Michael Fitch recently got some attention for a post on the Quarter to Three forums about how Iron Lore Entertainment, makers of Titan Quest, had to be shut down and how it was all everybody else’s fault. The main cause:
Piracy [OMG, did he just say that?]. Yeah, that’s right, I said it [oh SNAP!]. No, I don’t want to re-hash the endless “piracy spreads awareness”, “I only pirate because there’s no demo”, “people who pirate wouldn’t buy the game anyway” round-robin. Been there, done that.
Well, he goes on to say that sales of Titan Quest were crippled by pirates saying bad things about it, so I assume he at least believes that “piracy spreads awareness”. And he must have been aware of this effect ahead of time, having “been there” and “done that”.
Of course, that doesn’t excuse piracy. Its up to the copyright holder to decide if he wants that kind of awareness to be spread, and Iron Lore was clearly opting out. I’m not trying to defend piracy in this post. I don’t believe it can be compared to shoplifting, but it is clearly illegal (at least in the U.S.), and an argument certainly can be made for it being immoral and unethical. But these pirates were guilty of an even greater crime: not doing a very good job of it:
…with TQ, the game was pirated and released on the nets before it hit stores…. it missed a lot of the copy-protection that was in the game. One of the copy-protection routines was keyed off the quest system, for example. You could start the game just fine, but when the quest triggered, it would do a security check, and dump you out if you had a pirated copy…. So, it’s a couple of days before release, and I start seeing people on the forums complaining about how …. it crashes right when you come out of the first cave…. There was a security check there. [emphasis added]
The key here, as I’ve indicated, is the “dump you out” part. No indication is given that the crash is the result of using a pirated copy of the game. Very few games use this kind of security check, and most copy protection tells the user when it detects an inauthentic copy, so there’s little reason to suspect it either. On the other hand, a lot of PC games crash for no good reason at all. As a result, a lot of people who tried to pirate the game came to the reasonable conclusion that the game was just buggy.
A number of responses to Mr. Fitch’s post have pointed out what should have been obvious from the start: that this kind of copy protection serves no practical business purpose. The problem with piracy, we are told, is that it decreases sales. So anti-piracy measures are only really useful if they cause would-be pirates to actually go out and buy a legitimate copy. If pirates don’t know that their copy is failing because it is pirated, then they have every reason to believe that a legitimate copy would do the same thing. Sure, it probably occurred to a lot of them that using a pirated copy might be causing the problem, but in order to verify that, they have to spend $50 on something that cannot be returned. The incentive just isn’t there.
Of course, even if they had been more clear, only a small fraction of those pirated games probably would have been converted to sales. So it wouldn’t have made that much of a difference anyway, right? Not according to Fitch:
The research I’ve seen pegs the piracy rate at between 70-85% on PC in the US, 90%+ in Europe, off the charts in Asia.
….
So, if 90% of your audience is stealing your game, even if you got a little bit more, say 10% of that audience to change their ways and pony up, what’s the difference in income? Just about double…. Even if you cut that down to 1% …who would actually buy the game, that’s still a 10% increase in revenue….the difference between breaking even and making a profit.
So there’s actually a good chance that he could have saved Iron Lore Entertainment from its fate if he had simply been more sensible about implementing copy protection. Incidentally, a lot of people in the forum thread suggested that the copy protection middleware they used might not have allowed him to generate an error message, but that’s really not the point. He could have chosen a different middleware provider or just omitted that particular security check (and yes, it was his choice).
But, as it was implemented, all it accomplishes is to prevent pirates from properly enjoying the game. Without some financial benefit attached to this, it seems petty and vindictive to me, but that’s Mr. Fitch’s prerogative. If he feels that pirates don’t deserve to enjoy his game and wants to devote resources to prevent it, that’s certainly understandable. If it ended there - if this scheme was merely useless - I might be more likely to defend his decision to rain on the pirate parade (pictured at left) but, quite predictably, it proved to be harmful on top of it all:
So, before the game even comes out, we’ve got people bad-mouthing it because their pirated copies crash, even though a legitimate copy won’t [these would be the legitimate copies that weren’t available at the time because the game hadn’t been released].
So, for a game that doesn’t have a Madden-sized advertising budget, word of mouth is your biggest hope, and here we are, before the game even releases, getting bashed to hell and gone by people who can’t even be bothered to actually pay for the game.
Okay, criticizing the stability of a cracked game is (to borrow a phrase I heard on Boondocks) a bitch thing to do. In other words, its exactly the kind of behavior one would expect from someone who tries to get stuff without paying for it. Is it really such a surprise that some of the people who are screwing you over decided to screw you over a little more?
