There is no solution to the issue of protecting intellectual property (IP) that will satisfy all parties.  There are customers who will accept nothing less than publishers acquiescing to a quasi-honor system for purchasing software. That doesn’t work.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are publishers who want customers to have an always-on Internet connection to play a single player game.  They have every right to require they if they want but it will cost them tremendously in terms of good will and sales.

So what are the issues people have with DRM?

·         Legitimate: They don’t want the copy protection to interfere with their enjoyment or use of the software or game.

·         Legitimate: If a program wants to have a limited activation system, then it needs to provide a way to de-authorize other computers (ala iTunes).

·         Legitimate: A program should not be installing drivers or other hidden files on the system that use system resources.

·         Legitimate: Activation-based DRM means that if the publisher goes out of business or simply stops supporting the game or software or music that the customer can no longer use their legally purchased item.

·         Legitimate: Having an arbitrarily low limit on personal activations makes the program feel like it’s being rented.

·         Legitimate: Requiring the user to be always on-line to play a single player game. Though we do think publishers have the right to require this as long as they make it clear on the box.

·         Borderline: Requiring the user to have an Internet connection to install a game.

·         Not legitimate: Keeps people from installing the program on as many PCs as they own. I own an office full of PCs. I don’t think Microsoft would be happy if I installed Office on all of them.

·         Not legitimate: Keeps people from easily having LAN parties with their game. We allow this but demonizing publishers who frown on this seems unreasonable.

·         Not legitimate: Requires people to get updates through a specific source (Steam, Impulse, publisher secure website, etc.). This is one of our biggest pet peeves. If a game ships and there’s some bug found that materially affects game play, then sure, put out a patch wherever. But we’ve had users complain loudly that Sins of a Solar Empire v1.1 (essentially a free expansion pack) requires Impulse to download. Publishers have every right to make sure the people downloading updates are legitimate customers.  There are some customers that companies are better off not having IMO.

·         Not legitimate: Makes it harder for people to resell programs. (not saying reselling programs is right or wrong only that it is not the function of DRM to make it hard or easy to do this, it’s a different issue).

·         Not legitimate: DRM is just wrong in principle, you buy something, you own it and should be able to do whatever you want.  This is a view held by some but the person who makes the thing has the right to distribute it how they want. If I spend $5 million making a game, someone paying $50 doesn’t “own” it. There has to be some middle ground on serving customers and protecting IP holders.

Stardock’s position is that IP holders have the right to do whatever they want with their IP. But that doesn’t mean what they do is necessarily a good idea or good business.

For our games, we will continue the policy of releasing our retail games without any copy protection or DRM on it.  But we will require customers who want updates to download them from us and to make sure those updates are meaningful – not just bug fixes but actual improvements based on player feedback.

But on other games, we think it’s legitimate if publishers want to require activation to install the game. I don’t pretend to know whether the sales lost by users who have no Internet connection is greater than the sales gained from less piracy will work out favorably.  I don’t think there’s any problem requiring a user to type in a unique serial # on installing a program.

We do think there’s a problem having a user be told they can’t use a program anymore because they installed it 3 or 5 times over the course of the past year – and this isn’t an obscure problem. There’s plenty of software, not just games, where this has become a significant and obnoxious issue.

That's the essential reasoning to me... the 'gaming' industry (as a whole, btw) stands at a crossroad where they will have to select the most reasonable way;

LEFT side; user(s) total satisfaction.

RIGHT; business concerns, like innovation to products & profits allowing anything to actually take place within feasible time.

Sure, the Internet (which btw, i also pay for each and every month to an ISP) 'seems' to be the all_in_one future (for best or worst)... but when i install a game (upon my own freewill, after spending money, cuz i want it) it must be made clear that the value remains over a minimal number of leisure years. Buy anything today, you'd still want a certain sense of property (thus, why i was using the term *owning a game* localized on my very costly PC gear) & at least, the feeling that **A** distributor is going along with it for more than just an activation process.

Upgrades being some sort of bonus, the actual design of a title does matter once you realize -- the looping effect of returning customers. I doubt anyone could survive in these days where consuming has to be done parallel to the industrial infra-structure (provided it's present & of quality) without knowing somebody cares about their followers.

It's a win_win situation -- if one aims for innovative business decisions and *STAYS* ahead of the competition by daring to use whatever means necessary to satisfy the upcoming (web-based) second wave of consumers.

