Aha, so now international treaties go before the country's own laws? and how are they going to be enforced? anti-terrorist groups dragging away random passerbys into dark cellars, perhaps?

Do you actually think people care if the laws down in France or something, say we can't pirate? That's right - we don't. Laws are made by humans and aren't failsafe.

I'm pretty sure the police force, even the ones in court, are more-or-less pirates too. And the police isn't just some kind of weapon you bash the rest of us with, they're human too. Really, trying to use laws against piracy when you're talking Sweden is moot. Sweden is one of the leading gaming countries, and probably the leading piracy country - is that going to change? no. It's especially hilarious when some people try to paint up the image, that piracy gives a country bad reputation:

1. We don't care.
2. That's false.

I don't know how to go with the rest of your post. Explaining your point at the end of the post does help sometimes.

In conclusion, I'm a nice pirate and going to remain one.

The games companies aren't likely to bother to check whether you're a "good" pirate or a "bad" pirate (if they actually share your view of the distinction, which I doubt). The DRM companies *certainly* aren't going to make the distinction when pushing their products. The sites from which you download get to use you as a statistic when selling their advertising space.

Thus you and the other "good" pirates are *very much* part of the problem. You fuel the paranoia of the gaming companies leading to ever more irritating DRM, and money being spent on anti-piracy solutions which, personally, I would much rather have seen spent on giving us better products!

Well that's too bad, won't do a thing about piracy then. Swedish officials don't give a crap, and one (possibly more) minister has even admitted to piracy, and encouraged others to come out of the closet. Lobbying and otherwise trying to enforce something upon the government is considered illegal here, so MPAA have nothing to say. That international corporations think they can bully us around like pets is the truly hilarious thing.

As long as we're not suffering terror bombings, disappearances and blockades etc, we won't lift the piracy, no matter how many funny guys in lawsuits want to come over and try to persuade us.

Heh, and I see you've applied the ''I'm going to take it out of context and apply it to situations/things it wasn't intended for'' offense. Reminds me of the people that resort to ''if I'd take your logic and apply it to *completely out-of-context thing it wasn't intended to be applied to* it'd fail horribly''.

But this is going nowhere - we're bashing our heads into brick walls. Let's end it.

That's fine. Just don't complain about DRM and copy protection. Because while the hackers may be able to crack the most popular stuff, we'll all end up suffering with more and more intruisve copy protection that won't be cracked because it'll be so pervasive that only the most high profile things will end up being cracked.

I don't like copy protection but I'm only one voice and seeing jerks who think it's okay use what I worked hard on without compensation makes it hard to be sympathetic.

The worst part about all this controversy is that it is giving REAL pirates a bad rap. Check out The Best Page in the Univserse to see what I mean.

The art museum analogy is not bad, I guess. With PC games the difference is that the money involved is somewhat more, and there are more things that can potentially "go wrong" with a game, like compatibility issues, system requirements and major issues glossed over in reviews. The proverb "once burned, twice shy" applies to computer gamers as well, so someone who buys a game that won't work with his system and doesn't get a refund is probably going to download the next one.

One thing that occurred to me for companies to reduce their losses to copyright infringement is to improve distribution channels. Likely not much of an issue in the USA, but certainly in Europe is the following scenario: I want an English version of a game. Unfortunately, I live in Germany, and all retail stores here only stock the game in the German version, as does the German Amazon. Now my (bad) choices are: Bite the bullet and get the localized version with frequently crappy translation, or import the game from UK and pay a large shipping fee, as well as the bother of having to make payment via PayPal (since I have no credit card) instead of a simple bank transfer, as I could with a German distributor.

Stardock makes great games and thus builds trust with its customers. For them, this has the effect that people who already have one of their games are much more willing to take their advertisement on faith and buy a game without downloading it first. Still, please try to make it easier for people to actually buy your games. I chose the second route as detailed above with GalCiv, and I hope that I don't have to do this often with games I like.

An (albeit very late) reply to Kryo comment, because I agree with where you start but think your conclusion is way off:



I totally agree with this premise. In fact, that sounds like an excellent test to judge the state of IP protection in a particular region. Without IP there would be little economic incentive to create new works, so new ideas produced would be limited to a smaller scale. As you scale the level of IP protection up you're allowed to scale your new works larger and larger, because you should be able to recover more money. The more protection you have, the bigger the projects you can undertake.

So with zero IP protection, you can spend only as much free time as you and a few friends can scrape up to make a game you're passionate about. With a small amount of IP protection, you can take a risk with a programmer an artist and maybe a couple of others to produce a game you'd want to buy. And with a massive old heap of IP protection you can spend 40 million dollars and employ a small army to bring your checkbox-filling sure-fire-hit formulaic game to life.

Unfortunately when there's one group spending 40 million dollars on a game, it forces others to try and match that or appear to have poor production values. Great cut scenes and ultra-high def artwork just don't make themselves. You'd also find you have to match the millions spent by the other guys just to get the same level of press coverage as them (money spent on advertising, press junkets, and just general bribery), all to compete for a *LIMITED* consumer budget.

And it is definitely a limited consumer budget. Just ending piracy doesn't mean there's magically more money floating around, despite what the industy wants to imply. Piracy costing $500 billion (according to UK stats), and you want to claim all that money? Well some other industry is going to lose out then. Joe Bloggs is not just sitting on that cash in his bank, he's been spending it on other items like appliances, food, and cars. Those industries are going to hurt if they lose that money.

