Timeframe on DX11 (Side Debate on the Effects of Piracy)

PC gaming has always been bigger than console.

It's just that PC gaming has changed from AAA titles to indie games and facebook games like farmville, besides MMORPGS.

The BIG problem with PC gaming is the money problem - because PC gaming typically experiences about 90% piracy (for every 10 gamers, only 1 person paid for it). For indie games, it's not a big issue - the piracy helps the games get popular and even with 90% piracy, it gets you more money than being stuck in obscurity. For AAA games, it's a big issue as the games basically just break even - the porting costs are paid for by sales. Which is why AAA games have horrible ports - they often have console like limitations and graphics because the PC port is effectively "worthless". And no, Steam is no protection - Valve has decided to use a very low-overhead DRM system - they would rather have people pirate games than impose some draconian DRM system. It's very easy to find a lot of Steam games pirated the very next day.

Of course, most PC gamers have Intel video cards - AMD and nVidia's sell very little compared to Intel. So going absolutely crazy on graphics can easily alienate and isolate a lot of people. (Ironically, there's a strong correlation between gamers and piracy - it's almost as if those who own an AMD or nVidia card pirate games because they're more experienced with PCs, and more adept at using piracy sites. EDIT: Sadly, I just checked a common one - yes, TPA is available with full DLC and Pro tables - this is the version BEFORE Fish Tales, so the latest isn't pirated, yet).

Indie games love mobile and PC development because it's easy - to develop on a console usually requires extensive agreements and special NDAs and many other rules (e.g., you need a secured office space that's controlled entry by authorized people). For this generation, it appears that the Big Three as abandoned those requirements for indie games (most of which are done in home offices and such).

So the eagerness to have high fancy graphics has to be tempered with the fact that most PC gamers don't have fancy graphics. Because most PC games don't really require it. One should also note that many "PC only" developers have expanded to consoles - Valve with their Steam for PS3, and even Blizzard porting their games to PS3 and Xbox. Because while the PC market is much bigger than consoles, consoles do have a LOT of money (mostly from being fairly piracy free - even at its worse, the Xbox360 experienced around 10%).

Worf said:

PC gaming has always been bigger than console.

It's just that PC gaming has changed from AAA titles to indie games and facebook games like farmville, besides MMORPGS.

The BIG problem with PC gaming is the money problem - because PC gaming typically experiences about 90% piracy (for every 10 gamers, only 1 person paid for it). For indie games, it's not a big issue - the piracy helps the games get popular and even with 90% piracy, it gets you more money than being stuck in obscurity. For AAA games, it's a big issue as the games basically just break even - the porting costs are paid for by sales. Which is why AAA games have horrible ports - they often have console like limitations and graphics because the PC port is effectively "worthless". And no, Steam is no protection - Valve has decided to use a very low-overhead DRM system - they would rather have people pirate games than impose some draconian DRM system. It's very easy to find a lot of Steam games pirated the very next day.

Of course, most PC gamers have Intel video cards - AMD and nVidia's sell very little compared to Intel. So going absolutely crazy on graphics can easily alienate and isolate a lot of people. (Ironically, there's a strong correlation between gamers and piracy - it's almost as if those who own an AMD or nVidia card pirate games because they're more experienced with PCs, and more adept at using piracy sites. EDIT: Sadly, I just checked a common one - yes, TPA is available with full DLC and Pro tables - this is the version BEFORE Fish Tales, so the latest isn't pirated, yet).

Indie games love mobile and PC development because it's easy - to develop on a console usually requires extensive agreements and special NDAs and many other rules (e.g., you need a secured office space that's controlled entry by authorized people). For this generation, it appears that the Big Three as abandoned those requirements for indie games (most of which are done in home offices and such).

So the eagerness to have high fancy graphics has to be tempered with the fact that most PC gamers don't have fancy graphics. Because most PC games don't really require it. One should also note that many "PC only" developers have expanded to consoles - Valve with their Steam for PS3, and even Blizzard porting their games to PS3 and Xbox. Because while the PC market is much bigger than consoles, consoles do have a LOT of money (mostly from being fairly piracy free - even at its worse, the Xbox360 experienced around 10%).

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90% piracy? You sure about that? Seems rather high.

Edit:

Seems its not as bad as some people claim:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoo...nally-some-objective-figures-on-games-piracy/

Plus...playing PC games online, you generally need a unique key, so pirates are out of luck unless they only want single player. Not sure if Farsight could utilize something like that for leaderboard/multiplayer access though...but it does the trick for FPS games for example.