Protect my investment (with any tricks of your choice!) by giving me almost continual value for an equally valuable spending - and, i'll be the first to go along side... be it right or left.

(PS; not trying to suggest another or different "way" to run your own business, Frogboy... but, i've got a bit of experience with some of that stuff and had my fair share of success in the past.)

Frogboy, I tend to agree with most your points, but I have a few things I wanted to point out (to you, and to your detractors)...

1.

Why doesn't it work? this is already almost the state. I only say almost because due to the current scene state (delays in cracking patches, and only crack them for popular games with few patches), your frequent updates, and the awareness of stardock games (stardock is still not as "big" as blizzard or EA, so it gets less attention from crackers), that your system actually means that pirates are playing outdated versions, so your system serves its purpose. But I just found "GC2TA1.96bins.zip" in a quick search. (cracking of later versions of stardock games has been increasing very quickly as it becomes more and more popular and well known).

I foresee that soon all stardock games would be cracked almost immidiately, thus rendering into a pure "honor-system" (although by going through impulse, a person has a convinient one place stop to update everything, pirates have to redownload the entire game from p2p and risk a virus every time).

2. Some people have pointed that stardock says "No DRM" where it actually means is "non obtrosive, transperant almost all legit user (anyone with broadband might aswell not be aware of its existance), no risk of damaging system files, and generally acceptable to people DRM". I personally hate DRM, but I am A-OK with stardocks unusual and tame DRM. But they have a point that saying "no DRM at all" is misleading. Still, I consider stardock to be a "nice" company overall, not an "abusive" one like EA or Sony, not even average; but above average.

3. 

Intellectual property is such a vague umbrela term. It encompases completely different things into one pair of words. You are only really dealing and even discussing software / video games here. So saying "protecting software" or "software and games" makes more sense. Since you are not "installing with an internet connection" a song, a picture, a patent, or a trademark...

BTW... people have been pointing out that your DRM necessitates an internet connection to install a game... that is a fallacy. Since installing from a CD requires no internet connection, and installing from THE INTERNET already requires you to have an internet connection to download the game... Anyone who downloads the game instead of using a CD, obviously has an internet connection. There is no situation where an internet connection is needed unnecessarily (aka, you will not be required to have an interenet connection to play an offline game, or to install a game off of a CD).

Sorry Frogboy, but I can steal any game I want to right now.  You're already working off the honor system.  The software industry has been on the honor system since creation, and it's not going to change short of killing itself.  When people that want to are no longer downloading a couple hundred gigs in pirated material every month in spite of the protections, maybe you'll have a leg to stand on.

You are right in the first part, getting the "0 day" version of the game / first week of a game is where pirates tend to focus on.  Getting updates, by contrast, is much more difficult.  For example, I can easily find warez versions of WindowBlinds 6 (major release). Much harder to find warez of WindowBlinds 6.3.  Same with Sins of a Solar Empire. Easy to find 1.03, harder to find v1.1.  

It's not that updates are harder to crack, they're not. The issue is about convenience. Time is money. People who buy games tend to value their time. This is one of the reasons why they are so hostile to obnoxious DRM because it wastes their time.  A guy who is willing to spend a lot of time trying to cobble together updates is not someone who's going to buy a game in the first place. But there are plenty of casual pirates who will simply warez the initial game, decide they like it and then when they see the game's gotten an update find it's just more convenient to buy the game and they like it anyway.

I personally know of specific cases where this is exactly what happened with galciv2.

I would HOPE they meant "own" as in "own a copy/license" and not as in "I own it and if I wanna I can give copies to all my friends and post them on a torrent". Cause otherwise i'd have to lose another sliver of faith in humanity.

Even with the extra popularity of stardock games and the extra pirating attention, the latest pirate version of GC2 for example, is 1.96, I am playing 1.99 beta as a paying customer. And there is no need to redownload the whole game for a patch. So there is a definite convinience factor for ownership here. (not INCONVINIENCE like in normal DRM...)

Exactly and the activation protection in GalCiv II is trivial compared to say WindowBlinds which has a much larger installed base than Galactic Civilizations and is a case where we put in effort to protect. Try finding a working copy of WindowBlinds 6.3. WindowBlinds takes the extra step of torrent poisoning.  You can't stop piracy but you can definitely keep it from being an "honor system" setup if you want too.  

But since we aren't big into DRM on our own stuff in general, it's not something we lose sleep on.  The question is what publishers and users can agree on together.

