Game developers are faced with a dilemma: to use digital rights management (DRM) or not to use DRM. “The main argument against it,” suggests Patrick Klug of Greenheart Games in a blog posting yesterday, “is that all it does is to inconvenience genuine customers. Fact is that any game can be cracked, so all you do is spend time on something that in the end just annoys your real customers while only slightly delaying the inevitable.”
Klug has chosen the non-DRM route for the company’s new Game Dev Tycoon product. But he also did something different: “We released a cracked version of the game ourselves, minutes after opening our Store. I uploaded the torrent to the number one torrent sharing site [The Pirate Bay, according to TorrentFreak], gave it a description imitating the scene and asked a few friends to help seed it.”
But the cracked version is slightly different – it includes the effect of piracy on game companies. “As players spend a few hours playing and growing their own game dev company,” says Klug, “they will start to see the following message, styled like any other in-game message: ‘Boss, it seems that while many players play our new game, they steal it by downloading a cracked version rather than buying it legally. If players don’t buy the games they like, we will sooner or later go bankrupt.’”
Funds dwindle, and eventually the inevitable happens: the game developing game player goes bankrupt. It is, suggests Klug, holding up a mirror to the pirates; and there are already many of them. But whether the message is getting across is a different matter. Klug has been monitoring the pirates’ online comments. “Guys I reached some point where if I make a decent game... it gets pirated... Is there some way to avoid that? I mean can I research a DRM or something?”
Another pirate complained, “Why are there so many people that pirate? It ruins me!” As a gamer, said Klug, the irony made him laugh; but as the developer, “I wanted to cry.” Usage statistics one day after the launch are equally depressing: genuine version, 214 sales; pirated version, at least 3104 users.
But the issue, he suggests, goes beyond his personal experience and the future of Greenheart Games. A primary effect of piracy is to force developers away from single-player games to multi-user pay-to-play online games. “If years down the track you wonder why there are no games like these anymore and all you get to play is pay-to-play and social games designed to suck money out of your pockets,” he says to the pirates, “then the reason will stare back at you in the mirror.”