Either way, they said the sales are fine...

Jeff Strong said:

90% piracy? You sure about that? Seems rather high.

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It can be that high, yes. People are cheapskates and want the world for free.

I do think that the post underestimated the console piracy rate however. Nowadays, all seventh generation consoles have "homebrew" OSs which allow unsigned / unverified code. Therefore, all seventh generation consoles *do* have pirated games at the usual sites. The effective rate probably depends on how easy the homebrew OS is to install.

Like Jeff Strong said, there are ways to mitigate PC piracy. Other than multiplayer protection (unique key) and DRM, there are several other anti-tampering measures that could be used to detect cracks and hacks. The most effective ones I think are the ones that will cause a cracked game / app to work fine at first for a period of time, but then either stop workings or slowly develop easily identifiable weird / funny features. Obviously anti-tampering measures can be removed too, but time is often bought, sometimes a lot of time depending on the application and anti-tampering strength. (Plus, updates can introduce new anti-tampering measures, and then you can include value-added content in the update that the pirate won't get, etc.). So just because something is on a pirated site doesn't necessarily mean it's a complete working version of the app.

Of course, I also think Worf is also right... in that a lot of big studios put insufficient resources into anti-tampering measures and strategy on the PC. (And indie studios often never have enough time...) That's one opinion I've heard to be honest... that the big studios will focus on the consoles and leave the PC to games with revenue streams from downloadable content or social games, for the exact reasons Worf gives.

soundwave106 said:

I do think that the post underestimated the console piracy rate however. Nowadays, all seventh generation consoles have "homebrew" OSs which allow unsigned / unverified code. Therefore, all seventh generation consoles *do* have pirated games at the usual sites. The effective rate probably depends on how easy the homebrew OS is to install.

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Well, I wouldn't say this is that true. The 7th gen fared pretty well against piracy, well, PS3 and 360 did... The Wii wasn't so lucky. The 360 hacks required some pretty intensive hardware hacking and the PS3, while hackable, was later rendered unhackable in later firmware and hardware revisions. It wasn't like going into a shop in Chinatown, getting someone to slap on a modchip in an hour and voila, all the free games you can burn to a disc. Not only that but these mods were detectable when the machines connected to their networks and were promptly banned. Modding a PS3 of 360 meant losing access to PSN or Xbox Live, no comparing scores with friends, no online multiplayer, no achievements/trophies or any of that good stuff that became very popular in the 7th gen. Hey, congrats, you can pirate Call of Duty now... But you can't play with your friends online anymore, hope you enjoy the single player campaign!

You can say that PC gamers 'know how to pirate and just will' but most developers and publishers have found a lot of joy in selling on Steam. It's not like every pirated copy translates into a lost sale anyway, and we all know that, lots of people pirated just because it's there and they want to have a copy of everything, plenty will try it out and not be interested, others were just NEVER gonna pay for it anyway. One of Steam's best features, which has been embraced by a lot of publishers and developers, has been SERVICE. Put your game on Steam, it'll auto patch, save to the cloud, compare scores with your friends, work right in Big Picture Mode, log your achivements and gameplay, show you all the info about your friends playing, allow you to download and re-download your software on any PC you're logged into with ease, oh and lookit here, this game you thought was neat from a few years ago but never played? $4.99 for this weekend only, you should buy it!

I totally used to pirate EVERYTHING, even Half-Life 2, but I didn't grow out of it, I just got into Steam, there were sales, there were unique titles that I actually wanted to support, it removed the HASTLE from a lot of gaming and now I bought 19 things during the last Steam sale. I bought Season 3 of TPA and I won't have to do any work to get the next 9 tables in the season, they'll just automatically download and activate automatically. DirectX 11 patch? Sounds hard to install and manage, oh wait, it'll automatically install and just prompt me for DX9 or DX11 startup? It'll 'Just work'? Heck yeah.

At one point, FarSight was pushing out an update once every week or so. I feel SORRY for the pirating user who would have to re-torrent the latest version JUST to get that little update that paying users got as a tiny little download that automatically ran. Assuming that the people pirating the game made the effort to re-release the game with every update even.

AshleyAshes said:

At one point, FarSight was pushing out an update once every week or so. I feel SORRY for the pirating user who would have to re-torrent the latest version JUST to get that little update that paying users got as a tiny little download that automatically ran. Assuming that the people pirating the game made the effort to re-release the game with every update even.

