Iron Lore closed due partly to piracy issues says THQ

False bug reports hurt 'Titan Quests' reputation

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663
from Stardock Forums
We reported on the closure of Iron Lore Entertainment last week much to our chagrin. While it is sad to see such a talented company stop its development it is even more sad that THQ, their publisher, blames the closure largely on piracy.

THQ director of creative management Michael Fitch took the time yesterday to draft a long rant on the Quarter to Three forums where he ranted on piracy and the messed up PC market in general. This is the second time the PC gaming market has come under attack by higher ups, the first coming from CliffyB of Epic Games.

Fitch specifically mentioned a piracy issue based on how Iron Lore designed their DRM to handle failed checks. In Titan Quest the title would crash to the desktop should it fail a DRM check. This lead to numerous people claiming that the game was buggy, when in fact many of them were using a poorly cracked version of the title. In the end, the lack of a prompt explaining the crash lead to a bad reputation which more than likely caused some people to avoid the title.

As pointed out by many replies, why would a company NOT have a prompt after a crash. Did they feel that leaving that out would make it more difficult for pirates to crack? I am just gonna stop here and let you discuss amongst yourselves.
6,786 views 14 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top
What kind of prompt should they have included? How would they know how to intercept and error invoked by a cracker? The cracks always come after the release, thus one cannot predict code changes or how they would effect the game. Even if they added a dialog after a DRM failure, there would be no insurance at all that a cracked version would not make an attempt to surpass that and prevent the dialog from showing altogether.
Reply #2 from Stardock Forums Top
They could have included any number of messages, from say some specific code like 'Error 190238' that just tell tech support guys that the DRM has found a problem, or something more blatant like 'DRM circumvention detected, shutting down.'  I agree that this wouldn't have stopped the crackers, nothing will, but it would have stopped people from believing the game was buggy, when in fact it wasn't, it was a bad crack causing the crashes.
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Reply #3 from Stardock Forums Top
When crackers crack though, they bypass certain things which could infact bypass the expected error of a DRM failure and generate an unhandled exception. Once someone manipulates your code, your error handling is not longer intact and may no longer produce the desired effect. Obviously Ironlore could not fix the crack.
Reply #4 from Stardock Forums Top
I understand that, but if you check the External Link, you will see that they never claimed to have any sort of warning message at all.

Either way, to me it is sad that Iron Lore got tagged as releasing a buggy game due to bad pirates.  I mean, if you were pirating a game and it crashed, wouldn't you think it was a bad crack first?
Reply #5 from Stardock Forums Top

While throwing up a dialog saying "Illegal copy detected" probably would have shut up some pirates, the hackers distributing them would have just removed it eventually anyway.

Basically if you pirate a game, you shouldn't expect it to run well.  That seems like common sense, but those who pirate apparently lack this (given how many support requests they put in).

Reply #6 from Stardock Forums Top
Actually they probably would have realized their crack didn't work correctly and fixed it, kinda besides the point though.
Reply #7 from Stardock Forums Top
I don't even buy games unless they're either DRM free or I can get a crack to bypass it. The only games I've ever 'pirated' were really old games that I once owned and wanted to see how nostalgia stacked up against reality.

Starforce is the worst, and I'll never buy another game that uses that, crack or not. Even requiring the CD to play is more trouble than it's worth. The online services that require their front-end to be running just to load the game are also out - not to mention that Steam's foreign prices are generally higher than buying the box.

Imagine if you bought a car that needed a 48 character case-sensitive code entered to register it, and then needed the correct CD in the player evey time before you could start it. It's absurd. Any DRM must be *completely* invisible to the user, or they can stick it where the sun doesn't shine.
Reply #8 from Stardock Forums Top
They also failed to realize that DRM systems only harm the customers of the product, that drm is inherently flawed and hostile towards customers.. and as such it should come as no surprise that they met the end they did.

The only winners when a company uses DRM to restrict their product are those who avoid purchasing it.
Reply #9 from Stardock Forums Top
Michael Fitch et al should probably stop trying to alienate potential customers by insulting us. It's bad for business; if the pc market is so bad, get out of it and leave it to people who can handle themselves.
Reply #10 from Stardock Forums Top
THQ's Michael Fitch places the blame for the closure of Titan Quest developer Iron Lore Entertainment, squarely on the shoulders of game pirates, though he does suggest that they may have had a bit of help from dumb players, hardware vendors, and one particularly reviewer.
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Drug Treatment
Reply #11 from Stardock Forums Top
I have two copies of Titan Quest and IT (one for me and one for my wife). TQ was flawlessly done, and the things added in IT resolved any issues I had with the gameplay in classic TQ. However, I paid 80 bucks for all of that stuff together (Gold box wasn't out yet) and IT was buggy as all get out. I did not use a cracked version, they just left slowdowns and possible memory leaks in the game. It's well known problems on any fan forums, some people have made fan fixes for some of it, but there are still problems.

I play the Dawn of War series of games too, also THQ, THQ irritates me to no end, they claim piracy and make crap as annoying as possible it seems. Frankly they never gave Iron Lore a chance to fix the problems with IT.

All I want to do is install my game and pack the disk away. I have 1.5 terabytes of disk space, why am I treated like a pirate? People are always going to pirate your game. Quit annoying people like me, I often purchase 2 or more copies of games I like and it doesn't make me cry... except when the DRM annoys the heck out of me and I wonder why the warez kiddies get it easier than me, the paying customer.
Reply #12 from Stardock Forums Top

each game closed due to its own causes. maybe the technology support is not so strong or the team are not so united and so on..

Reply #13 from Stardock Forums Top

If there aren't DRM in the first place there needn't be any cracks.

Those who cracked the game would have pirated the games anyway, aren't lost sales at all.

So by creating a sophiscated DRM, it generated bad publicity, much like Spore did.

Reply #14 from Stardock Forums Top

Quoting AnnihilatorX, reply 13
If there aren't DRM in the first place there needn't be any cracks.

Those who cracked the game would have pirated the games anyway, aren't lost sales at all.

So by creating a sophiscated DRM, it generated bad publicity, much like Spore did.
End of AnnihilatorX's quote

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