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Tensions Rise Between Gamers and Game Companies Over DRM
Tootech recommends an article at the Technology Review about the intensifying struggle between gamers and publishers over intrusive DRM methods, a topic brought once more to the forefront by Ubisoft's decision not to use their controversial always-connected DRM for upcoming RTS RUSE, opting instead for Steamworks. Quoting:
"Ultimately, Schober says, companies are moving toward a model where hackers wouldn't just have to break through protections on a game, they'd also have to crack company servers. The unfortunate consequence, he says, is that it's getting more difficult for legitimate gamers to use and keep the products they buy. But there are alternatives to DRM in the works as well. The IEEE Standards Association, which develops industry standards for a variety of technologies, is working to define 'digital personal property.' The goal, says Paul Sweazey, who heads the organization's working group, is to restore some of the qualities of physical property — making it possible to lend or resell digital property. Sweazey stresses that the group just started meeting, but he explains that the idea is to sell games and other pieces of software in two parts — an encrypted file and a 'play key' that allows it to be used. The play key could be stored in an online bank run by any organization, and could be accessed through a URL. To share the product, the player would simply share the URL."
The user has the key. The user can retain or share the key, or just share the material unencrypted. As for remote DRM, even if you bloody well upload large parts of the game's code remotely it's just security through obscurity. As well as a source for nusiance and flakiness/unplayability.
Emotions! In your brain!
Crap like this is why I put my money where my mouth is and buy from Good Old Games. NO DRM, NO limits on installs, easy and hassle free, and even works perfectly on x64.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I just bought two copies of GTA IV (pc version) for me and my girlfriend, in the hopes that there would be some cool co-op. After installing 'Rockstar Social', and having to get a damn 'Games for Windows' Live-esque account, and having to register account after account and confirm this after that after serial after serial, I said, well, Fuck. It. In the trash they go, and $40 down the tube. Shoulda looked at the reviews first I guess.
Overreaching DRM and poorly written interfaces upon interfaces are the death knell for PC gaming. I am sorry, but they just keep getting worse, and worse and worse. Albeit the gaming experiences might be improving, the overall software experience is absolutely terrible. The amount of disneylandish crap pc game devs are pumping into games to mimic the consoles is absolutely infuriating, and doesn't seem to be getting any better.
I'll say it. I love PC gaming, but it is definately an industry that will die if they don't all get together and streamline some of the bullshit. Steam is the closest thing we have, albeit still is one more interface you have to use to get to another interface to start/load/join a game.
Back to Q3A and CS 1.6.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
Well, if the original FO3 was an indication, it shouldn't be bad. They made shitloads of cash, despite the fact that only the frontend launcher was protected... and using it wasn't mandatory.
The DLC also was unprotected. Sure, you (or someone else...) needed to use Games for Windows Live to purchase and download... but some digging in your user profile will find you the data files. You can simply copy those directly into the game's data directory, and you now don't even need to sign into Live to access them!
In fact, this is -required- for use of things like "fose" - which is kind of like a trainer except that it extends the game's scripting engine (and is used by any mod of decent complexity/elegance - see FO3: Wanderer's Edition for instance.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
I bought a copy of Neverwinter Nights when it came out and... well, they actually did with the game the very same thing the article is suggesting.
You have your CDs with your serial, which you use to install as many times as you want, and Bioware actually allows you to store that Serial in their servers, protected by a password.
Do you feel like sharing youre game? Just lend your CD key to someone, which could just mean to lend them the password for your account with bioware. Also, if you lose the damn booklet in which it came printed, or if you're just not at home, you can always retrieve your serial from their servers, provided you remember the password.
Now THAT's what I call value.
On an unrelated topic, they also ported their game to linux after a while. You didn't even have to buy it again! Just download the installation package for linux (yes, download, for free, from their servers), use your windows serial and you're all set. Suffice it to say it worked like a charm.
"Alternative to DRM"? No, this is just another form of DRM.
I like what Steam offers. I think it's a fair trade. I'm still not going to call it something other than DRM.
You know what the "alternative" to DRM is? Not putting fucking DRM on your products!
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I personally hate how Starcraft 2 works. You must connect to battle.net even to play single player. There is no LAN play.
It's all crippled by choice, and is one of the more evil rights restriction methods out there.
how about the general gaming public's response:
we won't buy anything with annoying DRM. Really, the solution is to add more DRM? Not exactly a solution.
Steam is no exception, and is only tolerable because it has no competition in that aspect.
Once other companies wise up to the steam concept nobody will give a crap for it anymore either.
