Would you buy Civ5 if it was only offered on Steam?

[wodan11]

How the hell is anybody supposed to answer that?

The same way they answer when they say that not doing DRM makes just as much money.

[Concrete Donkey]

I've never been a big fan of not having a box or a disc in my collection. I've had steam installed on my computers ever since Half Life 2 came out but until this Christmas I had never actually bought anything through the service. With the crazy cheap deals they were doing over the holiday period though I couldn't resist and was impressed with the hassle free way of buying games. I still haven't bought anything full price on there but if it was the only way to buy a new Civ game I wouldn't hesitate. I also wouldn't care if a disc version required it and would buy that instead.

[Ming]

Unlike "some" people who hang the boxes on the wall, or use the tin as stash boxes... I see no reason to have to buy something "physical" anymore. It's so much easier to buy it online. No discs to lose or break... no box sitting on a shelf that I will never look at again... I guess some people feel they need something physical when they buy something, but it's a digital world now.

[Felch]

The same way they answer when they say that not doing DRM makes just as much money.

Burden of proof falls on those who support the DRM. So far there is no evidence that games with DRM do better than games without. Anecdotally, I pointed out World of Goo, which has no DRM and has been fantastically successful in spite of piracy. Has Assassins Creed 2 had the same success on the PC?

[rah]

Unlike "some" people who hang the boxes on the wall, or use the tin as stash boxes... I see no reason to have to buy something "physical" anymore. It's so much easier to buy it online. No discs to lose or break... no box sitting on a shelf that I will never look at again... I guess some people feel they need something physical when they buy something, but it's a digital world now.

The only possible exception to this is the RULE BOOK. I'd rather read something in booklet form, and I'd hate to print out a 100+ page document. But since the rule books have been somewhat useless these days, this may not be as important. I still remember reading the one for IV vanilla. When I got BTS I was already aware of the changes so buying it on D2D wasn't an issue.

[wodan11]

Burden of proof falls on those who support the DRM.

Umm, no. Burden of proof falls on those who advocate changing the status quo.

So far there is no evidence that games with DRM do better than games without.

And I imagine there's no evidence that games without DRM do better than games with.

Anecdotally

An anecdote is not evidence.

Anecdotally, I pointed out World of Goo, which has no DRM and has been fantastically successful in spite of piracy.

Anecdotally, we have thousands of games which have DRM and have made billions. World of Goo made $4.8M revenue in 2009. Other games make $5M in a month.

WoG has an estimated 85% piracy rate. Meanwhile, overall piracy rate in the U.S. is approx 21%.
If WoG achieved the 21% rate, they would change $4.8M to $33M.

[SpencerH]

Rule book? Games come with rule books? And players read them? Never happens!

[wodan11]

On the subject of rulebooks... they're more essential than is sometimes believed. While it's true that sometimes they're pretty superfluous and I think games include them just because they're expected. To a great extent it depends on the quality of the in-game help. For example, RifE is a truly awesome mod. However, they are behind on updating the Civilopedia. As well as the 3rd party rulebook (which was made for FFH, actually, I think). So, as a player sometimes it's frustrating not knowing how things work.

But that's all about rulebooks in general. As long as you can task swap out of the game and look at a pdf, there's no real reason to have a printed rulebook.

[Felch]

Wodan, status quo never involved DRM like this before. So you're the one who wants to change things, let's just be honest about that for a second. And your assumption that WoG would make more with DRM is based on a pretty obvious logical fallacy. You're begging the question by assuming that DRM would have lowered piracy rates and increased sales when that is exactly what we're trying to discuss here. Considering that WoG made 4.8M on less than .1M in costs shows that you can have outstanding RoI without DRM.

DRM doesn't work. Every game that has been protected has been cracked. So it clearly has no impact on pirates. It does have an effect on legitimate purchasers, as we've pointed out.

By the way, an anecdote is evidence, it's just not very strong evidence. Since you don't have any actual figures that prove your point, you might just want to hush up. If you had real figures, showing identical games in different markets, one using DRM and the other not, then I might be inclined to listen to your horse****. As it is, you've got nothing more than fallacious reasoning and pedantry to back your claims. Why anybody in their right mind would support DRM is completely beyond me. It does nothing to hamper pirates and only serves to inconvenience legitimate customers.

[wodan11]

Wodan, status quo never involved DRM like this before.

In other words, its setting new ground. Thus, a change to the status quo.

So you're the one who wants to change things, let's just be honest about that for a second.

Sure. I'd love it if all games didn't have any DRM. It's inconvenient.

