I believe that's the fast startup option, which has now been disabled by default.

Actually, they are quite correct.  You've never had to have a CD in the drive, because of the way SD does it's product control -- which is Impulse.

When it comes down to it, Stardock has to do something to protect it's IP.  They are a business after all.  If it isn't something like Impulse, it's going to be some kind of DRM.  They have no choice.  The good old days of yore when companies operated on a policy based on the honor system.  Companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars, sometimes even more, developing a title.  They have to be able to see some kind of return on thier investment or they would cease to exist.  Games aren't written by two or three guys at home, in thier garage anymore.  It takes a whole staff of people to create a title, not to mention what it takes to get the title from the harddrives on the devs workstations on to store shelves. 

We, as consumers, have to be willing to give in a little.  If we don't, the only recourse developers have is to lock down thier titles with DRM (formerly known as copy protection).  I'm not thrilled with that concept.  The approach Stardock has taken is the least intrusive.  I don't have to keep up with a piece of medium, or even a registration code.  I don't have to worry about having some rootkit installed, or any other kind of "hidden" app that could interfere with my machines performance.  All I have to do is install a client that only needs to run when I want to run it, and create an account.  That's it!  How is that so bad?  It's a LOT better than the other alternatives that are out there right now. 

We'll NEVER see the freedom of access that once existed.  It's just not possible anymore.  There are far too many users out there now that have no trouble with not ever paying for thier software.  It's sad, but it's here to stay.  These companies aren't implementing these controls to punish us, the honest, paying customer, they are implementing these controls out of self defense.  How long could you survive if you only got payed for a fraction of your time on the clock???  Wouldn't you want to do something to make sure you got payed for all of your time?  I know I would.....

Actually, it does control pirates -- they don't get patches, so they get an inferior version.

You cannot prevent pirates from cracking any known form of DRM -- fact.  Even the strongest DRM will be broken.

So, instead, just keep them from the patches -- with a company like SD, patches vastly improve the product, leading to a situation that successfully scr... er, fu... ah, messes with the pirates.

Very interesting discussion i must say.

All that pirate vs. game-making-company thing is old as world , but here we see it coming to a new level

At one side we have Stardock - the company which i respect greatly (especially after that "hope you wont be our customer u lame warez kiddie" by Frogboy, +1 karma ).

At another side - THE PEOPLE (who want things made as easy as possible for em).

As a torrent user (yes, i always d/l games and check em before buying em, sue me ) i must say that Stardck policy was effective, to say the least. I d/l'ed Sins, played em and bought em (demo's are crap, dont even start talking about em, please). Same happened with GalCiv2. that was Part 1.

Part 2. I dont have a CD-drive. Really. I have local server at my home network at which i store all my data(including CD images). And i really HATE when i have to plug the CD drive in to play something new. Really, makes me mad. There are other things , that make me mad.

And we come to part 3. The broken disks and lost cd-keys. Happened to everyone i bet? Atm in my list  of lost software... 3(three!) copies of War3 + FT, NWN2 + MotB, Sacred 2. Thats how much worth of software? You count, i dont wanna get upset.

What Impulse gave me: storage for cd-keys, storage for my games, fast updates and ability to buy game in 2 clicks. Yes Impulse has issues(seen few due to "optimized windows").

So thanks, Stardock. You made my life a bit easier.

Edit: typos.

tough you do have those people,  and saying  sins is multiplayer anyways so u dont need the patch  sounds plain mean and dumb

care to say that sentence to him personally?  just cuase ure in a forum u still have no right to keep people out just becuase theyve got no internet,   

Well, I hope they don't.  It's FAR easier to use Impulse than the old way.  I'm loving it, and hope it just keeps getting better and better.  I love that I can buy games, ptach games, and get to chat (with the devs in most cases no less) about the games all in one client.  Very cool....

The most valuable thing to me...I don't have to keep track of product keys and cds.  So if my house burns today, I won't lose any of the games I've bought rights to play.  Now that's cool in anybodies book.  I just wish they had more business software.  Id set up an account for work in a heartbeat if there was anything avaiable that would fit our needs.  

