PC Gaming Alliance Report-The State of PC Gaming

[magerette]

The PC Gaming Alliance, a nonprofit corporation promoting PC gaming composed of PC industry members such as Microsoft, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, and Dell, has a report out called "Horizons," looking at the state of PC gaming and coming to some overall positive conclusions. You can read a summary of it here (http://www.verticalwire.com/releases/875-pc-gaming-alliance-illuminates-the-state-of-pc-gaming-worldwide-with-release-of-horizons-report), but here's a sample of the main points revealed so far:
Speaking at the Games Convention Developer’s Conference in Leipzig, PCGA president Randy Stude announced that PC gaming was a $10.7 billion industry during the year of 2007, with retail sales accounting for just 30 percent of total revenues. According to the report, growth was largely driven by online revenues from Asia, the world’s largest market, which is approaching half of total worldwide sales.
Online PC gaming revenue led the way in 2007 with $4.8 billion, nearly double the worldwide retail sales numbers for PC games. Digital distribution sales approached $2 billion, while advertising revenues from websites, portals, and in-game ads accounted for $800 million. Both are expected to grow substantially as major developers and publishers begin to adopt formal strategies to take advantage of new online opportunities.
“Our analysis clearly shows incredible growth in online PC gaming, proof that this industry is far stronger than anyone has reported,” said Stude. “Today’s consumers shop where they live - online.”
IGN also has a Q & A (http://pc.ign.com/articles/899/899363p1.html) with PCGA pres Randy Stude(Intel), and Roy Taylor(NVidia), the PCGA's CTO, that goes into the subject of what the Alliance is about a bit further. Here's a sample question:
IGN: The issue of PC game piracy creeps into just about every "state of PC gaming" discussion, but how are we to know how much damage it's actually doing? Will we ever really be able to get a definite sense of how piracy is really affecting game sales, or will it remain the sort of nebulous threat it appears to be today?...

Roy Taylor: Piracy is stealing. It's as bad as taking money from someone's wallet. Those users that do it often hide behind a number of excuses. We are very serious about addressing all aspects of this issue. But this includes not treating honest and desired users as bad guys. Poor anti-theft measures are part of the problem. They help justify downloading illegal non-protected copies and they cause resentment. The subcommittee is aware of all of these and is working on them. It's a big subject.

More information. (http://www.rpgwatch.com/show/newsbit?newsbit=9993)

[blatantninja]

GN: The issue of PC game piracy creeps into just about every "state of PC gaming" discussion, but how are we to know how much damage it's actually doing? Will we ever really be able to get a definite sense of how piracy is really affecting game sales, or will it remain the sort of nebulous threat it appears to be today?...


Roy Taylor: Piracy is stealing. It's as bad as taking money from someone's wallet. Those users that do it often hide behind a number of excuses. We are very serious about addressing all aspects of this issue. But this includes not treating honest and desired users as bad guys. Poor anti-theft measures are part of the problem. They help justify downloading illegal non-protected copies and they cause resentment. The subcommittee is aware of all of these and is working on them. It's a big subject.



What is this guy a politician? I haven't seen a question dodge that good since Hillary Clinton was still showing up on the today show every other day.

[AmShegar]

@blatantninja :

Haha, yes, that's what I thought also. "blablabla piracyisbad blablabla weretakingseriousmeasures" He didn't even answered partially to the question dammit!

[Hedek]

What is this guy a politician? I haven't seen a question dodge that good since Hillary Clinton was still showing up on the today show every other day.

Indeed lol. But there's no need to be a genius to know the question of that journalist is impossible to answer. So he tried as hard as he could not to look dumb, after all if you represent a corp that puts together Microsoft Intel AMD DELL nVIDIA you just can't get away with a "I don't know". You have to justify your salary.

How much piracy is affecting the revenues of the PC game industry is impossible to determine. You can have a pretty accurate estimate of how many game copies are being downloaded but that's about it.

