Rom's Rants

Free-Roaming Hostility From A QA/Developer Perspective.

Friday, September 26, 2008

Chris Hyman: Profane Whiny Warez Monkey

Just had a comment from Bruce Everiss on my previous post with another E-mail from another warez monkey that fell under the wrong end of the legal hammer...
From: Chris Hyman
To: bruce
Sent: Friday, September 26, 2008 5:05 PM
Subject: Remove my name you fucking bitch


Yeah, FUCK YOU Bruce you piece of shit. Remove my name "Chris Hyman" from your stupid ass fucking blog. Your blog is a piece of shit and you are one FUCKING UGLY OLD MAN!

FUCK YOU! GO TO HELL! I hope you die and burn in hell!

Oh, just letting you know I am getting my lawyer ready to sue you for copyright on my name. :) Prepare to be served and sued. Oh, and I will be getting damages from it. The money will start at $10,000. Who knows, I'll probably sue you for everything you got you fucking ugly ass.
Well, Chris, same comment applies. You did the crime, admitted to it, and are lucky that you are getting away with only having to pay the civil penalty.

And come on, threatening to sue someone in a different country for violating copyright on your name? First off, your name doesn't have a copyright on it. Second, he's posting information that is publicly available from a court case. Third, he's in the right. You did do the crime. Your actions, while they may not have directly affected him, do affect his industry as a whole.

You did wrong. You got busted for it. Man up and take it.

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posted by Michael Russell at 9/26/2008 12:29:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Thursday, September 25, 2008

Shawn Guse: Whiny Warez Monkey

Some of you may have seen that Activision went after some pirates recently. Based on some follow-up comments from Activision's lawyers, my assumption is that these guys modded their consoles and created the original ISO rips of certain Activision products and/or created the original torrents used to distribute the rips. Mind you, that is my assumption and may not be fact.

That said, these guys have agreed to settlements that restrict their future behavior...and now at least one of them is trying to erase the evidence of his crime from the net.

Now, this is a civil settlement, but the settlement does contain an admission from Shawn Guse that he committed a crime.

Consider your name being linked to the crime a part of the punishment.

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posted by Michael Russell at 9/25/2008 01:44:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Thursday, April 17, 2008

Piracy as an ESS

I want to talk about piracy again, but I'm going to remove morality from the discussion because it just brings the language Nazis out of the woodwork and I think this discussion can actually work without morality being brought in for this viewpoint. The reason I want to bring this up now is because recent information has led to the possibility of an equilibrium being found. For the sake of simplicity, copy protection is not included as a factor for this simple model.

An evolutionary stable strategy (ESS) is defined as a strategy which, if most members of a population adopt it, cannot be bettered by an alternative strategy. (Dawkins, 1976) It is not necessary for all of a population to adopt a strategy for an ESS to emerge. In fact, it is possible to find a blended ESS which depends on percentages of the population adopting complementary or opposite behaviors.

In a software ecosystem, we have three behavior patterns: producer, buyer and liar. Producers create the software, buyers purchase the software, and liars pirate the software.

For producers, there is a cost associated with the creation of the software and a cost associated with handling support after the fact. In order to maintain an ESS, a producer has to have its initial release bring in enough resources to cover the cost of the initial release, the cost of supporting the release and the cost of the next release at a minimum. Any less and it risks dying out.

For buyers, there is a cost associated with the acquisition of the software and a gradually smaller support cost per buyer for the producers. (The reason that the cost is gradually smaller is that as patches and support documentation grow, the cost to the producer to support the release shrinks.)

For liars, there is next to no cost associated with the acquisition of the software and a much more stable support cost per liar for the producers. (The reason that the cost is much more stable is that liars cannot get the patches.)

As long as a producer has enough buyers to support his release and the support costs for the liars and the buyers, a producer can continue to produce. Experience and evidence released by other companies show that on average, 80% of technical support contacts are from people who have purchased the software, 15% are from people who may purchase the software, and 5% are from liars (people who have not purchased the software). While we cannot quantify the number of people who have not purchased the software, we can quantify their expense on support.

Regional experiments with game pricing has shown that for most games, the initial cost does not affect the number purchased, just the curve at which they are purchased. In other words, if a game will sell 300,000 units, it will sell them quickly at first with rapid drop down to a low level at $50 or at a slow steady pace at $20, but it will still only sell 300,000 units. So cost for games is not really one of the factors that can easily be adjusted.