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They probably won't... or it will be very infrequent at best. DLC, nice free upgraded updates (like the upcoming DX11 upgrade for Pinball Arcade for instance), and good service are indeed piracy deterrents in itself. 10 years ago, in some cases it was more hassle to go through the standard retail channels than it was to pirate the game. With an engine like Steam, it's easily the reverse.

I agree. The Steam engine is quite powerful

If you pirate TPA on steam, you don't get the leaderboards. Same is true for pinball fx2. If you want to compete with your friends online, you have to pay. and it's quite affordable.

While steam is a pretty easy platform to pirate, people can make it unattractive to pirate on it.

Gearbox has a trick they do. with borderlands 2 they have certain "hotfixes" placed in the game that only apply if you are online, and you can't get online and pirate. Pirating that game limits you to LAN play (or Tungle, which virtualizes a LAN across the internet) You can also give bonuses to legit people that pirates cannot claim.

And honestly, steam is DRM done right. It's pretty non-intrusive, and VERY fair about redownloading. Yeah it's easier to crack then say star force was.. but it rarely if ever inconveniences a paying customer.

I honestly don't think piracy is such a big problem. People can pirate the games but that doesn't mean it is a lost sale in most cases. Today with Steam the treshold to buy a game is so low and it is so easy and convenient platform that all my friends have basically stopped game piracy. Some do download games accocinaly but they would now buy those games anyways. Morally wrong? Yes. Lost sale? No.

Someone was claiming that people are cheap and want to get everything at low cost. Well abviously this is the case. Who wants to pay more when you can pay less? But you should also understand that game being on sale is two way street. Yes, you get it cheaper but the publisher also gets more sales. People buy stuff they don't actually need from all sales. It doesn't matter if it is clothes, dvds or games. If it is a good deal and person has some interest to that item there is a good chance they will buy it. This is absolutely true on Steam sales. People spent even hundreds of dollars to buy many games that they have never time to play. If those games would have been normal price they would not have bought them.
I personally have about 100 games on my Steam library. Guess how many I have not even started once? The answer is 21 and to that you can add about the same number of games that I have played maybe an hour or so. Why I have this many unplayed games? Because they were on sale and I got a good deal. Who knows maybe I have time to play those at some point but if I don't then at least I supported the games that I think were good even though I never played them.

Now tell me how am I cheap? I have bought about 40 games that have not given me much value at all until this point? And this is not just me. On my Steam friends list I have so many people that have at least 50 games on their library and many have 100+ and one has even more that 250(!). How do I know this? There is an Steam Badge for game collecting. They don't have time to play all of them but hey, good deals, you get a game!

Then on a different subject.
Mike you said that you are still supporting Steam and PC platform. Any info for the Steam Friends integration? I really think this is a must have feature for a game like this.

I can only speak from personal experience, but the primary reason I don't even consider pirating anything these days is that with Steam and to some extent other digital marketplaces around the convenience of buying things became higher than copying them illegally. I admit to having pirated some things back in the 90s when I was a dumb kid and it was hard/expensive to find things in good old Finland on the up and up. These days I just open steam and click on some things a few times and I have whatever at better than torrent download speeds and none of the hassle (and a clean conscience). If anything is going to kill piracy it's that some companies have finally figured out that if you actually make it easier to get the games legitimately most people will do so even ignoring ethical/legal considerations.

I think now that people are realising that backwards compatibility is not guaranteed on consoles, Steam really has a chance to pull people back over to PC. Very clever timing with the Steam machines when you think about it.

I much prefer the simplicity of console, but many games I already own on console I have picked up on Steam in the sales just so that I know I can play it again later when Sony/Microsoft may have stopped supporting it and getting that last game-fixing patch might be impossible.

At the end of the day, PC is the ONLY platform with guaranteed backwards compatibility.

Alex Atkin UK said:

I think now that people are realising that backwards compatibility is not guaranteed on consoles, Steam really has a chance to pull people back over to PC. Very clever timing with the Steam machines when you think about it.

I much prefer the simplicity of console, but many games I already own on console I have picked up on Steam in the sales just so that I know I can play it again later when Sony/Microsoft may have stopped supporting it and getting that last game-fixing patch might be impossible.

At the end of the day, PC is the ONLY platform with guaranteed backwards compatibility.

