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Why Bother With DRM?
Brad Wardell of Stardock and Ron Carmel of 2D Boy recently spoke with Gamasutra about their efforts to move the games industry away from restrictive DRM. Despite the fact that both have had their own troubles with piracy, they contend that overall piracy rates aren't significantly affected by DRM — and that most companies know it. Instead, the two suggest that most DRM solutions are still around to hamper a few more specific situations. Quoting:
"'Publishers aren't stupid. They know that DRM doesn't work against piracy,' Carmel explains. 'What they're trying to do is stop people from going to GameStop to buy $50 games for $35, none of which goes into the publishers' pockets. If DRM permits only a few installs, that minimizes the number of times a game can be resold.' ... 'I believe their argument is that while DRM doesn't work perfectly,' says Wardell, 'it does make it more difficult for someone to get the game for free in the first five or six days of its release. That's when a lot of the sales take place and that's when the royalties from the retailers are determined. Publishers would be very happy for a first week without "warez" copies circulating on the Web.'"
Sounds like Game Stop should sue.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Brad Wardell of Stardock and Ron Carmel of 2D Boy
I don't know who that is but a few days ago I submitted a story on an interview with Sony's CEO:
In an interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia this month, Sony CEO and chairman Howard Stringer revealed an interesting point about open technologies: 'Customers will refuse to accept it unless the technology is open. Youth in particular really dislikes closed technologies, closed systems and the like. I think the failure of AOL LLC of the US is good evidence of this. When the Internet was just beginning to spread, AOL boosted its subscriber base by providing special services only to its customers. After a while, though, customers began rebelling, complaining that they weren't children. Because AOL wanted to keep them locked up in a narrow portion of the immense Internet cosmos, open technology was created. Sony hasn't taken open technology very seriously in the past. Its CONNECT music download service was a failure. It was based on OpenMG, a proprietary digital rights management (DRM) technology. At the time, we thought we would make more money that way than with open technology, because we could manage the customers and their downloads. This approach, however, created a problem: customers couldn't download music from any Websites except those that contracted with Sony. If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple Inc of the US.' He then mentions that Sony has a chance to provide something that Apple can't. Sounds like somebody should inform him of DRM-free iTunes. However when asked about customer confusion over too many open technologies, he claims that the customer will always like choice so the more the better.
Didn't get published so I thought I'd post it here as evidence that even the music distribution companies are saying, "Why bother with DRM?" Not surprising now that Amazon and iTunes are doing it though. I predict everyone will eventually pull their heads out of their asses, it just will take some longer than others.
My work here is dung.
unfortuantely, they often have -1 weeks of sales when there arent illegal copies circulating. I do sometimes pirate games, but i try to restrain from doing it when the game is young, e.g when a sequal has come out, i consider the original fair game. I know it doesnt really make a difference if i pirate it now or a year down the line, but it sits a bit better with me...
So, the purpose is not to prevent piracy, but to prevent multiple legal resales of games ... which would only result in further illegal piracy.
Sounds like a winning argument to me...
I'm no lawyer either, but I believe that only applies to trademarks, not copyrights.
You're thinking of trademarks. You have to defend trademarks or you lose it. Copyright is yours to enforce at any time unless you give it away.
They're defending thier IP in the eyes of the shareholders. Every public company has an obligation to its shareholders, if the current command structure lets pirated copies leak out from every hole, the shareholders might get new company leaders.
Is it sad that I am more likely to recognize you and your posts by your sig than your name or UID?
DRM doesn't bother me nearly as much as stuff like Steam and the death of the second hand market. Can you imagine how difficult it will be to bring a game to your friends' house to play?
"Hey, Ron, it's Steve. Since we're going to hang out tomorrow, I suggest you start downloading Butt Zappers 2 now. It should take up about 20 GB of your hard drive space."
"OK, what's your Live username and password?"
"It's XXXXXX and XXXXX. My credit card's on that account, don't use it to download a bunch of games like you did last time, okay bro?"
"Sure dude, but what if this puts me up over my bandwidth cap, you'll pay me back, right?"