There's no way to really determine how many of that number is actually copies that would have been bought had the pirate have no access to a pirated copy.
Same with music. I for example have downloaded records from artists that I would never have bought if it wasn't free. And no matter what their propaganda say I know I'm not harming the industry by doing so : I wouldn't have bought it anyway so it's not like they're losing any money.
Now it's true I have downloaded other things that I would probably have bought had it not been so easy to get it for free, and I know in that case that's stealing because it's money they should have gotten from me but they hadn't.

But there's absolutely no way to figure out on large scale what's the percentage of actual theft and what's just "people downloading out of curiosity who wouldnt have bought it anyway". Among that second group piracy has even become a marketing/advertisment tool for the industry: people downloading for free sometimes end up buying that product or another in the same franchise legally... and they wouldn't have had they not had access to it for free in the first place. (happened to me a lot)
And you could also add people who download stuff that they already own legally, for example I downloaded Fallout 2 recently because I wanted to try the english version (the french version I have with french voice-over just sucks). Also downloaded Baldur's Gate last year because for some reasons my computer couldn't read one of the CDs anymore.

And how do you calculate the contribution of people who -even though they pirate games- are willing to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade their gaming rig. That's actually money indirectly injected in the gaming industry (nVIDIA and ATI redistribute part of their profits to game developers through sponsorship progams and such).

Anyway I can't even tell what's the percentage of stuff I pirated that I was actually stealing and the stuff I downloaded just out of curiosity. If I can't figure it out for just myself, there's no way someone is ever going to determine such a percentage for the total bulk of pirated copies in the world.

Now what happens is that people like this PC Gaming Alliance know that percentage is impossible to determine but it's in their interest to convince everyone that 1 illegal download = 1 product not sold = 1 theft. Of course that's wrong and they know it but they try hard to keep everything blurry so they can continue their brainwashing.

[AmShegar]

@Hedek:

Couldn't have said it better myself. Well put, mate!

[Alrik Fassbauer]

I'm against piracy, but I'm also against brainwashing.

Seems I'm stuck between two parties.

[blatantninja]

We're used to that in the US!

[Alrik Fassbauer]

LOL ! :D

To me, this person is just an BEEEP, the way he dodges around any clear answer. And he might have his motives ... Corporate Brainwashing.

[Zloth]

BBZZZZZTTT!

Yeah folks, it's impossible to say exactly how much piracy is hurting the PC gaming industry. However, it's pretty obvious that it's having a BIG effect.

1. Is 1 download = 1 lost sale really silly? There are other ways to pirate than just via download. How many sales are lost to pirates who download one ISO then make DVDs for half a dozen friends? Who then pass the DVD off to their friends after they finish with the game? It's quite possible that 1 download = 5 lost sales. It's really hard to tell for sure but I would be surprised if anything more than 3 downloads translated to 1 lost sale. Even that would make a huge difference in PC sales charts.

2. The MMO industry is growing huge. MMOs get their money via accounts so piracy is irrelevant. Anybody who wants City of Heroes can go download it from their FTP site right now. Fat lot of good it will do you until you pay for an account. No piracy, big sales. Coincidence? Don't be stupid.

3. Games for casual gamers are another big seller. Sure, low system requirements are a big reason for that. But I think it's pretty obvious that another big reason for that is the fact that the folks playing these games aren't "sophisticated" enough to know how to download a free copy or get ahold of somebody who can.

No, piracy is not the only problem facing PC gaming. But it's blatantly obvious that it's one of the biggest problems, if not the biggest.

So out come the "can only be installed N times" DRM features. Works for me.

[zakhal]

IGN: The issue of PC game piracy creeps into just about every "state of PC gaming" discussion, but how are we to know how much damage it's actually doing? Will we ever really be able to get a definite sense of how piracy is really affecting game sales, or will it remain the sort of nebulous threat it appears to be today?...

