much less endemic nowadays.

Yeah, because rather than pirating from cracxxxed.warez I can buy the game on Steam/GoG sale for $1.4.

Exactly. Games are just software, there's no real unit cost to factor in when setting minimum prices, just market strategy. Running sales with different levels of discounts is as close to optimal as possible $/customer without doing stuff like individualized pricing (which surely requires a vast amount of computing power and human effort to do at scale). Only the truly penniless or retro-game fans need to pirate nowadays.

The real unit cost is worker development cost. Like any other tech company, this cost gets muddied in the platform/framework development costs versus more product focused costs.

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