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Iron Lore Entertainment's copy protection bites them on the butt

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Iron Lore Entertainment's copy protection bites them on the butt

from Sins Forums
Iron Lore Entertainment, maker of Titan Quest, is closing up shop due in part to low sales. Michael Fitch, a fellow from THQ, had some interesting things to say about it:

It's a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you're single-team and don't have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here's why.

Piracy. Yeah, that's right, I said it. No, I don't want to re-hash the endless "piracy spreads awareness", "I only pirate because there's no demo", "people who pirate wouldn't buy the game anyway" round-robin. Been there, done that. I do want to point to a couple of things, though.

One, there are other costs to piracy than just lost sales. For example, with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores. It was a fairly quick-and-dirty crack job, and in fact, it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy. There was another one in the streaming routine. So, it's a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how buggy the game is, how it crashes all the time. A lot of people are talking about how it crashes right when you come out of the first cave. Yeah, that's right. There was a security check there.

So, before the game even comes out, we've got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won't. We took a lot of sh** on this, completely undeserved mind you. How many people decided to pick up the pirated version because it had this reputation and they didn't want to risk buying something that didn't work? Talk about your self-fulfilling prophecy.

. . .

What was the ultimate impact of that? Hard to measure, but it did get mentioned in several reviews. Think about that the next time you read "we didn't have any problems running the game, but there are reports on the internet that people are having crashes."

http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=42663
End of quote

You have to wonder if Titan Quest would have sold better if they used no copy protection like Stardock's games.
92,413 views 55 replies
Reply #51 from Sins Forums Top

I would they are when they factor in all the variables both tangible and intangible as well as the impact on the value of their products.
End of quote

I fear that they haven't then correctly weighted ALL factors ;)

Reply #52 from Sins Forums Top
I look at the situation this way...

It is like when you tell a kid they cant do something. After that all they want to do is what you don’t want them to do. This is so because of the need they have to prove themselves for whatever reason. I am serious about this. So much so that I try experiments with my kids.

I smoke and I don’t want my kids to smoke and my friends always tell their kids not to smoke yet most of them do. Oddly enough my kids don’t. Guess what? I have never told them not to do it. In fact I leave my cigarettes laying around (counted of course) just to tempt them. When I smoke and they see me doing it I ask them if they want some, after which I always cough profusely and then talk about the deadly effects of smoking and make self depreciative remarks for doing it. Then I ask them again and they always refuse. I also always talk to them like I talk to adults. It works like a charm. I do other such things to them as well and they always work. The poor little lab rats have no idea. But I digress...

The people that do the hacking are the same and the more draconian the DRM the more of a challenge it is so the more they try. Take away the incentive and you take away the need for 99% of them to do it. I think this is a big reason why Brad has been successful with his business practices. Once the glory factor is removed the psychological attraction diminishes accordingly. It really is not rocket science as some companies make it out to be.

I also know this from empirical experience since I used to hack things when I was younger and the big thing in my peer group was who could beat the hardest flavor of the week just for fun. The reward for all the hours of work was simply a nice comments and a drink or two and the respect of peers.

It had absolutely nothing to do with the product or the developers. Those things never even entered the thought processes ever. So I always get a big laugh when see read or see these guys from the big companies talking about how their titles are the target and this is so because of yadda, yadda, yadda -etc... They truly do live in a fantasy world.
Elemental: Reforged
Reply #53 from Sins Forums Top
Brad started a thread on this topic. The title is On Piracy and PC Gaming. You can read it here.
Reply #54 from Sins Forums Top
The quoted article in the OP got me to reading up on Titan Quest when it came out, partly because I was thinking of getting Soulstorm. Never been a fan of Diablo games, not that the top down perspective wouldn't work, necessarily, just the brain dead button mashing doesn't work for me. From the sounds of it, what strategy Diablo had was mostly lost to Titan Quest. Furthermore you needed at least a decent gaming rig to power it. All things considered, maybe adding hard core copy protection to TQ wasn't such a bad idea, given the anticipated market of hard core button mashers. But it didn't work. I'm waiting on Soulstorm. Demo of Dark Eldar looked good. We'll see.
Reply #55 from Sins Forums Top
I bought TQ, and enjoyed it for a while. I never heard any of the hub-ub around it being buggy. However, as others have mentioned, my interest waned because ILE didn't provide dedicated closed servers, and there was no anti-cheat anything for multiplayer. When multiplayer consists of running around with OMGWTFBBQ hacked characters, the game is pretty much dead after you get your fill of single player. Blizzard learned that way back with Diablo I. What's the point of beating a whole level to kill the boss to get the uber item, when everyone else in the world cheated and gave themselves 2 of them, and 1000 skill points to boot? I think this is the real reason why the game and perhaps the studio died.

As far as I see it,if TQ offered a compelling multiplayer experience, they'd still be selling copies and people would still be playing it. If they didn't make it known that those 'bugs' were caused by pirated copies they only have themselves to blame.

Oh, and Fearzone, I got Soulstorm and it's a lot of fun. If you like RTS games, I think you'll love that one.