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Agreed, at least up to a point. Technically it isn't guaranteed forever, since some old stuff was absolutely impossible to run for a long while before people came out with the dosbox emulation thing. I guess if there's a demand for it someone will figure out how to make it go though even in the future. With consoles you're usually stuck with what the manufacturer wants you to run so there's much less chance of anything similar ever happening unless there's a major shift with the way console applications work, and I kind of think there will have to be in the near future if consoles are to survive in the market.

Roope said:

I honestly don't think piracy is such a big problem. People can pirate the games but that doesn't mean it is a lost sale in most cases. Today with Steam the treshold to buy a game is so low and it is so easy and convenient platform that all my friends have basically stopped game piracy. Some do download games accocinaly but they would now buy those games anyways. Morally wrong? Yes. Lost sale? No.

Someone was claiming that people are cheap and want to get everything at low cost. Well abviously this is the case. Who wants to pay more when you can pay less? But you should also understand that game being on sale is two way street. Yes, you get it cheaper but the publisher also gets more sales. People buy stuff they don't actually need from all sales. It doesn't matter if it is clothes, dvds or games. If it is a good deal and person has some interest to that item there is a good chance they will buy it. This is absolutely true on Steam sales. People spent even hundreds of dollars to buy many games that they have never time to play. If those games would have been normal price they would not have bought them.
I personally have about 100 games on my Steam library. Guess how many I have not even started once? The answer is 21 and to that you can add about the same number of games that I have played maybe an hour or so. Why I have this many unplayed games? Because they were on sale and I got a good deal. Who knows maybe I have time to play those at some point but if I don't then at least I supported the games that I think were good even though I never played them.

Now tell me how am I cheap? I have bought about 40 games that have not given me much value at all until this point? And this is not just me. On my Steam friends list I have so many people that have at least 50 games on their library and many have 100+ and one has even more that 250(!). How do I know this? There is an Steam Badge for game collecting. They don't have time to play all of them but hey, good deals, you get a game!

Then on a different subject.
Mike you said that you are still supporting Steam and PC platform. Any info for the Steam Friends integration? I really think this is a must have feature for a game like this.

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tldr(joke) you eant a sale for a game thats just released ive got a game collection in the thousands too lol, buy or dont, have you ever heard of breaking even?

As for piracy, the irony is that there was actually an Amiga game of mine that broke and I couldn't get a replacement from the publisher as their license had expired. I managed to get it years later from an originally pirated copy that was released (supposedly) legally online. In fact there is a huge archive of Amiga games that were released as abandonware that without the piracy groups could not have happened due to the copy protection.

If Steam ever folded we could lose access to everything, so a part of me is still in favour of pirated copies remaining out there. Not to mention I became a fan of The Elder Scrolls and Bioshock after trying them on PC first, I would have bought neither without that as I didn't think they were my kind of games. Steam realise that with their free weekends and even Sony dabbled with their 1 hour trials of full games on PSN+, although they still aren't pushing that hard enough IMO.

After all, is it morally wrong to download a pirate copy of something you actually paid for but can no longer obtain without paying again? I'm not talking about downloading on a different platform (like Pinball Arcade PS4 when you own on PS3) but actually downloading for the ORIGINAL platform, or an emulation of the original platform.

Bringing things back on topic, this is also why I think its a good thing we finally have trials of all tables on Pinball Arcade. Anyone wanting to dabble in just a few tables needs to PLAY them first, although I do find some tables cut off on too low a score to get a proper feel for them.

Alex Atkin UK said:

If Steam ever folded we could lose access to everything, so a part of me is still in favour of pirated copies remaining out there. Not to mention I became a fan of The Elder Scrolls and Bioshock after trying them on PC first, I would have bought neither without that as I didn't think they were my kind of games. Steam realise that with their free weekends and even Sony dabbled with their 1 hour trials of full games on PSN+, although they still aren't pushing that hard enough IMO.

After all, is it morally wrong to download a pirate copy of something you actually paid for but can no longer obtain without paying again? I'm not talking about downloading on a different platform (like Pinball Arcade PS4 when you own on PS3) but actually downloading for the ORIGINAL platform, or an emulation of the original platform.

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Valve has stated that if they're about to go tits up they'll turn off the call home feature for the catalog. As far as downloading a copy of something you own a license to, morality is an entirely subjective thing anyway so the questions is pretty pointless. It is however illegal unless you get permission from the rights holders as far as I know.

Whatever

I've moved the piracy discussion to its own thread, since it really no longer has anything to do with DirectX 11 nor the timeframe for the PC TPA version to get DX11.

Larry said:

. It's their mechanism and it needs to be a helluva lot more bulletproof than it is..

