Must-Read Article

I'm going to miss Iron Lore, they did damn good work. Very interesting read, thanks Brad.

Yeah, I read Michael's article earlier today when it was referenced in the Wargamer forums. I have to admit I was shocked that the percentage of piracy for PC games was that high -- it scarcely seems believable! :SURPRISED: There's a couple things I don't understand, however.

First of all, why is it that computer games can be pirated but not console games? What makes PC titles so much easier to crack than the same title on the PS3 or 360? And perhaps most pertinently, why can't PC game developers use the same techniques as console game makers to prevent piracy? I can only surmise that the reasons preventing them are technical in nature, but I'm utterly baffled as to why this is the case.

Piracy is just the symptom of a perverted economy where official product price does no longer reflect its actual value.

Basically there are two markets: The free market and the black market.

The price of a product on the free market represents the officially governed price, made by the producers or the government, while the price on the black market represents the true value of the product.

You want to make sure that the free market price is lower than the black market price.

In terms of Software, where the black market price is zero.nothing, you have to change the the free market price to match the black market price. Basically give your product away for free.

Now, you have to build an infrastructure around your product. Like support contracts, merchandise (e.g. sell some Drengin masks, good for Halloween) or just a plain donation button. The last one actually works very well, lots of people like charity.

A very good article indeed. I guess it helps to vent frustrations every once in a while. I may not be a developer, but I know the value of a hard days work. If someone came up to me the next day and said everything I just did was "stupid." I would be a little angry. Programs may be buggy at first and not work on every system but I can imagine that it is hard to make something that works on different machines with different hardware configurations. If you have an Xbox or Playstation, they are all the same. (For the most part.) You only have to make the software work a certain way. Maybe if all PCs were the same, PC developers would not have to keep a bottle of Excedrin permanently mounted on their desks.

I always try to describe to my friends about how bad piracy can be. How it hurts business. And of course, how it can drive up prices. I try to think about how much games could really cost if piracy didn't exist. I doubt it will ever go away but developers and pirates will constantly be finding ways to develop and crack new code.

Piracy is really, really, really tempting. I live in Asia right now. I go to work everyday and walk past a street vendor selling the latest movies on DVD. Sometimes ones that are not even in theaters yet. I always see a crowd around the vendor as they give away their money to get the latest movie. I have felt the urge to buy a copy now and then but I try to resist. I could get the lastest and greatest for about $2 a pop. Sometimes the quality is good and sometimes it is poor. But that does not stop people from snapping up a copy of something that was stolen. I guess the same could be said for PC games. You get what you pay for so be happy with it.

I think that developers deserve a lot more credit than they are given. Before you post how bad something may be, check yourself first. Do you meet the minimum requirements? Do you have the latest drivers? Did you get a legitimate copy? If you can answer yes to these questions, it may be a good time to post a bug. I am sure that if you do some research on your end, a techie will be more than happy to help you out from their end.

I take it you're not a developer.

I am a developer. But not on proprietary software.

There are lots of companies making money by giving away stuff. A common example would be the companies behind most Linux distributions.

Linux distribution companies do not make money from end-users.  Their money comes in from large support contracts for companies.  RedHat, the prime example of this model, realized that the end-user market was a waste of time and have fully focused on enterprise customers.

With the exception of MMOs, the "give it away for free, charge for the service" model doesn't work in games.  At least not to a level that could support an actual company.  Look at any single player game.  What services could you add to a non-internet game to justify a monthly fee to a regular user?

The biggest problem with the whole idea of depending on merch, donations & support contracts is that there is pretty much 0 guaranteed return on investment.  Spend 2 years working on a game with a team of developers, and you can't even count on X number of sales.  You have to rely on an even less reliable income source.  If I can get something for free, unless it's crippled, chances are I won't want/need the "extra" service.

I don't think piracy will ever stop until people sit down and think about how much financial effort goes into making a game. Developers can complain until they go blue in the face, but it won't do the industry any good because the people using their products have no idea how much it costs in time and money to create even the simplest game. Developers have to pay for licenses, engines, testing, artwork, marketing, distribution, programmers, demo creation, possibly support costs when they need help, and everything that goes into the planning process that ties the afore mentioned areas together. Those costs are monumental and there is NO guaranteed return on the initial investment.

