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Interesting Article by GalCiv Designer

Linedog

Novice
Joined
Jun 1, 2003
Messages
63
Location
San Francisco, CA
This fellow has an interesting view re. piracy and copy protection as well as publishers and the perils of doing business with them:


Pc Games Need To Deliver The Goods To Compete!
Don't Blame Pirates For Pc Game Sales Decline
Posted By: Draginol
Date Posted: 7/20/2004 4:49:22 PM


This article from "Elf-Inside" about his experiences with games and with Stardock really underscores where the PC game industry needs to go. He has a really good analogy:

When I buy a pizza, I expect to get a pizza. I expect it with the toppings I order, and I expect it to be delivered promptly. By calling Domino's or Papa John's, I've contractually agreed to pay for a pizza when it arrives. But if the deliverman shows up 2 hours late, with cold pizza, with Anchovies instead of Peperoni, then, no, I'm not going to pay for that. The problem with typical game publishers, is they expect you to eat that pizza, and be happy for it. You paid for hot pepperoni, and got cold anchovies, but you have no recourse.

Which is so true. It is also one of the reasons why I think the console market is really starting to eat the PC's lunch. I've been outright hostile to consoles for years but even I find myself starting to buy console games. Why? Because they work out of the box. I don't have to "Wait for the first patch" to play the games.

And PC games have a perfect storm of bad habits:

First, I am expected to devote hundreds of megabytes to them. Okay, I can live with that.
But then they expect me to keep the CD in the drive.
And then I usually have to keep track of a little tiny paper serial number (usually taped to the back of the CD jacket).
And all that so that I can play a game that needs a couple of patches to play.
And when the PC sales go down, what's the reported reason? Piracy of course. Yea, it's piracy. Sure. In my experience of writing games, it's not pirates ripping us off of our hard earned money, it's been publishers. The tale of Galactic Civilizations is very similar to the tale of Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

The other developers told me I was daft to write a space based strategy game for OS/2! So I wrote Galactic Civilizations for OS/2. I was a college student back then so I couldn't afford to get it into the stores. So a publisher called Advanced Idea Machines "published" it. They never paid us royalties and disappeared soon after. Since I had no money, I couldn't afford a lawyer at the time.

So I got smart. Stardock would publish the OS/2 sequel Galactic Civilizations II. So we made the game, manufactured the boxes, took care of all the marketing and getting it into the stores. And just to be safe, we had two distributors. One called Micro Central and the other one called Blue Orchards. Both went went out of business owing us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

That particular incident nearly wiped out Stardock.

But no matter, we recovered. We clawed our way back up and made it into the Windows market. We decided to make a Windows version and we decided to work with a well known publisher on it (Strategy First). This time everything would go perfectly...


Well, that was a year and a half ago and we're still waiting for royalty payments on most of their sales. But this time, we had an out -- direct electronic sales. People were able to buy the game directly from us and download the game.

So don't talk to me about piracy. It's not the pirates that have ripped us off of hundreds of thousands in lost royalties. It's been "Real businesses" doing that thank you very much. The position of royalty eating parasite has already been taken.

It's the demographic of people who allegedly do all this pirating that's been paying our bills. People with Internet connections who download games. They pay my salary. They are my overlord now. So I hope you can excuse me if I don't lose sleep at night that some 15 year old might have downloaded my game while some executive at a company (or former company) is sailing on their boat paid for by my hard work. The software pirate can go to jail on a felony, the business executive who doesn't pay royalties gets off the hook.

So yea, tell me again how I need to put some dongle or whatever on my game to keep 15 year olds from pirating? When our contract with publishers forces them to wear a shock collar that I can press a button to shock them if royalties aren't paid on time then we'll talk about forcing customers to deal with massive copy protection. But it's not the pirates I worry about.

I'm sure that Galactic Civilizations is pirated somewhere. But I highly doubt it's pirated in significant quantities. I know it sold over 100,000 copies out there. But people didn't pirate it much. Why? Because we didn't force them to pirate it. We didn't make someone have to create a CD crack so that they could play it on their laptop on the plane where the CD drive is replaced with an extra battery. We didn't make them have to download "patches" to get the game working. The version of Galactic Civilizations that won Editor's Choice Awards from most of the major PC game publications was the 1.0 version out of the box. And we encouraged people to pay their hard earned dollars for the game by giving them value by putting out updates after release. We put out a bunch of free updates that added tons of features. A BonusPak, a free expansion pack. Heck, GalCiv 1.21 is due out this week! You want to fight piracy, don't give people a reason to pirate.

