Kamis, 29 Maret 2012

Seven Ways to Stop Piracy WITHOUT DRM

It’s a fact of life: Cutthroat buccaneers be pirating. Last year, UK Entertaining Enjoyment approximated a 4:1 rate of stolen game titles against those that were lawfully bought. What do those statistics mean? A lot, when you are discussing loss income. In appointment with our own Nathan Grayson, CEO Marek Å panÄ›l of Bohemia Entertaining said that for every genuine gamer swaying a explode launcher in ARMA 2, another 100 gamers with stolen duplicates of the game are converted away. Which is a whole lot of unrealized noticed cash that should have ended up in Bohemia Interactive’s coffers. As most of our visitors will be quick to point out, Bohemia Interactive’s not the only company to have their wood shivered by electronic piracy. As a protection against having their perceptive qualities sharpened, damaged and exchanged online like so many football credit charge playing cards, a lot of companies have converted to Digital Right Management; a move that hardly ever does more than momentarily slowly pirates and enrage shelling out clients. Luckily, there happens to be lot more non-DRM relevant alternatives out there for designers and software companies to discover that will stymy piracy while regard the privileges of their shelling out clients.

Bake in Deterrents 


Instead of being Threatening, why not be very funny when it comes to protecting your merchandise from piracy? Which is what Serious Sam 3 creator Croteam did when experienced with the issue of how to suppress the piracy of their generation without saddling their genuine customers with the problems that can come from a balanced serving of DRM. Instead of serious against the law acquired duplicates of the overall activity, Croteam decided to create Serious Sam 3 a depressed encounter for cutthroat buccaneers by placing an unbreakable lilac scorpion hellbent on ruining them into the mix. No issue where the gamers operates or tries to cover, the game’s hilariously highly effective enforcer monitors them down and eliminates them, creating it difficult to perform the first-person shooting in serenity. 

Provide Higher Levels of Support & Quality Control


Anger, Results New Nevada, Skyrim and War 3 all have one factor in common: They were all a hot, glitchy clutter when they were released.  A lot of cutthroat buccaneers rationalize their pillaging of electronic items by saying that they do not pay for a item that does not execute as it was designed to. While launch plans and market demands will always be a aspect that chooses upon when a application program created available to customers, application designers would do well to consider implementing Blizzard’s It is done when it’s done” mind and sit on their items until they are able to attest to their efficiency. If which is not possible, then using a solid program for mistake confirming and quality is a must: After all, no one wants to pay for something which is damaged right out of the box, and if they do, they want to know what can be done to fix it as easily as possible. 

Perks

In an effort to quell the second-hand sale of their software, a growing number of developers have been offering consumers premium downloadable content perks tied to a single-use code. The Catwoman missions in Batman Arkham Asylum and the cross-game weapons and armour offered by Electronic Arts in a number of the games from their catalog over the past few years are great examples of this. We’re betting gamers would like to see more of this sort of thing—with tastier options than a few cosmetic items for our in-game characters. By routinely doling out fresh in game content to paying customers, development houses would be providing consumers with a compelling reason to pay for their wares. It might not stop piracy dead in its tracks, but it’d definitely boost sales. 

Standardize International/Regional Releases

There’s plenty of excellent reasons to stagger the release of a new piece of software on an international scale: Doing so keeps servers from melting into pools of unusable silicon, and preserves the sanity of help desk agents, if only for a little while. That said, if a game’s not available in the states, even though the Italians have had it for a week, you know that someone, somewhere is going to be pirating that bad boy.  By giving consumers what they want simultaneously on an international level, developers could strike another reason for illegally downloading an application from the the litany of excuses pirates have been employing for years.

Lower the Cost of Digitally Distributed Software


Placing a software product in a physical marketplace is a costly undertaking, matter how you cut it. Product production, art and marketing, shipping—they all cost a goodly sum of dollars that wind up getting factored into the retail cost of a piece of boxed software, thus forcing consumers to decide between buying groceries for the rest of the month or investing in a new application. For some reason—let’s call it crazed avarice—digitally distributed iterations of the same software often costs the same as their boxed up, marked up cousins. Were software developers to dramatically lower the price of their digitally distributed wares, it’d be an uphill slog for pirates to complain about the market value cost of what they’re swiping. Sure, lower prices for digitally distributed wares means a less robust bottom line, but some cash is better than none, and where piracy is concerned, no cash gleaned from the sweat of your programer’s brows is likely exactly what you’ll wind up with.

Make an Effort to Actively Engage Your Community


Friends don’t steal from friends. Friends have your back. Whenever possible, you want your customers to be your friends. It doesn’t pay to get locked into an adversarial relationship with the people responsible for giving you money. Developers would do well to get to know and understand the concerns of their market. Insomuch as it’s possible, uncover the reasons why your market base feels compelled to pirate your products and do your best to address them. Listen to your customer’s frustrations and concerns, and whenever possible, provide them with the help they need and deserve. As the old adage suggests: Respect earns respect. While you might not be able to obliterate the piracy of your products entirely, a modicum of concern for your customers could help to reduce it.

Nuke Them From Orbit (It’s the Only Way to Be Sure)


You’ve tried lowering your prices. You’ve opted to forgo Digital Rights Management measures in favour of introducing downloadable incentives to paying customers and tormenting pirates with a frustrating in-app nemesis. Simultaneously releasing your software across all regions? Been there, done that. Hell, in an attempt to curb pirating, you’ve even gone so far as to drastically reduce the online price of your software. Sadly, none of it has managed to make a dent in your company’s shrinkage you’d been hoping for. At this point, you can keep on keeping on and hope that your non-DRM related anti-piracy measures and hope that they eventually gain traction, or sue the bejeezus out of anything that moves. Sadly, neither solution will be the cure-all you’re looking for. DRM is, well it’s DRM. Hated by the masses and viewed as a challenge by dedicated hackers, it’s only a matter of time until any Digital Rights Management solution is circumvented. 
What about lawsuits, you ask hopefully? 
As with most legal matters, suing the individuals who pirate your products is more of a marathon than a sprint. Take CD Projekt Red, the development house behind  The Witcher 2: Assassin of Kings, for example. Since it’s release in 2011, over 4.5 million copies of the PC game were illegally downloaded, putting CD Projekt Red in an ugly fiscal position, to say the least. In response to the rampant piracy they were being subjected to, the Polish development studio tracked down a large number of alleged pirates of the game and demanded they be paid for the the use of the software, or face legal prosecution. Great idea, right? Not so much: In the first few weeks of January, the development house announced that they would be discontinuing their legal crusade against those that would dare to pirate their game, chiefly due to the fact that the only thing that seems to enrage gamers more than DRM is the prospect of a shaky, difficult to support lawsuit based on the art—not science, mind you—of IP tracking. 
If there’s a final, definitive solution to online piracy that doesn’t in some way involve Digital Rights Management, it has yet to be found. We can only hop that when such a solution is implemented, it’s one that’s as just to a product’s paying end users as it is to the companies that designed it.

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