Considering that WoG made 4.8M on less than .1M in costs shows that you can have outstanding RoI without DRM.

Oh, so we're talking about design & production cost. Which has absolutely nothing to do with piracy and DRM. Someone could use the WoG "design model" (which amounts to two guys making a game in their basement) and include DRM. It's irrelevant to the discussion.

DRM doesn't work. Every game that has been protected has been cracked.

I'm not aware of any game which used a hardware DRM, as I suggested might be a good alternative and a new application of technology which has some pros vs the cons. The closest to this suggestion are consoles which use actual plug-in modules instead of discs.

So it clearly has no impact on pirates.

That doesn't follow, logically. Just because some pirates cracked a game does not mean all pirates cracked it. And, the inherent problem with WoG is that it was a free download to the public at large. No crack was required. This was in fact an enabler, and increased the number of pirates; in effect, it changed some legitimate purchasers into pirates. Whereas, any DRM at all would have eliminated that increase.

It does have an effect on legitimate purchasers, as we've pointed out.

As does no DRM at all, as I just pointed out.

By the way, an anecdote is evidence, it's just not very strong evidence. Since you don't have any actual figures that prove your point, you might just want to hush up. If you had real figures, showing identical games in different markets, one using DRM and the other not, then I might be inclined to listen to your horse****.

But you don't have any "real figures" either, so aren't you spouting horse**** too? That's kind of two-faced of you, I think.

As it is, you've got nothing more than fallacious reasoning and pedantry to back your claims. Why anybody in their right mind would support DRM is completely beyond me. It does nothing to hamper pirates and only serves to inconvenience legitimate customers.

Because your assumption that "it does nothing" is not true, and thus your logic falls apart.

Admit it: neither of us have any hard data upon which to base any kind of conclusion. An anecdote is worth than useless. All we have is wishful thinking and conjecture.

[Brael]

If Civ5 was only available on Steam, I would buy it on Steam. If it were offered physically elsewhere, even at a higher price I would go elsewhere. The reason is that there's not a whole lot of game franchises I actually like. The ones I do like, I enjoy having the box for.

Well of course they are. But not that much more, and it's a moot point: you're looking purely at the manufacturing cost. The company would easily recoup the extra expense by reducing losses to pirates. And, what about distribution costs? I'm not willing to postulate that it'll be cheaper to distribute but I can see how it might be.

USB drives are cheap but not free. Lets say a drive for the hardware key costs $3, at a minimum that's a $3 increase to an ~$50 game or a 6% increase in the cost. If it's $5 it's a 10% increase. Both of those assume there's no markup on the key portion of the price on the retail side of things as well. In the end, the price change wouldn't really change any customers mind about buying things, but it would represent an additional upfront investment for the company. A higher investment on the games distribution means a smaller budget for the games development.

Reducing losses to pirates isn't a big way to get more profit though. A pirated game isn't a physical object, it's a virtual object which costs nothing to duplicate an unlimited number of times. There's no material loss to piracy, there's only lost sales and the fact of the matter is, a pirated game doesn't translate to a lost sale. In a game like civ which really is a niche market, the only people that are going to play the game in the first place are the ones that actually like the genre. The others will either pirate the game and play it for a week, or if that weren't possible be perfectly content to not play it at all.

And I imagine there's no evidence that games without DRM do better than games with.

This depends on just how much copy protection there is. Spore had such a problem with piracy because of the attitude of the developers. Not only did they basically go out and challenge people to crack it by saying it would be nearly impossible to crack, but the pirated version treated the customers better. The real version treated the honest paying customer like a criminal while the pirated version bypassed all that and treated the pirate like an honest paying customer. If you're trying to play the game, ethics aside which version would you have rather had?

An anecdote is not evidence.

Unfortunately here's some more anecdotes for you, and worse they're not even first hand. There's a company named Spiderweb Software. It's an independent game company with something like 3 employees, one guy makes all the games (rpg's) and they've come out with several over the years, I've been playing their games since 1998 and find them to be rather fun.

Occasionally this developer writes articles about piracy, for awhile he had a regular column on a game site and he's put a few up on his own website. Being an indie developer he's pretty much confined to niche games that major studios don't bother with, in much the same way that turn based strategy is a niche that studios don't bother with much, though civ still has probably 100x this guys customers if not more.