I stopped getting tense after MechWarrior4. When that stupid game didn't work in any CDROM drive I owned due to DRM, I stopped buying new games for PC. I only play old games or open source games, both of which I have plenty.
Unfortunately, many publishers really ARE stupid when it comes to DRM. They think it is a fight they can win. Also they get focus on the wrong thing. They want to reduce piracy at any cost, rather than focusing on increasing sales, which is what matters.
Even if you could make a 100% uncrackable DRM it wouldn't be useful is said DRM was so invasive that nobody was willing to purchase you game. You've have stopped piracy, but killed sales. It would be like a store so determined to eliminate shoplifting that they sealed all exits except one and had armed guards strip search all customers and employees. It'd probably work but nobody would shop there so in the end it would be worse than doing nothing at all.
I'm quite sure the reason Ubisoft is changing is because their DRM has probably cost them sales, as well as costing a good deal of money to administer. I know I'm two of the sales they lost. I was planning on getting Assassin's Creed 2, since it looked like the first one but with the annoyances taken out. Also Settlers 7 looked interesting. After hearing about the DRM, I wrote them off. I didn't pirate them, they've been cracked despite the "server side processing" shit, I simply played other games. There's no lack of good games out there, I lack the time to play them all so if they want to be assholes that's fine, I'll just spend money elsewhere.
What publishers need to concentrate on is DRM that is non-invasive. I'm not saying DRM is worthless, I'm sure there are people who are cheap and won't pay if they can easily get away with it, but you want to make it so that the DRM doesn't hurt legit users, but actually helps them. Steam is a good example in that regard. If you get a Steamworks protected game, it is to your benefit not to crack it. Reason is when you register it on Steam you get all updates automatically from good servers, and you can redownload it as you please, again from fast servers. It actually improves your experience, makes things easier. So even if someone doesn't care about doing the right thing, the easy of use, their laziness, can convince them to pay.
If companies wise up and start focusing on increasing sales, by making things better for legit users, rather than trying to decrease piracy, I think it'll go a long way.
It's not just DRM that is the problem.
It is also the fact that many companies are now opting to host servers, rather than let you host a server. This severely prevents you from ever owning your game. Once the company decides to no longer host the servers... that game is dead.
Classic gaming will be a thing of the past. You will not own what you bought.
How will people play Street Fighter IV 10 years from now? Probably the same way people play SF3 online now, with hacked custom server code, that runs through an arcade emulator.
But thats not really owning your game if you have to hack it, write server code... etc
is it?
Actually, these companies would consider that illegal.
Personally, I have no quarrel with the way Steam is run. It offers me a great deal of convenience, some excellent sales, and the ability to download and play my games on just about any computer I want to. When I buy games digitally, I buy through Steam because I feel that they've done DRM "right", or at least well enough that I don't have any problems.
Steam's customer support has also been fantastic to me over the years. I sent them an email inquiry just this afternoon about a purchasing question and they responded within a few hours - on a Sunday. The response was polite, succinct, informative, and written in perfect English.
Valve itself has also done a great deal to command my respect. When I sent an email to a member of the Team Fortress 2 team regarding an issue with the game overlay I was having, I was put into contact with one of their programmers who examined some stack traces I sent over and helped troubleshoot the issue. Their executives also have a sense of humor and personally respond to emails frequently. Every single time I've contacted Valve and the Steam team, they've been respectful, helpful, and treated me like a customer rather than a criminal. As a result, I shop almost exclusively at Steam because I feel they've earned my loyalty as a customer. That is what I feel most software/music/movie companies fail to realize: if you treat your customers like criminals, they'll certainly consider acting like them.
And clearly, no one cares about the environment because a vast majority of vehicle sales are coming from vehicles that run on gasoline/diesel.
What a load of shit. It's been proven time and again that "we" will not pay for anything we don't have to..
You might stand on principle against DRM, or only use piracy as a means of evaluating a product before playing blind date with fifty bucks, but you're in a very, very small minority. The majority is scum who will download the pay what you want Humble Indie Bundle off a fucking torrent. The sooner everyone can admit that piracy is a serious problem, and DRM schemes are often desperate developers pushed into a corner, the sooner we can work toward finding a good middle ground.
1. You aren't citing a source of this information. I'd love to know who is the authority on copyright infringement rates, they're usually wild estimates that are highly inaccurate.
2. You're falling victim to the common fallacy that 1 copyright infringement = 1 lost sale. This is simply not the case. I've only ever seen infringement to hurt bad games, the ones that even with massive publicity cannot survive. I've bought many an indy game simply because myself or a friend got it free and thought it was cool. Yep, betcha didn't see that one coming, did you? Because it NEVER, EVER HAPPENS in the minds of morons who can't see beyond this simple fallacy.
