
The Final Answer For What To Do To Prevent Piracy [of Indie Games] - ab9
http://jeff-vogel.blogspot.com/2011/05/final-answer-for-what-to-do-to-prevent.html
======
danilocampos
The other important point:

Every minute you waste on the specter of piracy is a minute you're not
spending making something useful. Given the choice between spending time on
people who are paying you versus the people who never will, the choice seems
obvious.

No one is going to crow to their friends about your awesome anti-piracy
mechanism. Make their life better? That would be something worth sharing.

Piracy is inevitable, loyal users aren't. Put effort into the fight you can
win.

~~~
jbri
The author makes the quote:

> _Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people
> to pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big
> mistake._

Which is absolutely 100% correct. Because your goal shouldn't be preventing
people from pirating your game. The number of people pirating your game is
basically irrelevant. What matters is the number of people _buying_ your game.
Reducing piracy is only relevant if you're converting those pirates into
paying customers - if you're not, then you haven't actually achieved anything.

~~~
yason
You can't reduce piracy per se. You can just make your product more worth
buying and as a _side-effect_ piracy may go down a little, i.e. some who used
to pirate it will instead buy it. Or then more people are buying and more
people are also pirating it: that'd still be an improvement.

Trying to reduce piracy will just give you a void and you still have to fill
that void with buying customers. So starting from the latter part in the first
place makes more sense.

~~~
danilocampos
Quite so – my view has always been that making something so valuable that
people will steal it is a great problem to have.

------
patrickyeon
I have not heard of a single protection scheme that could not be broken. Not
from the laziest homebrew 'protection' to the schemes used to protect 5- or
6-digit sale price engineering software, passign through every game in
between.

If you plan on implementing a protection scheme, here's what I would want you
to do. Think of the best and worst things it could do to these two classes of
people: legitimate customers and pirates.

Pirates. Worst [for you] case: it inconveniences them for an hour. Best case:
it inconveniences them up until two weeks after your release [two weeks is the
usual goal for a game, Spyro was legendary in a way, and lasted two months
[http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirat...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/3030/keeping_the_pirates_at_bay.php)
]

Customers. Best case: it inconveniences them for five seconds. Worst case:
Depends on your scheme. Make it one where worst case is a one-day support
e-mail away. Not where they lose all their files, are left cursing your name
and treated like trash because they just wanted to move to a new computer.

~~~
patio11
There are more than two types of people though. Back when I wrote about the
subject I came up with four shade, though there might be more.

[http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/09/05/everything-you-need-
to-k...](http://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/09/05/everything-you-need-to-know-
about-registration-systems/)

To misquote a Chris Rock line, there exist at least some people who are as
honest as their options.

I love online software over downloadable software for many reasons. One is it
makes piracy virtually impossible. Another is that the conversion rates are
much higher. Those might be totally unrelated, but hey, accounts in my DB
means I don't even have to care. (Gamers are voting for this future with their
wallets.)

~~~
robryan
Games are slightly different, for example with WoW there are plenty of people
playing for free on private servers people have setup, you don't see this at
all with SaaS apps. Although if your game is an MMO and popular enough the
network effects mean the vast majority of players are going to want to be on
the legit servers.

------
endgame
Steve Jackson Games has a similar approach to protecting their ebooks:

<http://e23.sjgames.com/faq.html#protected>

> Q. Are the files in e23 copy protected?

> A. No. That would interfere with your use of them.

------
oemera
Anyone knows Company of Heroes? It's not an indie game but a game from THQ.
The developers decided that adding mechanism to it to prevent piracy is wasted
money. And they were right because everybody I know bought it and the is/was a
huge success.

Mechanism to prevent piracy are so expensive that it is not worth the money.
Plus in the and the game will get cracked anyway and that means all the money
you put into it was just useful for a short time.

Another thing about preventing piracy methods is that in most cases the paying
customer are losing. I buy a game for 50 bucks from Capcom and can't play it
cause they wanted to prevent piracy with a phone-home DRM. This is ridiculous.

------
TamDenholm
Please tell this to big game developers that make you have a persistent
internet connection to play, or only allow the key to be used 3 times etc.

Things like that only punish legitimate players, if it's pirated, those
safeguards are removed and aren't a problem.