People always say that if you give software X away for free, the public will respond and poof...instant profit. As a consumer and a software developer, that is not how life works. Free and OSS models work because a group of people wish to create or enhance a service or product that did not exist in the capacity that they wanted. It is not time efficient for one person to design an entire system, so multiple people decide to work on a project, usually to serve their own greater good. After the product has been proven to work for them, they may decide to let other people use their product for free, as a licensee, or under the guise of accepting non-obligational donations for updates and continued support. In this example, software X was not created with the intention of turning a profit, but the opportunity to profit exists. Most other game and software developers develop with the intention of making money. I'm not saying that we want to get rich, but we need to sustain a lifestyle or add to a coffer from which we'll draw to make our next project. This is the fundamental difference between the two software creation mentalities.

My needs as a consumer are automatically at odds with my needs as a developer. As a consumer, I want to pay the cheapest price possible for a good. The free market determines the cost of a product and boom....that is what an industry standardizes on. In the case of games, it is about the $50.00 price point. If a product or service is available for free, it completely disrupts or can even destroy the forces that balance a particular market segment. Said plainly, pirates are destroying the PC games market.

I don't know what the appropriate solution to this problem is though. I absolutely abhor DRM (even though I recognize its need). DRM does not solve the real problem: Content makers are trying to reign in ditribution of a good that is in infinite supply. Software is easy to copy because it is digital. Pirates will ALWAYS find a way to get around DRM checks. I've read about the idea that Content distributors will band together and unify their efforts to stop piracy. This sounds great, but is terrible from a consumer's standpoint; the consumer loses the ability to choose how they will use a service. I already hate the fact that I need a cd in a drive to play most PC games. Why? I don't need a cd in the drive to use windows, photoshop, or use winzip.

People out there need to support companies like Stardock (with their wallets), so that we aren't forced to accept DRM as a new standard. Individuals who pirate aren't bad per se, but they aren't doing the rest of us any good....

From reading this and the other thread here discussing IP and copyright it can clearly be seen that some people have an enormous sense of entitlement to use other peoples work without paying them anything. They would like there to be no laws governing IP.

That would mean an end to the video game, music, book and film industries, these things take a lot of time and resources to make and people need to make a living so making these things needs to be profitable anyone who doesn’t understand that is a self-deluding fools or a communist/anarchist.

Saying it’s not stealing because you are making a copy not taking anything from them is untrue; it’s like hiring someone to wash your car or trim your hedge and then refusing to pay them. When you buy software you’re paying for the time and sweat of the people who made it.

Now to be honest back when I was 13 or 14 I did sometimes pirate games for my friends and use games they copied for me (This was on 3 ½ inch disk in those days of course. But when I grew up, I came to understand the value of someone’s hard work once I had to earn a living for myself.

I now work as an IT Consultant, and I don’t work for free (on account of having rent and bills to pay), why should game developers? I can tell you a client refusing to pay for work I’d already done would have an appointment in court.

I think a lot of people who pirate software and condone it are either criminals, to young and immature to understand the value of hard work, or just on some wacky self-obsessed anarchist trip, (e.g. very immature but probably old enough to know better).

The same could be argued about the classical distribution model. It could happen nobody buys the game, either because the game isn't good enough or because everybody will pirate it.

So,
What would be the correct way of involving the Feds or States in this issue is the real question?

How much time and energy (therefore hard currency) would have to be spent?

Will the end product justify the means (or cost for that matter)? Would bringing thousands of millions of "pirates" to justice help increase sales (or decrease the actual customer base)? Of course, maybe, someone smarter than I, with a marketing background in PC Gaming and Games could come up with a way to bring the "Pirates" on board... such as...

Tada! Our favorite company, and probably the only company not in the "red" in lower Southeast Michigan, Stardock has the right idea, in that their response is "Here's a nibble of the real product, Mr and Ms. Beta Tester, now tell your friends to go watch a more full blown copy on G4!"

Yes, I did DVR the episode with Brad on G4 and I have decided to purchase a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire, after watching the battle scene, even to the point of investing some hard earned cash on another gigabyte of Random Access Money...er Memory.

Stay focused Stardock, your customer base is appreciative, even if they do not always seem like it.

W/R
Kirk Smith
USN CPO(R)

aka: Suralle Straykat
Kat Lord @ Large

Random Access Money.

I like it.

From a purely technical standpoint, the pirates will always win. They are always one step ahead of the legacy content industry.

Even if all the hardware you could buy would only run DRM'ed software it wouldn't help. There are enough people capable and willing to build their very own computers from scratch, it is actually not that hard.