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Good luck with that. Do you know how cracks work? At their most basic, it's simply finding the code that checks for DRM and skipping it. All that's needed then is for a pirate to ZIP up the files along with the patch and bam, a pirate copy. It's simply not worth going overboard with protection, as that ends up inconveniencing legitimate users (SecuROM, anyone?) The reason is people who are going to pirate a game will pirate it regardless... back in the early 2000s you could find every game pre-cracked, or cracks available to download from newsgroups.

When I was at Uni at the turn of the millennium there were all sorts of pirated games doing the rounds and pretty much everyone who had a connection to the network in their room had them. They were sourced from the likes of MySpace (the original one, not the social network pap) and XDrive, not forgetting the newsgroups. The daft thing is people would hoard them with little to no intention of playing them - there were genuinely few lost sales there.

FWIW, I paid my way through Uni by writing Shareware games for Symbian handheld PDAs. Piracy was common and there was a program which generated keys (including for my games) which was very popular. Nonetheless, I still sold hundreds of copies of my games. Those people motivated enough to find a keygen would not have bought my games anyway, so I didn't count that as a loss. One pirate even emailed comments on my code, suggesting I use hashing for keys... I should have done, of course, but didn't think to use it. And even if I'd added it, the old versions of my games would still be out there. Once something is online you can never get rid of it!

Steam changed all that. All of a sudden there were legal, guaranteed working downloads and prices were pretty reasonable too.

Steam does it well - light-touch DRM which prevents a casual "I wonder if I can copy this?" piracy but which won't stop cracked versions (as there's very little that will). Even things such as World of Warcraft get ripped off - there are private servers which emulate the official Blizzard ones.

Piracy will go on no matter what is done. IMO a light touch with DRM, a la Steam is best, you don't want to cheese people off with overblown DRM and hardcore pirates will just laugh at whatever DRM you come up with anyway.

Comparing it to theft of a physical object isn't the right way to look at it IMO. If you steal a PC, the owner no longer has use of it. Crack a game and nobody who already has a legal copy loses it - there's a potentially lost sale but even that's not guaranteed. And there's no easy way yet of monitoring what people are doing with their PCs... if they run a game under a debugger or using ProcMon to see what it's doing, then circumvent its protection, nobody will ever know. It doesn't make it right, but it does mean it's almost impossible to prevent.

nice post retron

Larry said:

There NEEDS to be better enforcement in general.
"Low overhead" my patootee, that's a cop-out on Valve's part for crap DRM, simple as that!

It's about enforcement, many things are illegal, only a selective group are actively pursued and punished. The movie and music industry has generally created the idea over time that "doing something illegal on your PC does not translate into you getting in trouble".

If you steal my PC, I can call the cops and they will at least make the effort of checking all local pawn shop lists for 30 days.... who does Farsight call? No such thing as "internet cops" yet. There are authorities that have the power and jurisdiction, but a pittance of the effort that spent on breaking these systems is spent on fixing them. Until that gets changed, it will continue status quo (IE a peer-to-peer cesspool).

This problem is very big, and needs to be addressed as a global issue by Valve, not Farsight. It's their mechanism and it needs to be a helluva lot more bulletproof than it is.

To the OP, I am really looking forward to the advanced lighting and effects that DX11 will offer, and suspect even though it might hit a bit later than hoped, it will be worth every second of the patience.

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You complain and yet, those developers and publishers putting their stuff on Steam not only find it profitable but put more effort into their Steam ports than ever. Go back a few years and they were just shoveling shoddy PC ports to Steam. Bioshock, wow, Bioshock 1 and 2 like BARELY run on PC because it was so half assed and rushed. Meanwhile, if you look at Bioshock Infinite you see a LOVING port. Big Picture Mode support, full controller support, steam cloud, a nice implementation to ensure the game runs nice on the system. And you see this now in the vast majority of major titles released to Steam. I had a great experience playing the new Tomb Raider on Steam, the full SDK implemented, if it weren't for having graphics settings options, I'd have thought I was playing it on my Xbox. You don't read stories of companies raging about rampant piracy at the hands of Steam and that's because, this might be shocking, PEOPLE ACTUALLY LIKE BUYING GAMES ON STEAM. You may think Steam is deeply flawed but the publishers and devs don't seem to share your views... And I think their views are more relevant than yours.

Ok, sorry I spoke up. Piracy in general gets under my skin.

I will keep my ignorant nonsense to myself in the future.