One of the reasons I've always liked physical hardcopies... that and the fact I enjoy collecting books, CDs, games, and movies. Digital has its convenience, and physical copies won't stop somebody uploading the product online for free, but in the end somebody that wants to get a hand on the hardcopy will either have to resort to shoplifting (and risk being arrested and going to jail) or just going out to buy the product.
The physical products are sadly almost an endangered species. Whileas many people love them (also merchandise), the production costs (especially for international customers) can be so high that it barely profits for either party. That said, I believe that - especially in the RPG genre - books in particular would still be a profitable physical product that many people simply adore to have in their hands, and not on a monitor.
(When was the last time you saw a game coming with really cool physical products in the regular copy? A map in "Skyrim"? Eh. I say a book with the lore and characters, or an artbook, is special!)
After all, piracy does have its consequences, and people who think they're "sticking it to the man" when they pirate either don't realize or don't care that they're really sticking it to the honest consumers, who will have to pay the higher cost when prices go up as a result.
That is because levering prices is the easiest, most simple solution. But in my opinion, if a developer sees that maybe 80% of his products get downloaded for free and he needs - let's say - 15% more to survive, going up with the prices is counter-productive and will result in higher piracy. Lowering the prices is a solution, one of many. Another I - personally - quite adore, is to
use the pirates to your advantage. You've got 80% of all your potential customers, after all! Why not do something with them?
(But that topic, again, exceeds the topic of DRM.)
- There's a simple question that needs to be asked at this point: What do you think is worth more from the two following choices, for someone with no existing reputation: 50 sold copies and 50 people talking about your game
- 500 pirates talking about your game
- There is no correct answer, as it all depends on who plays your game. [...] It's not "theft", in the standard sense of the word. It's a copy, and the mentality behind that copy is a wildcard; it could be anything from a potential customer to someone who'd never consider your game if it wasn't available for free.
Words taken from me before I could utter them. Splendid!
We have some very,
very interesting psychological concepts to fight in ourselves:
Instinctively,
"money = good" and
"no money = bad". If we shake a tree and a banana falls down, we're happy. If it doesn't, we feel quite frustrated. But that is
primal instincts;
"do now, get now".
Some thousands of years ago, a few clever human beings have figured out that if you take a seed and shove that beast into the soil,
give it water and
hunger for a few days (okay, maybe months), that tiny, useless-looking thing will actually grow into a
steady source of income (of bananas);
cultivation.
It is kind of a very basic principle that you only get what has been able to grow, first. And you can invest your own resources to aid its growth, as well as control your own "theft" to not make the thing starve. (e.g. harvesting more than nature can re-grow within that interval.) That's also what we find in children, which we have to ---okay, I think you get my point: We need to invest, speculate, help it grow and
then have a steady source that can support us;
symbiosis.
(Also kind of what will lead every monopoly to its own demise.)
In selling games, we have to see that sometimes, money isn't always what will really feed us. The ancient non-monetary trading isn't really all that wrong. We have
myriads of currencies!
(Of which I only present 4.)
- Liquid Market Currency: Give someone a game and you get - let's say - $50 transfered to your bank account. Nice. Risks: Inflation, transaction fees, currency conversion fees, possibly "thin money" (i.e. our entire credit-based economy that is prone to implosion), one-way usage, etc.
- Presence: You give someone a game, he pays you in US dollars, but then gives it to 100 other friends (wow, Mr. Popular!) without giving you any money. You just gained +100 reach! Risks: reach has to get converted into liquid money if you want to buy a hot dog, unless the reach is so immense that the hot dog vendor knows about you and hands you one for free.
- Service: Someone wants your game but cannot give you money nor really knows of many people to give it to. Simple: If that person is a blogger, make him mention your game in his blog. If he's a programmer, offer him to fix some bugs in exchange for the game. If he's a composer and you really lack good music, offer him to compose a nice album for you in exchange for the game. (Not the best examples, but you get the idea, I hope.) Risks: it's just a connection and deal between you and one customer that takes time and effort, and for a single copy of a game might not come to profitable deals. (Something like selling a car in this way, certainly is an acceptable option.)
- Classic Trade: You give a game, he gives a movie. Or a free month for his online service, e.g. web-hosting. Risks: again, with individual, small games, you have to sell entire bulk shipments to find a valuable trade offer.
And as our friend said:
"it's a wildcard". What do you really know about games, gamers and the market? All you really know is:
- You have a product. You present it to people.