The two factors that a producer can adjust are quality and quantity on a sliding scale based on the number of buyers in the market. A very short, high-quality game and a lengthy bug-laden game can cost about the same to make. A producer is trying to strike the balance between the duration of the game and its quality. In practice, the "money spot" is less than one support contact per thirty copies sold.

Now as the number of liars in a marketplace increase, the amount of resources that a producer can devote to the production of their next release decreases due to the increased support cost of the liar's market share.

At least at the moment, we have achieved a bit of equilibrium in the PC market. Five years ago, that equilibrium was at about $2 million to produce a product with about 350,000 buyers. Nowadays, the balance point has shifted to $750,000 to $1 million with 250,000 to 300,000 buyers. Fixed costs per unit have risen even though the prices that we sell games at has not. Pirated goods are more available on the PC due to the proliferation of broadband and the number of liars willing to pirate has increased in part due to the extremism of the anti-piracy lobbies of the RIAA and MPAA. Attempts to continually monetize games (MMO's, ad revenue) have had mixed results with most MMO's not being profitable and ad revenue averaging under $2 per unit sold.

Essentially, our equilibrium is smaller products like PopCap and Stardock titles. "Galactic Civilizations II" cost $1 million and sold approximately 300,000 units according to a Stardock spokesman. While there will be some big budget bets, they will be fewer and further between.

Even digital distribution isn't a godsend because rather than the cost of the unit and the retailer margin, we have the chargeback margin and the ongoing cost for bandwidth. Digital distribution may grow your marketplace, but people are still (rightfully) skittish about using their credit cards online, European debit cards won't always work on American networks, and to be fair, it further reduces the opportunity cost necessary for one to become a liar. In short, digital distribution is a wash.

The current generation of consoles is still trying to hit an equilibrium. The biggest advantage that consoles have is that there is a higher barrier of entry for a liar to take from a producer on a console (the cost of modifying the console) and there is a risk associated with modding because the act of modding could result in damaging or destroying the console. As a result, liars don't really become a problem for consoles until a soft mod is released.

So to sum up, the marketplace is evolving to handle the larger number of pirates by reducing the amount spent per title. If the number of liars continue to increase while the number of buyers continues its slow decline, it is very likely that the PC market will return to the days of hobbyist developers being in charge (in which cases systems like Microsoft's XNA initiative will seem more prophetic than anything), but unless we can come to some middle ground between the anti-piracy and copyright-abolition agendas, we will continue to see fewer and fewer high-profile bets on the PC.

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posted by Michael Russell at 4/17/2008 06:52:00 PM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Friday, August 24, 2007

The Who Down In Gameville

All of this BioShock hubbub on the net brought out the Seuss in me. Apologies for the length, and for the meter being off in some sections.

The Who down in Gameville love to play
Video games all the night and all day.
They play them with meals,
They play them on wheels,
They play them online,
They play them all fine.

The gamers defend their systems with glee,
Some on PC, others on 360.
A straggling few have a PS3,
But their numbers are too small
To matter, you see.

The 360 gamers had plenty of games
But the means to control them were all the same.
No keyboard, no mouse would enter the fray;
With joystick, it was deemed, all games will play.

The PC gamers had games out the nose
And many could be played with a rubber hose.
Though hardware and drivers made compat pure shit
The gamers could play the game as they saw fit.

The 360 was capable of finishing the war
That Master Chief started this year less four;
But the PC gamers didn't really feel sore
Because they felt their computers could do so much more.

A few undesirables in either camp
Would pirate the games with their digital stamp,
But the PC suffered from warez much more often
That the 360 suffered in its small red-ringed coffin.

The makers of games saw the pirating void
The 360 protection automatically deployed.
It was too hard for most people to pirate and mod,
Unlike the PC where DRM's a fraud.

The makers of games kept selling to both
But the revenue figures weren't giving them hope
So they decided to turn PC games on their ear
And put in some roadblocks for casual pirates to fear.

They put in some code to check for the disk,
Figuring that would reduce their risk,
And for a while, the sales were in tune,
Until one day in the middle of June
When a fellow who went by the name of Woon
Etched into the code his Eldritch rune
And with that act of modification
The pirate people resumed their duplication.

The makers of games saw this,
And they were not pleased.
So they tried it again,
This time with product keys.
The crackers struck with the greatest of ease,
Bringing the simple code to its knees,
And copying again was as simple as a breeze.

While the battle to reduce bad copies commenced,
The good PC gamers were left on the fence.
While 360 gamers played games left and right,
Their PC shelf experienced a blight.
The PC got ports; even then, just a few.
Several had more bugs than a case of the flu,
So the PC gamers decided on just what to do.