Compare the number of PCs around the world vs consoles. Theres so many PCs (even if you just pick those that can run games) that consoles dont even exist really but still most of the gamedev money is put on the consoles - because on them you can get better sales.

It wasnt always like this though. Perhaps the faster internet connections and advanced p2p software have made freeloading so easy on PC that people dont see any point in buying games anymore. Thats atleast how my friends see it.

While you can d/l console games for free too you cant do it as easily as you can with pc aka few clicks of mousebutton. Once you can d/l p2p software and games with few clicks of gamepad button console freeloading will be as popular as on PC.

[TheMadGamer]

It's good to see that the report indicates pc game sales are at least 'healthy.' It's a bit of a bummer that a lot of emphasis is on mmo's tho.

Regardless, all this positive chatter about pc gaming must have at least a dozen or so 'game reporters' busily scribbling up more 'pc gaming is dying' articles at this very moment...

[blatantninja]

Compare the number of PCs around the world vs consoles. Theres so many PCs (even if you just pick those that can run games) that consoles dont even exist really but still most of the gamedev money is put on the consoles - because on them you can get better sales.



That misses a big point. The vast majority of PC's out there can't run the bast majority of games published in the past 3 years.

The only way this is going to change is if more games are played online in an environment where the server is doing the bulk of the computing or they get IGP's to a point that they can handle most modern games at an acceptable framerate.

[JemyM]

1. Is 1 download = 1 lost sale really silly?

Imagine if a TV channel show a movie and millions watch it. Then imagine if they got payed for a full-price movie for every person who watched it. Lots of money right?

Imagine if you sold 1000 T-shirts for 1 penny each. Now imagine that everyone who bought the T-shirt bought the T-shirt for full price. Again, lots of money right?

Those examples are pretty much the same and equally dreamy. 1 download is not 1 lost sale, pronto.

[zakhal]

Imagine if a TV channel show a movie and millions watch it. Then imagine if they got payed for a full-price movie for every person who watched it. Lots of money right?

Imagine if you sold 1000 T-shirts for 1 penny each. Now imagine that everyone who bought the T-shirt bought the T-shirt for full price. Again, lots of money right?


Imagine that you steal 1000 t-shirts and then give them away for free. It doesnt matter whether those receiving them have any interest to buy them - you still gave away 1000 shirts that didnt belong to you and you must pay for them so in the end it is 1-1.

[Dhruin]

In my opinion, every time we argue the minutiae of how many lost sales piracy really represents, we are enabling pirates.

Piracy is bad for the industry. Full stop.

[Hedek]

In my opinion, every time we argue the minutiae of how many lost sales piracy really represents, we are enabling pirates.

Piracy is bad for the industry. Full stop.

That's true. Another problem is when piracy becomes the excuse for everything. A publisher who sold 1000 copies and tracked 10000 illegal downloads will tell his investors "we had a potential of 11000 sales had it not been for piracy, you can't blame us for that failure, we did an excellent job our game was great". Those numbers don't add up that way.
So piracy actually harms the industry in two ways : by lowering sales, but also by being the easy veil shed over things that may have not only been caused by piracy.

No matter how harmful it is however, I'm surprised the industry still hasn't managed to solve that problem. I mean the tools exist. We know how to prevent piracy. Other games showed how (yes I'm thinking MMOs, so what's stopping single player games from using the same model except for the monthly fee?). And yet countless publishers make stupid decisions and totally fail on how they fight piracy (like paying to include secuROM in their product only to have it removed by "fixed exe" once released, and the only people who really suffer in the end are the legit costumers).

Another solution would be to force ISPs to deny access to pirating websites (torrents, emule and such - and it doesn't just solve the issue of computer gaming piracy), technically it's easy to do and would put an end to all illegal downloads. Politically and legally that's another story though.

[Alrik Fassbauer]

A publisher who sold 1000 copies and tracked 10000 illegal downloads will tell his investors "we had a potential of 11000 sales had it not been for piracy, you can't blame us for that failure, we did an excellent job our game was great".

