Because it would alienate potential buyers. har har drm good har har, customers bad. This is an attitude from the past that gets you nowhere.
I think that if you really look around, you will see that drm does no one any favors. The fact that these developers treat us as potential customers instead of potential pirates really goes a long way.
I don’t doubt that the game will be pirated. It’s a fact of life nowadays. Is that good? no of course not. Is it the end of the world? depending on how you handle it, definitely not.
If people never planned on buying, drm wouldn’t convince them otherwise. If people are on the fence about it, having no drm might sway them to give it a try. And even the people who pirate the game, still do free advertising for you
That’s right but at least there has to be some security measurements in order to make ACEO not sharable like WinRar on the internet. I mean you can find cracked SimAirport download links all over the internet. But you cannot find GTA5 download links on regular sites.
Adding GTA 5 forms of anti piracy measures is a bit much for ACEO I guess, but if they do manage to build in some sort of protection to indeed prevent links on normal websites that would be totally acceptable.
Maybe GTA5 was an overshot example but you get my point. Maybe just maybe making ACEO so that it won’t work without Steam opened in the background. I know there are fake programs to act like Steam but at least this will avoid most of shares online.
While we do appreciate all the creative tips on how to make the game un-piratable, we are convinced that there are a lot of very talented people across the world that easily will fool any attempt we make at implementing any piracy protection.
The best piracy protection is a good game that is fairly priced. If people download it illegally then they probably have some reason for it and that’s fine. We’ll put our resources into developing new features instead of protecting the product, in the long run that’s probably a better investment anyway.
I would not agree with the fact that piracy is fine. You would not go into a bakery and take a loaf of bread just because the store owner can not see you and you claim to have a valid reason to do so. Illegal download will happen and it is not much we can or will do about it since it is more or less pointless to spend time on DRM as illustrated. We can, however, aim to have very frequent releases for the future meaning keeping the game updated outside of Steam would be tedious.
If someone wants the game, enough to download a pirated version of it, then i can’t blame them, but still, it’s technically illegal, but when I search for Airport CEO on google, on of the first things that pops up is “Airport CEO download” or “how to download Airport CEO for free”, not always, but sometimes.
Looks like some people wants the game, more then we do…
And when we can find people who already wants to pirate the game, then we know, that free copies will be distributed across the internet as soon as the game is released.
This is probably pretty clear, and I may just be repeating what other people has said, but this is just what I have found.
When piracy and torrenting was at it’s peak, we bought hard copies of games for 49,99£. This plus the fact that most games only could be installed 3 times befare you had to bit a new key and so forth simply made piracy more convenient than being legit. Now, piracy is just a lot of work, filled with viruses and not least illegal. Price the game sensibly, and put it on steam. In Norway the government actually has passes laws requiring your ISP to store the slites your broadband has vidited just to kull piracy.
What if you don’t want to have Steam running in the background? If the game is released via other channels, like GOG or on the devs’ own store, they will have to maintain two copies: the one that needs steam and the one that does not. It just adds an extra annoyance to the legit users, the ones who pirate it won’t care, and it will add more overhead to the publishing process.
Almost certainly they’re only releasing it via steam so this point is kind of irrelevant, and of course there are programs to get around the steam authentication. A couple I use myself are just copies of the right file in the right place so it’s not really that hard.
I agree with the devs, regularly updating the game with new content is the best way to combat any piracy.
Pirates will miss out on all the new features that you guys will come up with post-release.
The old saying goes that ‘locked doors only keep out honest people.’ Same as any efforts above plug and play designed to disrupt piracy also goes to disrupt the experience of legitimate customers.
I would commend the devs of accepting that pirates will happen but rather to focus on a great game and minimal impact on the legitimate customer. I disagree however with any notion that NO action should be taken to protect intellectual property, and I find it disconcerting how difficult it is for people to understand the notion that people should be rewarded (financially, etc) for their work. I choose when I use my skill-set for free and when I charge for my services and so too should games developers as it is how they pay their bills, put food on the table, and so on.
I would disagree with the notion that running through steam is terribly disruptive to a playing experience. I personally would much rather activation through an independent distribution platform than chalking up yet another brand platform (Ubisoft, Microsoft, Rockstar Social, etc, etc.)
