One thing I just realized I really like about Telltale
NO DRM.
Here is a company that treats us with respect by not including a bunch of bullshit DRM in their games, they just let us install games and go play, like we are mature people.
and what do we do? We buy every game they make and give them all our money for merchandise :P
Hats off to ya, Telltale, for respecting your customers, and for consistently putting out high quality products that we all love and cherish. I love you guys!
Here is a company that treats us with respect by not including a bunch of bullshit DRM in their games, they just let us install games and go play, like we are mature people.
and what do we do? We buy every game they make and give them all our money for merchandise :PHats off to ya, Telltale, for respecting your customers, and for consistently putting out high quality products that we all love and cherish. I love you guys!
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you know when you install a game and you have to install a bunch of software along with it that says you can only install it on this computer or you have to login to EA or Windows Live or some other service for the game even work, and you can only install the game 3 times in your lifetime, and it's just a huge hassle...
that's DRM
it's supposed to protect the developer from piracy by making it hard to pirate, but really all it ever ends up doing is punishing the PAYING customer who has to jump through all those hoops because the pirated version USUALLY GETS RID OF ALL THE DRM SO ITS EVEN EASIER TO PIRATE IT THAN IT IS TO BUY IT.
It's a broken system and it doesn't work.
Plus it shows INCREDIBLE disrespect to us people who like to BUY games to support our favorite developers. It's a slap in the face.
They have SecuROM online activation for the downloadable games, and SecuROM disc check for the DVDs.
I've never had a problem with either, but some people have (esp. the disc check).
And I was able to install the sam and max disks and then play them without the disks just fine. How were people having issues with it?
Actually I was installing a different game yesterday on my machine, all comfy, and then I suddenly realised I had no box with me, it was upstairs
SHOCK HORROR :-O
So for the next three-four minutes i'm sitting, all tense, "don't ask for key don't ask for key don't ask for key don't ask for key"
I hate that. It's like when you go to a store and they overtly video-camera you, or the woman at the bank treats you like a criminal for wanting to get money out with picture-ID.
You give a little, you receive a little :-)
If so, it would be interesting to see the number of installs vs number of sales.
This is one game Im gonna get angry about seeing cracked and available for download.
yeah same here. usually i see games by EA (think Spore) being pirated a ton and it doesn't phase me a bit since they punish their customers for actually buying the games
but with telltale, i would actually take it personally. ToMI needs to sell well (and i still think it will, even when people pirate it)
Since my gaming computer does NOT have an internet connection, I need to get the request code for each and every episode of the games, then e-mail that to support@telltalegames.com and then wait a few days for a response. This is incredibly annoying and I don't think it's necessary. At least the DVD's don't have this nonsense (like Half-Life 2 or BioShock).
I'm not really upset about this, but it's still an unnecessary obstacle. I could just download a crack and run the games using that, but I'm not feeling too comfortable having to do that. I would hope this will be fixed for Monkey Island. Get real folks, this online activation stuff won't stop piracy. It's just a pain in the butt to those who DID pay for the games and just want to get what they paid for.
i guess i thought everybody here had an internet connection?
The distribution worked pretty well for me so far. One thing i would love to see changed is that they spare us the CD check for the season DVDs (maybe a goodie for pre buyers?!) because it's annoying swapping discs in your bay and as always with these things, it doesn't prevent anything.
Yeah, but EA also threw in some "virus".
Given we're on the internet atm?
SecuROM is a surprisingly versatile piece of software. You can make it do freaky things and lock everything down, or you can make it be fairly polite.
We also went out of our way to try and streamline the activation process as much as we could, because ... well, things like unlocking a game don't actually have to be frustrating! They just are by default because people tend to not think when building things like software unlocking systems.
We made it so you can use your forum username/password instead of a serial number (but if that doesn't work, serial numbers are still supported), and beyond that offering unique key-based way to override even the serial number step, in case something freakier has gone wrong or you haven't got internet. For computers which can't activate due to no internet, we support dropping the hardware key out to a text file (to put on a USB thumb drive) or sending it to the printer, so you don't have to write it down by hand when walking from one PC to another. Also you can activate the game a ton of times before anything under the hood starts bleeping at you.
There are some decent reasons why we protect our games, and because of that it was important to us to make sure that for most users it was as invisible as possible. And, for anyone who ran into trouble, we wanted to facilitate their getting the game up and running as many ways as we could (hence the three different unlock methods), and offer the best tech support we can on top of that.