In fairness, the retail version of The Political Machine will have a CD check. However, the electronic version from TotalGaming.net will not and users of the boxed version will be able to forgo the CD check after January 1, 2005 as part of our compromise with our publisher. A win-win since the main problem with CD checks is losing the CD or damaging it in the long term and it satisfies the publisher's concern over "0 day warez" sites (though it'll still get pirated I'm sure).

I think that's a major reason consoles are starting to really crush the PC game market. People are getting fed up. They're getting a cold pizza and being told to lump it. It doesn't have to bet that way.

For example, The Political Machine comes out in August. We plan to have a free update available for it on the first week that adds some new features and extra goodies. There will be "bug" fixes but they'll likely be bugs no one would run into. And we'll put out updates as regularly as Ubi Soft will let us (unlike with GalCiv, The Political Machine updates have to go through Ubi Soft's outstanding QA department).

We don't do this because we're nice. We do it because it is good business. If the competing technology (consoles) can't be updated with new stuff after release, then you should exploit that advantage. And that means add new features, not use the Internet to supply updates that finish the game!

I'm not against copy protection schemes on the PC because I'm some sort of flower child developer. I'm against them because they're bad business. They discourage people from buying PC games in the first place. Once you make someone have to hunt down a CD crack, you've set them on the path of pirating the whole game and future games.

That's what I hope to see TotalGaming.net prevent. Make it a no-brainer for someone to purchase games electronically by keeping costs reasonable and make using the games they've purchased easy and convenient. After all, it's their pizza, deliver it to them as they want and they'll support you with future orders.
 

HanoverF

Arcane
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Messages
6,083
MCA Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Divinity: Original Sin 2
When I buy a pizza, I expect to get a pizza. I expect it with the toppings I order, and I expect it to be delivered promptly. By calling Domino's or Papa John's, I've contractually agreed to pay for a pizza when it arrives. But if the deliverman shows up 2 hours late, with cold pizza, with Anchovies instead of Peperoni, then, no, I'm not going to pay for that. The problem with typical game publishers, is they expect you to eat that pizza, and be happy for it. You paid for hot pepperoni, and got cold anchovies, but you have no recourse.
Kind of a weak analogy, but ok...

The tale of Galactic Civilizations is very similar to the tale of Swamp Castle from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Wha? The Swamp Castle where the nubile young women want Lancelot to "spank" them?

So is he Lancelot tempted to spank the attractive publishers? Or he's the not so innocent girly looking to get a spanking from the big burly publisher?
 

Psilon

Erudite
Joined
Feb 15, 2003
Messages
2,018
Location
Codex retirement
Swamp Castle is the one with "no singing" as a rule. Lancelot killed most of the wedding guests there.

You're thinking of Castle Anthrax, where Galahad was waylaid by the grail-shaped beacon.
 

Anonymous

Guest
I mostly agree with this, just because everyone who cries 'piracy = bad game sales' is usually incorrect. Pirates have little effect on game sales. It's similiar to the RIAA saying mp3 downloads make CD sales go down.
 

Dhruin

Liturgist
Joined
Aug 15, 2003
Messages
758
From a post I made on the Obsidian boards because I don't fee llike re-typing:

Brad's article is interesting and he makes some good points but misses the mark in other areas. I really haven't seen piracy reported as the major reason for a decline in PC game sales - have you? He also draws a direct link between a decline in retail sales and lost developer earnings as a cause, which is logically weak.

In my experience as a computer retailer, anti-piracy protection does reduce casual copying and is therefore likely to be effective for mainstream buyers. The knowledgeable pirates will never be stopped but they are a small group compared to the mass of purchasers who hit the "copy" button in the Nero wizard, find it doesn't work and don't bother again.