If you know that “word-of-mouth is your biggest hope” and you know that (whether you like it or not) you are going to get a lot of word-of-mouth from pirates, how can you not see the importance of controlling that message? It seems that in his rush to screw over the pirates, Iron Lore missed their greatest opportunity - using the piracy problem to their advantage. They didn’t even have to advocate piracy or give away free copies. Just implement sensible copy protection that doesn’t look like a crash and enjoy the free publicity. Instead, they managed to make the worst of a bad situation.
You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can’t change how people behave… whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren’t so rampant on the PC. That’s a fact.
Maybe you can’t change how people behave, but you can predict how they’ll behave and plan your strategy accordingly and that does matter. Its a lot more useful than hoping that people will act differently and then complaining when they act the way they always do.
Consider Peter Parker. Everybody knows the origin story of Spider-Man by now right? Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben was murdered by a burglar that Peter could have stopped earlier. Burglary is wrong. Murder is wrong. It can obviously be said that if burglars and murderers didn’t exist, then Uncle Ben would not have been killed. But instead of spending the rest of his life bitching about crime, Peter acknowledges how his own actions could have easily prevented the murder and focuses on what he can do to prevent it from happening again. That is why I feel sympathy for the character of Peter Parker and not for Michael Fitch.
I’m sure that the people at Iron Lore are good at what they do and I’m sure Titan Quest was a great game. But as Alex Rigopulos and Eran Egozy of Harmonix recently told Newsweek, “making a fun game just isn’t enough”. Especially for indy developers, good business sense is crucial. That means being able to see opportunities and take them, not underestimating your opponents, doing PR damage control, finding a market where you can compete and people will actually pay for your product, and taking responsibility for problems that you could have prevented. It seems to me that ILE’s downfall was as much a product of Michael Fitch’s inability to do these things as it was the result of piracy.
He goes on to blame stupid manufacturers, stupid reviewers, stupid players, and other things that have been a fact of life for everyone in the PC game industry (if not the world) for decades (if not millennia). However I thought this was his most telling comment:
There are few better examples of the “it can’t possibly be my fault” culture in the west than gaming forums.
Well, he’s certainly demonstrated that.
At first glance, I thought some of them were clever ways to get people to make better use of the medic class and some of the more advanced features of Steam. Offering the Family Practice achievement for uber-charging ten of your steam friends seems like a great way to get people to use the community features of Steam. Unfortunately, its also a great way to get people to badger players with friend requests that they’ll delete as soon as they get they’ve ubercharged them.
As if that weren’t bad enough, there are achievements like Placebo Effect, which is awarded when you “Kill 5 enemies in a single life, while having your Uber-Charge ready, but undeployed.” Undeployed? So that means that now, in addition to players just starting out who don’t use ubercharge because they don’t know how it works, now we’ll have experienced medics running around not using their ubercharge in order to get an award that doesn’t benefit anyone but themselves?! It seems like a great way to ensure that a certain percentage of players are basically playing a different game than all the other players. I’m not sure why Valve would want that, but my experience, and the accounts I’ve heard from other players, seem to confirm that it is the case.
Its not surprising that some medics are colluding with other players to farm achievements. When you consider the chances of earning achievements like Group Health - “Work with 2 other Medics to deploy 3 simultaneous Uber-Charges” - in the course of an ordinary game, it becomes a lot more attractive for 3 medics to sit in the spawn room and heal each other while the rest of the team tries to… you know… play the game. I guess all we can hope for is that some bright bulb creates a server specifically for farming these achievements so the rest of us don’t have to be dragged down by it. We’ll lose some skilled medics for a while, but I guess at least they’ll come back with some neat toys.
Of course it all started with that great ambassador of Japanese culture, Pokemon. Nethack fans weary of the constant barrage of Pokemon games could be forgiven for missing 
Not technically a Mysterious Dungeon game, Izuna is brought to us by Atlus. Always the savior of western fans of quirky Japanese games, Atlus came to the rescue of english-speaking gamers looking for a Mysterious Dungeon-like experience a year ago with this game. Not quite as harrowing as Shiren, if the titular character in Izuna dies she loses all her equipment and has to start from the ground level, but keeps all her experience. This lessens the frustration factor considerably, making it an ideal entry point for those who are looking to get into the genre but are perhaps allergic to Pokemon. Izuna doesn’t have a very wide variety of items to collect, but it does one of the things that rogue-alikes do best: it takes a small gameplay vocabulary and varies it just enough to make the experience seem fresh, even when you have to start a dungeon all over again… and again. Its starting to wear thin for me, but I’m almost finished it.