"I guess."
"Wait a minute, I don't have any room on my hard drive left."
"So, just delete some of your old stuff. You can always download it later."
"Are you gonna pay for me to download all that stuff too?"
"Dude, I knew we should have gotten Playstation, Sony made a deal with Comcast and PSN downloads don't count against the cap."
"Yeah, and maybe we'd actually be able to download it. Looks like the Butt Zappers server is slammed right now."
Honestly, if they try to foist that stuff on us, I'll just stick with the old, disc-based systems.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
This struck me as a hypocritical position on the part of those game publishers. Either IP is property or it is not. If it is property, then there should be no restrictions allowed on whether or how frequently it can be resold (i.e. no one tries to stop you from reselling your car or your house). If it is not property, then there should be no artificial scarcity surrounding it which would also make this or any other DRM an inappropriate practice.
It should be obvious that what they seem to want is a level of control that is unavailable to the manufacturers of any other sort of good or service. It's surprising that anyone takes them seriously. Much lively debate occurs on the fine nuances of copyright law while missing the point that what they want is to be singularly special, to wield powers unavailable to other industries. That's known as the inability to see the forest for all the trees. That's why I think it's a phony debate, just like most media discourse surrounding what should be regarded as power grabs. They are aiming at an unreasonable amount of control over the marketplace in the name of copyright.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Used games don't make Publishers any money.
Pirated games don't make Publishers any money.
Solution: Games should use the Software-As-A-Service Model.
Imagine paying a "small monthly fee" for say GTA-IV, or a library of GTA games.
Your "small monthly fee" would cover :
- Saved game storage
- Game updates
- Technical Support
Imagine paying to receive a brand new PS3, and a full library of games.
When you are bored with one game, simply pay to play another!
For other small monthly fees, the publisher would also retain your saved games per month.
Nothing to update, nothing to activate, nothing to buy/sell or worry about.
No games to lose, backups to make, etc. All your games are available, simply replace the hardware, which could be covered by another "small monthly fee".
Computing is a commodity, like electricity. People should get used to paying as they use it. Nobody needs their "own" "Personal" computer, just use a cloud service of some sort.
Was there any follow up to Ubisofts release of a DRM free Prince of Persia
When I was a starving student (and associate engineer struggling to pay rent), I had a very slim budget, and would play "warez" until I could save/beg/borrow enough to buy the full versions, and I would *unless* the game sucked anyway. Now that I can afford software and music, I make it a point not to pirate copyrighted info, but I will still "evaluate" music before I buy it from MPAA publishers. And most people I know feel the same way.
So, the real product that DRM protects is the "Turd in a Can," a product that the consumer would not pay for if they knew beforehand that they were buying crap.
I can see the fnords!
Uh, no it's not. Your account, yes. Your PC, no. You can only play online with the same copy from one place at any one time, but it's by no means locked to your PC.
Also, insert generic Slashdot joke re: girlfriends/children #46 here.
Really, if we distill the arguments for DRM down far enough, it becomes clear that the idea is to try to work around the First Sale Doctrine and kill the second-hand market.
It's not copyright-- you are granted a copyright automatically under US law. I believe you are thinking of trademarks, which have nothing to do with DRM.
As someone who is involved with having to decide whether DRM goes into our products or not (I work for a book publisher), I can tell you that we are most certainly aware that DRM does not 'work'. We are under no illusions that it is tamperproof. However, we are also aware that DRM can make something 'hard enough' to copy that only really motivated people will bother-- the rest will just say, "heck, I'll just pay for this thing." Our financial people claim that they can show this is indeed the case. We are, of course, looking into alternatives, like the Books24x7-type solution which is DRM-free, but which is also a total PITA to copy.
I strongly advocate copyleft, so my role is occasionally difficult. But in the end, my company signs the paychecks, so my responsibility is to them. At the very least, it forces me to see the issue from both sides. A _lot_ of money goes into developing and printing books, so you really don't want to see that go down the drain.
Let us consider, for a moment, a DRM-loaded game from the past year.
Spore.