Futhermore, what would be a easier alternative? Maybe they could just ask. When you go to download the patch it says "Are you a Pirate?" and if you click yes you wont be able to download the game. Actualy in that situation you would have been treated as a pirate up until you hit NO so i bet someone would complain about that too.

 

LOL, that sounds a lot like something I thew out when we were working a problem with our campus portal.  We were trying to work out how to get a user's initial password to them in such a way that we wouldn't have to use snail mail or e-mail, but that would be secure.  A heated discussion broke out as we had on one side those that wanted to make it as easy and convenient as possible and on the other side those that wanted to make sure it was secure.  I was in with the later.  It got to a point where I just threw up my hands and said, why don't we just have a list of new users pop up on the login screen and we can say, Click here if you are John Doe, Click here if you are Jane Doe, etc. 

Click here if you are a pirate...LOL!!!    Hey, you could make it even more secure.  Have it say, click here if you have a legal copy of our software, then have it pop up a window that says, "Are you sure? Yes-No?  That would make it bullet proof!!!  No pirate is getting past that....   

Guilty before proven innocent? I wish that's the way it worked for our court system also.

If Stardock says Impulse isn't a DRM thing, that's fine by me. But I am frustrated about the way people talk about pirates in here.

Wall of text warning: if you don't want to read my thoughts about piracy, skip right into the end.

(edit: In the following text, piracy = sharing copyrighted material, a pirate = a person who thinks the mentioned action should be legal)

Well, I am a pirate. I am also Stardock's customer. Now when you think pirates just DL stuff from somewhere without never ever paying for anything, where do you get this idea from? Can I see some statistical data that clearly confirms your assesment, please? Well, no, I can't, because there is none. Just the standard assumptions propaganda lies that are made up by RIAA, IFPI and the record industry, etc... I agree that piracy affects the video game industry differently, but... Today, if a game isn't pirated, it isn't sold either. I don't buy all games, but I do buy all the games that I like, and Sins is one of these games. I do not buy these games because it is the "right thing to do", but because it is the logical thing to do. If I see a game that I like, I want to support it to encourage companies to make more of these games. If i bought games without trying them out first I would probably end up in a situation where I'd be supporting the development of games that I do not like.

See this. And this. 2D Boy estimates that their game's piracy rate is about 90%. That means 1 game sold for every 9 downloads. But... does this actually have an impact on sales?

Let's assume that Games X and Y are pretty much the same. The difference is that Game X is uncopyable, while Game Y isn't. Assume that both games sell 10 000 copies.

Now, Game Y gets distributed on a torrent site right away when it gets released (or possibly even before that). It gets downloaded 90 000 times, thus giving it the estimated 90% piracy rate while the total player amount is 100 000. Now this is a huuuge setback for the ones who made the game, isn't it? Yes, if you interpret that it shows the amount of lost sales, but it doesn't. The vast majority of the people in that 90% wouldn't have bought the game anyway. If game Y was also uncopyable, 2D boy estimates that for every 1000 "extra" downloads they would sell one (1) copy. This means that Game Y would have sold 10 000 + (90 000 / 1000) = 10 090 copies and have 89 910 less players. I'm well aware that these figures are only rough estimates - but who wins and who loses in this situation? More people = more clans = a richer community = better experience.

(just for a curiosity, by this math if piracy rate was 99% (10k sold, 990k pirated), the devs of Game Y would sell 10 000 + (990 000 / 1000) = 10990 copies, which is less than a 10% increase.)

By the way, online games seem to be pretty much immune to piracy due to the need of a legit CD-key.

FYI piracy is not stealing. Even if 10- to 15-year-olds think that it is "cool" and "criminal" to be a pirate and go and warez everything they can - this doesn't make piracy stealing. Piracy is not even a crime. It's a growing political movement consisting of people who think that spreading and sharing culture is a good thing. This group of people includes the beforementioned "criminals". Sure. It also includes artists, writers, coders, highly educated IT professionals, professors and others. Piracy will never be stopped either. The deal with all the criminalization is just that the copyright lobby pretty much gets to make the laws pretty much everywhere, so... you can guess the outcome. Bottom line is - even if you think piracy is bad, trying fanatically to stop it just because someone told you it's bad would/will lead to a far, far worse situation for human kind.

