Game Industry Vets On DRM

An anonymous reader points out an article at SavyGamer in which several game industry veterans were polled for their opinions on DRM. Cliff Harris of Positech Games said he didn't think his decision to stop using DRM significantly affected piracy of his games, accepting it as an unavoidable fact. "Maybe a few of the more honest people now buy the game rather than pirate it, but this sort of thing is impossible to measure. You can see how many people are cracking and uploading your game, but tracking downloads is harder. It seems any game, even if it's $0.99 has a five hour demo and is DRM-free and done by a nobel-peace prize winning game design legend, will be cracked and distributed on day one by some self righteous teenager anyway. People who crack and upload games don't give a damn what you've done to placate gamers, they crack it anyway." Nihal de Silva of Direct2Drive UK said his company hasn't noticed any sales patterns indicating customers are avoiding games with DRM. Richard Wilson of TIGA feels that customers should be adequately warned before buying a game that uses DRM, but makes no bones about the opinion that the resale of used games is not something publishers should worry about.

Comments

Legitimate Customers

[Manip]

What they should discuss is the negative impact on legitimate customers rather than on piracy...

For one example, I legally own *two* copies of Red Alert 2 yet I have them both no-CD cracked. Why? Because I don't want to have to go find the CD each time I want to play and worse still the game even supports playing back Audio CD while you play but yet that requires you to juggle the RA2 and Audio CD constantly just to get the damn thing to work!

The best thing to happen to DRM has been Steam. They have a fairly healthy level of DRM or at least the Valve games do... I hear Bioshock 2 has Steam + "Games for Windows" + SecureRom? What the heck? And an activation limit on Steam?! ... Well Steam *used* to be good for consumers before they started letting publishers do whatever the hell they want.

Re:Legitimate Customers

[El_Muerte_TDS]

Steam was never good for customers. It was just less bad than various other solutions. Steam just makes up for some of it's customer limitations. But in the end you are still renting games that come with a remote kill switch.

Ubisoft

[khellendros1984]

I've bought a number of Ubisoft games over the years. That won't be true if their new releases start "featuring" a constant tether to the internet. Frankly, I'll stick with the CD checks (or Steam). Steam isn't my favorite, but at least it doesn't force a constant connection to the publisher's servers to play a game!

Re:Unavoidable

[theheadlessrabbit]

Sadly I think this is going to lead to games which are free to play, but contain targeted in-game advertising down the road. I don't want to see how badly that warps the game designs we see as a result.

another option could be to follow the 'sudden attack' method of payment. sudden attack is a Korean FPS which is free to play. Weapons, costume sand power-ups are available through an in-game store. You can either earn points in-game, or pay cash, and exchange those for certain items.
This way, people with no money and lots of time can enjoy the game, they aren't completely locked out, but players who don't have hours and hours of free time to rack up points can just pay to get the goods.
I think this, combined with advertising is likely to be the future of gaming.

well, since companies are mostly made up of greedy ass holes, the future of gaming will probably be pay to buy the game, then pay to play the game online, then pay for the items to use in-game, AND have levels full of ads and product placements.

Living here in Korea

[Anonymous Coward]

Living in Korea, I see the sort of extreme example of piracy run rampant. Korean companies scarcely consider the idea of a game that isn't online because it would be universally pirated that very day. They'd never see a dime from it.

I teach in a private academy where I see lots of kids with Nintendo DS's; I never see real games in them. They universally use this R4 chip that has all the games loaded on it. Because of this, Nintendo barely considers them a market. Meanwhile OS bootlegging is so prevalent, that people no longer even expect a legitimate OS with a new system. Microsoft even jacked the price up on Vista when they released it here to try to bleed some of the losses out of the few remaining customers.

I don't support DRM or prosecuting old ladies, but I also think measures to prevent piracy must be taken in some capacity lest it irreparably warp the industry like it has here in Korea.

The Lesson is: DRM doesn't work.

[Corporate Drone]

Harris bemoans the fact that, regardless what effort he puts into a game, someone will crack it. But, he's attempting to learn the wrong lesson.

It isn't that people (/ consumers) are intrinsically fair.

It isn't that crackers are acting out of some noble desire to rid the world of DRM.

The lesson here is simple: DRM doesn't work. There's no real ROI on it, so don't put in on games and make it difficult or unplayable for your paying customers. Period.