"Our platform of choice is wounded right now
Because makers of games hold their too-sacred cow
Of keeping their games legit,
But unfortunately for us,
They're giving us shit.
The bugs, the crashes, the gamepad controls,
The 4:3 graphics, the sad online trolls.
We'll hold out for games that make us complete,
Only then will we go and suckle the teat."

A new game came out that would fit the bill,
And the PC excitement betrayed their thrill.
The screenshots filled their hearts with such glee
For it looked just as good as it did on 360.
The water effects were astoundingly good
And did you hear the sounds of bullets on wood?
The enemy AI was really a treat
And the game would take many hours to beat.
The PC gamers were also excited to see
It designed for 16:9 instead of 4:3.

Gamers of all kinds went out on day one
To pick up their copies and have them some fun,
But one of the PC'ers decided to see
What the game looked like in old 4:3,
And what he saw he decided to abhor:
People in 4:3 could see just a teensy bit more.

While the 360 gamers were exploring Rapture,
The PC gamers were starting to capture
The fury of others at what they perceived
As attempts to trick them, make them deceived!

The 360's plasmids were making them cautious
While the PC gamers claimed to be nauseous.
The 360's were hacking and splicing with glee
While the PC gamers were chanting "FOV!"

While the 360 gamers were after old Ryan,
A wee PC gamer, who we'll call Brian,
Discovered the PC version didn't want
Him installing his game wherever he'd want
And if he installed too many copies at a single time
He'd have to call for permission (albeit on the dev's dime).

The devs explained that you could install it twice
Compared to the 360's once, now wasn't that nice?
But the PC gamers grew incensed, they say.
"Can't install how we want? Then we won't pay."

The 360 gamers were saving the Sisters
While the PC gamers were making new blisters
Typing out hate mail to community relations
Typically reserved for some Third Reich nations.

The makers of games attempted to appease,
Saying "Five installs now, and soon FOV!"
But the PC gamers said, "Too little, too late,"
While 360 gamers learned Andrew Ryan's fate.

The 360 gamers took a rest and paused their games
Since the plot twist made them question their aims.
They went to the forums to discuss the game
But found that they had been covered in flame.
They looked at their copies, the same FOV,
The same behavior in 4:3.
Only one copy in use, just like on PC.
They saw the debate and thought it quite lame
And then they unpaused and continued their game.

As the 360 gamers completed their quest,
The PC gamers thought they were the best
For getting their way was what mattered now;
The game had become secondary to their sacred cow.

In the end, PC gamers got what they wanted
But the game left their shelf space curiously haunted.
The uproar scared other devs away
As they asked, "Why didn't they just play
The game as designed? It's the game that they needed.
It wasn't these petty demands to be heeded.
The 360 gamers played all day long,
They shuddered when the Sister sang her eerie song.
They loved the game, it's easy to see;
They didn't whine, bitch and moan like those with PC's.
We pour our hearts into these games that we make,
But seeing the toll these arguments take
Really do encourage us to flee...
To hell with PC, we'll build for 360."

Now that you have read my sad tale,
Of PC gamers chasing their white whale,
Can you see why elitism made it to be
Just too much trouble to build for PC?
The PC market's feeling the cruch,
For Blizzard's "WoW" has been eating their lunch
And they're fairly certain about this small hunch
That pirated games delivered the sucker punch.

But pleasing PC gamers is no small feat
And elitism raises the bar they must meet
So the makers of games still love the PC....
As a tool to make games for the 360.

(Edit: Fixed typo. [Wrote this thing on a BlackBerry...])

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posted by Michael Russell at 8/24/2007 09:31:00 AM | 6 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Friday, December 29, 2006

The Pirate's Plank

Okay, let's talk about the number one issue that has come across on the tech support forums and E-mails for "SiN Episodes: Emergence," the Radek office trap.

Issue: Player trapped after Radek leaves office
Severity: 1
Repro Steps: There are two ways that this could happen with the initial release of the game.
  1. The player is on a very slow machine, and does not watch Radek go through the door. (28 reports)
  2. The player made a massive mess in the crane control room, and Radek has to teleport past some debris. (11 reports)
Cause: If Radek was either unable to cross through the doorway or unable to find a path to his final pathnode, he would teleport from the doorway to his final pathnode, skipping the trigger that he had to pass through to trigger the appearance of Elexis.