Coming back to the $40 million game though we face the true purpose of IP, the promotion of the development of the arts and sciences, which in this case is gaming. Command & Conquer 3 cost tens of times the budget of Command & Conquer 1, but has it advanced gaming by the same amount? FIFA 2008 cost tens of times more than FIFA 1998, but again has it really done that much more for gaming? Does anyone actually think "I've just having so much more fun with these games than the ones I played a decade ago. This budget increase was totally worth it!"?

And if anyone thinks that's just nostalgia speaking, we have an opportunity in this console generation to witness low budget games competing directly with higher budget ones. Thanks to the DS we can see how much fun games can be when studios are able to take more creative risks and actually innovate when huge budgets aren't at stake. I always used to be a strong PC gaming supporter, but this year I've only bought TotA (not exactly a high budget game either) and UT3 (more as a sympathy purchase, haven't installed it yet). On the other hand I've bought and finished 11 DS games and it's been a total breath of fresh air. Now I'm not saying everyone has to agree, and they may say the DS stinks and has rubbish graphics, but it's the biggest selling console this generation which does counts for something and it's in no small part thanks to the unique games. The DS hardware though will evolve in the same way as every other console has, and the budgets will increase to the point that truly innovative ideas are simply too risky to attempt.

So to summarise for the TL;DR folks:

1. No IP protection = too small budget = discouragement for developers. Fair enough.

2. Turning up the IP protection allows bigger projects. I say game budgets are too big. Big projects discourage risk, and discourage innovation. This would be fine by itself but big budget games also make it hard for small budget games to exist because big budget games can buy shelf space/advertising/reviewers and simply shout down the smaller games when it comes to getting the word out. The domination of sequals and movie tie-ins further show the risk aversion of the gaming industry.

3. Bigger projects also require bigger backers, forcing gaming companies to merge together to stay competitive. We're already down to just a few main players. At this rate we'll be seeing ElectronicUbiVision in the next few years, followed quickly by Star Powered Games.

4. The DS shows that games can be produced on a low budget, with more innovation, on a 66MHz machine and still sell fantastically in 2008.

5. There's only so much the average American has available to spend on keeping themselves amused each year. When someone develops a $40 million game, that's 20 x $2 million games that may never be. There's a greater chance the gaming envelope will be pushed by one of those twenty games, than one megablockbuster.

6. Great IP protection is what keeps the ElectronicUbiVision's in business. It's those companies which are the biggest threat to Stardock, and what push it off the shelves at the shops. They are the ones that drown out Stardock in the gaming press. The are the ones which place huge ads across gaming media and on national TV, draining the consumer of their limited entertainment budget. When Stardock shouts for greater IP protection it sounds like turkeys voting for Christmas, since it will just empower the big companies to crush them some more.

So really this is just a long way of saying that it's big companies that hurt Stardock more than piracy, and piracy hurts big companies more than it hurts Stardock. Stardock makes good games on a reasonable budget which people with money enjoy and that helps them win against piracy. Big companies make so-so games and then try to trick people into buying them with flashy graphics, big ads, and throwing money around. Piracy deals far more harshly with that kind.

Problem with DRM is it all comes down to trust. If the copy protection scheme Frogboy postulates comes about and it doesn't work well because of the DRM messing everything up well... People will go back to something that works. There is a good reason why Vista isn't selling well because it is a steaming pile of DRM that doesn't work well because of that reason.

That and if you get really bad DRM shoved down your throats with no alternatives or recourse... There is always the court of public opinion and that court is distinctly unfavorable to unreasonableness. Look at the Bioshock controversy. Bioshock PC sales are crud and that game is now $30 and falling because they put digital bondage all over it that broke the game and it was widely reported. Comcast unblocked bit torrent because it lost big time in the court of public opinion.

I agree that in nations where noone pays for IP anyway DRM is a good idea but in countries like the US where the majority of people are willing to pay for IP putting DRM all over something is just getting to be intolerable.

To use the museum analogy what if the museum in order to stop people from looking at the paintings for free put a protection screen in front and only handed out goggles to paying customers. Now in order to see anything with the goggles you have to cross your eyes and give yourself a major headache. These screen are also 5 feet in front of the actual painting so people who sneak in the back door can just stand between the screen and the painting and see it in all its glory without getting a headache... That is what DRM is and that is why it doesn't and will not work...

If a company wants to put a flaming hoop for me to jump through in order to get what I paid for they can keep their stuff and I'll keep my money. And if they fail because noone buys their product because they don't have the trust of the consumer well that's a good thing they deserve to fail from their terminal stupidity. Yes I'm bitter... Losing $800 worth of hardware to Starforce and Pace Interlock (which cost me MY valuable time when it crashed my computer at random intervals and I lost data which I then had to spend hours recreating) will do that to a guy.

Not *everyone*. I'm part of that exception group

Baen Free Library

I'm well aware of it. If authors and publication companies choose to allow their works to be downloaded freely, that is their choice. That is, by definition, not piracy. It's frankly a good buisiness model, for books anyway - but it shouldn't be forced upon those writers and companies that choose not to participate.

Kryo don't get troll baited.

Frogboy, stop scaring me!!!!!!! What has brought on this sudden doomsday prediction! If you worry bout spore, I'm not buying it. It may be the one game I looked forward to, but the copy protection is ridiculous. Hell Windows XP copy protection is ridiculous IMO!

I wish to make games of my own. Ones that will give people a nostalgia feeling of the good old days. If there is no place for company like yours in the future, then there is no place for me on this platform either.