It took me, on my uber shitty satellite connection, less than five seconds from reading to find a 1.1 beta torrent of Sins.  I wont hold it against TPB for not having a new beta version of an expansion for a game over two years old.

I downloaded the CC demo before it was released, I have plenty of friends that downloaded the full Spore game before it was released.  Mass Effect was fully cracked four days after it was released, cracked day one with a flaw.  Nearly everything ends up on the internet.  You may not want to call it the honor system, but I can bloody well steal damn near anything I want to with ten seconds of looking.

The only reason any software companies have my business is because I choose to give it to them for philosophical and logical reasons.  A time premium of a couple days, or not having the latest beta version is meaningless to me.

You're *alsooooo* hilarious, btw.

If there is only one good reason to buy a game from anybody, to me it is more about honesty (the real solid perspective of one's life principles).

As to when all other excuses not to must be used somehow, is certainly one too many obstacle to social & economic equilibrium. Call me an idealistic freak with an agenda still waaaayyyyy underneath the already busy justice network trying to put order in primal & cavern apes chaos.

By your own public admission, you're simply a thief and i have absolutely no respect for such people.

Nuf' said.

Well, if you look at reply #14 in this thread from a Stardock employee

You will see that their are indeed listening and trying to find solution. When the solution will be available is the next question

I am not surprised that you, psychoak, were able to find torrents easily.  However, just because you're into the hardcore warez scene doesn't mean the average person is.  I follow the warez sites fairly closely and *I* could not find it.  Now unless you want to argue that I'm less technically sophisticated than the average gamer, I think my point (written with my Draginol account) stands.

Here's the situation that the anti-DRM people don't want to be in:

You don't want the bell curve to be slanted to where 99% of users are okay with X and you're in the 1% that isn't okay with X.

My anti-copy protection position is well known but it isn't based on some utopian vision. I simply think that obnoxious copy protection results in more lost sales than it gains from people who buy games but casually pirate.

I don't think it takes that much "protection" to get people who casually pirate games to buy the game. But the hard-core warez guys are never going to buy anyway and anything you create will get cracked at some point.

Therefore, if you're in the position of having 99% or so of the user base not agreeing with you AND your position is that any protection at all is unacceptable, then most companies are going to simply choose to lose you as a customer.

Based on what I'm reading here, virtually everyone is okay with entering in a serial # when they install a game (our games don't require this) and requiring an Internet connection to install an internet-only available update. 

The best copy protection is a three-tier scheme.

1) Make a good game! FFS!!!!! If your game is crap, people will not want to pay for it.  Many games have lost sales not due to people who liked it pirating it opposed to buying... but to people who torrented it, and found out it sucked/was not as advertised/was buggy as hell.  If you make a good game, people will pay and support you - if you make a bad game, we'll not only NOT buy it, we'll tell other people not to, and we'll remember it the next time a game with your logo comes up on it.  Gamers are fiercely brand-loyal, and one bad game can effect your sales for years - case in point, I haven't touched any game with an Atari logo on the box for 2 years due to the way they handled Multiplayer for a Wii game I bought.  If they had a PC game coming out I really wanted, I'd torrent it first.

2) Light DRM, be it a serial key (Which is more than bearable) or a one-time activation for an internet game (either a downloaded game or one that is multiplayer-focused.)  I do not support internet activation for SP games bought at retail, or the SP portion of a game like Crysis which has SP and MP (had an issue with this, trying to install it on my laptop and forgot about the stupid internet activation requirement.)  I really support the digital distributation method (easy patches, easy validation, and more money can go to the developers, in theory.)

3) Content/updates that gives a value to a legitmate copy over a pirated one - Impule updates, multiplayer portion, shared content ala Spore, some reason to want to own a copy.  Make the actual ownership of a liscence, if you want to call it that, have more value.

Exactly. Some people will go to almost any length to avoid paying. If you can stop the casual copying you're doing great.

There is one downside(to me at least) to some of the newer copy protection on games, I can no longer share the game with a group of friends. As a way of saving money and still being able to play different games we used to pass games on as we finished them. Instead of buying half a dozen copies of every game we'd only get multiple copies of the ones we wanted to play against one another. This is probably a good thing from your point of view though, and your demos are still sufficient to allow the sharing

I'd like to add my voice to the ones wanting a way to install to a disconnected computer

The computer with internet isn't always the one I want to install the update on.