Its DRM was considered by some to be so limiting that some people simply never played the game. People were exasperated that, at release, it allowed only one user account per copy. That installs couldn't be "restored" by uninstalling the game (many of these things have been added since).
OK, so all that said, copies of Spore were still readily available for download a week prior to release on torrent sites all over the world. Despite cumbersome DRM, that in some cases prevented actual customers from being able to extract full enjoyment from the product they purchased, anyone that wanted a DRM-free copy could still have gotten one prior to the release of the game.
Lesson: It. Doesn't. Work.
Maybe...maybe it prevents someone from taking the game to a friend's house and installing it, or the like. But it isn't preventing wide-scale piracy, even during that "critical first week".
If you don't defend a trademark, you can lose it. I'm not sure how this applies to copyright.
That's why RMS doesn't like the term "Intellectual Property", by the way. It's a vague concept that combines three very different bodies of law: Trademarks, Patents, and Copyrights.
For that matter, think about just about every copyleft-style license -- GPL, Creative Commons, etc -- do those become invalid just because people are copying them? No.
If such a law exists at all (for copyright, instead of trademarks), I would think it would have to do with actually legally defending your copyright -- as in, when you're aware of the vendor down the block selling burned pirate copies, you should sue him. It absolutely has nothing to do with taking the law into your own hands with DRM.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I've got Stardock games on multiple computers right now, all at the current version, quite easily. I'm not really sure what you're talking about. Hell, the EULA explicitly says you can have it on more then one computer at once (two in Demigod's case).
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
(...I'd like to know more about this Butt Zappers game.)
I can see the fnords!
Not only that, but me and my friends have observed that they really don't care how many people are playing simultaneously. One of my friends purchased Demigod, we all installed it from his account, and we've all been playing it on LAN/online with no problems.
At least with Steam you can download it as much as you want, so there's that.
I get your point, though, and now that you just about have to have multiple copies of a game to fire it up at a LAN party I imagine we'll just stick with UT2K4 and earlier, plus L4D (a special case, and something that we'd all been dreaming of for years, so of course we all bought it). Certainly, the bar for buying a multiplayer game has risen since it became impossible or complicated to install one copy on several machines for a quick LAN session, at least among the people I game with. If we don't all want to buy it, there's no reason for anyone to buy it, and only with very rare exceptions (L4D) do any of us do much multiplayer FPS gaming outside our rare LAN parties.
It's kind of like board gaming, which we also do a lot of. If we all had to have a copy of each game to play, I doubt we'd do it as much, and we'd buy way fewer board games.
It's a pity none of us can stand console FPS games. The last one we had fun playing (rather than just frustration) was Perfect Dark, which we still break out from time to time. Oh well, there's still SSB.
In addition to the above comments noting that it is just tied to your account, not your PC, note that the GOO system allows you to deactivate a game on your account and transfer it to another. 1 minute spent googling "transfer stardock games" would have found this out for you. Try doing a little research next time your tempted to make assumptions about how something works that you have no knowledge of.
I think 2D Boy gives publishers more credit then they are due. I think publishers ARE stupid over all. I think they really do think they can win this war. They think "Well if we just keep getting better DRM, we'll find something they can't crack." I think they also believe that DRM does give good ROI, which is to say that the increase in profits is greater than the cost of the DRM. I really believe that most publishers are stupid about this, just like the music publishers.
The problem is they see these big numbers of copies out there and get dollar signs in their eyes. They think "Man, if we had been paid for each of those copies we'd be RICH!" They are right too. Games are heavily copied. If every person who ever downloaded a copy instead paid for the game, they'd probably make 5-10x the money. What they don't consider, of course, is that not everyone would. There's a lot that people will take for free that they won't take at any price, much less a $50 price. You offer it for free, they say "Yes I'd like that." You want any money for it, they'll pass.
However, greed is able to short-circuit logic for many people I don't think the people at publishers are any different. They see the money they could be theoretically making and stop thinking logically about it.