The next logical step would be to make self-made computers illegal. But as if that would help. One can still buy illegal drugs, illegal pornography, hire people to do illegal stuff and so on. A totally unregulated free market. Supply and demand, risk and profit.


What I'm saying is that there's no point to combat piracy with laws or DRM. You need to make a legal copy more valuable than a pirated one or if that's not possible, change to a different business model.

I thought some of the commentary on Stardock was interesting. In particular, the supposition that Stardock gamers are a different breed and that the distribution model that works for Stardock would not work with FPS gamers. I don't think that is true, but it seemed like a lot of others did. Frankly, the GC II user base as a whole seems to be pretty computer literate and quite capable of using something like a bit torrent...But simply chooses not to go that way. I believe this has more to do with the approach and less to do with the players. I know that I could easily pirate any game out there, but that is simply not something I want to do. Perhaps that is more true with the community as a whole than I had previously realized (or perhaps I should have a lower opinion of FPS players).

In addition, Stardock has built up credibility with me personally through it's past games and I am much more likely to buy a game from them blind than I am from any other game company. All the same, I did install and play the demo version of GC II before my purchase. Even with Sins of a Solar Empire I have held off of purchasing for two reasons. The first is that I have pretty limited time right now. The second is that I am ever leery of getting burned by buying a game that just doesn't suit my tastes, and I'm unsure if Sins suits my tastes without trying it. I probably will eventually try it, but I would be much more comfortable about it with just 15-30 minutes of time on a demo or even a youtube video walk through. The fact that Stardock is distributing it and that they appear to be doing post release patches counts heavily in their favor.

Do others agree/disagree? How about it Stardockians? You know us well, are we different in this respect compared to the FPS crowd?

Personally I think more game publishes / developers (if they have control over this sort of thing) need to use a model similar (or even exactly the same) to what Stardock does, and I’m not just saying this because this is the Stardock forum.

That is:
1. No disk based copy protection
2. The ability to download it straight from a trustworthy source. Also no BS ‘you can only download it once’ or anything like that should apply. It is also good if you can download it a little bit at a time. This also somewhat removes the issue of certain countries getting games much later than others.
3. Have the copy protection kick in when you apply a patch (i.e. you need to enter your key and it is checked online so it can't be faked, at least on any mass scale).

The reason I suggest this because as I consumer I want:
1. Not to have to go look for and put in a disk every time I want to play for no other reason than it needs to check a few lines of wasted space.
2. Not to have to worry that I will potentially waste my money because the power fails at the worst possible time (i.e. I know I have life time access to the game no matter what)
3. In at lot of cases I like to try before I buy.

I also believe this is the best path to follow because it is less likely to lead people into piracy in the first place:
1. If there is disk based copy protection (which in my experience is broken 9/10 within a day or two of a games release, if not sooner, and certainly within a week) then people will be driven to seek out a no-cd crack, which are generally not hard to find, or even make yourself if you know how.
2. If they can simply download it from an official site then why waste the time learning about how to use bit torrent etc. to get some copy that my not even work, or worse, my just be some virus or porn video, even if it is ‘free’.
3. I know the purpose of demos is to give people a taste of a game, but most demos these days are so big (mainly due to textures I guess) that you my as well almost download the full version anyway, not to mention that demos tend to come out about the same time as most full version, if not later.
4. If you support your games (like Stardock does ) and make it very hard, if not impossible to patch your game without a legitimate key, but very easy to do with one, and don’t require them to verify each time, or launch some ‘third party’ program each time (i.e. steam) then you give people a strong incentive to actually buy your game, even if they did pirate it to begin with.

Obviously this is going to work better for some games than for others (namely high re-playability games vs your more play and throw away type games), but on the whole I think a lot of the reasons for piracy (or at least the main reason I have done it) is that it was simply easier and most times faster to download a pirated copy of a game and get a crack and than it was to buy it legitimately and probably end up cracking it anyway.

I thought this was a joke, but subsequent posts seem to indicate that this is to be taken seriously. You've got to be kidding!

I speak as one whose salary is comes 100% through charitable donations (I am the pastor of a church). And I've got to tell you ... even with people who claim that God is #1 in their lives, you get a *lot* of "free riders" who will gladly take all that you provide without giving a bit of support.

So actually, the whole issue does come down to an issue of morality and ethics. Yes, there will always be "pirates" (another word for "theives") who will dishonestly take what they want at the expense of others. Stardock's "gamble" with no copy protection is counting on there being enough honest people to pay for the product. They are perhaps banking on their "we trust you" policy to influence borderline pirates into becoming honest purchasers. They are also hoping that rewarding honest people will engender a long-term trust in them as a company. To the degree that it is succeeding (and, happily, it seems to be succeeding), it is because there is a good number of people who are honest or who want to be honest. Apart from that, it would not work.