I've always liked the outlook this developer has had towards piracy. The reason I like it is that it makes sense to me, and it's coming from someone that's been successful in the industry with first hand knowledge of his sales figures and what copy protection has brought him the most profit over the years. Anyways, that outlook is that piracy is so rampant that anyone that wants your game for free can have it. What this means is those who are your customers aren't really customers anymore. That buy button on a website might as well be a paypal donate link because it's effectively doing the same thing so customers should be approached in the same fashion. In short, do the exact opposite of what Spore did:
Treat your customers like they're honest rather than criminals
Ignore the pirates, they're not giving you money... use that time/energy to focus on those who are
Convince people to want to give you money rather than trying to prevent them from not giving you money

To me, it makes sense and kind of goes along with what I've always thought. I see the players of any given game in one of three categories. Those who pay, those who will pirate but pay if they had to, and those who won't pay no matter what. DRM tends to focus on (unsuccessfully) stomping out that large group of the last category when it's that smaller number of people in the middle category that you need to pay attention to. Giving the paying customers more attention and ensuring they have a good time keeps people in the will pay category. Focusing on piracy at the expense of your customers experience just makes more people look towards piracy to have a good time.

Anyways, I don't really have all the answers. What I can say though is when I play civ or any other game I want to install it as quickly as my dvd drive can read the data, go through a minimum of hassle with looking for cd keys, and then click play and be able to play the game without any additional hoops to jump through. If the game does that, I'm happy. If it doesn't, I'm not happy

I will say though that one thing concerns me with hardware keys, and that's that you can be in real trouble if you lose it. I've got a program called motionbuilder that I use, it has a hardware key. One day I lost that key. That was not a good day for me (though I did eventually find it).

Oh, one other thing

WoG has an estimated 85% piracy rate. Meanwhile, overall piracy rate in the U.S. is approx 21%.
If WoG achieved the 21% rate, they would change $4.8M to $33M.

Where did you get that statistic? 21% seems very very very low to me. I've seen companies estimate 70%-90% piracy rates and games which have online high score submissions have been able to track sales vs submitters to find rates of ~75% piracy. That 21% just doesn't fit with everything I've read on the subject in the past.

[Proteus_MST]

Would you buy Civ5 if it was only offered on Steam?

Dunno,
depends on a lot of unknowns, especially
1. How good (and bugfree) will the game be (especially compared to Civ IV)
2. How much time do I have at hand (it is a bad thing to begin playing a game which will lead to a one more turn syndrome, if you haven´t enough free time to play it...either you get frustrated because you cannot play the game often enough, or your job suffers )

I would definitely prefer to get a CD/DVD version of the game...
but if it is good enough I might think about buying it via Steam

[Felch]

Wodan, as long as we're willing to agree that this is all horse**** and conjecture on both sides, I'm cool with that. All we have are our personal viewpoints, and mine is that DRM is less than worthless since it punishes legitimate customers and does nothing to deter piracy.

Related question: Does anyone know of any game that is piracy proof? WoW comes close, but I know a guy who played a pirated version on a private server.

Brael - Spiderweb makes great oldschool RPGs. The Exile/Avernum series is fun as hell. And they're able to stay in business by keeping costs down. If your costs to produce and market a title are in the 50 - 200k range, you'll be able to make money on a relatively low selling title. It's the companies that throw 10 million at a game who need to see a gazillion sales in the first week. I'd like to see the industry move toward lower cost production methods. Two guys in a basement can make as good of a game as anybody.

[Brael]

All games can be pirated. The closest to a game you can't pirate is an MMO because you're paying for access to a certain companies server. Just about every MMO has private servers though. However, those servers are used by a much smaller portion of the playerbase.

Two guys in a basement can make as good of a game as anybody.

They can certainly make a fun game, but large studio releases have more people to throw around into every department. Two people, no matter how hard they work or how much talent they have in everything aren't going to be able to put in the raw hours necessary to create something 100 people are working on so there's always going to be a gap in the art and content.

It's an interesting point about costs though. Dragon Age: Origins (rated one of the best 2009 titles) according to mobygames has 203 different jobs in it's credits with 912 total credits given to 903 people. That's a lot more people you need to sell to in order to make a profit.

I don't think you'll see the industry move towards lower cost games any time soon though, hardware keeps advancing and in order to take advantage of it you need more and more people to create more and more stuff for the games. If we were all still playing on commodore 64's and atari's the art department wouldn't need as many people for example, but with high definition, insane video cards, and so on... there's a need for more artists. The same is true on the programming side of things, as you get faster processors you're able to make more complicated code and do cooler things.

