Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by programminggeek | Hacker News Reader

programminggeek

Treating your customers as humans is good business.

Customers pay and pirates plunder.

Software pirates will find a way to steal things they are unwilling to pay for. The smart companies in software will work to serve their customers and leverage the pirates for their one valuable quality - free marketing and distribution.

Another way to look at it is the reason the F2P + micro transactions works is the same reason that shareware works, lower the friction to enjoy the product and make it easy to share. Sharing is valuable.

Video game companies are so much hoping to stop piracy or used game sales that they forget that sharing a game with friends is free advertising and marketing for them.

If League of Legends wasn't free, I probably wouldn't have tried it, but because it is free to play a lot of my friends have played, purchased, and enjoyed the service. Apparently Team Fortress 2 makes 3x more money as F2P than a traditional $50 boxed game.

To me it boils down to getting your product into the hands of people who are willing to pay for it. If people aren't willing to pay for it without DRM, adding DRM won't make you more money, it will just piss off the people who were willing to pay you in the first place.

I'm kind of surprised how many of my hardcore gamer friends are anti Xbox One already simply because of the way MSFT is going to handle used games and DRM. They're losing the hearts and minds of their core market.

Selling game cheaply is good business, DRM has nothing to do with the success. Most of my games are on Steam (and most of games on Steam has DRM), I have 2 or 3 games on GOG. Only because they were cheaper on GOG when I wanted them. With a bad DRM you can easily lose customer but I don't think you actually lose customer if your DRM are well done.

Also Team Fortress 2 make 3x more money for 2 reasons. It's Valve, which has a HUGE fan base, and they sell crate that contains a random hat, which can be sold for money to someone else (in the end it act like a lottery where people think they will be able to get a rare hat that will be sold for hundreds of dollars on the market). I don't think you can reproduce these two things on every game.

But in addition to steam games being cheap, steam has turned into an absolutely wonderful service, no more worrying about serial codes or patches or losing the discs. I have a lot of games on steam that I haven't been able to play yet, but bought because I know I won't lose them

> no more worrying about serial codes or patches or losing the discs

So, Steam is better than the DRM you were used to before it. So much better that you prefer not to deal with the old DRM system at all...

That's not exactly a point against "DRM does always annoy the honest clients".

Except for games that use GFWL - the serial number has to be re-entered every time you install them, and they're tied to an email address you might not have one day.

but I don't think you actually lose customer if your DRM are well done.

In my view - no DRM can be well done, and some customers always will avoid DRMed services. So Steam loses some customers for sure. Many of them end up as GOG's customers naturally ;) Competing on DRM-free as a feature has its benefits.

Is this really true, or we suffering from Pauline-Kael syndrome here? How many people are actually aware of DRM outside of a rabid internet minority (and I include myself in that list)? It may lose some customers, but I bet its a minuscule fraction.

Is it true that people who dislike DRM prefer GOG over Steam and that DRM-free is one of the primary features that attracts many users to GOG? Yes, it is true. How many - I can't say exactly, but this subject is often brought up on GOG forums and site features feedback - you can read about it. Minority or not, GOG responds to this demand, while Steam doesn't, so GOG is more competitive in this particular aspect.

I don't doubt that - I've bought games on both platforms (Alpha Centauri on GOG = awesome). But the point is, amongst total games sales, I would like some degree of proof as to what the actual effect of the outrage is. Of course the GOG forums are DRM-angsty; that's part of why they are at GOG! What I don't know (truly - not being adversarial here) is whether DRM is a real factor for a substantial number of buying decisions, or not. The recent Sim City fiasco was probably the highest profile DRM-related brouhaha ever; - Rock Paper ShotGun, QT3, Polygon, all the gaming press (including the larger offline press like PC Gamer) covered it and expressed outrage, as did some mainstream media. And yet, best as I can tell it had little effect on actual sales (I'm open to being convinced I'm wrong on this).

http://www.joystiq.com/2013/05/07/simcity-sales-reach-1-6-mi...

What I don't know (truly - not being adversarial here) is whether DRM is a real factor for a substantial number of buying decisions, or not.

I'd be interested if someone could make a thorough research on these decision factors, but I'm really not sure what kind of methodology can be used for that. It's hard to measure such things for external researchers. Companies which participated in DRM fiascos (like the SimCity one) probably can estimate how many customers they lost in result, but they might not want to publish that information :)

Ironically though, lost sales caused by DRM won't necessarily make them change their minds about DRM. Some publishers executives can excuse failures of their low quality products by lost sales caused by piracy, so they use DRM to cover up their incompetence (i.e. "we are doing all we can!"). So additional lost sales won't convince them to drop that excuse for their products which fail just because there is no big demand for them. They'll claim it's because DRM wasn't yet strong enough, and pirates just cut their profits ;)

Actually, non-internet users are more likely to feel it, when they can't activate or play their games without a connection.

They at least need it to buy the game. But when it's DRM free they can do it somewhere, and then just bring the installer home.

I mean when you buy a disk, put it into your PC, and can't play it because there's no internet connection. Or when your internet cuts out and your game quits even if you're not playing online, just because the DRM can't phone home anymore.

Right, on-line DRM is one of the worst kinds.

I tend to only buy cheap games (or heavily discounted games) on Steam, partially because of their DRM. A game on Steam isn't bought, it's more of an indefinite lease. If Steam as a service shuts down, or something happens to my account, Valve isn't guaranteeing me access to my games (as far as I know).

I try to buy on GOG even if it's slightly more for games I wish to keep, archive the installer, and be able to revisit years into the future.

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