[cninja]

Park mentions people might think piracy is "a victimless crime against rich fat cats and celebrities who don't really need the money". I wonder what would happen if instead of a fancy logo of the development company at the beginning of a game, there was an picture of the developer/development team with his/her/their names. With a picture, the faceless corporate entity becomes an actual person with a name. Has this ever been tried before? I suspect if it ever became too persuasive, then the crackers might just remove the picture, but it is a thought.

[idlewords]

I think the WROX series of programming books (and nearly all tech blogs with thumbnail photos) make a compelling case against showing developer headshots. There's a reason we became computer nerds.

[cninja]

And I think you are making my point for me. Which would be a more personal website: a blog with some computer nerd's face on it, or a blog with a corporate logo on it?

If a person's profile picture on a blog doesn't reduce the readership, then why would it on the splash page of a game? If the looks of a person mattered, the only popular blogs with profile pictures would be hot girls.

[randallsquared]

You only talk to hot girls in person?

[skolor]

I'm not sure that would be very effective. Judging from the pirates I have known over the years (and, being in college and having come from a highly technology oriented high school, there have been quite a few), this would not serve as much of a deterrent. For the massive majority of them, the fact that it was a "crime" at all did not enter their minds. They were motivated by one of two things: either they wanted to play the game/watch the movie/listen to the song, or they thought it was good and wanted to share it. In fact, when it came to being a small group (such as several of the local bands, or indie movies), the desire to share was that much greater, because the pirates could say "Hey, these guys made something really cool, I want other people to experience this".

While I can't say that piracy is always like this, from what I have seen it tends to be a sharing situation, which eventually leads to future sales. While it is only anecdotal evidence, there were several bootleg movies that were passed around and led to large groups of students going to see the future movies (for example, after having passed around a bootleg copy of the Matrix, we all went to see both the sequels, and having passed around several Jet Li movies led to us going out and watching Fearless).

From what I have seen, piracy is largely done by people with a fixed budget for entertainment, who spend it on what they think are the best value in terms of entertainment. Very rarely would a entertainment company lose money from this, their product would not have been bought in the first place. On the other hand, when a new product is released, past pirates are much more likely to purchase the new products, as long as what they pirated was of a good quality.

This does not particularly help new developers, or developers who may only put out a product every few years. With something like the article, where an AI Wars II may be years off, if ever made, that doesn't help them right now (although its probably a safe bet that this blog posting helped sale quite a bit). The only way that I can see to help a currently released product is to continue to release content for it that is largely available only to register/verified users. Continually (or at least semi-regularly) releasing downloadable content seems to be the best anti-piracy method available. Giving out both a Product key (which is then verified locally, and will eventually be cracked by the pirates so that the game can be shared), and a DLC key, which is generated randomly and is verified against a database of the legitimate product key/DLC combinations server-side will make it so that while your game will be pirated, anyone wanting to get the new content will either have to jump through all the hoops of getting the cracked version of each piece of new content, or just buy a copy of the game.

This does require releasing high quality DLC on a regular basis, but it looks to be far more effective than DRM. By including various map/level/character/item editors as DLC, and encouraging submission, you can even remove large portions of content creation costs for new DLC by creating a community around the game that creates new content for you.