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Indie Game Dev On the Positive Side To DRM
spidweb writes "The online backlash against DRM has gotten a bit excessive, especially since the purpose of DRM is entirely admirable: to stop thieves and free riders and to help creators actually get paid for their work. This blog entry calls attention to XBox Live, a place where strong DRM is helping to encourage quality games at low prices which make money for their developers. Quoting: 'If I could snap my fingers and give myself the same absolute control over the games I make that XBox Live has over theirs (in return for lower prices), I would. The freedom of the current system is nice, but it comes at too high a cost. Honest people need to pay extra to subsidize thieves. The unfairness is just this side of intolerable, and it's only getting worse. DRM is fair if, for what the corporations take, we get something in return.'"
Exactly. Why should I be penalized for a game that not enough people want to buy.
What they are missing are the number of "pirates" that download games to make sure they aren't a pile of crap and can run on their system. I purchased one game that was labeled as vista compatible without verifying. Well can't get my money back now.
There is a quick and easy solution to this sort of piracy: release demos again. I was bored and downloaded six demos off steam of games that I was unlikely to purchase. Now I own three of them and the developers are all getting a cup of coffee on me.
You could do it like adobe does: if you transfer the lic you have to register the transfer with adobe. they have a form you submit. this is not an obstacle.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
First sale doctrine is a RIGHT, not a "privilege". DRM makes people mad. And lastly, I think this whole 'pirate' definition is skewed. To me a pirated game is one that is copied, repackaged, and sold as if it were genuine. Getting a copy for free, trying it, and deciding you don't like it is a whole different matter. Just because some one is playing a game you developed that is a copy of one that someone bought does not in my mind mean that person would ever be a customer. Maybe he/she thinks the game is ok, but not good enough to pay for. My guess is that most people, if they really like something will buy a copy for themselves. Thinking some one owes you money for some peice of crap game just because the tried a copy is off the wall to me.
I don't buy DRM'd anything.
* Carthago Delenda Est *
I disagree with you. There is a scarcity and it is skilled developer's time. Software development isn't the kind of domain where you can pay lots of low-skill, cheap, developers to replace a few highly skilled developers. They'd probably expect 60k (low end) - 100k (moderate end). Skilled programmers if not paid well or interested, will probably move somewhere else, and that costs more money to orient another employee to their work. Now if you have ~10 people on a project that spans 2-5 years, you're looking at a few million in development, not counting marketing, publishing, and lawyers (for miscellaneous legal negotiations). This implies that you should sell a few hundred thousand copies to break even. Some IPs can do this easily and others cannot. That being said, if developers came up with an ideal piracy-prevention method, it could mean the difference between staying afloat to produce another game or closing shop. This is, perhaps why some companies see DRM as a necessary evil: It annoys a small population of consumers, but might give them a better chance at surviving the fiscal year.
Copyright infringment is stealing. Disturbing the peace is murder. Driving without a license is embezzlement. Any other minor crimes that we can rename to more serious ones?
Anti-piracy activists seem to be the only people on the planet that believe monopolizing markets reduces prices and competition raises them.
Well other than the people that used to claim linux made proprietary software more expensive SOMEHOW.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
If piracy ended tomorrow, prices would NOT drop.
That's fundamental economics; reduce competition and prices will rise. And with protected monopoly rights, unauthorized copying is what passes for 'competition'.
DRM coupled with extremely high cost makes it dumb as hell to purchase many things.
Interesting note, piracy forces prices higher which forces a reaction to integrate ever changing DRM., which in turn drives prices higher. Nasty cycle pirates have created.
Record companies sell millions and millions of copies of a song for $1 with virtually no distribution costs or anything.
Their distribution cost is completely irrelevant. Its a straw man's argument. Likewise is their profit. For it to be even slightly topical is to argue the free market and capitalism is wrong. Are you saying no one is entitled to make a profit?
Imagine if record companies sold songs for $.25 and put them on a server where you could download them if you lost them. In other words 100% DRM free with even assisted recovery of your files
We can already imagine that with iPhone and Android applications. While not 0.25, piracy is live and well for $0.99 apps which have very real costs associated. People pirate because they feel entitled, not because of price.
They are the people that would never have bought music to begin with.
Yet another lie pirates tell each other. If they would have never bought the song in the first place, they would have listened to it once, deleted it, and never listened to it again. Like stock, they effectively devalued it. Go illegally grab up a bunch of stock and when you get arrested, tell them its all okay because you would have never bought it in the first place.
Apps get downloaded used once, then never used again.
Then you failed to read that issue seems to largely on affect iPhone users. And just the same, that's not true for all applications either. If the application remains installed, they are assigning value to it. If they use the application, they are assigning value to it. If an item has value, and it is obtained without paying for it, the item has been stolen. For IP, we call this piracy. For stock, its called theft, fraud and/or embezzlement.
Like the parent said: Give me a good value and the money will flow easier than ever.
Then that's you and not pirates. By you're own admission, you don't pirate. If you do pirate, by your own admission, you're lying to yourself and everyone else who reads your post.