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Game Distribution and the 'Idiocy' of DRM
In light of the increased focus on the DRM controversy in recent days, Ars Technica did an interview with execs from CD Projekt's Good Old Games about where the problems are with current DRM implementation. "For me, the idiocy of those protection solutions shows how far from reality and from customers a lot of executives at big companies can be. You don't have to be a genius to check the internet and see all the pros and cons of those actions." Penny Arcade is also running a three-part series on DRM from game journalists Brian Crecente and Chris Remo. Crecente talks about how some companies are making progress in developing acceptable DRM, and some aren't. Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction to minor gripes.
There are now two games I *really* wanted that I can't get because I don't want their DRM infesting my machine. Nor do I want to use pirated games (being a programmer myself I don't like to download illegally, I really would prefer to pay), so I don't get to play at all.
I've been a computer gamer since 1983, and this not being able to buy things because of stuff put there to stop piracy is a new experience for me.
I hope its short lived, or the number of new games I buy is going to plummet.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I usually do as well, unless it doesn't require any interaction on my part after it's installed. I especially hate when the CD/DVD has to be in the drive... it's www.gamecopyworld.com immediately after install if that's the case.
The only games I currently play that I haven't cracked are Steam games... their DRM is barely acceptable, so I haven't felt the need to do away with it.
I've been playing Spore recently, I would love to go out and buy it, but I refuse due to the DRM involved. It's a pretty good game and I'm happy to pay for it, but I won't pay for DRM.
"Remo recommends against a trend of overreaction to minor gripes"
That, in a nutshell, is why the industry isn't taking all the bleating about DRM seriously. DRM is a business decision. It's not there because they hate your freedom, it's there because they think it will help stop or at least slow piracy. If the world wasn't full of thieves, there would be no DRM.
Acting like DRM will go away if you cry about it is childish. It will only go away by becoming invisible. Nobody seems to know that iPhone apps are protected with DRM, nor that it helps bring prices down (although it certainly doesn't have to; PSP DRM hasn't had any effect on software prices).
The real issue is that DRM doesn't work well in the hands of software producers (audio/video/apps), because their monetary conflict of interest pushes them to wield the power of DRM to extort hight prices.
The only successful DRM comes from hardware makers (read: Apple) who balance the power to govern sales without extortion prices and without runaway piracy, because their interests are aligned with both consumers and intellectual property content producers.
That's why Microsoft's DRM didn't work; the company only cared about producers because it wasn't selling its DRM products directly to consumers, and subsequently stacked the deck against end users.
Apple carries DRM like the Ring.
The Japanese iPhone Failure Myth
...the social contract that says "it's really not nice to do that". Some people use the "would you say you did that if the programmer/artist was in the room with you?" test. This test can fail. It can fail if the programmer/artist isn't really the person taking home the pay. Back in the day, it often was; but now many of them are just employees, so they might not care if you pirated the game and if they got paid barely living wages and worked 70 hour weeks, they might even applaud you. Same deal with music. This will depend somewhat on how the artists feel about their relationship with the recording industry. Any number of one-song phenoms, and even current artists with bad deals won't care, because they don't get the money anyway. Some artists who've already got their mansions won't care, and may even regard giving it away as philanthropy. Others still want their beans and aren't ready to set up "The Foundation", so they'd be pissed off.
Oh, and there is one other effective DRM and sensible, but it's only valid if the product relies on the network. Sell a userid, and prohibit multiple-logons. At that point, your enforcement mechanism is similar to an ISP abuse department. Legitimate buyers will call to find out why the service turned off, and get reminded to keep their password secure. Everybody else will shut up, or they might try but then the operator will say "you're not the registered user, piss off". Too many games are fun without network access for this technique to really impact the market.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Most reasons why someone doesn't purchase a particular game can be boiled down to one of the above. If I simply don't purchase a game, there's no guarantee which of the five basic reasons was the reason why I didn't purchase it. In the case of Bioshock, it was the DRM itself, but I haven't told 2K games why I haven't gotten it. From their perspective, it could be any of the above reasons, when in fact it is because of the DRM.
If I don't buy Bioshock, I have sent the same message to 2K games as has the guy with a five year old Dell POS with a Celeron and Intel Integrated graphics, the MMORPG-or-bust gamer, the broke college student paying for school by himself, the living-under-a-rock gamer whose last purchase was DOOM, and the "gamer" whose entire software collection comes from Limewire, when the reality is that my reasoning isn't any of those. The problem is that I've got their statisticians and marketing folks grabbing their magic 8-balls trying to figure out why my software shelf doesn't have a copy of Bioshock on it; odds are that I probably have been categorized in their pirate category.
In the case of Spore, EA games is being told that they've gone so far with the solution with reason #5 that DRM has become their reason #6, and it's a reason that they can very easily overcome. This backlash that TFA advises against is actually working because if every one of the 1-star comments on Amazon is a single lost sale, that's 2,578 lost sales as of this writing. That's something that EA's bean counters can't otherwise explain away. The fact that EA has changed a policy at all is a step in the right direction (they're not going to abolish DRM overnight - SecuROM is on the other side of the fence convincing them that DRM does indeed work).
