TLDR: "The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates," Gabe Newell said.
Having said that, the conclusion is pretty much in line with what many gamers and pirates have been saying: Stop screwing the customer and creating pirates of them.
I'm lucky enough to live in an English-speaking country, but I'm sure that if I lived in a country that typically sees long delays before localization, I'd find a way to get it early. Even if that meant learning English and engaging in piracy.
These companies understand hype and the way it drives sales, and then completely fail to use that knowledge when it comes to other countries. They won't wait! The hype has pushed them into getting it NOW, by hook or crook.
In regards to pre-lease, A bit of a stretch calling what Valve does DRM. The pre-release stuff is straight up encrypted. It's a convenience for the end-user to pre-load the data. Once the game gets released you don't need to contact valve's servers for decryption keys every time you want to play.
Steam itself will install any game I own on any machine I log into. Steam competes directly with The Pirate Bay, and wins.
My point is that good DRM can protect rights of both parties , but never does. Instead, if often restricts the consumer's rights in favor of the publisher. Steam comes closest to balancing interests, but falls short as well.
Original post follows:
Who should stop screwing the customer? And how should they stop?
Any discussion of fixing the music (EDIT: or gaming) industry or stopping piracy needs answers to these questions.
One of the advantages of piracy, one of its conveniences, is that you can get anything you want in one place. But no one is in a position to provide this legally. Spotify (and others (EDIT: such as Steam for games)) would like to, but they can only legally provide what record companies (EDIT: or gaming companies... I think I can stop with the line by line clarifying now; the point is that this applies to all pirated digital content) will provide to them. And they will only provide what it is cost-effective for them to acquire and license. They aren't going to have truly independent artists, because dealing with artists rather than labels isn't cost effective on such a large scale.
The only way to overcome this I can think of is a compulsory license for distributing music, akin to the compulsory license for playing covers. But there's no way I can foresee the unintended consequences of such a fundamental change in how copyright is understood.
But whether or not such a compulsory license is a good idea is not the point. The point is that "stop screwing the customer" is vague to the point of meaninglessness.
Steam is missing a few major titles (mostly from EA and Blizzard), but it's one of the most complete digital download services. It also seems to be rather indie friendly.
But all types of digital piracy are connected by similar economical choices of the consumer.
Valve, iTunes, Spotify, Hulu, and Netflix all combat piracy by being more convenient than the alternative. I'd much rather use those services to get what I want.
However, if content is not readily available digitally, then plenty of people have no problem getting that content via piracy. And the reason they do that is simple: the risk of getting caught and punished is vanishingly small. Even when the RIAA was at it's most aggressive, the number of people sued was trivial compared to the people who were file-sharing.
I think it boils down to this: if you are not in the marketplace, your stuff will be pirated. So get in the digital marketplace and "close the buggy-whip factory" already.
It remains to be seen whether Origin can gain any traction as a (currently) single publisher platform, but it is required by their new releases, just like Steam back at Half-Life 2's release.
When 90% of the world gets the game in January, and you get the game in July, you feel pretty screwed. Everyone has already explored and spoiled everything. There's very few people left to have a discussion about anything, because they already know. You get to watch everyone else play the game, wishing you could.
That's assuming the game EVER comes to your country. It might not.
And you'll probably pay more for the privilege, even though the game is worth less, for the reasons stated above.
That is, unless you pirate it.
Localization isn't just bureaucratic nonsense that was conjured up to aggravate gamers in foreign countries - the games actually need to be translated to the local language.
As for if you were living in one of those countries as an expat, as you suggest, that's a very small market and not worth pursuing.
This was especially true a few years back, when some publishers wouldn't release games in the UK until the "European" translation was finished!
TV Series do get around the moment they get on a torrent site, but many many people can follow them thanks to the subtitles provided by fellow viewers. If not they would have a harder time following them.
Uh. No.
Also, most games are not translated at all.
Point is that localization really isn't the only thing that delays a launch in, for instance, Sweden. I guess we have to wait for it to be localized to other parts of Europe before we get to play it in English (or German, but I'd guess that few Swedes prefer German over English). Which is just stupid.
And if it really is translated to Swedish you'd pick English anyway (exception: if you are a group of friends it can be quite fun to laugh at the poor translation).
In a country where you don't dub movies/TV you get quite good at understanding English at a young age and in such a country I don't really think gamers would prefer a localized version anyway.
Steam uses region codes, much like DVDs, to deny you the language of your choice - because they screw with prices by area and don't want to lose this ability.
Even Steam's DRM is too much. If for whatever reason they disable your account or some of your games there's nothing you can do. Your games are just gone. As if someone came in and cut up your DVDs. Except that if you had had DVDs you could just re-download them and your keys would still work.
That's because it can't be broken. You can't break what isn't there. Pre-load only downloads 99% of the game. Let the user download the game sans a few important bits, say the entire executable, and upon release enable download for the last tiny bit. Most retail games release weeks early because it's impossible to stop once the disc hits manufacturing.
