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[Anthony Flack]

I think what Sony did was listen to the hardcore / loudest voice / gamer types and neglect the vast majority.

I was kind of joking, but I was thinking more about their music and consumer electronics divisions. Particularly with regards to their DRM, which I have fallen foul of in the past (I have a minidisk recorder that is rendered unusable thanks to Sony's DRM. After spending several months wrestling with it, I finally got a response from Sony tech support, which was quite literally "Yes, it doesn't work. Please continue to purchase Sony products").

[RichCI]

The player can give suggestions, sure, and I agree it's incredibly important to listen to those suggestions.  At the same time, however, I think that what the player suggests is not usually what the problem is.  For example, if the player is saying an enemy is too fast, or that a level is too long, I don't think that the answer is usually going to be to slow the enemy down or shorten the level.

To expland upon what Xelius was saying...  It usually takes some translating from what the player originally suggested to what they really mean - that it's too difficult to deal with faster enemies, or that your gameplay/level design isn't engaging enough in longer-term scenarios.  Now, I'm not saying there's never a time when the player is right - certainly there are situations when really, all you need to do is slow the enemy down - but the majority of the time, there's probably some underlying root problem that the player isn't capable of understanding, and therefore, isn't able to suggest it as a solution.  So, in that sense, doing what your users say is usually a bad idea, because you're missing the real problem.

That kind of thinking can be applied quite a bit in life, I've found.  If someone tells me I talk to much, perhaps instead of talking less, I should figure out why what I'm saying is so annoying or boring that they'd complain about it in the first place.   

[Chris Whitman]

Word.

If there's one thing that working in business software taught me, it's that customers have no idea what they want, or what they need. What they do know, however, is what they don't want.

Typically, customers bring issues up, not because they have a better idea of how things should work (which happens in rare occasions, but not often), but because there's something in particular they don't like. Unfortunately, they aren't always best at expressing what they don't like, so they make some suggestion which they believe will fix their problem, but probably won't (after all, they're unlikely to know the software as well as you are).

The trick is typically to coax exactly what is wrong out of them, ask leading questions, etc.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

In the long term DRM is pretty essential, Sony or any other large company that relies on IP is going to need some form of it. The problem isn't DRM, but stupid/intrusive/broken DRM that causes more trouble than it's worth (and I'm not even sure that's the case for Sony; would it really make more profits without it?). But this is off-topic.

I agree that players are much better at identifying what they don't like about a game than suggesting what would make it better. But sometimes they can do the second as well. For instance, TimW (he runs indygamer and is an editor here I think?) played my game and gave me tons of good suggestions like "a way to view the stories of previous levels all at once, without replaying those levels", I implemented some and the game is the better for it.

Of course he's reviewed hundreds of indie games so he is more likely to suggest useful things than the average player, but it's still a player suggesting additional features which worked. The same goes for some of my other playtesters too. I of course received suggestions from people that I thought would be a bad idea which I didn't take too, you have to be selective.

[AdamAtomic]

Do you really think Sony spends LESS on DRM than they lose on piracy though?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

I really have no idea, but it makes sense to me that they wouldn't do something without a reason. Corporations aren't stupid, most of the time they think carefully about something, test it extensively, and decide on the most profitable course of action, and change it if it isn't profitable.

What I mean is, why else would they and other corporations use DRM if it didn't save them money? Out of hatred for people? Out of insanity? Did they just toss a coin and decide to use it?

It's arguable that they actually do lose more money than they'd gain if they didn't use it, but deciding which is true has to be based on a lot more data than we have access to, I'm not going to decide one way or the other based on a few case studies.

[AdamAtomic]

They do it out of fear, I think, more than anything else.  A long string of "what if"s.  They don't think it through logically; they say "well we just found out that someone cracked our game, and it was downloaded 1000 times!  That's a $50k loss!"  But is it?  Who says those 1000 people would have even played the game in the first place?  Ask the frat boy who buys Madden every year if he has any idea what "warez" are.

Not everyone totally screwed it up.  Valve & Steam have DRM and its unintrusive and effective, but beyond DRM they also provide a convenient download and play service.  So they're not shafting the customers, and they are providing themselves a new commercial outlet with higher returns than retail, to help offset the cost of the DRM development.

Plain old disc-locking and rootkit type stuff though, I think its very expensive for these companies to put into place (imagine buying a million licenses of a piece of software), and all it does is get them bad press, and prevent people who might have TRIED the game if it was free from finding out if its good or not, and it's very, very hard to prove how much revenue anyone ACTUALLY loses due to pirating.  To me it seems like lose-lose!

Maybe there is "good" DRM out there, or will be eventually, but it will cost much more to develop and implement than pirating ever cost them!  DRM is a subset of general software security, and thus it faces all the same daunting problems.  Software CAN NOT be truly secure!  Computers with interchangeable drives and operating systems and processors and hard drives make it almost impossible to do a legitimate hardware match as well, again risking screwing good paying customers (which is MUCH worse than accidentally doing nice things for bad, not-paying customers).

I dunno, those are my thoughts as an outsider.  The only good DRM right now is hardware dongles, and even those get hacked on a regular basis.  I think it's a lost cause!  The best copy protection is a good community and good reputation.  Beyond that, I think companies just need to expect some losses!

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

That argument doesn't make too much sense to me. For instance, it's based on the suspect assumption that piracy doesn't lose companies significant money (I am not arguing that it does, just that it's not clear that it doesn't). It also assumes that corporations have emotions -- I don't think corporations act on fear or on any other emotion. Sure, they have humans running them, but I think the professional environment limits decisions made on fear, and it wouldn't make sense that all the big IP-related corporations would be engulfed in fear simultaneously and act on it year upon year despite it losing them money. But as I said, it's possible, it's just that I'd just like to base it on data rather than conjecture.

But, I don't want to sidetrack this thread too much; perhaps it can be split into a separate DRM thread.

[Anthony Flack]

Yeah, it probably should be I guess. I don't want to add too much, except to say that I don't think that piracy hurts creators or consumers in any significant way; although it certainly affects big media companies like Sony (who also don't act in the best interests of either creators or consumers). As a creator and consumer, I am against DRM, but I can see why the powerful middlemen with their extensive media monopolies want to enforce it.

My problem arose from buying a minidisk recorder (explicitly designed for making field recordings with a microphone) from a company that is ALSO a big media company (and is quite happy to cripple its electronic devices to support its publishing interesxts), and the fact that Sony was so arrogant tha they didn't care that their crummy, broken DRM had literally given birth to a technically great product that simply didn't work, for no good reason.

It really is a great little machine, but I still can't use it. I don't think it will ever be fixed.

[Chris Whitman]

Two words: quarterly reports.

Large companies do things which often seem irrational, but make sense when you think about concepts such as reassuring shareholders and pumping up profits over the short term.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

Yeah, it probably should be I guess. I don't want to add too much, except to say that I don't think that piracy hurts creators or consumers in any significant way.

I know this is a case study, but Winter Wolves, after installing copy protection, saw sales go up by 35%. The effect was immediate and permanent.

Again, that's just one case study, and nothing to base thinking on, but I think that if independent game developers can gain more than a third more sales through copy protection, how much more may big companies like Sony be losing?

People are more likely to pirate from what they see as a faceless corporation than from one guy making games out of his house. What % increase would Sony give up without DRM? We don't know, but if that case study holds true, probably at least 35%.

I'm sure you could find similar examples of when an independent developer installed copy protection and sales went down (although personally I haven't seen such an example, but it probably exists) though. It's just the law of small numbers at work.