Also the DRM companies push their products heavily, of course. They reassure the publishers "Oh ya, our DRM is really effective it'll get you a bunch more sales but if you DON'T use it, we'll you'll go to the poor house because nobody will buy your game!"
Personally, I think the numbers on the Bittorrent sites tell the real story. Demigod sure as hell got downloaded a lot, because people were very interested in it. However, Spore got downloaded even more, because even more people were interested in it. The difference DRM had on downloading in that case? Zero. People downloaded if they wanted to.
If you're talking about a LAN party, not all games really require you to buy a copy for everybody. Demigod (most recent example I have) lets you use one copy for everybody on the LAN. It even says you're allowed to do that in the game's manual.
It seems like it's next to impossible to find out what the policy is before actually buying the game, but some games are friendly towards LAN players. :)
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I never buy a game in the first month, let along the first week of a release. Mostly, I'm waiting for the quality of the game to become apparent after some play in the real world, and also I don't like the bleeding-edge prices of new releases.
Avoiding weird DRM is another benefit.
After a few days or weeks, the real effects of whatever cockamamie DRM scheme the publishers crowbarred onto the game become apparent.
After a few weeks or months, applications like Alcohol 120 will adapt so that I can be assured of making backups.
After a few months to a year, the price starts to dip into my admittedly modest range. By then, I know whether I can keep the game for myself if the company goes out of business, whether I'm facing potential hassle in making my own backups, and whether the game is worth it in the first place.
After a few years, the game may re-release with digital distributors under no-DRM agreements geared toward truly enthusiastic gaming communities. Witness GOG.com.
Gaming on the long tail rules -- provided you're not desperate to get hopped up on the Newest, Shiniest Thing.
Get real. When was the last time a popular game* was released and it wasn't available that day via P2P? In fact you often see them days BEFORE release on P2P already cracked and ready to go.
I remember when Spore came out the first day or two had something like 30,000 seeders on TPB. Even right now there's about 15k people seeding both the star trek movie and the latest episode of fringe ... and as many people downloading. And this is just ONE tracker. It's actually faster to download the game/movie than drive to the store and buy it half of the time.
Any software company that deludes themselves into believing DRM stops piracy by any significant amount delusional. It's all about preventing resale...which is still detrimental to the customer. Stupid how a library can rend DVDs, CDs and books but somehow software managed to squeak in such an exception.
* Excluding exclusively online games (aka WoW, etc.)
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
"What they're trying to do is stop people from going to GameStop to buy $50 games for $35, none of which goes into the publishers' pockets."
Really?
Last time I checked, Gamestop sells used games a day or two after they come out (at $60) for $55.
And I haven't seen a PC game or peripheral (new or used) in a Gamestop in ages.
The Steam hate might have held some ground in 2002/03 while angry Counter-Strike players still clung to WON.net, but times have changed. Unless you're regularly blowing all of your monthly bandwidth on torrenting "linux isos", you can stomach a Steam game download or two with even the most draconian ISP.
"It's XXXXXX and XXXXX. My credit card's on that account, don't use it to download a bunch of games like you did last time, okay bro?"
Steam doesn't persistently store your credit card information. I'd be weary of any digital delivery service that did.
"Can you imagine how difficult it will be to bring a game to your friends' house to play?"
Okay, okay, let's just say your pal doesn't want to waste the bandwidth or time on downloading; that's fine. So, I don't know - as difficult as opening Steam up, navigating to "Backup games", burning it to a disc and walking it over? Personally, I can't imagine a mortal among us to tackle this Herculean errand.
"Wait a minute, I don't have any room on my hard drive left."
Gone are the days of juggling CDs and game installations to ensure you have 100MB of space left in order to pay tribute to the Windows 95 swap deity. If you're using an even remotely modern HDD of an even half-acceptable size (heck, even grandma's new HP for checking chain e-mails and visiting smileycentral comes with a 300GB drive these days), yeah, if you don't have enough space to install something from Steam? Not only are your computing practices more than likely idiotic to begin with, but you can most certainly deal with uninstalling some junk. Or hell, you've just proven you need it - so go buy a second HDD.