So, Brad and crew, thank you for your approach, and I wish you continued success. I am doing two things to support you:
1) Buying your products (I just got SOASE -- good job!)
2) Continuing to preach "Thou Shalt Not Steal!!!"

One thing I've learned from economics.

The difference in choice between $2.00 and .01 is much smaller then the difference between $1.99 and free.

People tend to light up at free.

As for Stardock customers being different. Perhaps GCII customers are more affluent and therefore the opportunity cost of purchasing legitimately is lower?

Like I said before charity isn't the only income source. In the world of software there are also support contracts, customized versions (e.g. client specific extensions, integration with other products) and so on.



The question shouldn't be about the moral and ethical implications of piracy. Instead one should question whether it's ethical to demand much money for a product that has zero long-term costs for the individual copy.

Take a real, physical product. It costs an amount of X for development and further improvements. In addition, each copy costs an amount of Y as physical labor is involved.
After the initial investment has payed off, product price gets close to production costs, as otherwise someone else would sell a cheaper product.

Now take software and other forms of so-called "intellectual property": It costs X for development and maintenance. Each copy costs exactly nothing. After initial investment has payed off, price stays high. And nobody can sell the same for less, as patent and copyright prevents it. As an example why this is bad, have a look at the music industry. They are still making profit out of music that got written 50 or more years ago. The original artists are long gone yet that cash cow gets milked endlessly. Doesn't seem right to me.

I thought that argument was a load of BS myself. I play FPS and RPGs as well as RTS and TBS, the reason I've bought Stardock's products is a combination of them having great games, having great support for those games and being anti-copy protection.

I honestly doubt that strategy gamers are more affluent/more honest/less tech savvy or whatever crappy reason people are trying to blame Stardock's success on. Stardock is successful because they have a great product and they support and respect their customers AND potential customers.

I didn't play any of ILE's games but from reading the reviews I highly doubt they reached the same level of depth and originality as those from SD, to quote the first review of TQ I read: "There's no way around it: Titan Quest, like its source material, is all about clicking on monsters until they die and seeing what flies out of their bodies afterwards". I can't remember reading anything this negative about Galactic Civ.

On top of this, they have copy protection working against them by both inconveniencing their existing customers and scaring off potential customers.

It's always sad to see a game developer go under, but in the end it's not just the industry that's to blame.

I bought stardocks games, both the originals..

Why? because I pirated them and LOVED them.. they have built up a trust for making a good playing game.

Would I pirate again?

No, and for a few reasons,

1 demos are easy to download, yes it may take a hour, but you know # 2 wont bite you. and it gives you a good chance to see the game out.

2 Sadly the state of the no-cd fixes and such are no longer safe, it used to be that you could download a crack for photoshop or the game of the week.

Nowadays you are likely to get that crack, but you don't realize you are now a spambot... or someone is looking at your keystrokes, stealing your identity and bank info.

3 I realize that if I support good games and music, I feel better.

4 The industry has CHANGED, its not just stardock, there is steam/valve (never tried them)
Music and Movies are available via Itunes/netflix/Amazon at a DECENT price.
You have such variety to purchase from its SCARY..


So would I pirate? not again, and i will never recomend the "warez" scene to anyone because of the security issues that they will ALWAYS have.

I don't believe those statistics on piracy for a second. I don't know a single person who pirates PC games. I'd be surprised if it was even 10%. I know quite a few with chipped consoles though.

Yeah, I didn't even get into that. I simply don't believe that 90% of the copies out there are illegal. Maybe in some country where the game isn't published or has no history of copyright laws, but not in the vast majority of the first world.

That number is distinctly less than credible, at least in the first world. I understand piracy is rampant in Asia and eastern Europe, though.

Why is it potentially unethical for a producer to set a price for a product that isn't necessary to human survival, i.e. food, water, shelter? Planned economy folks buy into the idea that someone other than the producer should set a "reasonable" price for a product. That kind of populist thinking will actually get you less of what you desire. The more you try to restrict a producer's ability to charge a price set by a lawful free market the less product you'll get or the lesser quality of the product.