In
so many cases the way someone
uses and
interprets the product can be extremely different from what you've intended to deliver. I give you a personal example:
I bought "Skyrim". The developers' intention was to deliver an epic roleplaying experience (probably). You think I played it like that or bought it for that purpose? Like hell I did!
(Let's leave my personal opinion about the game out for a moment.) I simply bought the game because it was fun to mess around with mechanics, trying to gamebreak, speedrun, find exploits and mod it. To this day I only remember
"Blabla dragons, blabla Blades, blabla Alduin" from the story and world. But it was worth it, it was fun, and it was
my "Skyrim". - Your customers will decide what the game is you delivered.
Hence, we can't really justify surprise on our faces if we find that people simply don't consume the game we expected them to, maybe define "games" differently, "fun", "RPG", etc. And hence I also think piracy is a very clear expression of that: Our customers want to do something else with our product and we've failed to spot that, hence the price doesn't appeal to them.
(Then there's also the question of how customers want to purchase and attain your product or pay you. Maybe someone doesn't want to pay for the game, but would gladly create mods and collaborate? But this question related to the "wildcard" is rather vast, so I rather not take risks to hijack the thread and proceed. Apologies.)
Do not get DRM. First of all, as players ourselves we hate DRM right?
I believe that we make some psychological mistakes when starting to think of commercialising our products:
- We're all gamers: Us, who designed the game, and the customers, who will play the game, simply love games.
- They can do what we do: Simply because we have had more resources and determination doesn't mean that our customers may not be "better" at creating the same type of game than we did. Look at all the modders and how they surpass the original developers by far.
- Gaming != Creative?: As a designer, we like to think of ourselves as "productive" and "creative", and I can understand when some people think of playing games as "consumeristic" and "passive". But from a psychological point of view, playing games is insanely creative and it's not random that "gamers" and "game designers" tend to have an incredibly big grey-zone (e.g. us, right?).
If we think of our customers as clones of ourselves (well, or simply "as humans"), we may see that all they want is to have fun, play games, be taken seriously, maybe given some creative aspects in our product
(e.g. moddability) and not too much of that "producer vs consumer" barrier. In my personal opinion, the point where we consider someone "professional" or "more authoritive" because they make more money and have higher production quality, is when the gaming community starts to get divided into "producer vs consumer" and also suffers aforementioned "emotional distance" where theft is a lot more likely to happen.
- Players will love you more if you give them full control over their games.
- You are gonna want friends giving copies of their games to all their friends, which means more people play your game.
- I believe that a lot of people that were emotionally touched by your game will buy their own copy...after they beat the game already with their friends copy.
[...]
Piracy is not a lose of sales, people that will only play your game if its free will never buy your game anyways.
- Give them Everything: Personally, as a gamer who isn't just in for some casual "Angry Birds" fun, I adore to see the entire architecture and source-code of the game. I think it's also what makes the RM community so special, because we can look at each other's methods for designing and constructing a game and modify it. It's also more personal and you get to adjust the game to your liking if you don't agree with some difficulty setting the developer designed, for example. Risk: Theft of the code/resources and redistributing it under a new name. Solution: Copyright, maybe?
Also, if you tell your customer beforehand: "Hey, it's cool if you create your own mod. Just maybe credit me?", chances are that modding/hijacking will increase, but also with more connection back to you as the original author. (I know that here, we could discuss forever, but I just think that e.g. Valve, Blizzard and Bethesda didn't really do something stupid by encouraging modding, seeing how they're pretty high up now.)
- Make it Social: Compare today's gaming experience to the one back in the 80s/90s where you actually had to hang out with people to experience multiplayer sessions. If you can experience a game only alone, how likely are you to recommend it to some friend? Once you can discuss or play a game together, compete, cooperate, compare results, it gets really fun and obviously people will start to almost force their friends to get the game too. We've seen some interesting strategies in that department, e.g. "buy the game, get a free copy for one friend". Effect: wildfire!
- Experience matters: We tend to cling to things that we have an emotional, often sensuous experience connected to. We're more likely to pay for something while being in tears of joy after an outstanding ending to our favourite game and maybe even offer the developer our soul, than having made the first experience with the game as being a tedious process to free yourself from DRM and feel the tears of your wallet.
- Pirated games aren't a loss: As Chrome said, those people wouldn't have bought the game anyways. Now, there are two other options: Either they would've, but were too cheap for it, in which case you maybe lower the prices, or they would, but only once they could play the entire game pirated, in which case piracy wasn't damaging. DRM only shifts the semi-convinced potential customers to PirateBay & Co. or gets rid of them anyways. (There are good counter arguments, of course, too.)