It is even worse : Piracy can be used as an substitute for explaining low sales which are in reality quality-based.

It's a very similar thing as in the music indistry. In my opinion, they say the same and there really aren't much differences between both industries.

[abbaon]

In my opinion, every time we argue the minutiae of how many lost sales piracy really represents, we are enabling pirates.

Piracy is bad for the industry. Full stop.
A single pirate causes the industry a non-zero loss in revenue. Together, pirates cost the industry billions. No argument there.

But you appear to be suggesting here that arguments over the exact damage caused by piracy will themselves encourage piracy which would not otherwise have taken place. (That's how I read "enabling"; correct me if I'm wrong.)

Taken as a whole, how many lost sales do you suppose all of these arguments represent? :)

[blatantninja]

Imagine that you steal 1000 t-shirts and then give them away for free. It doesnt matter whether those receiving them have any interest to buy them - you still gave away 1000 shirts that didnt belong to you and you must pay for them so in the end it is 1-1.

It's not the same thing because there is a marginal cost to producing each t-shirt where there is not on pirated content. A better example would someone copying a t-shirt themselves and selling the copies (or giving them away).

Regardless, I still don't think you can say that one download = one lost sale. The example above about the pirate making a dozen copies for friends who them make copies or loan it, etc. is pretty far off reality. Most people that pirate games are downloading them, not trading physical discs (at least in the US).

It all comes back to that invisible number of how many would buy if piracy was not an option.

♠

[Yeesh]

It is even worse : Piracy can be used as an substitute for explaining low sales which are in reality quality-based.

Of course people will always search for a way to shift the blame when sales are disappointing. BUT if we're all in agreement that the impact of piracy is significant yet impossible to assess, then musn't we also accept that you can't ever say for sure what "in reality" was the cause for low sales?

Remember that lousy games might have very good sales on consoles, just like lousy movies can break $100m in ticket sales. The idea that only a certain small percentage of high quality games are worthy of actual purchase is exactly the sort of notion that makes casual PC piracy feel so innocent.

[Dhruin]

That's true. Another problem is when piracy becomes the excuse for everything.

I don't really agree. Sure, game companies talk piracy up - why wouldn't they? It's a problem a lot of people don't care about, so they're trying to increase the visibility of the situation. In the boardroom, however, I don't believe they are so naive.

I'm not currently in an industry even remotely connected with software but when one of our products fails to garner the sales we wanted, we don't publically say "that widget sucked". We say "it's a competitive area of the market and we'll continue to refine our approach" or somesuch - but behind closed doors, we know exactly what happened. Just because the righteous 'net gamers want to hear "mea culpa" from game execs doesn't mean it will happen or that it should - they are the same as every other industry.

No matter how harmful it is however, I'm surprised the industry still hasn't managed to solve that problem. I mean the tools exist. We know how to prevent piracy. Other games showed how (yes I'm thinking MMOs, so what's stopping single player games from using the same model except for the monthly fee?). And yet countless publishers make stupid decisions and totally fail on how they fight piracy (like paying to include secuROM in their product only to have it removed by "fixed exe" once released, and the only people who really suffer in the end are the legit costumers).

Yeah...it's a solution for you, perhaps. How often have you seen people say they won't accept an online component for a single-player game? Plus the server and development expense with no ongoing income? Perhaps it will happen but it isn't the panacea you make it sound.

Is it perhaps possible the game execs have good estimates of what sales Securom protects, versus the license cost? I don't know - but it belies credulity that every significant publisher is wrong but the internet knows better.

That isn't to say they can't do things smarter and better, by the way.

A single pirate causes the industry a non-zero loss in revenue. Together, pirates cost the industry billions. No argument there.

But you appear to be suggesting here that arguments over the exact damage caused by piracy will themselves encourage piracy which would not otherwise have taken place. (That's how I read "enabling"; correct me if I'm wrong.)