The late Milton Friedman (Nobel Prize winning economist) pointed out that there is a cost for the lack of trust between buyers and sellers in any economy. The greater the lack of trust the greater the cost to the economy. For example, let's say we have an apple seller. Now this apple seller fears being robbed or killed if the apples are out on display, because it’s happened to other apple vendors. This will drive apple sellers out of the market. In the meantime apple prices will go up. If prices go high enough, the apple seller will be able to hire/invest in a response to the apple thieves/killers. Maybe it will be armed guards, maybe it will be some other security measure, but rest assured that whatever course of action is taken, it will have a cost that will be passed on to apple buyers. The problem is not the apple seller, nor the apple buyers, but the root of the problem is the apple thieves/killers. But when we don't see the apple thieves because they're prevented by the apple seller's security measures, we buyers complain that the apple seller is charging too high a price, that the seller's made enough money, that the threat isn't real, that the seller doesn't need armed guards protecting his apple stand, all the while not realizing that as soon as the armed guards are gone the thieves/killers will return. (yeah that's a long sentence)

So the same is true with software companies. If no one pirated software, it would have a lower cost. Why? Several reasons. 1) Less money spent coming up with ways to discourage piracy. 2) More money would be made by software vendors that in turn would cause greater competition (provided there is a low entry cost, which is the case for this industry, you don't have to build a $500 million production facility to get started). More competition means more products competing for your $$, which leads to increased supply, which leads to lower prices, which causes an equilibrium to occur related to the selling price of the product and its production cost.

And don't try using the argument that the pirate market is a free market, because it is not. There is no free/voluntary exchange between a buyer and seller at an agreed upon price. Why? Because there is no seller. There is however a victim of theft. And it doesn't matter that I've got a supposedly unlimited supply of apples. Why? Because if I don't sell enough apples to pay me enough to live on (or a sufficient return on investment), then I'll go into some other business or invest my money in some other business.

Theft/piracy, whatever you want to call it, it has a cost to the buyer and the seller for which neither was responsible. And if piracy helps get more people to buy the product then why don't developers just stop with the security measures and give their product away for free to everyone, or tell the pirates/thieves how to crack them? Why? Because that company will be out of business. It's not a viable business model. If it were, companies would be paying pirates to steal their product.

Now I agree that some security measures are less annoying than others to the buyer. Being strip searched at the apple stand is worse than being videotaped.

So I would like to ask the question a different way. Is it ethical for thieves/pirates to cause my cost to purchase a product to be higher? Is it ethical for thieves/pirates to decrease someone else's assets?

There is so much misinformation here, it's terrifying.

My background: I have been a cracker privately and very briefly for a large cracking group. I published a paper about cracking winzip on fravia's site, back when it was all about reverse engineering. I have legally cracked software for which my company no longer had the source in order to deal with a y2k issue. Sometimes I just crack something that's free just to see what kinds of fun things I can do by changing the machine code.

I am not a guru in this field, but I know my way around olly and IDA fairly well.

I pirate things. Many things. I pay for most everything I like, and I don't pirate anything that's easier to get legally. For me, it's not a bit about price vs. worth - it's about price vs. convenience. I bought the Orange box from valve because I could download it instantly. Torrents are slow as hell, especially for something that's still new. Easy sell for me. I subscribe to Netflix because the wait is about the same for downloading a movie, but I have guaranteed (or nearly) good quality, plus the new instant watch selection of TV isn't awful. I don't buy any music at all, but I legally listen to pandora.com because it's convenient and of decent enough quality.

I heard about the original GC when I was on a civ 3 forum bitching about the crappy AI (I pirated civ 3, then bought it when I liked it, just for the record). So I pirated GC1. I liked it, so I bought it. When I heard about GC2, I pirated it again. It didn't impress me terribly, but I noticed their policy was STILL to not have copy protection. So I paid $70 for 10 tokens and got the GC2 + DA combo and later TA. I grew to really enjoy GC2, which came as a surprise to me, because I bought it primarily to support a company that was doing the RIGHT THING. Not punishing the customers with BS copy protections. I will likely never pirate anything else from SD, because I trust their reputation.

Is piracy "right"? Definitely not. Is it a form of stealing? Absolutely. But we do it because we are lazy or we just don't trust that a piece of software is worth $50. When you remove those two factors, us middle-class pirates stop pirating.

