Dragon Age Forum News (Dec. 05, 04)

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Here are today's Dragon Age forum highlights, collected by NWVault. Please take into account that these are only single parts of various threads and should not be taken out of context. Bear in mind also that the posts presented here are copied as-is, and that any bad spelling and grammar does not get corrected on our end.

Georg Zoeller, Designer

This HL2 thing SUX !!! Will Bioware do the same ?

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It's bad marketing, as you can see throughout the topic, this kind of protection will make the product to lose some of its "potential" customers, and that aint good right?

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A copy protection has to balance the needs of the developer and publisher against the needs of the customer.

One way this could look like would be to ship the game with a media bound copy protection and allow the customer to register and get access to an authentification based protection so he can select whether he wants the "CD in drive" or "talk to masterserver" kind of protection.

Personally, living in broadband heaven Edmonton, I'd go with authentification any time so I could package away my precious CDs/DVDs, but I also see the other side as I couldn't get any broadband where I lived in germany.

In case of the Premium module, the decision for this kind of copy protection was made because it was already a part of NWN (multiplayer verification) and as such much cheaper than other solutions. A different protection could have been selected (and licensed for a lof of $$$), but it would have had impact on the pricing of the modules.

So, in short, the projected sales with a different price point (caused by a more expensive copy protection measure) and the projected sales for the "no copy protection" model were lower than the sales with a reused NWN multiplayer authentification.

All in all this discussion is kind of mood because

a) The publisher usually makes the ultimate call on the copy protection. Some publishers have license contracts running (i.e. for X years or for XXXX games) with copy protection vendors which they can not easily escape without losing cash - which is the reason why you see certain copy protections on every game made by a publisher

b) It's not likely to get publishing contracts without the copy protection clause.

c) Some major US retailers will not put your game on the shelves if it does not feature media bound copy protection.

BioWare's say in this matter is limited. If, by the time DA is released (in a few years) our publisher (which is not chosen yet) requires use of an online authentification mechanism, we would probably have to do it. We were not thrilled about SecuRom on NWN either, but we had no choice in that matter as well. You can expect similar situations to happen in the future as well.

Obviously we will try to push for a copy protection measure that our audience can live with and Derek has said multiple times on these boards already that he'll fight to death against certain kinds of things (i.e. stealth drivers installed on a customers system aka StarForce) and it's our policy to be open about it.


About copy protection

There is a simple misconception here. The mission statement for copy protection software is not to make copying impossible (every protection short of pay for play like in MMORPGs on a PC can be defeated with enough time, it's inherit to the PC architecture), it's to make it inconvenient. If you look at it from this perspective, yes, copy protection can suceed by reaching a certain point of inconvenience.

The level of inconvenience for each individual varies, the 15 year old nerd in school will jump great length with all kind of hacks to make his game work again after each update - at which point people with less spare time on their hands (job, married, children, etc) will just have caved in and bought the software.

The kid probably wouldn't have bought it anyway, even if he could have earned the cash to buy it in the time he needed to make it work, so it's not a big deal in the end - But the more mature player with less time (the PC game audience ages), a job and enough cash, would not have bought it if he could have conveniently copied it from a coworker will have bought the game because of the protection.

For the publisher this boils down to a simple question: sales recovered due to inconvenience >> sales lost due to people pissed off by copy protection. As long as the answer is "yes", I don't see any chance that they might drop this approach.

There are many ways to crank up inconvenience, from frequent patches, to limit patch access without registered CDKey, to Master Server Authentification to all kind of other shennenigans that ultimately will get the user to decide "bah, I'll just buy it" - and the copy protection was successful.

Short: be careful when flinging around "it doesn't work" - It entirely depends on your perception on how it should work to make that call.

More:

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Perhaps, but in doing so you incur tremendous costs that considerably outweigh the benefits from lack of piracy. The servers and lines required to run an MMORPG are not cheap... unless you plan to charge a monthly fee for bandwidth considerations alone, the idea of a singleplayer EQ is quite suicidal.

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The reason why it's safe is because a good chunk of the game code is not in the hand of the player. GuildWars is using the same thing - instant anti piracy measure.

Sure, someone might, at some point, come out with a server emulator for even these games, but that's just a lot more work than adding a few JMPs into an existing game.

More:

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The problem is, it's no more work to download HL2 off Bit Torrent than it is to download a similarly sized program with ZERO copy protection. (I've tried a little cracking in the past...and the speed with which these games come out illegally is impressive to say the least.)

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HL2 had no pre release piracy (as opposed to i.e. Doom 3) however, which is a *big deal* sales wise in a world where everyone wants the new toy the day it is released and possibly earlier.

How inconvenient however is downloading of bittorrent to you if you don't have broadband? And how fast will you get new updates and things like HL Deathmatch? Does it bother you that you can't join CS: Source multiplayer matches on AntiCheat servers? Does it bother you that BitTorrent does not mask your IP address and that you might get hit with a lawsuit at some point (whether or not it would stand in court does not matter, look at the RIAA lawsuits, most of them "settle" at the expense of the downloader)?

You might be able to answer all these questions with "it doesn't bother me", but you can bet that there is a good share of people who just find it too inconvenient to get torrent hunting again for every update and who want to play multiplayer on secure servers, etc. It's a matter of making it inconvenient enough for those people who would buy it but take the pirated copy if it's easy to get (for them).

It's all a matter of perspective, for the geek who is used to all this stuff, it's kind of easy to say "it's about as easy to steal it than to buy it"...

I'm not a huge fan of DRM, but some realism in the debate can't hurt - Just saying "it doesn't work" is quite far from the far more complex reality.