~~~
Deestan
Having frequented large amounts of game forums over the past 10 years, I can
assure you: _The big game developers get told exactly this hundreds of times a
day._

------
wccrawford
I disagree a bit:

"Whenever you find yourself starting a sentence with, "I don't want people to
pirate my game, so I am going to ..." you are very close to making a big
mistake."

There's one way to end that sentence that isn't a mistake:

I don't want people to pirate my game, so I am going to... Make it such a good
game that they want to pay for it.

It actually works! Some pirates aren't convertible because they are complete
jerks, or don't have money, or any number of other reasons that make
conversion impossible. But quite a few are actually decent people who have
needs that aren't being met. They -will- pay for a product that has value and
meets their needs.

This article is a good example of failing to meet those needs. His piracy
prevention tactics actually make it easier to pirate the game than buy it!

True story: I have a friend who bought some software and liked it. Then he
reinstalled Windows and it wouldn't install. He contacted tech support and
tried for 2 weeks to get them to fix the problem. He gave up, pirated it, and
then emailed them telling him that he pirated it instead. Yes, a product he
already owned. The next day they sent him a new registration code that fixed
the problem. Ridiculous.

------
DanBlake
Valves approach is best- Try to make the multiplayer experience worth paying
for.

Unfortunately, The market is being forced by execs to move to a platform that
is "internet connection required" for playing single player games and the
tools to do this without piracy being a issue are going to be here soon (
onlive ) - Yes, occasionally a source will leak to the public but for the most
part this new system is going to be worse across the board for the consumers.

Sometimes 'progress' sucks.

~~~
chris11
I'd also say that steam's more convenient than piracy. And the drm is usually
painless. And you throw in their sales, and games will go for 5 or 10 dollars.
To me the convenience alone is worth the money.

------
incosta
I actually had a similar situation more recently (but with mobile apps, not
games). Also asked a user to enter program-generated key when making a
purchase. I don't think it's a huge problem if you explain where this key is
shown inside the app. Speaking of distraction-free "buy now" webpage a
reasonable solution I came up with the following solution: just ask for user
e-mail (it's already provided by systems like PayPal anyway). Generate a
random "user id" (better make it numeric) and send it to the user's e-mail
along with activation instructions. Then user must go to another webpage on
your site and enter 3 pieces of information: e-mail, id and the program key
(the last one must be shown by the application). This page, if all goes well
(the info is checked against the database records), generates an activation
key to be entered to activate the program, which is also e-mailed (not just
displayed on the webpage). This way you can control the piracy issue (because
everything goes via e-mail, and also know/conrtol # of activations per user,
since last step can be performed multiple times).

------
xedarius
I kind of agree with this philosophy, to a point. However would you leave your
house without locking the front door?

~~~
mattmanser
He still has a serial key system, so he has a lock. He's just not bothering
with the bear traps, electric fences and guard dogs.

~~~
xedarius
Fair enough, and agreed.

------
bluedanieru
Why the [of Indie Games]?

~~~
hasenj
I don't think corporates rely on "loyal costumers". I can't imagine a manager
at some big company agreeing to this line of thinking.

I mean yea, theoretically this applies to everything (games, music, movies,
etc), but .. I have a hard time believing that big companies will someday
realize this.

~~~
wccrawford
I disagree. When they make XYZ 7, they are counting on loyal XYZ customers to
buy it just because it's the next one. I'm sure they also try to make a great
game, but the budget for development and marketing were based on the sales of
XYZ 6 and that many of those customers will be back for the next one.

Brand loyalty is real and companies do count on it.