Retail discs that require one-time Steam activation can be uncrackable because those important bits aren't on the physical disc. Once a Steam game is unlocked for play it's immediately cracked and released into the wild.
I'm not sure what you mean. If you mean that there's been no Steam game that has not been pirated before it was released, I know for a fact the recent game "Orcs Must Die" was pirated. I was impressed playing it at a friends place, tried to buy it on Steam when I got back home but it hadn't been released yet.
Well lucky you. Steam is no better in this regard than anyone else though; they do region lockouts. Valve doesn't with their games afaik, but Steam certainly does.
The sooner the content world gets rid of silly region restrictions the better we will all be. It is ridiculous that even with trade agreements North American companies insist on charging non-US customers more for a usually sub-par service.
Region coding should be illegal. Or rather, enforcing it.
People choose to become 'pirates' because no one is forcing them to play video games. They have choices—pay for a game, don't play a game (A horrible thing to suggest, I know) or get a game without paying for it (Often called pirating). It's always amused me that people seem to speak of playing videogames as some right that they have and how dare anyone take that away from them.
Add to this that the translations are often very badly broken - my eyes and ears bleed when I play French versions of games. I actually prefer to get the english version through Steam, and I am sure a sizeable fraction of players would agree.
The only successful localization ive seen to date is stracraft2 - so good that I didnt even bother redownloading the english version from Blizzard. Admittedly i havent even been checking out most localized versions for a while - so it may have been improving lately without me noticing.
Translations are often bad and delayed. This is as true for games as it is true for movies or books. I hate it. The obvious solution is to just get the english versions.
But the worst thing is, there is often no legal or practical way to get the english version. Books are easy. You can get just about any english book through Amazon (.de, .fr, .etc). Movies are somewhat bad. DVDs usually include english language. iTunes doesn't feature (many) english movies, but Ebay sells US iTunes gift cards. Games are actually really hard. It is possible to order from Amazon UK or Amazon US, but shipping will be weeks and there is a good chance you will have to pay customs. Steam requires a VPN and a foreign account and a credit card proxy (Entropay works fine). Not what you would call convenient.
If people can't take the time to read the article, they shouldn't comment. Period.
And yes, I almost always check the comments before reading the article (but I always read the article before commenting).
The only way to stop piracy is:
1) give all of your stuff out for free 2) have a service that can't be pirated
The reason big companies don't want piracy to become mainstream is because at a certain point, it becomes part of culture and "normal" to just pirate something, which means they won't be able to charge money for it (everyone will expect it for free). This is exactly what is starting to happen.
Back in 1999, there was no antipiracy technology, yet piracy was just as rampant as it is today. We have: Last.fm, Pandora, Youtube, Grooveshark, etc,etc. Yet, people still pirate music.
It's funny because back when Napster first started, everyone said that the artists weren't getting treated right, so that's why they were downloading music. Now that any artist can pretty music start a website with no record label, those reasons have changed.
I don't think it has anything to do with any of those reasons. Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money on something they can just as easily get for free.
This parallels many of the people protesting wall street: Just as investing in an education doesn't mean you are guaranteed a good job, investing your time and effort in software, music, and movies doesn't mean you are guaranteed a profit.
Do they really?
I remember 15 years ago when a lot of my friends started building mp3 libraries, ripping the CDs they had, and downloaded huge amounts of music.
Now, none of my friends have their libraries anymore, or care about it at all. They use Spotify, or Last.fm, or something similar and never pirate music, because it's simply too much work to do it, compared to just searching for exactly what they want in some paid service.
Yet, people still pirate music.
It's also the case that some people will always pirate stuff -- but does it really matter when the market got a lot bigger? To me it's really not an issue of price -- BUT I do refuse paying for crappy content or for content that's too expensive relative to my monthly revenue.
The biggest problems with the movies/music industries for example is not piracy, but crappy content. For instance I go watch movies at my local movie theater, and I regret paying for 25% of all movies I'm seeing, even though I'm pretty selective about it. That's just sad.
Nobody wants to spend their hard-earned money
on something they can just as easily get for free.
Other things would be convenience (searching for stuff on PirateBay is totally not fun), free online backup (100 GB on DropBox is $20 / month - and with my current needs, I would need 3 times that storage and constantly growing) and the insurance that you're buying quality.
You see, even if people prefer Free all the time, people also think that quality reflects directly in the price paid. That's why people still buy Nike shoes, even though there are hundreds of brands producing cheaper clones with reasonable quality.
And back to searching on PirateBay, I can't count the number of times I downloaded something, only to find that it was not what I wanted or that it was of poor quality. Sometimes whole hours would pass until I found something that I liked, or until I gave up.
And that's the thing -- some people will always pirate, but other people will prefer buying if it is more convenient. And yet other people have this feeling of accomplishment when rewarding authors that they like (me included) ... like 2 days ago I bought a copy of an ebook called "The Making of Prince of Persia", even though you can find the whole book in the author's blog.