When developers undertake a new project, they do projections on the market and the sales they can anticipate (as do publishers). It's ludicrous to think publishers don't do some similar research on the cost/benefit of the protection they are paying for. Brad's games are niche market products so his circumstances are a little different. I'm pretty sure I could offer a free pirate copy of GalCiv to every one of my customers and once they understood what it was, I'd get a mix of "whatever" to "Nah...not my thing". If I offered The Sims or Diablo 2 they'd be queued round the block.

By the way, don't I have to swap discs on the consoles that everyone is stampeding to? Do they "trust" their customers or do they implement protection systems?

I've seen a few comments on this post of Brad's at various forums around the net. There's often a cry to get rid of the "evil" publishers. Please. Who is going to make the milestone payments so the developers can actually develop? How many projects failed because the developer consistantly ran late, couldn't contain the bugs and/or deliver the gameplay?

The real causes of PC sales decline are complex and entwined. The major cause is that gaming is no longer a niche hobby: it's mainstream entertainment. The nature of a console makes it attractive to casual players, which in turn has attracted developers and publishers. Over time, the production costs on large projects has skyrocketted, which means they must address a large audience to be profitable. Smaller games with smaller budgets don't have the production quality, which further turns off casual players because it isn't as pretty/easy to use/balanced/bug-free/whatever. Retail stores increase console displays and decrease PC displays. This becomes a self-fulfilling cycle.

However, this has meant there are gaps in the PC market for the right companies to exploit. Eventually a few (more) developers will realise there is a market for PC RPGs that address the PC RPG market, rather than trying too hard to attract a casual audience.

Edit: I should throw the improved capabilities of consoles into that mix. :)

--------

I like his work but the pizza analogy is weak, publisher payments aren't directly connected to retail sales and disc-swapping is required on an un-modded console so that's irrelevant.
 

Araanor

Liturgist
Joined
Oct 24, 2002
Messages
829
Location
Sweden
Dhruin said:
I've seen a few comments on this post of Brad's at various forums around the net. There's often a cry to get rid of the "evil" publishers. Please. Who is going to make the milestone payments so the developers can actually develop? How many projects failed because the developer consistantly ran late, couldn't contain the bugs and/or deliver the gameplay?
Developers who can't run projects competently should rightly go out of business.

As I'm sure you know, games do not need mega-budgets to be good. And with the rise of the Internet, games do not have to be in the stores and have advertising to sell. Initially, it's a great opportunity for niche developers, where they can develop with greater freedom and not have to sell in AAA numbers to keep going. Eventually, I can see it becoming the main avenue.

GalCiv and Laser Squad Nemesis are setting great examples, and I can see Paradox moving in this direction too with their online store and (partly) self-publishing.
 

Vival

Augur
Joined
Apr 13, 2004
Messages
230
LlamaGod said:
I mostly agree with this, just because everyone who cries 'piracy = bad game sales' is usually incorrect. Pirates have little effect on game sales. It's similiar to the RIAA saying mp3 downloads make CD sales go down.

Well, mp3 downloads DO make CD sales go down. Often there only a few good songs on a CD burried under a lot of filler crap nobody wants to hear or to pay for so it's of course much more handy just to get this particular songs(without extremly annoying copy protections). That's one of the reasons why the music industry is vehemently against mp3 and does not provide reliable mp3 download services: If customers had the possibility to buy just the quality stuff it would force them to stop producing cheap, crappy songs since they couldn't sell it together with the good songs any longer. In the end, ironically, it's their own greed that makes them lose money.
 

Dhruin

Liturgist
Joined
Aug 15, 2003
Messages
758
Araanor said:
As I'm sure you know, games do not need mega-budgets to be good. And with the rise of the Internet, games do not have to be in the stores and have advertising to sell. Initially, it's a great opportunity for niche developers, where they can develop with greater freedom and not have to sell in AAA numbers to keep going. Eventually, I can see it becoming the main avenue.

GalCiv and Laser Squad Nemesis are setting great examples, and I can see Paradox moving in this direction too with their online store and (partly) self-publishing.

I don't disagree with this at all; I'm just balancing the ledger. Uncountable times publishers have screwed up projects or screwed over devs...but without publishers most projects won't even get going.

Again, as interesting as many of his points are they have nothing to do with PCs losing out to consoles - the premise of the article.
 

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