We didn't see that behavior at all during testing. Even with less than .1% of our customers at the time experiencing it, we still went through and got it fixed in the first update over Steam.

After that update, we were still getting reports of this behavior. Obviously it shouldn't happen, because the trigger was grown to encompass Radek's final pathnode, so there was absolutely no way that the Elexis trigger brush wouldn't be tripped.

We managed to track down a copy of the warez version of the game, and used that to isolate out the problem. In this case, the same behavior as above was still happening, but the cause was changing because of how the warez morons decided to crack the game.

The last four months of testing on the game were spent using an internal Steam server. The reason that we were testing over Steam was that Source and Steam act differently when shown loose files as opposed to files inside GCF's. When a file is inside a GCF, it is considered an official release. When it's a loose file, it is considered a mod. The warez morons unpacked the files from the GCF's and modified a DLL file. As a result, it triggered the behavior change in the engine.

Here's what happened. "SiN Episodes" loaded up SE1_U4Lab02 and tried to load the pathnode file. The pathnode file was missing some file system metadata, so the engine thought that the pathnode file was out-of-date. The engine loaded the pathnode file, but then created a new "quick" pathnode file. The "quick" pathnode file is there so that map authors can quickly test their maps before building the full pathnode file. Because of how the map was constructed (dynamic bridge, sealed doors, etc.), the "quick" pathnode file had no link between Radek's start point and his end point.

As a result, if someone using the warez version plays the level and does not die, Radek uses the "out-of-date" pathnode file and completes his path, but is still subject to the previously mentioned potential causes. However, if the player exits the game after loading the level or restarts, or dies on the level and reloads, or starts a new game after getting to U4Lab02 once, Radek will never trigger the Elexis portion of the cutscene, and the player will be trapped.

In this case, a bug was introduced by the pirates because it was causing a codepath to be executed with the production data that would never be executed with production data.

On the upside, because of how the savegame files work, we could tell by looking at the savegame whether or not the player was using a legitimate copy of the game. On the downside, the vast majority of the people I spoke with who were asking for support for this issue knew that they were using a pirated version of the game...they just didn't care.

And with that, I weep for the future of the PC games industry. People felt that they were entitled to support, even for a copy of the game that they didn't buy. Once a sense of entitlement falls on a crowd, no amount of education will change their ways.

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posted by Michael Russell at 12/29/2006 09:30:00 AM | 1 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Thursday, December 28, 2006

Pirate Wall of Shame?

Here's a bit of an idea that's been bouncing around my head for a little bit...

How would you guys feel if I set up a "Piracy Wall of Shame" for these guys who decide to warez our products and still contact support?

The rules would be:

1) Once you have verified that someone stole your game and contacted support, you'd forward the entire support thread (minus any confidential information) to the Wall of Shame E-mail address.

2) Once the WoS verifies the claim, the E-mail thread is posted on the site.

3) Each individual game would have its own WoS page that contained all the threads.

4) Each WoS page would have a link to where they can buy the game legally via Amazon.com. (The link would have a commission link back to cover the costs of running the site.)

5) If someone who was posted decides to purchase the game after being posted on the site, they can be removed by E-mailing a digital picture of the game package, receipt and their name/E-mail address written on the receipt to the WoS site.

6) Once the WoS verifies the purchase, the E-mail is removed, and a notice is put up that a legitimate sale was created through use of the site.

Any thoughts?

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posted by Michael Russell at 12/28/2006 03:21:00 PM | 3 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

The Nerve...

Okay...it's been almost a month since I was laid off from Ritual. Almost a month of not having to deal with idiots asking for support for the pirated version of the game. Aside from still not having my personal belongings back, my time at Ritual was starting to fade from my memory...until 15 minutes ago.

What do I receive in my E-mail box?
From: wilton wilfred [address removed]
how can i get pass through the office of viktor radek? i've been standing for half an hour after he spoke and i realise that something wrong here. after searching for an answer, somebody said that i have to install steam. is this required? heck,i just want to finish this game.
__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around
http://mail.yahoo.com
My reply:
I'm glad that you want to finish the game.

However, the issue you are encountering was introduced by the pirate group Provision when they broke the Steam copy protection on the game.

If you want to finish the game, please purchase a legitimate copy. If you purchase over Steam, it is available for $14.99, or if you want a copy at retail, it's $19.99.

Perhaps if more people had bought the game instead of pirating it, I wouldn't have been laid off from Ritual.

Sincerely,
Michael
I'd been trying to decide whether or not to post my post-mortem of this particular issue or not. Guess I should finish writing that fucker up so I'll stop getting E-mails like this one.