Taken as a whole, how many lost sales do you suppose all of these arguments represent? :)

Yep, that's what I'm suggesting. And yes, I realise few will agree with me. Every time piracy is discussed, a whole bunch of people will defend piracy by proxy (not necessarily maliciously, of course). Game companies estimate piracy too high, they're all idiots for using Securom anyway, if they only used a free/ad-supported/whatever model instead of an outdated paradigm (have we had "nothing is removed from an inventory yet?" I didn't look).

Ultimately, these arguments serve to encourage and embolden a culture where piracy isn't that big a deal. In fact, the bastards probably deserve it.

[abbaon]

Yep, that's what I'm suggesting. And yes, I realise few will agree with me.
I do agree with you. I just wanted to do my recursive "lost sales" gag. Okay, a serious post.

If I were in the habit of framing issues in moral terms, I'd say something like:

Game piracy is always wrong, even when games are buggy and broken, and even in countries where game prices are some absurd multiple of the average weekly wage. (You missed those two excuses.) Pirates aren't merely victims of circumstance. They're moral agents who are responsible for the harm they've done to the industry.

The debates on this forum are the least of the circumstances which could excuse piracy. The people participating in them are doing nothing wrong, because nothing ever transfers one iota of responsibility away from the pirates. The choice and the blame remain with them.

That's a bunch of bullshit, though. The logic I can really get behind is that of a pirate: a few debates taking place on one small specialty website is almost harmless...

Yeah...it's a solution for you, perhaps. How often have you seen people say they won't accept an online component for a single-player game? Plus the server and development expense with no ongoing income? Perhaps it will happen but it isn't the panacea you make it sound.
And there may be no way to make it more desirable than piracy. It's hard to see a service component in a single-player RPG. No-one needs global leaderboards or matchmaking. You can't soak the people who will willingly pay more for in-game advantages. DLC is iffy, because you can just steal that too on an open platform. Perhaps the only big-budget PC RPGs in a post-piracy world will be MMOs?

[Hedek]

Yeah...it's a solution for you, perhaps. How often have you seen people say they won't accept an online component for a single-player game? Plus the server and development expense with no ongoing income? Perhaps it will happen but it isn't the panacea you make it sound.

I never said I like that solution, I believe however it's the only known thing to-day that totally prevents piracy. Of course it has downsides, of course it's not convenient for us gamers. But publishers aren't concerned by that... unless it negatively affects sales.
This leads me to believe that they know they're going to lose even more sales with such a drastic anti piracy measure than what piracy is costing them right now.

In the meanwhile they're trying to find out other means, that won't drive users away and so far all have proved ineffective.

Is it perhaps possible the game execs have good estimates of what sales Securom protects, versus the license cost? I don't know - but it belies credulity that every significant publisher is wrong but the internet knows better.

It's not that I know better -not going to talk in the name of "the internet"-. Publishers are well aware of their shortcomings, they know they're wrong, but they have no other choices. On one hand they're talking piracy up as much as possible because it's actually convenient to hide other shortcomings and at the same time they can't implement the really effective anti piracy measures because its effects would be even more harmful than piracy thus proving piracy isn't as big as they claim.

Publishers know how many sales secuROM saves : zero. There are recent examples of games with no anti piracy measures that sold very well, Company of Heroes for instance. They don't put secuROM to prevent piracy, they put it to convince their investors they're actually trying to do something against piracy.

The only thing investors care about is securing their investments, and if a publisher says he's not going to use secuROM or similar, there's no way he'll get any money.

I apologize if I sounded like "publishers are stupid". Indeed they're not. They know, they know much better than me, that everything they do doesn't work. But they have no choice, they have to at least show that they're trying to do *something*.

