Is piracy really a problem for Volition?

SR Gamer

SR Gamer

Everybody knows that piracy is not a good idea when it comes to adding mods because pirated versions don't run through steam and mods won't work. But piracy has evolved and software pirates are always one step ahead of copyright policies. The minute that the pirate saints row 3 provider (I'm not gonna mention any names here) realized that updates don't go to pirated versions, they put up pirated updates that enabled pirated versions to work alongside original ones.

But as it seems, volition couldn't care less. In fact they partially support pirating their games.

In order to see how much the people want to pirate it, they made sure that you should purchase it through steam. But their suspicions were confirmed when a version that doesn't need steam popped up months later. They want to see if anyone would take the trouble to pirate their game so that they know that the game is worthy of that honor.

Quote from Eric Barker, Volition

"I don't think piracy is something at the forefront for us," says Volition studio manager Eric Barker "First and foremost, we want to make sure we're making a game people would want to pirate."
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http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/18j2atg1214u6jpg/ku-xlarge.jpg
 
fortunately, Deep Silver's CEO believes the best way to handle piracy is to ignore it. I'd rather have a bunch of idiot pirates outting themselves here than invasive DRM, so props to Deep Silver for that
 
Corrodias said:
The words "policy" and "piracy" are so similar. Coincidence? How about another word that ends the same way... conspiracy!
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It's a conspolicy!
 
It's actually a good policy they have. I can't remember who (I keep thinking Brian Fargo said it but maybe it was someone at Obsidian Entertainment?) but they noted that the best defense against piracy is to make a game that people want to buy. If you make a decent game, people will pirate it. If you make a BAD game, people won';t buy it, but people will pirate it (for lulz). If you make a GOOD game, lots will pirate it, but far more people will go "Wow! I guess I can chip in the cash!" and will buy it. Sure the pirates go up, but sales do too. It's kind of hard to say how much is lost sales because, well, if you're saying every copy downloaded is a lost sale you have your head in the clouds (or up your own rear). Or you're a CEO talking to shareholders (see prior).

In turn, it seems the policy is to make good games, and let Steamworks do the DRM side of things. It's breakable, but as far as it goes it's hard to.. and sometimes you get some nice side-effects that aren't intended but work great. A lack of mod support for pirate copies is a great offshoot, and one I wouldn't be surprised might end up being an actual thing for some devs to try (to go with things like exploding bases, missing level geometry and abilities, sudden bad events, and complete eventual game corruption and crashing (see RA2, Arkham Asylum, Game Dev Tycoon, and Spyro) ). Really, the main problem is it's impossible to get real hard data about how many sales are lost to piracy (as it's a non-thing you're guessing would be sales based on a mix of market data guesses on how much other unrelated games sold, and how many copies you estimate are pirated then guessing those would all be actual sales somehow). Thus whenever some says it's a big issue, you should wonder where they get their data. It might not be considered the best tactic by other publishers in the industry, but focusing on better games and no horribly restrictive DRM might be a great move for Deep Silver. It certainly gets them better publicity whenever Ubisoft finally unveils their biometric chipping that requires uploading a blood sample to play your game, and due to possibility of inter-family piracy anyone cousins or closer have to buy multiple copies just in case. :rolleyes:

Of course, here it's just plain not supported, and the main bonus is that the game doesn't do mods if it's pirated, so it becomes easy to tell the game-owners apart from the game-pirates. It's quite sensible for a forum that relies on goodwill and back-and-forth dialogue with the company itself. If this was about modding a Squaresoft game however, piracy might be more tolerated as Squeenix would be trying to sue the pants off and shut down the forum anyways for modding, and that kind of ruins any chance of goodwill with a developer. :(
 
Gondar said:
It's actually a good policy they have. I can't remember who (I keep thinking Brian Fargo said it but maybe it was someone at Obsidian Entertainment?) but they noted that the best defense against piracy is to make a game that people want to buy. If you make a decent game, people will pirate it. If you make a BAD game, people won';t buy it, but people will pirate it (for lulz). If you make a GOOD game, lots will pirate it, but far more people will go "Wow! I guess I can chip in the cash!" and will buy it. Sure the pirates go up, but sales do too. It's kind of hard to say how much is lost sales because, well, if you're saying every copy downloaded is a lost sale you have your head in the clouds (or up your own rear). Or you're a CEO talking to shareholders (see prior).

In turn, it seems the policy is to make good games, and let Steamworks do the DRM side of things. It's breakable, but as far as it goes it's hard to.. and sometimes you get some nice side-effects that aren't intended but work great. A lack of mod support for pirate copies is a great offshoot, and one I wouldn't be surprised might end up being an actual thing for some devs to try (to go with things like exploding bases, missing level geometry and abilities, sudden bad events, and complete eventual game corruption and crashing (see RA2, Arkham Asylum, Game Dev Tycoon, and Spyro) ). Really, the main problem is it's impossible to get real hard data about how many sales are lost to piracy (as it's a non-thing you're guessing would be sales based on a mix of market data guesses on how much other unrelated games sold, and how many copies you estimate are pirated then guessing those would all be actual sales somehow). Thus whenever some says it's a big issue, you should wonder where they get their data. It might not be considered the best tactic by other publishers in the industry, but focusing on better games and no horribly restrictive DRM might be a great move for Deep Silver. It certainly gets them better publicity whenever Ubisoft finally unveils their biometric chipping that requires uploading a blood sample to play your game, and due to possibility of inter-family piracy anyone cousins or closer have to buy multiple copies just in case. :rolleyes:

Of course, here it's just plain not supported, and the main bonus is that the game doesn't do mods if it's pirated, so it becomes easy to tell the game-owners apart from the game-pirates. It's quite sensible for a forum that relies on goodwill and back-and-forth dialogue with the company itself. If this was about modding a Squaresoft game however, piracy might be more tolerated as Squeenix would be trying to sue the pants off and shut down the forum anyways for modding, and that kind of ruins any chance of goodwill with a developer. :(
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You are wrong if you think that the game doesn't do mods if it's pirated. There are copies with that side effect removed.
 
games still do mods when pirated, it is just harder to get it working properly. Steam updates automatically for you, all you do is just sit and wait then hope it dont mess up your mods, even if it do the author probably get it fixed pretty quick. The pirated copies have to take time to search for the patches, while many pirates rather skip the modding part and play the core game.

There is no point trying to stop piracy, look at GTA IV when it first released. GFWL + Rockstar Social + Steam (if it is Steam copy), it dont stop pirates but it make the paying customer suffer while pirated copy became the superior copy with all DRM disabled. The developer of Witcher series, CD Projekt didnt even give a crap for DRM. You can buy a copy and share it with 10 friends if you want to do so, pirates dont even need a crack to run it and the devs are still doing very well.
 
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