And people thought I was making shit like this up...

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posted by Michael Russell at 12/28/2006 01:27:00 PM | 5 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

Saturday, July 22, 2006

[Games] The Hidden Cost Of Piracy

I don't think it's any secret that a warez group called Provision pirated "SiN Episodes: Emergence" about three hours after it was released over Steam.

There are lots of comments that people make trying to justify piracy. "A person who pirates wouldn't buy it anyway." "It's try before you buy, so you only support people who deserve it." "I'm poor and can't afford $20." "We aren't stealing from you, we're stealing from the faceless corporation." "We're only stealing the bits, not the merchandise."

Even if you buy all of those, I can still say that you're stealing resources from me. Why? Because you're stealing my time.

When we shipped "SiN Episodes: Emergence," we had two small config bugs that slipped out and affected a small percentage of our users. We spent the next week working on fixes for that bug and others, testing the fixes, and getting the fix up over Steam so that people wouldn't be affected by it. During that first week, I received about 230 support complaints specifically regarding these two config bugs.

The fix was released on May 17, along with several other miscellaneous fixes. The patch was released over Steam and people who owned legitimate copies were updated and were happy.

Between May 17 and May 24, I still had over 200 support complaints about the config bug. It was fixed, the fix was out and released, but I was still getting support complaints.

I E-mailed each one back individually, trying to get additional information. The responses I got back from the people who replied were insane.

"Did you let Steam install the update?" "What's Steam?"

"Where did you buy the game?" "Over Steam." "What is your Steam ID?" "I don't have one."

"Have you tried running the installer?" "Oh, my copy didn't come with an installer. It's in a folder on a DVD. I just drag it to my machine and then run the game."

For the last five weeks, support requests for the pirated version of the game outnumbered support requests from legitimate purchasers. Last week, the pirates outnumbered the true customers by almost five to one. It takes time and resources to track down solutions to people's problems. I spent seven hours searching for answers to one guy's problem just to find out that when I asked him a question regarding a setting, he was checking on his friend's machine for the "right" answer and then on his machine and if the two didn't match, he was reporting the "right" answer so I wouldn't know he had a pirated version.

I really pride myself on the level of service I have been able to provide to our customers, but it is really disheartening to see the number of people who not only stole our game, but then steal my time in an effort to truly get something for nothing.

Mind you, I'm one guy that's been handling support for what could be called a niche product. Since release, I've spent more time handling customer service than I have handling the responsibilities that I have in my department. If I'm getting overwhelmed by the freeloaders, can you imagine what it's like for other companies with more pervasive products?

Support isn't free. Support personnel have to get trained, get paid, get benefits, etc.

The copies of "SiN Episodes: Emergence" that you buy pay my salary. Retail copies of Windows are more expensive partly because Microsoft has to factor support costs into those sales. More and more companies are moving to console games, not only because they make more money (they do because there's less piracy in the console space), but because they save major bank on support costs.

There are companies that love the PC and will stick with it for richer or poorer, but until we can find a way to better reduce piracy in the PC space, I'm afraid that it's only going to be for poorer.

(Edit 7/24, 6:22pm: Fixed typo. Edit: 10/24, 9:20am: Added sponsored links, tags.)

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posted by Michael Russell at 7/22/2006 09:40:00 PM | View blog reactions

Thursday, May 11, 2006

[Piracy] SiN: Ep (Not Work Safe)

[ temper on ]

Evidently, this lame-ass pirate group going by the handle of "PROViSiON" decided to dedicate some hours so that episode one of "SiN Episodes" would be what is known as a "0-day warez release." Fucking smacktard pieces of shit.

The game is $20. $20. All this industry has been hearing from fuckers like this is "Oh, drop the price and we won't pirate because we poor people won't have to." So, we self-fund the game entirely, drop the price to something to a level where we stand a chance of breaking even, and what do you know! They pirate our game anyway!

So if you know any members of this "PROViSiON" group, do me a favor...kick them in the fucking nuts and piss on their face. When they ask why, just say, "Well, normally I have to go to a fetish club and spend $20 to do that to someone, but you walked by and I figured, 'What the hell, I'll do it for free.'"

Assholes.

[ temper off ]

By the way, if anyone who downloads the warez version comes to one of the sites and asks for support and I find out that you warezed the game, just be warned that you haven't seen temper yet.

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posted by Michael Russell at 5/11/2006 07:17:00 PM | 10 Comments Links to this post | View blog reactions

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