And I'm surprised you believe secuROM may work, being against piracy doesn't prevent you from trying to learn how pirates operate. The problem with secuROM is that it's a second product added at the final stage of development over an already completed product. As long as games aren't developed with anti piracy in mind from as early stage as preproduction, as long as all vital game assets are stored locally, ad hoc anti piracy measures such as secuROM will never work.


Yep, that's what I'm suggesting. And yes, I realise few will agree with me. Every time piracy is discussed, a whole bunch of people will defend piracy by proxy (not necessarily maliciously, of course). Game companies estimate piracy too high, they're all idiots for using Securom anyway, if they only used a free/ad-supported/whatever model instead of an outdated paradigm (have we had "nothing is removed from an inventory yet?" I didn't look).

Ultimately, these arguments serve to encourage and embolden a culture where piracy isn't that big a deal. In fact, the bastards probably deserve it.

I'm not trying to defend it. I'm trying to measure its exact effect, and if it's not possible, at least try to determine why it can't be measured. After all that's what IGN was asking. And the moment a definitive solution to piracy exists, as cumbersome as it may be, piracy becomes a SOLVED problem : it's only a matter of which corporate risks publishers decide to take : losing sales to piracy or losing sales to anti piracy measures.

If a patient refuses to be treated for rabies because he's not willing to cope with the side effects of that treatment, that won't change the fact that rabies is considered as a "disease that humanity solved and that is no longer a threat to us"

Because solutions exists, any time someone in the industry complains about it they're just trying to make excuses, and hide their fear of taking difficult decisions.

Yes piracy is a problem, but it has to be considered as an inherent problem that's part of the business they're running. And it comes down to how a given player of that business decides to work around that problem, the same way tobacco companies have to deal with anti-smoking policies and campaigns or car makers with the rise of gas price. You can complain about it, or you can sell cars that consume much less even though that means losing costumers who enjoy big fancy fast cars. Yes that means your company will have to change and adapt but so is the market: changing and adapting.
The game industry can choose to continue making offline single player games and risk piracy, or they can stop doing any offline single player games and force costumers to change their behaviors. In the end there are no piracy problems, only decisions to take.


PS: and I have to add that the gaming industry is in a privileged situation compared to the music or movies industries : at least a solution exists for computers. The same can't be said for records or movies.

[Brother None]

I agree with you, Dhruin, but...

Is it perhaps possible the game execs have good estimates of what sales Securom protects, versus the license cost? I don't know - but it belies credulity that every significant publisher is wrong but the internet knows better.

I hate this argument. It's an overly simplified appeal to authority. "They're professionals so they must know". I've seen publishers make gaffes before, and there's plenty of historical precedent of market segments buying their own lies.

So no, you can't just appeal to the authority and knowledge of gaming publishers. It doesn't actually invalidate any specific argument made about piracy, it's just a blanket catch-all "you must be wrong"-ism.

[zakhal]

Id software joins the discussion:

"I think that there's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content - even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs - is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games," said Hollenshead in an exclusive interview published today.

"I think that if you went in and could see what's going on in their minds, though they may never say that stuff and I'm not saying there's some conspiracy or something like that - but I think the thing is they realise that trading content, copyrighted or not, is an expected benefit of owning a computer."

Hollenshead - famed for PC titles Doom, Quake and the forthcoming Rage - believes that PC manufacturers will obviously speak out against piracy in public, but the enormity of the problem is evidence that it's being largely ignored by hardware companies.

"I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another.

"When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is elicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit.

"You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you're just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem," he said.

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/pc-manufacturers-view-piracy-as-hidden-benefit-for-consumers-hollenshead

[Hedek]

Id software joins the discussion:

Thanks for pointing it out. Indeed he makes good points, but what is he expecting? That Dell HP Sony & co should band together to include hardware copyright protections on the computer they manufacture? That's exactly what the WII PS3 and XBOX 360 provide, and it's actually the only reason why these consoles even exist : they're just DRMs. Not going to happen.

