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Forums - Gaming Discussion - World of Goo publisher files for bankruptcy

Rhonin the wizard on 31 January 2009
The_vagabond7 said:
Mise said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Goes to show that piracy is a problem. People can complain that companies go crazy with DRM but it's because they are terrified of this sort of thing. People will go pirate crazy if you give them the chance.

People will pirate like crazy anyway. Anyone who wants to download a game will likely be able to do so within a week, or a month at absolute worst - without any DRM BS. Meanwhile all honest customers will have the potentially harmful protections to deal with, along with any other paranoid crap publishers choose to push on their discs. The illegal product will therefore be better AND free.

Piracy is a problem, yes - a problem DRM will never solve by itself.

 

Correct to an extent. But alot of people are just "casual" pirates that aren't going to put forth any effort to pirate something with DRM, but if they can just google "get this game for free" then they will do it. I'm guessing games with DRM don't have a 90% piracy rate. I'm not saying screwing the customer is good, but you have to empathize a bit when you see this sort of thing. They extend an olive branch to the gaming community in good faith that they will buy a great product at a cheap price, and their olive branch gets stolen. That doesn't send a good message to publishers that are deciding how hard to crack down on piracy.

Name one PC game with DRM that can't be pirated.

And as I said Brighter Minds published the PC retail version, the PC downloadable and WiiWare versions were published by 2Dboy.



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Kasz216 on 31 January 2009
The_vagabond7 said:
Goes to show that piracy is a problem. People can complain that companies go crazy with DRM but it's because they are terrified of this sort of thing. People will go pirate crazy if you give them the chance.


Does it?

I mean if we were in great economic times... MAYBE.

A company going bankrupt now isn't actually surprsing.



Godot on 31 January 2009

Well, piracy may be a problem on PC but it's not that much a problem on consoles. It just shows that you need a better business model on PC (Steam would be a good choice).



How many cups of darkness have I drank over the years? Even I don't know...

 

famousringo on 31 January 2009
The_vagabond7 said:
Mise said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Goes to show that piracy is a problem. People can complain that companies go crazy with DRM but it's because they are terrified of this sort of thing. People will go pirate crazy if you give them the chance.

People will pirate like crazy anyway. Anyone who wants to download a game will likely be able to do so within a week, or a month at absolute worst - without any DRM BS. Meanwhile all honest customers will have the potentially harmful protections to deal with, along with any other paranoid crap publishers choose to push on their discs. The illegal product will therefore be better AND free.

Piracy is a problem, yes - a problem DRM will never solve by itself.

 

Correct to an extent. But alot of people are just "casual" pirates that aren't going to put forth any effort to pirate something with DRM, but if they can just google "get this game for free" then they will do it. I'm guessing games with DRM don't have a 90% piracy rate. I'm not saying screwing the customer is good, but you have to empathize a bit when you see this sort of thing. They extend an olive branch to the gaming community in good faith that they will buy a great product at a cheap price, and their olive branch gets stolen. That doesn't send a good message to publishers that are deciding how hard to crack down on piracy.

 

Erm, that describes exactly how easy it is to get a DRM-cracked pirate version of a game. Torrents of protected software don't get a lot of hits, it's the cracked software that shows up in a Google search.

DRM makes no economic sense. It tries to persuade more people to buy a product by raising the cost of the product. Unless there's a compensating increase in benefits (Steam, Xbox Live), there's no way it can succeed.



"The worst part about these reviews is they are [subjective]--and their scores often depend on how drunk you got the media at a Street Fighter event."  — Mona Hamilton, Capcom Senior VP of Marketing
*Image indefinitely borrowed from BrainBoxLtd without his consent.

tmbh on 31 January 2009
Rhonin the wizard said:
tmbh said:
World of Goo had no DRM, serial number, registration or anything like that (PC version). They just provided me with an non secure direct download link and a message clearly stating there was no DRM etc.

Quite unbelievable that they would release a game like that, no wonder it had a 90% piracy rate!!

You do know DRM can be bypassed?

Duh! Yeah!

But not putting any sort of restriction/registration on it is crazy!

This is from my receipt:

"We are trying an experiment: World of Goo has absolutely no copy protection or DRM
at all, since we want to give you (and everyone) the best experience we can.
Thanks for not distributing this, and helping us make this possible!"

I just tried the original link it provided for me and it still works to download Mac and PC version!!



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Mise on 31 January 2009
The_vagabond7 said:
Mise said:
The_vagabond7 said:
Goes to show that piracy is a problem. People can complain that companies go crazy with DRM but it's because they are terrified of this sort of thing. People will go pirate crazy if you give them the chance.

People will pirate like crazy anyway. Anyone who wants to download a game will likely be able to do so within a week, or a month at absolute worst - without any DRM BS. Meanwhile all honest customers will have the potentially harmful protections to deal with, along with any other paranoid crap publishers choose to push on their discs. The illegal product will therefore be better AND free.

Piracy is a problem, yes - a problem DRM will never solve by itself.

 

Correct to an extent. But alot of people are just "casual" pirates that aren't going to put forth any effort to pirate something with DRM, but if they can just google "get this game for free" then they will do it. I'm guessing games with DRM don't have a 90% piracy rate. I'm not saying screwing the customer is good, but you have to empathize a bit when you see this sort of thing. They extend an olive branch to the gaming community in good faith that they will buy a great product at a cheap price, and their olive branch gets stolen. That doesn't send a good message to publishers that are deciding how hard to crack down on piracy.

Sins of the Solar Empire has no copy protection whatsoever, and it has neither crap sales (over 500k) or a 90% piracy rate. And it probably isn't the only small budget game that has done well without DRM.

Yeah, most people will just get the game for free if they can - I've personally been called a lot of (negative) things because I've - god forbid - BOUGHT games that can be easily downloaded off Piratebay. But putting crap like rootkits and StarForce on the media of those who actually buy their games isn't exactly the answer. I can see why they do it, and I disagree with them - if the legal product has more value and is more accessible to the consumer than the pirate download, they'll buy it.



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Katakis08 on 31 January 2009

Arcade Games always performed weak on PCs, only these housewife crap like Bejeweled sell well. I guess, that's only because the most customer don't know about pirate copies at all ;)

And by the way, 2Dboy did some nice cash with the WiiWare version. Also, they sold the distribution rights to many local territories (box version).

Roundabout, I bet they got ~3-5 million $ USD at least.



SSSBOLIMAR on 10 February 2009

:(