[wodan11]

USB drives are cheap but not free. Lets say a drive for the hardware key costs $3, at a minimum that's a $3 increase to an ~$50 game or a 6% increase in the cost. If it's $5 it's a 10% increase. Both of those assume there's no markup on the key portion of the price on the retail side of things as well. In the end, the price change wouldn't really change any customers mind about buying things, but it would represent an additional upfront investment for the company. A higher investment on the games distribution means a smaller budget for the games development.

The game would be able to deduct the cost of the CDs, let's say that's $1. So, that will defer part of the cost.

For the rest, presumably the executives at 2K are convinced there's value in DRM, and would pay for the added cost out of the (possibly misguided) conviction that it would increase sales (by virtue of reducing the piracy %).

Reducing losses to pirates isn't a big way to get more profit though. A pirated game isn't a physical object, it's a virtual object which costs nothing to duplicate an unlimited number of times. There's no material loss to piracy, there's only lost sales and the fact of the matter is, a pirated game doesn't translate to a lost sale. In a game like civ which really is a niche market, the only people that are going to play the game in the first place are the ones that actually like the genre. The others will either pirate the game and play it for a week, or if that weren't possible be perfectly content to not play it at all.

That's somewhat true, but such a generalization does not hold 100% of the time. I'm not sure it would even hold 50% of the time.

Consider WoG... as I mentioned, the ease of pirating (no technical expertise necessary, anybody or their grandma could just DO it) can in fact be an enabler. By making it more difficult, the "casual piraters" are eliminated. And some % of those people are those who "actually like the genre" as you say.

This depends on just how much copy protection there is. Spore had such a problem with piracy because of the attitude of the developers. Not only did they basically go out and challenge people to crack it by saying it would be nearly impossible to crack, but the pirated version treated the customers better. The real version treated the honest paying customer like a criminal while the pirated version bypassed all that and treated the pirate like an honest paying customer. If you're trying to play the game, ethics aside which version would you have rather had?

Ideally, any DRM does not include such a bias. Ideally, it's totally transparent to the user.

THAT is why some people (such as Felch) have such a bug up their rear about DRM. Because it's intrusive and annoying.

I will say though that one thing concerns me with hardware keys, and that's that you can be in real trouble if you lose it. I've got a program called motionbuilder that I use, it has a hardware key. One day I lost that key. That was not a good day for me (though I did eventually find it).

My suggestion has the game stored on the USB drive, so it's a little different than your standard "hardware key". In fact, the DRM would be totally transparent; it would be best to be marketed as a way to have a totally transportable game from computer to computer, no wear & tear on your hard drive, etc.

Where did you get that statistic?

Google pointed to a couple articles in IGN.

21% seems very very very low to me. I've seen companies estimate 70%-90% piracy rates and games which have online high score submissions have been able to track sales vs submitters to find rates of ~75% piracy. That 21% just doesn't fit with everything I've read on the subject in the past.

21% is the U.S. rate. The rate for east Asia is about 75% as I recall.

Wodan, as long as we're willing to agree that this is all horse**** and conjecture on both sides, I'm cool with that. All we have are our personal viewpoints, and mine is that DRM is less than worthless since it punishes legitimate customers and does nothing to deter piracy.

Sure. Mine is that DRM is has some value since it punishes legitimate custoers and does some undetermined (yet > 0) amount to deter piracy.

Anyway, meh.

Related question: Does anyone know of any game that is piracy proof? WoW comes close, but I know a guy who played a pirated version on a private server.

But WoW requires an internet connection, so it has that going against it. At least to the CIV market, many of whom like CIV because it's portable and can be played anywhere.

Brael - Spiderweb makes great oldschool RPGs. The Exile/Avernum series is fun as hell. And they're able to stay in business by keeping costs down. If your costs to produce and market a title are in the 50 - 200k range, you'll be able to make money on a relatively low selling title. It's the companies that throw 10 million at a game who need to see a gazillion sales in the first week. I'd like to see the industry move toward lower cost production methods. Two guys in a basement can make as good of a game as anybody.

But what they don't have is anything but grassroots marketing and anything resembling mass market distribution to retail channels.

Entrepreneurs are healthy for any industry, but they aren't ever going to get rid of the tried-and-true performers. Unless the entrepreneur model can be successful 100% of the time, real game companies aren't going to do it. They make games because their demographics and projections say selling X copies will break even, and they expect to sell Y, which tells how much money they'll make.

If and when the entrepreneur model becomes successful 100% of the time, that's when 2 guys in their basement will put 2K and Blizzard and everybody else out of business.

Until then, all we have are one or two success stories in the backdrop of a bunch of failures. We don't ever hear about them.