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This was a pretty interesting read, and it was nice to see a dev/publisher come out at say that releasing DRM free had no real effect on piracy or their revenue. The only part of the article I question is the claim that 90% of the sales came from Steam, can't help but wonder how much of a difference there would have been had the game released at the same time on GOG and Steam. If developers/publishes didn't treat GOG as an after thought then Steam would not be the only option, and we all know most games sales are picked up right after release.

Sorry if this has been posted already.

Thanks for sharing this article. +1.
I've been visiting the official site, but I hadn't read it earlier.

Finally a developer sees the whole picture. I'm really happy, I've supported them by purchasing their game on GOG. :-)

I believe that pirating software or not depends mostly on users' ethics. DRM is just punishment for legitimate users and a way for the developers to show how little they respect their customers.
If Train Fever was a Steam only, DRM-infected game, I wouldn't have bought it too. I don't even have a Steam account!

Nice article +1

Haven't bough a physical copy of a game in like 6 months i think,but did buy digital some of the games here even on the second day of winter sale.What i like about digital copies on gog it's easily available and doesn't take my room space even though i still have some left and no problem installing it.Since i can only play older games i find gog as a nice solution.

So, the DRM free version still phones home? I know that's not DRM, but if it's doing that behind your back it's something I'd be annoyed about (I don't know if it does, it's possible that they explicitly let you turn on server logging, in which case their piracy figures are probably skewed).

What I find interesting when I look at the figures about piracy and sales in the first months after release which are presented in this article, is that piracy is often talked about either as a loss of sales or as having no direct relation to sales at all, both based on the same assumptions that customers and pirates are two completely different factions opposed to each other. Now, I myself avoid downloading pirated copies of games and I don't condone it, but I know people who do it on occasion, and those people are customers, too. Sometimes buyers of the very same game they downloaded illegally before. I guess it would be tricky to get any reliabe statistics on this phenomen, and I'm not saying the figures would necessarily be that significant, I'm just saying that even though piracy is in itself negative, it can also have positive effects for developers, like free marketing. I wonder how many of the people who pirated the game shortly after release did so to try it out and then bought it afterwards, or talked about it to their friends or people on the internet who then became interested in it and bought it instead of downloading it illegally.

Maybe this effect is just as insignificant for sales as the effect of DRM-free offers supposedly is for piracy, but contrary to the notion that DRM-free releases could increase piracy, I hardly ever see developers pondering about whether piracy might have lead to some of their sales. I guess it's kind of a taboo to talk about it. Of course it might also be less interesting from a business point of view to talk about it, as you can decide whether to release your game DRM-free or not, but you don't have any control over whether it's pirated or not. Although I seem to remember the developers of Anodyne and McPixel using the Pirate Bay to promote their games. Anyway, just some random observations. :)

Just checked the Linux version.
The only network specific option is about sending crash reports, which can be turned on or off. I don't know if these are the logs they mean though.

Anyway the game was released on GOG on March 5th 2015, so the data on that graph aren't from the GOG version.

This: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Qkyt1wXNlI

Me too! My main reason for supporting then was that they supported Linux, but now I have two reasons!

Knowing this I find the conclusions he draws a little doubtful. That's half a year after the Steam release, I'm not surprised the piracy rate didn't go up from the GOG release at that point, interest for the game from pirates will have been satisfied 6 months before that, when they gained access already.

And while a ton of games get hacked soon after release these days I'd argue the ones using Denuvo or whatever that new one is probably have a fair argument to not release on GOG at the same time considering that DRM remains uncracked for months sometimes.

I'm also a little baffled he claims Steam requires him to have DRM on his game, which is simply not true, he had the option to not use it

I think the point to draw from this is not that it probably wouldn't have made a difference that long after release, but that a GOG release didn't add to the overall piracy level of the game. Further reinforcing that if you release on Steam or GOG it really doesn't matter, you game will be pirated and around the same level regardless of platform. Well I wouldn't go that far, one of the main reasons I would say Denvo lasted so long was a lot of the early games using it were less popular games. Unless I'm wrong, when a very popular game was released it was cracked like a few weeks later. This will only get faster as crackers become more familiar with it. This I agree with, but maybe we are taken that a little to literal if your talking about the part in the article I'm thinking of, might be he just means generally with Steam your are tied to Steam, and even without DRM you still kind of are for updates and stuff.

That was indeed an interesting read, thks for the find.

I personally believe DRM is bad as a whole as it punishes the majority who buy their games legally in order to counter pirates whom wld download the cracked versions regardless of whether a game is cheap or on sale anyway. The article further reinforces my belief that making a game with DRM will only push honest customers away from buying & perhaps even 'forcing' them to seek alternate copies online. By doing so, it may actually have the opposite effect of 'encouraging' potential buyers to become pirates instead.

Wat concerns me more however is the fact that even if some games r DRM-free, they are still 'secretly' sending back info to the developer/publishers & that to me may be even worse than the game being DRMed. As far as I'm concern, if a game tells me from the start they collect info (for statistical or otherwise) & allows me to opt out of it I'm OK with it but if they do it behind my back then it's a definitely NO-NO for me.

It's similar to what CDPR said when they released DRM Free The Witcher.

If you want a look at a different situation, see the sales figures for King of Dragon Pass:
http://kingofdragonpass.blogspot.com/2015/10/sweet-16.html
GOG sales accounted for 40% of total sales across all platforms.

That one is a bit more complicated as they are actually different versions on different platforms, and has the reverse problem of the Steam version being released later than the GOG version. (and Steam and GOG versions are also different versions of the game)

I think this article for what its worth, was a well worthy read, and it comes from a business that totally knows how to best market their games to gather the most consumers, judging by how they were selling both physical and digital, and the digital being sold on GOG and Steam, etc. DRM is yet again a punishment for the honest consumer but otherwise a non-issue for crackers (not pirates as someone else said a while ago on GOG).