2K Australia: BioShock Postmortem

"I think the big lesson we learned out of this is that your customers hate you."

Then he really hasn't learned anything, has he?

You have to give him credit for most of the interview, which is obviously enlightening and honest and reveals the depth of thought and care 2K Australia took in making the PC version of the game, but the entire segment on copy protection is nonsense.

What people hated was getting their game home and not being able to play it because the copy protection servers had folded under the load. What people hated was the certainty that those severs will be going away at some (hopefully far-flung, but who knows?) point in the future, making it impossible to install the game. What people hated was an extremely low limit on the number of times the software could be installed, even if the servers were running, even in accordance with the EULA, ever. In short, what was hated is the fact that genuine customers were being punished for actually buying the game. Of course they were angry.

(In fairness, some of those concerns have been addressed after the fact. At the time, however, the great bulk of the criticism was perfectly justified.)

What astonishes me, and what I didn't know until this interview, is that the 'great lengths' they went to to prevent piracy kept them un-cracked for only 13 days. I mean, really, was it worth it? I have no doubt that BioShock moved a lot of units in that time, and that there would have been significantly fewer if a launch day crack had been available, but how much of their total volume moved in that time and what negative effect (if any) did the publicity have on sales?

I'd be willing to bet that the ill-will was less reflected in sales numbers than might be expected. For starters he's absolutely right that people will get onto the net to complain about almost anything. Further, many of the issues only emerged as apparent problems after people had bought their copy of the game. It was widely reported in on-line media but people are fickle. It's essentially impossible to know what the impact of that is.

More interesting is the length of the protection, especially in light of some of the measures and some of the other comments made in the interview. The measures that got people most agitated were the long term ones, things like the lifetime ceiling on install attempts, which have essentially no function. The ceiling could easily have been set 2, 5 or 10 times higher (and had to be raised anyway) without any serious impact. Sure, you'd get unscrupulous people who would install the software on three computers a day during that protected period and some loss of sales, but that's going to happen anyway, and much more fiercely, the moment the protection is broken and the extra copies during the protected period would still be limited. It's also going to be much more well received that gamers can only install their product 15 times rather than 3. It's also interesting that he suggests Steam 'doesn't help address the copyright issue' because they have no long-term protection measures in place. The fact is that, despite what he describes as huge efforts, neither does BioShock. 13 days can hardly be described as long term.

It's not that I don't think copy protection is a necessary thing, or that publishers and developers aren't entitled to protect their property. I do think, though, that the copy protection measures implemented in BioShock are a good example of the prevailing idea that it's OK for genuine customers to have their experience compromised, by having them buy a product which doesn't work as it should, or expires in a punitive timeframe, in order for that to happen. Of course that's going to upset people. Having paid full retail price for the game they have a (not unreasonable) expectation of being able to enjoy it as advertised.

Developers are rightly pilloried when aspects of their games simply don't work, technically. If Supreme Commander had shipped with an installation program that didn't work, they'd be pasted for it. If Halo 3 is (eventually) released and it's autosave function writes corrupt data 5% of the time, there'll be an uproar. In neither of those cases would the developer try to claim that the lesson to be learned was that the public hates them. Copy protection should be no different, but 2K seems to think they can produce an implementation that provides middling functionality with serious side-effects and then not take responsibility for it.

Honestly guys, just accept it and commit to doing better next time ... because the rest of the game was great.

(Geez ... every time I post it turns into an essay ...)

Fascinating article. It's six years old now but it raises some interesting points of comparison.

Firstly, the article suggests that the first two months of a game's release accounts for 30-50% of sales. On that basis we can extrapolate that the 13 day protected period that 2K achieved would be somewhere in the area of 7.5 - 12.5% of sales. That'll be an underestimation, because games sell hard at release and then taper rather than selling evenly over time, and it's a fair bet that other factors have skewed the purchase profile one way or the other. Even so, and especially given that the PC SKU's sales are an estimated 20% of that again, the proportion of copies sold with effective copy protection is not as large as might be imagined.

Secondly, the approach pursued in each case is notably different. By trying to make the programming challenge of cracking as difficult as possible, Insomniac ensured that their legitimate customers were entirely unaffected. Unless you're attempting to alter the code, or play altered code, it has absolutely no effect. 2K's approach of making contact with the code difficult (with their downloaded exe and limits on installed copies) effects their legitimate customers as well ... quite possibly moreso than those trying to play the game illegitimately.

Third, the attitude toward the process seems entirely different. In the article Dodd assesses exactly the same question that Slater does, except that he actually examines his system. He acknowledges it's strengths and weaknesses. It's immediately obvious to me that one of the biggest lessons from the BioShock copy protection launch is 'if you're going to have activation servers, make absolutely certain they can handle the load'. 2K could have saved themselves a lot of the ill-will that they ended up receiving just by making sure that their system actually worked as designed, and people would be able to play their game when they got it home.

The attitude on display here (and thebigm is right, it's not just 2K ... but theirs is the interview in front of us) is that PC gamers hate the people who toil away making games for them and will use any excuse to justify their piracy. Now that may be true to some extent, but it's important to remember that by and large to people offering criticism over this were people who had bought the game already. They weren't fundamentally anti-copy-protection (for the most part). They were saying, quite legitimately, that the copy protection scheme was broken because it negatively effected (in some cases eliminated entirely) their game experience.

There's a comment at the end of the gamasutra article which is absolutely true, that we can have enough of an impact to make pirating a much less attractive option. Publishers and developers need to be mindful that this also works the other way. The degree to which copy protection effects the legitimate customer has to be a consideration, because it can have enough of an impact to make legitimate purchase a much less attractive offer. And a customer who's paid full price for a game that doesn't run is probably going to run out of patience long before a cracker who's doing it for the fun.