So while he's right, he also knows hardware companies aren't going to do anything. What is he adding to debate? Nothing but trying to put part of the responsibility on someone else. It's not going to help solving the piracy problem for software companies in any way though.

Again it's only up to software makers to solve that issue, no one cares about them, no one's going to help them. They're alone on this one.

offtopic PS: love your sig Zakhal :)

[Alrik Fassbauer]

"When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is elicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit.

Can somebody please put this second quote into a bit more simple words ?

In understood that people think or believe that the "Free Trade" is something that comes shipped with any new PC ... But I don't quite understand this quote.

[Hedek]

Can somebody please put this second quote into a bit more simple words ?

In understood that people think or believe that the "Free Trade" is something that comes shipped with any new PC ... But I don't quite understand this quote.

Hardware makers will use this 1% of legit sharing to justify not doing anything. "We're not taking actions because there are legit users that we don't want to penalize".
Even though they know the vast majority of P2P sharing is violating copyright, they use the minority of legal users as an excuse for the whole.

[blatantninja]

Thanks for pointing it out. Indeed he makes good points, but what is he expecting? That Dell HP Sony & co should band together to include hardware copyright protections on the computer they manufacture? That's exactly what the WII PS3 and XBOX 360 provide, and it's actually the only reason why these consoles even exist : they're just DRMs. Not going to happen.

So while he's right, he also knows hardware companies aren't going to do anything. What is he adding to debate? Nothing but trying to put part of the responsibility on someone else. It's not going to help solving the piracy problem for software companies in any way though.

Again it's only up to software makers to solve that issue, no one cares about them, no one's going to help them. They're alone on this one.

offtopic PS: love your sig Zakhal :)


MSFT could solve the issue pretty easily I would think. The way the 'drm' works on consoles is simply that they won't play burned DVD's without some type of mod chip. The software exists to detect if a disc is original or burned, so MSFT could add something into DirectX where if keyed off by the game, it checks to see if the disc is burned or not.

Of course, this is similar to the systems that require you to have the CD in the drive, but if it were integral to the DirectX process the only ways around it would be to rewrite DirectX, or rewrite the portion of the game that makes the call. This would certainly piss of the crowd that likes to use the 'no-cd' patches though.

I think fundamentally if you are able to transfer content off the delivery platform (whether that be by DVD or server in a MMO), pirates will be able to get around any DRM scheme.

[Hedek]

MSFT could solve the issue pretty easily I would think. The way the 'drm' works on consoles is simply that they won't play burned DVD's without some type of mod chip. The software exists to detect if a disc is original or burned, so MSFT could add something into DirectX where if keyed off by the game, it checks to see if the disc is burned or not.

Of course, this is similar to the systems that require you to have the CD in the drive, but if it were integral to the DirectX process the only ways around it would be to rewrite DirectX, or rewrite the portion of the game that makes the call. This would certainly piss of the crowd that likes to use the 'no-cd' patches though.

I think fundamentally if you are able to transfer content off the delivery platform (whether that be by DVD or server in a MMO), pirates will be able to get around any DRM scheme.

As long as everything happens client side, any anti piracy measure won't work. Sooner or later crackers will trick DirectX into thinking the illegal copy is actually genuine. The only way to prevent piracy is through mandatory and constant connection to the publisher's server. And if pirates prevent the game from connecting to that server, the game should be programmed in a way it wouldn't be able to run because it lacks vital assets (that only the server provides).

Hardware protection, as the ones found in consoles, aren't harder to crack, they're just less convenient to crack. But in practice they are very effective as they require a physical intervention from the cracker on the console (because everyone doesn't possess such "skills"), so in most cases people aren't able to get their console "fixed".

[V7]

Trusted Computing anyone? The hardware giants haven't ignored IP protection they just can't sell it to consumers.

I'm not sure server-side assets is a complete solution either - at some point those assets have to be displayed/used on the client computer and I wouldn't put it past a smart group to copy or emulate them client side.