Erm anyway, glad that at least for some people we did our job well enough that the protection stuff went unnoticed.
I'm not sure if we track anything like that here, but other studios released stats (and I have friends in other studios that expressed similar stats) that put the figure at something like 90%+ of all PC game installs right now are pirated copies. This cuts across all genres, price points, developers, publishers and whether or not the game has DRM. It appears that there really is no such thing as "targeted" or "discriminating" piracy. It's an epidemic on the PC.
Which is probably why there has been such a large shift to console development this generation.
For reference, the point of DRM is not to prevent a game from being pirated. It's to delay a game from being pirated so more copies can be sold during the first few weeks.
I have very rarely had any problems with any form of copy protection or DRM. I understand the necessity and can live with the minor inconvenience. It's only really bad when the DRM software itself doesn't work correctly, which isn't the fault of the game developer.
Yeah we switched from that stuff for a reason: it was sucky and horrible! We have graphs of number of requests sent in to tech support, and you can see the month where we switched to the new system, because the number of people who needed tech support basically falls into the Grand Canyon. Good times.
Did you read my post? I was talking about my gaming computer (which is a different one than my 'internet' computer).
I'm fine with how the season thing is done but how large do you think is the amount of piracy you prevent by doing a cd check these days due to crack providing sites, torrents, special networks, ...
Personally i don't know anyone who does not visit such a source in order to get rid of it (after they bought the originals). It's just an annyoing extra step you hope the developer could spare you, even more because you already payed for the season before.
Yet another example of punishing the paying customer. If I had pirated that particular game I wouldn't have had to deal with this issue.
Just to clarify the comment that Jake quoted; The comment I made wasn't meant to suggest that TTG made a bad decision when they choose SecuROM for their protection or a dig at Duate. I thought Duate might find it interesting that the game he thought had no DRM used the same company to protect their game as the game he used as an example of bad DRM.
From my perspective, which is probably wrong, it seems that the problem with SecuROM is that it is usually up to the publishers rather than the developers to decide on how the software is set up. Publishers think along the lines that a property is valuable to them so it needs to be locked tighter than a ducks behind, and don't consider how it effects the customer. Since SecuROM gives the option of doing some pretty drastic things to lock down a piece of software, publishers try to use as many features to restrict the use of the software as possible. Developers, on the other hand, tend to have more concern over how the customers are effected. This is why developer driven DRM is often cited as how DRM should be or DRM-free even though they are using some form of DRM.
But the question generally for me is, does DRM really help at all. I have seen following numbers:
Piracy Rate with DRM 90%
Piracy Rate without DRM 90%
All it mostly does is to annoy paying customers.
This:
i didnt think you were digging at me, no worries
A download game at least has the grace period of being not available on the "black market" before it is downloadable.
It would be interesting to see how non drm vs. drm piracy numbers fare, but the numbers I have seen posted in blogs from independend developers seem to indicate DRM does not really help too much. If you want to pirate a game you will do it anyway, if you want to buy it you will buy it!
Things will become really problematic once DRM interferes in a way that it becomes more convenient to play the pirated version, then the paying customer has to face the fact that for paying he got lower quality than for copying it and that has plagued PC gaming for so many years and is one factor for the downfall of it! (among many others)
On the other hand, if I was a games developer I am not sure what I would do, especially a small gaming house cannot really afford to send testing balloons in the air.
Good move, the games I bought from the store are definitely hassle-free. The same cannot be said about Sam & Max Season 1, which I bought locally on DVD.
Only question is, how much of these installs would be there if there was no way to get a free copy. I think the total number of installs would be drastically lower.
Definitely. Which leads to the question I've had for a while: while not pull the DRM completely after a month or two?
I don't think so, a person who would pirate a game wouldn't mind waiting for a game to become free...
BTW, here are the 4 types of pirates -
1.The guy who thinks games are not worth the money
2.The guy who lives in an area where there is no availability of games, and cannot get them from outside because of the huge amount of custom duty
3.The guy who wants to "test drive" a game (Yeah, even games that have demos, never understood them)
4.The guy who wants to make money mass producing pirated copies
The second kind of pirate I can sympathise with, but digital distribution kinda fixes this problem for a lot of people. Though I still love opening a box... Love the feeling
YR DOING IT WRONG! Seriously.
np: Tosca - Busenfreund (dZihan+Kamien Dub) (Suzuki In Dub)