But you know what? The fact is, Gabe Newell, Valve co-founder, has gone on record mocking conventional DRM and stated, paraphrasing, that the mission of Steam is to make buying games, storing games, and accessing games easier and more convenient for the customer. Their content servers are widespread, well-maintained, and frankly - your aside about the "Butt Zappers server being slammed" is moot. Even the dreaded Slashdot phenomenon is a drop in the pond to Steam's full throughput. The recent roll out of of Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 content packs have proven testament to this.
The only real complaint of yours that stands is with respect to re-selling your games - but really, tough shit. It's probably the only real remaining trade-off of digital delivery, so just consider that you're trading resale value for a few dollars in publishing costs the next time you buy a Steam game a bit cheaper than the brick and mortar box cost.
As a final note to answer any forthcoming "but, but, but, what-if!?" conjecturing, Valve has stated repeatedly that in the event they close up shop, a means for us customers to retain our purchases will be provided. If you have to crusade against digital delivery, don't go after Steam.
I mean, carmakers worry about it enough to *advertise* their car's historical resale value (well, if its good, eg Honda).
Granted, I suppose 'gamerz' probably dont worry *quite* as much about resale value when deciding to buy a game as someone buying a new car, but with the way the economy is going, they might start doing so more and more.
Just like companies that don't offer support (even documentation) on older products becuase they don't sell them anymore - no concept whatsoever that resale value might affect the price the market is willing to pay for new products.
Yes, trying to kill the second hand market (both the friend handing over a game they no longer play and the selling-on-to-recoup-some-cash parts of that market) is the publisher's primary reason for DRM, there is another factor that many seem to forget about when it comes to piracy/DRM.
That factor is shareholders and other investors. The developers and publishers know that DRM essentially does nothing most of the time and is in fact sometimes a cost (if the time cost of wiring the DRM deep into the game, as some do, is greater than the small or zero amount not lost in sales), but do they want to spend an age explaining that to the mugs who pony up the venture capital.
When an investor asks what you are doing about people copying your games "there is nothing we can do" is not an answer that will go down well.
Case in point:
Fire hoses do not work against pirates equipped with rocket propelled grenades.
Fire hoses have not be tested on thieves. EA may be working on the technology.
DRM has not been tested on pirates. The Coast Guard may be working on the technology (You pirate, you can no longer listen to your ipod! Bwahahaha!)
DRM does not work on thieves.
Shooting them in the head works on pirates.
Shooting them in the head is against the rules of engagement for thieves in this class. EA may be working to change that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Except that game DRM usually requires you to have the disk physically inserted to play. So if you are playing on a netbook (they don't come with internal CD/DVD drives) or your 5-year old decided to use your disk as a frisbee, then you are screwed. All DRM that doesn't require a physical token to be connected to your machine is defeatable -- you can simply save the entire state of your machine and copy it to another similar machine. The DRM that does require a physical token sucks because, well, because it requires a physical token, which can be misplaced, stolen, or broken. Case in point: I installed The Sims 2 on a macbook in the (licensed copy of) Windows XP running under Parallels. It let me install the game, but refused to play. Why? Because Parallels virtualizes the CD drive! So because of DRM, I can't play a game which I have every legal right to play. As I've said before (about Sony's OpenMG): "The purpose of DRM is not to keep you from copying the content. The purpose is to make you pay for the same content over and over again." E.g. every time you sell, lose, or upgrade your current hardware.
So, should single player games simply have no DRM at all?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
It's not even that he's unaware of DRM-free iTunes. If that were the only problem, I'd be quite happy to inform him of an opportunity that I simply don't see being exploited right now:
Purely web-based purchasing, with an open API.
Amazon MP3 is pretty cool. Better than iTunes, because I can use any program I want to play the music, and because there's a Linux client, I've now set my mother up to purchase music that way, and have it automatically imported into Amarok.
But it could be so much better.
Purely web-based would mean no client I have to download and figure out. An open API, or even a decent enough web interface, would mean I could write an Amarok plugin -- be able to listen to a preview, and buy it right there, just like (I assume) iTunes does. Others could write Songbird plugins. It's possible they could even make a deal to incorporate it into iTunes.