_____________________

Anyways, I still think it's pretty stupid for Stardock not to make a stand-alone patch file. This would 1) solve ALL the problems with patching Sins that arise from troubles in getting Impulse to work, 2) not affect your piracy rate (DRM never does) 3) keep your customers happy. The argument that Impulse is faster and reduces DL times is a pretty hollow one since some (many) people clearly don't want to use it for patching and some can't even get it to work.

My question to Stardock is: If Impulse isn't your idea of a DRM system in any way, then why don't you make a stand-alone patch file available? If Impulse is better than the alternative, then people will start to use it and you will have nothing to "fear". Otherwise they will just hate it.

Because it is too expensive for us to create stand alone patches for the 300+ programs we develop/publish/update every time we do an update.

But we are open to creating stand-alone updates on a case by case basis in the event that it's a popular enough program (like Sins).  But that stand-alone update won't have any of the advantages of Impulse. And those users will have to go through additonal security steps to verify who they are.

I ask you though, is there a stand-alone update for Left4Dead or Halflife 2? The reality is, as games get more complex the days of downloading some .zip file are numbered.

Ok. Sorry, if I'm frustrating you!

By the way you say it, I figure there's no such patch for those games, I haven't played them though. But from what I understand, you need Steam to play HL2 anyway, so... And even if filesizes grow, connection speeds tend to go up also, possibly even at a faster rate. I can't deny that you have a point, though.

But why? This will have absolutely no effect against piracy and it doesn't make any sense. If someone doesn't get a cracked pirate version of the patch going soon / at some time, then this would only mean that no one cares enough.

There's also the fact that the most of the updates don't affect single player that much (aside from the graphics update). Considering that non-legit copies of the game can't even get online (as I understand), I really don't get your logic on this one.

So you think that the developer of a game should just put out the full game as a big .zip file and rely on the honor system?

Perhaps you should start a company and try that.  Good luck with that.

Maybe what we should do is just have Sins out there as a big ZIP file with a PayPal donate link next to it.

Come on, let's have a little common sense here.  There is a huge gulf between having some sort of honor system and requiring a rectal exam to get access to a file update.  There's a happy medium.

Heck, why have passwords on your email accounts? If someone really wants to, they can probably find a way to crack it (as Sarah Palin learned).

Any system we have is going to have the user type in their CD key and their email address at some point so that we can identify them as someone who has purchased the software.  It's not asking much of the user.

I have never stated that I'm against copy protection. I have stated I'm against unreasonable inconconvenient of legitimate users.  Asking users to type in some data to identify who they are is no different than requiring user to type in your user ID and password before posting on this forum.

I'll say what I said before - at a certain point, we just don't want the business of Internet cranks.  Getting rid of zealots is a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

Frogboy, I'm not trying to tell you what to do. Don't put words into my mouth. I never said anything about a "honor system", although that is a very common argument ("That's what's going on, isn't it? If someone wants to download your software, then he can just type www.generictorrentsite.com and get on with it."). Although... there's still the factual lack of statistical data showing how piracy affects sales negatively, as is also usually claimed.

A recent study among finnish pre-highschool youth proved that 69% of them practice piracy, and 27% do this on a daily basis. Considering the nature of the internet, I have no reason to believe that these numbers are much different in other countries. Are you ready to label them all as criminals?

A happy medium considering piracy in software is all right as far as I'm concerned. Especially since piracy affects software a lot differently than other digital media. However, RIAA, MPAA, IFPI, etc etc etc are not happy with a happy medium. They want all pirates to be hanged publicly and after that preferably left naked in a cage to rot for a few weeks for downloading a few songs just to show everyone how bad piracy is.

My message was that instead of fighting piracy, copyright owners need to learn to cope with it. It won't go away, and if it will, then we're much more screwed than in the opposite situation. I recently got Impulse to work and I think that Stardock is going into the right direction here. There's much to do, but the direction you have taken seems right to me. I thank you for that.

I don't have anything personal against DRM either, as long as it works. But the truth is that most of it only affects the buyers, not those who don't pay. I think CD-keys are possibly the best kind of a copy protection there is for online games. Considering Sins is mainly an online game, what else is really needed?