It's a funny and interesting trade-off when you mention making it so Joe-Six pack can't copy the media. In order to make that possible, company X has to distribute their product on hardware that isn't typically available. Nintendo is particularly good at this in that they stuck with cartridges for the longest time, put out their GameCube games on CDs that weren't regular sized, distribute Wii games on dvd (I believe). I think most companies don't go this route because either they eliminate a certain portion of their customer base or building the infrastructure (like distributing consoles and regulating physical media) can be daunting. Ironically, it's not entirely the user's fault but the developer's for choosing the largest customer base by using the easiest to distribute methods. By maximizing profits without considering the other issues, they kinda shoot themselves in the foot. I think the people at Stardock have it right though: figure out who will pay for your game, make them as satisfied with their purchase as possible, and ignore the rest. Ultimately, people who pay will get what they want and people who don't pay will live with what's available (like DRM encrusted software).
Once Joe-Sixpack graduates from the baseline "I put CD in drive and click copy, if it doesn't work, I can't copy it," to the "I go online and download this crack," or "I go online and download this torrent," Joe-Sixpack is already far, far beyond the effects of DRM.
Joe Sixpack has long known where to download cracks and torrents (and that shoudln't surprise anyone here anymore). DRM has been since it's inception been an annoyance only to customers. I can understand that companies try to curtail piracy, but its measures have been ineffective and have delayed cracks for a week or two at most. Joe Sixpack gets his cracks from the same torrents that non-Joe Sixpacks do.
Then use that money saved from not having to develop useless DRM and make a good game.
I was at a company that had produced some software and decided to implement a form of copyprotection about a year and a half ago. Their number of customers was very limited and they were selling it for a very high price. They decided to go with an existing solution (a commercial off the shelf copyprotection requiring an authentication server, mac addresses (lol) of the client PCs and a USB key on each client).
They sold their software for 100K$ to three companies. The copyprotection had cost them a flat fee of 10K$. It was after they had released their software they realized that the authentication server (which was to be locally or remotely installed as a service) had some strange bugs if a computer had more than one network card, and would stop legitimate users from authenticating. This of course affected 2 out of their 3 customers who had opted to install the authentication server on a server.
This was of course a bug in the copyprotection software, and was fixed in an update. A few months after the whole fiasco I had heard from one of their customers that they had installed the software on terminal server. Now everyone used the software on the terminal server, thus circumventing the mac address and USB key issue and violating the EULA without any real technical knowledge.
The worst part of it all was that it was a company with a headcount of 5 that developed the software, but they had an internal procedure regarding the copy protection that was overly paranoid and bureaucratic at best. It took them 3 weeks to hand me a key for porting the software to linux, and after 2 days of waiting I had #ifdef'd all of the copyprotection stuff so I could at least do my job. This of course led to internal debate about if this violated procedure or not (fyi: it did, and I was sternly asked to wait for a key next time and remove the #ifdef COPYPROTECTION wherever it occurred).
The company went out of business a couple of months ago, effectively leaving customers stranded if they buy new hardware, which they eventually will. As to why the company went out of business? Poor management, enormously small market, bureaucracy in a small company, bad ideas, in-house developers knew where the company was going and were actively looking for another job two or three months after they were hired.
Idiot.
If you like spore, buy it! You already have a cracked version running, so the hassles of its DRM are no excuse. Just buy it, put it on your shelf still sealed and continue playing your cracked version.
The problem is DRM and other protection mechanisms are unpopular, but in many areas it is clear that piracy is allowed to run rampant that there will be no sales. This is especially true for "popular" software.
There are some people that claim not to pirate - but it is certain they have some software they didn't pay for. Maybe someone just gave it to them or maybe their morality is a little more flexible when it comes to certain things. The problem is that for the last 20 years or so piracy has become pretty mainstream. Why would anyone pay for something when the same thing (sometimes better) is available for free? I'm not talking about free open-source here, I am talking about pirated software. Literally everything you could ever ask for is available for free by anonymously downloading it. So why would anyone pay? It is just a little too easy today and really there is no putting the genii back in the bottle. Piracy is here to stay.
The goal of a lot of pirate web sites and such is to make it impossible to obtain revenue from music, movies, books, software and anything else that can be put in digital form. While I believe these evangelists are few in number, the Internet provides them with a strong presence. Often, the pirate sites will come up first in Google before the publisher's web site. What does that say about popular software? There are some people that will pay - shareware has run at about 5% of users paying for over 20 years. But that is as far as it goes. Name one business that can exist with 5% of the revenue they had last year.
Face it, in the near future every piece of software will be available for free. The only question will be if anyone finds it profitable to publish software. Offhand, I would say the number of players will be very limited. Most software will be a web service where the user never gets to hold anything on their computer. Open source will have a role, but probably not much larger than it is today.