MetaFilter posts tagged with DRM and piracy

Step 1. Make an utterly fantastic game. Step 3. Profit!

straight — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:24:08 -0800

2D BOY made around $100,000 in a week. That’s $50,000 each for writing a blog post about a game they finished a year ago. By letting people pay whatever they wanted. 2D Boy stirred up a lot of discussion (previously) about game piracy when they used online scoreboard data to estimate an 82% piracy rate for their fantastic indie game World of Goo (previously). For World of Goo's first birthday, they decided to try the Radiohead model and let people buy the game for any price they choose. Now they've released extensive data about the results. Short version? "A huge success," even though the most commonly chosen price was only a penny. Don't miss the excellent analysis in the Rock Paper Shotgun article (that first link), including the comments where one reader has created a chart showing that the bottom 40% of the downloads account for 1.5% of the profit and the top 30% of the downloads account for 83% of the profit.

Batman dies in cloud of poison gas – unless you actually buy the game

joeclark — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 09:24:41 -0800

DRM as a cloud of poison gas. Run an illegally-downloaded prerelease version of the video game Batman: Arkham Asylum and Batman always dies in a vat of poison gas. Run the legit version once it gets released and (apparently) there won’t even be any poison gas. (Game developers: “[Y]ou have encountered... a hook in the copy protection, to catch out people who try and download cracked versions of the game for free. It’s not a bug in the game’s code, it’s a bug in your moral code.”)

Almost like an anti-Doctorow

camcgee — Mon, 15 Dec 2008 09:33:47 -0800

TweakGuides presents a very long examination of software piracy as it relates to PC gaming: "PC piracy and related topics such as DRM seem to have become so shrouded in illogical excuses, hysteria, scaremongering and uninformed opinions that having a sensible discussion on the topic is virtually impossible." The first couple of pages are fairly broad introductions to basic legal and technical issues that can probably be skipped without losing much but he eventually gets into evaluating such claims as "DRM causes piracy" and "DRM never works," and offers apologies even for the reviled Starforce and SecuROM. Link via RPS.

The current state of DRM and piracy in casual gaming

tybeet — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 06:50:24 -0800

You may have heard by now about World of Goo, an independent game which can best be described as a "physics/construction puzzle game" that touches on everything from beauty to consumerism to internet privacy. The developer, 2DBoy who had originally released the game under a "no-DRM, don't screw us" policy now estimates a piracy rate of 82%. The authors cite a related figure of 92% found for a game called Ricochet Infinity, which was, in contrast, released with DRM, and whose developer studied the effects of their continued efforts to patch up the keygens and exploits in its DRM along the way. From this article: "As we believe that we are decreasing the number of pirates downloading the game with our DRM fixes, combining the increased sales number together with the decreased downloads, we find 1 additional sale for every 1,000 less pirated downloads. Put another way, for every 1,000 pirated copies we eliminated, we created 1 additional sale."

They just want to go home.

goodnewsfortheinsane — Fri, 12 Jan 2007 13:39:17 -0800

I know you're all lining up to buy Sealand, but The Pirate Bay wants to beat you to the punch.

i wanted to do this first

sourbrew — Sat, 28 May 2005 12:01:25 -0800

Darknet Blog - Interesting articles about what is shaping technology today, and how the industry is playing nice with the government to legislate drm into our lives.

DVDs that self destruct

thisisdrew — Thu, 02 Dec 2004 09:16:20 -0800

When technology falls into the wrong hands ...After 48 hours, the DVD expires and turns black. "The viewing window begins when the consumer opens the package and exposes the Flexplay DVD to air. A Flexplay DVD can be watched as many times as a consumer wants during the pre-set viewing window." More here, here, and here.

Digital Rights Management -- A Battle That Can't Be Won?

boltman — Sun, 24 Nov 2002 19:39:50 -0800

What is the Darknet? Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Darknet is. Okay, actually, it's a term that some Microsoft computer scientists came up with to refer to all the different ways that internet users can swap copyrighted materials. In a paper they authored [DOC] for a workshop on Digital Rights Management (DRM), these engineers predict that the Darknet will grow ever stronger and more efficient while DRM technologies will make legal right holders less able to compete with Darknet and are ultimately "doomed to failure."