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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.'"
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...
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)
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.
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".
Brad Wardell of Stardock and Ron Carmel of 2D Boy
I don't know who that is but a few days ago I...
Stardock develops non-DRM'd games like Sins of a Solar Empire and now Demigod. They always make a big todo about how there's no DRM and then SecuROM (the DRM guys) get upset that they didn't use their DRM and say they'll download their torrents. Stardock has a Steam-like product called Impulse that many have said is akin to a light form of DRM, but still DRM.
2D-Boy are the developers of World of Goo, a popular indie game that was once reported to have something like a 90% piracy rate, which was argued by many to be unbelievable, etc. World of Goo has no DRM.
Reviewing just the first hour of video games.
Pirating the game later has the same effect as buying the game second hand as far as the publisher is concerned, but by pirating it you don't support the second hand market, which benefits the publisher. I might see such practices justified for games that break the second hand market, but if they have no/reasonable DRM, I can't say I entirely agree with you.
I think you've got that backwards. By buying used games (instead of pirating), you give money to people who bought the new game, reducing the effective cost for them, and making it possible for them to buy more new games. Say I have $50 to spend, and used games sell for $25. So I can buy one game for $50, you pirate the same game, that's it. Or I buy a game for $50, three months later you buy it used for $25, I buy another game for $50, three months later you buy it used for $25, so it cost me the same $50, but the manufacturer got $100. So buying used games _does_ support the manufacturer by making new games less costly.