I refuse to give players "full control" over anything I give them. Is it really "mine" anymore if they have the same privileges and rights to the product as I do?
Even if people would probably love to get their hands on all of my resources, I'm not going to let them have it just like that.
There are some differences between the different kind of "rights":
- Right to use non-commercially: If you hand over the source code, all other resources and say: "Here's everything. Go nuts." but they're not allowed to turn it into a commercial product and sell it and/or any variations of it (e.g. mods), you don't really lose anything about the original product. People still need to buy that one to get the original version. Example: "The Elder Scrolls" series.
- Right to use commercially under license: If you hand it all over, tell them to create their own mods and even sell those, but either credit you as the original creator, or give you a share of the revenue cash, you still profit from the publicity and/or cash flow that - maybe more talented - consumers create. Example: "Counter Strike".
- Right to use commercially: You hand it all over and they can do whatever they want, even if nobody will ever find out that you created it. Example: "GNU Project".
RPG-Maker VX, for example, says that you can sell whatever you've created with it, without sharing profits with the software's original authors, but other restrictions apply, such as
(correct me if I'm wrong) not hacking the
.exe and
.dll files, for example. In this case, since it's a tool and not a game
(although that's one of the big problems: what is a game?), it may be less fatal for the original authors if people sell the games, since the original product (the tool), is entirely different from a game; kind of like saying:
"Okay, you can sell stand-alone campaigns you've created in our RTS's built-in editor, but not the RTS itself."
I think it is very important to note that your intellectual property is
automatically copyright protected (at least for visual art, music, stories, games, etc.) and other people make themselves amerciable by using it commercially in their own products.
(Again, professional lawyers here, correct me if my choice of words is wrong.) Unless, of course, you specifically state that your resources are free for commercial use and hand out the license to the public or put it under an open-license like the aforementioned
GNU Project, where
(as far as I know) people cannot put their copyright on a product someone shared for free use in the community.
If someone illegally acquires your game, I think you needn't worry about them using your resources. They already broke the law, so whatever they do with your unencrypted resources, will be illegal to begin with.
(Again, not a lawyer, but from what I know.) You can visit me in jail in a few months if I were to take the music of - let's say -
"Hotline Miami" (which just sits there in the install directory, conveniently unencrypted as
.ogg files) and use it in a game which I sell. Even if the game had been for free!
(Once more: not a professional lawyer.)
In short: If my understanding of the digital rights and intellectual property laws is up-to-date, you may just leave your files unencrypted and open for everybody to edit, modify and look at, without risking that they will redistribute them. And even if you encrypt them in
.dll or other filetypes, it is
so easy to crack that. So, it's just damaging the curiosity of the customer. And guess how much the customer can learn about game design if they can look at
how the game has been designed? It opens the market for new talent (like us) to get the help they need to develop their skills and maybe design a game of their own one day.
(I'm also saying this from my personal experience of exploring RPG-Maker 2000 games back in my days, Half-Life maps, Daggerfall resources and some source code and encrypted media from games like Diablo II. Many great game designers have started as modders, btw!)
A trailer is a controlled video that might just portray the only good points of the game and
nothing about the game "feel" or how well it plays mechanically.
Screenshots have little value, especially if you're an indie dev that either a) isn't tremendously good at art or
can't afford / doesn't want to hire someone to do impressive original artwork.
[...] What made me play it was a friend playing it while spending the weekend here, and
me trying it using the guest login function. I bought it a few hours later.
Again, something I know from first-hand experience as well as observation and just a bit of common sense. Look around you and you will find AAA game publishers release trailers of their games including
only cutscenes. I'm trying to control myself here, but this is an issue that I've been facing for a very long time:
production quality sells, not the game.
Now, this works for people who aren't very critical and just want to play a game so long as it
looks good and demonstrates the hardware's capabilities. Hell, in 90% of all cases I can't even trust the term
"gameplay trailer", because it is a machinima of the gameplay, where all the UI graphics get removed, in-game menu navigation doesn't get displayed, nice looking video filters applied and the camera angle modified, conveniently. Half of the time you're there wondering whether it is gameplay or yet another cutscene. So, no, it doesn't really show how the
game is, since you have zero idea how it actually
plays.
As
Galenmereth pointed out: You have to
play to be able to judge. Guess how I decided that I wanted to get
"Ocarina of Time"? Saw it at a friend's place, played it, bought it the next day. Same with the majority of my N64-era games. Even today, guess what
convinced me to buy
"Skyrim"? The most anticipated RPG of its year which's hype didn't catch on to me? Having played it at a friend's place.
