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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.
I think piracy is unavoidable in a non-subscription based model like most standalone games. The target audience (teenagers) sees themselves as poor, or actually is poor, and is thus unwilling to pay for something they can get for free. Others undoubtedly resent the fact they are being asked to actually pay for a game, and so are willing to crack them. :P
I would like to see the demographics on who *does* pay for games and see if I am write, or if people of all ages are cheap bastards
Now the MMO world has it much better off, since you need a subscription to actually play the game at all. Of course that undoubtedly leads to a lot of problems with stolen CC numbers and the like, so perhaps you are no further ahead. By requiring a CC number to even register, they of course limit their potential sales massively as well.
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.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
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.
Huh? What's to crack if there is no DRM?
Pirate the whole game, I can see that happening, but that's cracker-lackin!
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
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.
DRM is fundimentally flawed in that it only affects your paying customers. 2 days after your game has come out a stripped version will pop up on the torrent sites, meaning that anyone who wants to play the game for free can. Psi-ops was a classic point - I bought the game, only to find that the DRM system objected to me having a dvd burner in my system. So it got returned, and I downloaded a copy.
Net result of DRM in this case - 1 lost sale.
'Don't worry' said the trees when they saw the axe coming, 'The handle is one of us.'
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!
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
"The security measures used to restrict the unauthorized use of this software may cause your computer to experience partial or total loss of functionality, and may conflict with other software or hardware you may have installed on this machine"
It's true enough, and worse is that they are not going to be responsible for restoring your system if it does in fact get hosed.
Starbucks, Harbuckle of Breath.
DRM, nowadays at least, isn't so much about piracy but more about killing the used games market. Of course they'll tell you it's about piracy, but it really isn't
The trend is that the average age of gamers is now in the 30s.
What this has to do with DRM is the fact that, at our age (yes, I am in my 30s) what we have the least is time - at the point in your life where you do have a decent income, money is much less of an issue than when you're a teen - if all I have is 1 or 2 hours a day for gaming I don't want to have to jump through extra hoops to play a game and I sure don't want to see my gaming time wasted because my Internet connection is down or the gaming servers are down and the games requires remote authentication (something that adds no value for me).
The second point is that, when you actually work for a living you can relate the true value of money to the time it takes you to earn it. The cost of a game is then more than a mathematical figure, it's measure in how long do you have to work to pay for it.
The third point is the increased awareness of the value of things that comes with age. To put it simply, a game fulfils one's need for entertainment and escapism and bad games cost twice as much as good movies and 3 times as much as good books and yet have less entertainment value.
That said I still pirate games, and in the end it boils down to 1 reason: ...
- There is no more try-before-you-buy for most games anymore - the age of Game Demos is gone. I don't want to waste my hard earned money (and I do know how hard it was to earn that money) in a game just to take it home and discover that it sucks, it has too many bugs or it refuses to run in my system due to DRM. I've had plenty of situations where I would buy a game and it would either not work properly, turn out to be little fun or exceptionally short even though gaming sites had been hyping it to no end. At this point (after 20! years of gaming) the gaming industry and the gaming press have shown me again and again that they are not to be trusted
So what I do nowadays is I download the game, try it and if it works ok and I like it, I buy it. Just recently I got X3:TC and bought it as soon as I found out that the game maker had removed DRM in the latest patch (in fact I even got the Gold edition since I trully believe they deserve the money).
From summary:
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.
That was an argument FOR using DRM?
"I have a rock that keeps away shoplifters, it only cost me $ton_of_money annually, and I use it to knock customers on their head every time they buy something. Now, the rate of shoplifting is the same both with and without the rock, so I see no reason to stop using it."
It's The Golden Rule: "He who has the gold makes the rules."
Don't allow users to even see the screen without making receiving a certified letter from the publisher with a secret code. Don't let the user even play the full game. Force them to download large chunks of it from your server after releasing only half of it on disc.
Store integral parts of every level on a master server that can only be accessed by pausing the game and entering the secret code.
It will sell trillions of copies!
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.
Um, they got their "stuff" back if he returned the game, or are you really accusing him of stealing some bytes? Letting them keep the money for a product that he couldn't even use would just endorse their practice of using DRM. Personally I just wouldn't have played the game, but I can understand his view if he wanted to legitimately play the game and the company was basically telling him he couldn't, and worse, treating him like a criminal after he paid for their product! In this case if the company lost out it was due to its own blinkered greed and stupidity.
Exactly, the telling quote was that the inclusion of DRM didn't put customers off. We can extrapolate that to the non-inclusion of DRM not really losing customers to piracy (i.e. they would have similar sales figures and always lose similar customer numbers to piracy regardless of DRM). That being the case, the inclusion of any DRM seems incredibly pointless. Why neuter the customer's experience while simultaneously increasing your costs to produce (by developing around and testing the DRM), support (by having increased numbers of customers unable to play their legitimate copy contacting you to complain) and sell (when those self-same customers return their non-working copy) the game?
Well, since we are talking about DRM, I should mention Good Old Games.
Basically, they sell "old games", without any DRM whatsoever, and that are 7/Vista/XP compatible.
And although they have some fairly "recent" titles (Painkiller, for example), I don't recall seeing any of their games on the P2P networks. Or any cracks. Oh, right, they don't have anything to crack to begin with :)
Oh and the games are dirty cheap as well. And legal.
I think that the person that mention that this should be about beneficts for the legitimate client is right.
In the GOG case, I can install the game wherever I want, when I want, no activation or "phone-home" or whatsoever. And they really provide a "value added" service: some games aren't available anywere else (even P2P networks), and they have gone the extra step of making them playable on the modern versions of Windows.
So the publisher cashes in their older titles, instead of clinging on them and not doing anything with them (like actually selling the games) and/or chasing whoever dares to mess with it, i.e. fan-made remakes, reverse engineering and things like that, GOG cashes in with the nostalgia of the clients, and the quality of the majority of the offerings, and the clients cash in as well, being able to play quality games for low-low prices, and not having to worry about if SecureRom will break their Windows.
Just a quick mention of Steam. I like the concept, and they are doing some things right. But I hope they don't let the publishers run wild with the platform (the Bioshock 2 "protection" seems insane! DRM on top of Steam and validations?!).
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
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.
mmm... yeah... You see, we're putting the cover sheets on all TPS reports now before they go out...
Indeed.
Hey, asshats, we gave you copyright protection for a reason, and it wasn't to help you. It was to help society.
You've stopped helping society? But you bought all the lawmakers so we can't change the copyright laws?
Bite me.
Copyright laws have long since stopped reflecting the will of the people. Laws are supposed to be a social contract we all agree to, but no one in his right mind would, for example, agree to retroactive copyright extension to encourage long-dead people to produce more stuff. Copyright laws have managed to work themselves outside said social contact, and hence, morally, you can do whatever the fuck you want WRT them.
You want society to abide by the laws, they have to, at least vaguely, match what society actually thinks should be legal. Period. That's how laws work. It's not 'society has to do whatever laws corporations can buy'. Copyright law has long falling out of matching what society wants, long enough to actually have people grow up with mismatched laws, resulting in no respect whatsoever of them.
Sucks for the numerous content creators who didn't have anything to do with this brokenness, but they should, by this point, know what world they live in.
That said, game manufacturers aren't Disney, and aren't trying to rip off the entire system. They really do need to get paid for their games.
But that doesn't mean it's moral for them to sell people games that will crap all over user's systems and/or not function and not give a refund. Even if the law says they can, because copyright law is not a reflection of what laws society actually wants.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?