Although PC soccer management sim Championship Manager is experiencing a 90% piracy rate, its publisher is not planning to add DRM to the mix.
Roy Meredith of Beautiful Game Studios told CVG:
[The 90% piracy figure is] not just a number in the air, we can measure it and we know that there are a huge amount of pirated copies. There's a real issue around DRM ... I'd love to defeat pirates, but actually, with all this mess on Spore and Football Manager, which I haven't been able to play this year... I spent about three hours trying to go through this registration process and I really want to play it but I've got other things to do with my life.
There are actually other ways of dealing with piracy too. One is to compete price-wise. We haven't got to pay [console licensing] royalties to Sony or Microsoft, so we can go into territories and price compete.
Comments
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
Civilization IV's DRM wouldn't run on my computer, I'd held off getting it for awhile and forgot why. Was a pretty nasty reminder. I'm pushing for a refund by 2K games, and if/when I get it I'm going to give the money to this company.
Glad to see a company standing up for what's right.
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
Of course they won't. What would DRM do for them?
- They have to pay licensing costs
- They would anger buyers who now have to go through the hassle that is DRM for nothing (game will be cracked anyway)
- They would lose potential buyers that refuse to support games with DRM
Adding DRM wouldn't help them in the least. Any publisher adding DRM nowadays doesn't deserve to get money from its games.
Besides that 90% seems too high for me. FIFA, perhaps. A soccer managing game, I don't think so.
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
Really? To me it makes more sense than FIFA having 90% piracy. It's niche. Niche titles tend to have a small core group of followers who'll support it, and if anyone else cares they don't care enough to pay anywhere near full price just to dabble.
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
Although some people will harp on incessantly about how drm is 'needed' to prevent piracy, this move by Beautiful Game Studios actually makes perfect sense.
World of goo had what .. a 90% piracy rate, and also had no drm?
Yet the developers compared it with another game they made called 'ricochet' that DID have DRM. Know what their conclusions were?
that both games had around a 90% piracy rate... with or without drm. Showing that DRM is basically useless in preventing pirates.
http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
I was just about to say the same thing :)
Absolutely spot on
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
NovaBlack here has it DEAD ON! DRM makes no discerable difference in piracy.
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
I have no doubt they can track it. After all, It's easy to see 10 people playing it when they've only sold one copy.
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
Did you know that 95% of all statistics are made up ;)
Seriously, though, just add a cd key for online play and people will buy it.
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
So has anyone on here gotten this game?
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Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
k how do you measure it plz i want to know becuse everone else says they can measurse how many pirate copys their are, yet they dont tell me how they measure it.
but it good that he not adding drm, have not brouht a game from ea for a year now for the pc. which is going to stink if battlefield 3 going to have it.. that is if their a battle field 3
thanks again
Zaruka
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
The game probably has some sort of online component to it, which makes every copy connect to their servers. They know how many copies they sold, and they can track how many copies are connecting to the servers.
-- http://pixelantes.blogspot.com/
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
They probably compare the amount of sharers of pirated copies to their own sales rates, however, my own concern from my understanding of this sort of thing is that there is a downloader and an uploader, but the downloader can also sometimes be uploading, so they would count as one of each, therefore you could theoretically get up to double the true number of people sharing the program.
That said, 1%, strictly speaking, is 1% too many, particuarly in cases such as this, where the company involved isn't even using something like DRM, as has been said before, the West needs to shake this 'Everything, Right Now' attitude.
He's right about the solution to some degree, particuarly in the current financial climate, expensive games are going to be copied more than cheap ones, but people do need to start showing some respect to companies that don't behave like 'All your installs are belong to us.'.
Re: Soccer Game Has 90% Piracy Rate But Will Not Add DRM
see i agree with that, we should buy the games we want when the companys dont use the install limit thing
that why i brought prince of persia, a ubisoft game that had no drm but did not farcry 2 which had drm.. which im kind of glad too becuse i heard it was rather boring lol.
thanks again
Zaruka