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One huge misconception here is the idea that "most" cracks have trojans and spyware in them. A cracking group has a reputation to uphold. They do not take kindly when a member releases a crack with a virus or malware of any kind. They will boot that member if something like that occurs, possibly even the first time (depending on severity and whether the malware could have been an accident). The "scene" will stop trading with the group if the group is releasing bad cracks. The whole scene teams up to share pirated stuff - there are the suppliers, who get protected stuff up before it's available commercially, the server guys who run the FTP servers and supply bandwidth, the crackers, the DVD rippers, etc. Each one belongs to the "network" as a whole, and gets all the free stuff they could want in return for their services. A given cracking group needs to be releasing quality "goods" in order to stay on the network. It is not good for a group to get the boot. The group does not want this. It is in their best interest to release good stuff.

This is not to say software cracks don't go out with trojans in them - of course some do! But the vast majority (80-90%) do not.

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90% of worldwide users are pirates? BS, I say! Of course I cannot show evidence to refute this statistic, but let's think here. Say a game like The Sims 2, which sold around 13 million copies worldwide (so says Wikipedia). A game that popular and (dare I say it) that easy to crack, is likely to be on the higher end of piracy stats, so 90% works for me. This means that that game was pirated by nearly 120 MILLION people. To me that's a pretty outrageous figure for any game.

Additionally, there is literally no way to measure piracy. Pirates don't fill out "What did I pirate recently" on a census form. Torrent downloads can't easily be tracked as far as I know, and even if they could, they are fairly meaningless, as a single person may pirate the same thing three times in his life if his computer changes or hard drive fails or whatever. By the same token, those of us who download and later pay are technically pirates, but definitely not a lost sale. I stole Civ 3, liked it, and paid - that download may have looked like piracy, but a week later I was a paying customer.

And you can't always be sure of piracy. I played Knights of the Old Republic 2 all the way through, but never bought it - a friend loaned me the original CDs he purchased. That's a "lost sale" by the same definition as piracy is. If a survey were taken of how many people played KoToR 2 vs. how many bought it, my figure would look like piracy. But it was 100% legit. By the same token, my friend loaned me some TV shows on DVD, but I preferred my computer for viewing (call me nutty, but really I'm just terribly lazy), so I torrented them even though I had the legit DVDs sitting on my desk the whole time. Is that piracy? I have no idea.

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Another misconception is that stardock customers are somehow "different" than other customers. Not at all true. The success of valve's steam should be an indicator to anybody who isn't whining about their failure of a company that FPS players are keen on paying for quality games if it's convenient. If a game is released today on Steam, I can get it today. Waiting for a crack may take several days, and I'll pay rather than wait, if I'm actually interested in the game.

And Titan Quest... come on. That game failed because it was just another D2 clone. Nothing special about that game, at least in terms of the initial impression it gives, and reviews (both critic and "normal" people). I couldn't even bring myself to spend the time downloading. May not have been a bad game, but it just wasn't something that the market was craving.

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Piracy helped Iron Lore close down? BS! I don't know any of my pirate friends who were any more interested in their games than I was! The studio just wasn't producing anything groundbreaking, and in the harsh game development world, you have to do something that's going to get attention!

Stardock has the most in-depth 4X game I've ever seen. And their copy protection model has attracted a ton of free attention. PR is good, so doing things that surprise people always helps. I bet SD wouldn't be as successful if they did the traditional copy protection model.

Additionally, if IL was writing such devious copy protections into their games that they would just do a crash to desktop, they paved the way for their own funeral. Copy protections of all sorts have proven time and again that they "detect piracy" in the honest people from time to time. So some of those "pirates" the article talks about almost certainly were legitimate customers. And by making a few legit users' lives hell, they deserved the backlash of angry pirates whose complaints were perfectly valid. Remember, software engineers are very far from perfect. We make some of the stupidest mistakes. We are some of the most absent-minded people. If a simple game like GC1 can be buggy on 1-2% of the install base, imagine how buggy the really "clever" copy protection schemes can be.

The CD protections of the late 90s were so bad, some companies actually GAVE AWAY a no-cd patch (Firaxis on Civ 3, for instance) on request.

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Piracy will not stop through a "please respect us" effort. It will not stop through triple-layered DRM. There is no way to stop a pirate. Hardware can be bypassed, software can always be cracked. Nothing can stop piracy, and the only thing that truly slows it down is convenience. The majority of people I know who pirate things (say 10 or so who I actually talk to about these issues) have a hard time justifying a weeklong torrent download if a little cash will get them what they want instantly. Steam, SDCentral, iTunes, etc.

Note that Amazon.com is selling DRM-free music now. Pirates love that. Not to help us pirate more stuff, but because we value our "rights". Kind of perverse, eh?