Protection would be relatively easy: Just a temporary URL, and it'd be about as good as Amazon MP3 is right now.
The problem is, of course, that he doesn't get it at all.
A lot of people thought Sony's content download service was doomed, but it's in a pretty good place right now in the form of the PlayStation Network, available to PS3 users for network gaming, video, etc. The DRM is based on Marlin, an open scheme developed by consumer electronics companies and other companies.
So close, and yet so far...
So, I'm guessing to this guy, "open" is just a buzzword. He seemed to have a basic grasp of what it means, and then he went and claimed a DRM scheme could be "open".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
... more should be expected more from game companies. Many classic games no longer work and people have to use emulators like DOSBOX, etc. Not to mention a lot of defunct 3D accelerated games that no longer work properly (older 3D accelerated versions of mechwarrior 2 comes to mind).
There is no good reason for software to break down at all given all the talent and interest in saving many classic games. I'd really like it if the industry extended a branch to some of their fanbase of whom many also work in the industry or related industries and if not, are heading in a similar direction via hobby, or looking at it in the future as a professional career.
There should be very little reason why people have to go to www.gog.com to rebuy games they've already long since purchased. I wouldn't mind paying a small fee monthly for maintenance of a catalogue of old games personally that kept them updated and working as hardware evolves and changes.
That might be asking too much, but the quality we get out of the software entertainment industry is pretty crappy these days if one looks past the flashy graphics. Broken AI and unfinished product is the norm rather then the exception.
DRM is a horrible idea, it doesn't really serve a good purpose. I spent time last year studying about DRM for college project and all my findings point it being useless.
Besides preventing certain media players from being able to play certain music files or preventing DVD's from being able to run on different Operating Systems, DRM fails to make a proper case with digital media.
I don't think allowing open copying of commercial DVD's is a good idea but I also don't think blocking music files with a DRM is a good idea. There is no need to eliminate the idea of DRM but I think we have to put a logical cap on how we use DRM.
One of the biggest problems with DRM is OS support. Windows and Mac deal with DRM fine, but Linux and Unix don't cope well with DRM. I think if were going to allow DRM to live then we need to make sure it works 100% across all platforms. and not only on the most used platforms.
In the end DRM serves really no good purpose. DRM is really only a way to introduce problems into media and the Operating Systems that have to work with the media.
Thanks
Docmur
Here's the problem: That $50 price includes the game's value at resale. If the resale value is $35, then you're diminishing the value of the original purchase price by making it impossible for a 2nd buyer to use. Simple, basic economics. So, if you remove that functionality, some of which justifies the $50 price, the game is no longer worth $50, because the value of its resale is now gone.
So, the result of adding DRM to your game and not lowering your price to reflect the diminished value is that your game now appears overpriced. Good job, you've now guaranteed yourself flagging sales because of greed.
Imagine if car companies programmed their cars to self-destruct if sold to a second buyer. It's ridiculous. The argument that second hand sales take money out of the pocket's of the producers? Ridiculous also. Just stop it, you idiotic, economically ignorant publishers. Focus on making a damn good game, one that's good enough to purchase in the first place.
"I Don't Have Enough Faith to be an Atheist"
The would rather punish GameStop for selling a used copy of a game?
Yes, actually. Game publishers make zero money from the used game business; in fact, they perceive the sale of used copies as the loss of a sale of new copies that would have otherwise occurred. If the game publishing industry could make it illegal to sell used games, they would do so in a heartbeat.
If DRM doesnt work, and they drive stores like GameStop out of business, then they will just drive MORE people to download cracked games...
That doesn't really make sense. While GameStop makes the majority of their profit from used game sales, they're far from the only game retailer. If GS dies because they can't sell used games, people who are willing to buy a game will just go to Best Buy, or Wal-mart, or Amazon, and pick up a new game there. The only people whom that will make download cracked games are the ones who aren't willing to buy new games in the first place -- and the publishers don't care about those people because, again, they're not making any profit off of them.
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)