"Trine 2"? Got a guest pass, completed the game with two friends online, had a blast, bought it. Agreed, this last example of "playing the entire game for free" does have its flaws, but if you look around: It works.
Another great example of extending beyond your own, purchased, registered-to-one-machine copy, is
"Little Big Planet": Play it at your friend's place with your own profile and store your progress. Did the game sell exceptionally badly? No. People love being able to play together, because the game gets associated with
good memories. And people like to buy good memories. Just recently I thought:
"Why the hell did I just buy a game I already own on CD from the 90s?" The answer:
good memories (and upgraded connectivity for online multiplayer, adjusted to today's hardware; but you get the point).
Guess why Microsoft had to back down with their tail between their legs? Because - amongst many reasons - they considered it a threat that
two or more people could play with
one copy.
It's not that different to buying clothes: If you can't try them on, you're
probably not going to buy them. DRM in that sense damages your own sales heavily.
(Same with region protection, etc., but that's just an entirely different monstrosity to look at. No hijacking here.)
Sometimes it takes time for your product to reach a level of success.
Who in here paid attention in physics class? Anybody? Nobody? Okay. Because then you might not know what I'm talking about when I say:
v = x/t.
(Where v = velocity, x = displacement, t = time.)
Whatever you're selling, you're selling it
across a distance. In the case of digital game distribution, the "distance" is the difference between
"insufficient reach vs sufficient reach", i.e. gaining enough reach to having crossed the border of
"I can start selling my product and claim a revenue that pays off."
Now, if we toy around with the formula, it becomes apparent that:
t = x/v. The time required to reach your goal has to do with your "velocity". And it doesn't matter if you're blessed with ingenuity and luck and
t = 1 month or if you have to go the steep way that probably most of us will, and where
t > 5 years; you will have to
wait and endure.
(Needless to say, DRM is obstructing that "velocity", since you prevent reach.)
However, digital wares are not in limited supply; a copy is not lost from inventory. Your stock is always full.
Again, something I have to compliment in observation.
- Shoplifting: Limited resources from our planet that have been painstakingly manufactured got stolen. It's not in proper hands. It's like stealing food: There's no way to magically "create" food.
- Digital Copies: It takes some bits of physical reality, otherwise it's nothing that gets "lost". You still have your original source code and can duplicate it for each customer. At the worst, as our friend already said, you "lose" some traffic on your servers, which, however, can also be profitable if you have deals where visitor count matters!
Certainly, you expected money, but as we've elaborated countless times before: Some of those people wouldn't have bought it anyways. So, this is the closest to profit you can come. They carry your name into the world.
And as for the other people who are potential customers but simply get offered the choice between "free, pirated version vs expensive, official version", well, give them a reason to prefer the official version. For one thing - as mentioned above - give them a reason to
care about supporting the people behind the product.
I know, it's kind of absurd that we have to pay so much attention to "winning over" customers from the pirate side of the force to the official side (with Luke and Yoda; who can say "no" to Yoda?), but physical reality is not different: You're not fast enough, treat your customers not nicely, make it a hassle to get comfortable with the product, your customer will go to someone else. It's been like this since the age of early trade and it will always be like that. Digital piracy is really not that big of an innovation.
To conclude this rather biblical text, I'd just like to say that I believe
we hobbyist and/or indie game developers are the ones who can define the gaming market, before any of us reaches fame and might become victim to all the fighting up there with law and money. And something that I feel is of great importance to also consider here, is something people familiar with East Asian traditional cultures (or medieval Europe) will recognise:
honour.
As much as we try to protect and distribute our products with monetary methods, I think behind every producer and consumer lies a human being that has a conscience of what they're doing. It would stretch this topic if I went into explaining other correlations to this phenomenon now, but I - from a psychological point of view - get the impression that the affinity to theft etc. has a lot to do with how intergrated a person feels into the community that he/she steals from. It shouldn't lead to public ostractism when a member falls out of line
(as this would create an atmosphere of fear in the community), but people within a community may feel respected, appreciated and recognised if they do something honourable (e.g. donate a lot to the developer). And that's exactly what I think a lot more developers should focus on:
Your customers are a community. They don't sneak to your store at night, fetch a copy, then hide in a cave alone. They love to share their experiences about the game and maybe create something entirely new out of it.
Alas, I think you get my point: Include the community and try to understand what they expect from you, and then you can also stop worrying about DRM and piracy etc.
(Further food for thought: Look at Russia and China's active cracker networks and the reasons behind them!)