3. Yes, because a requirement of a consistent internet connection is gaming friendly. Do remember many games lasted for well over a decade because people could play them with their friends on a LAN -- even without the internet. When you require something that is, at times, as difficult to obtain as an internet connection (even such a seemingly simple requirement) you instantly kill that and your customer base will quickly get annoyed, very annoyed, at random outages when your servers fail (yes, everyone has outages, even you) or when they're playing a SINGLE PLAYER GAME and their internet cuts out because their ISP sucks ass (like most in the USA do) and suddenly their game tells them "oh hey you damn pirate, gtfo!" and closes. Thanks so much for thinking of your paying customers.
The simple solution for you is to stop worrying about these "pirates." The customer is always right, and your loyal, paying customers are getting fucking tired of telling you to STOP DOING THAT. When it's clear that "piracy" leads to a reduction in offensive DRM and higher accessibility to games, even those who would pay to buy your game won't. It's simply not worth the aggravation imposed "for the good of the game."
Parent is right.
I've lost out of more or less a generation of games.
I stopped pirating after in my last year of uni, then realized that the drm was too intrusive.
I'm stuck playing civ 4 (all expansions, all paid) and a few steam-games, like defcon, some hl-mods and portal.
DRM has basically been a wedge against cultural proliferation, and as such it sucks much more. I almost cry, when I realize that there are games, that I would love to play, but I just will not install them on my computer, due to digital rights management. Bioshock, spore, assasins creed 2, company of heroes, silent hunter 5 and many many more.
DRM is the reason i buy music anymore, i got a sony-infected cd and apparently hadn't turned off auto-play after adding a new dvd-drive.
the people who do install this fit the description:
Because they deprive the world of cultural enrichment. They do so without regards to the fact that promoting cultural enrichment is the very reason they have copyright in the first place.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
Believe it or not there are people in this world that still use physical mediums to transfer data. It's possible to actually buy a disc that has a game (or games) on it, install them from the disc, and them play them all without permission from an outside source.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
But how much of those pirated copies are actually a lost sale? Most people that pirate software do not intend to buy the game if they are not able to get a pirated copy. The irony is that most pirated copies actually work better due to the removal of the obtrusive DRM. For a lot of legally bought games that required the CD/DVD in the drive I installed a no cd crack so i would not have to juggle the discs ll the time. You hear a lot of issues with DRM failing on some system configurations which makes the game unplayable for people that legally bought it. DRM hurts sales instead of improving them.
I sometimes play some of the oldies I have for years. This will not be possible with the current games. If the publisher no longer want to support it it will no longer be playable.
DRM does not improve sales
So, adding DRM costs money but does not give any return for this. Then you say:
The point is numerous quality developers are having their necks wrung by piracy, and their quest for a way to guarantee profit - to them - is worth the relatively small number of customers that refuse to purchase their products due to DRM.
So, DRM does not improve sales and, you agree, harms them (although you say by a small amount), but game developers are doing it because it is a way to guarantee profit?
I don't see your logic here. You have something that increases costs, doesn't increase sales, but still somehow increases profit? The profit from selling any product is the per-unit price, minus the per-unit costs, multiplied by the number of sales. You've agreed that adding DRM drives up the per-unit costs and decreases the number of sales (albeit by a small amount), but you still somehow contend that DRM increases profits?
Oh, and developers are not having their necks wrung by piracy. The number of pirates is completely irrelevant. Here's a simple thought experiment: would you rather 100 people bought your game but no one pirated it, or 1,000 people bought it and 10,000 people pirated it? The only thing that matters from an economic perspective is the number of sales. Reducing piracy is only important if it increases sales - as an end in itself it is meaningless, except perhaps from an emotional or moral stance.
If your DRM scheme reduces piracy by 50%, but does not increase sales, it is pointless. It cost you money, but you got no return for it. If it increases sales (which you've already agreed it doesn't), but not by a large enough amount to cover the costs of adding the DRM, you get no return from it.
Your argument sounds like someone banging their head against the wall and then telling people that they have to do it because they have a headache.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I decided I wanted to play Bioshock. Yes, it's a few years old, but so what.
Living in Germany, I can only buy a censored version. I am over 18 and want to play the game as it was intended to be played. Steam not an option, then.
Looking for physical media, I realized that SecuROM is still used with the DVD variant. I refuse to install any such thing on any machine I own or maintain.
I contacted Steam support, looked around the web, etc. I tried _really_ hard to play by the rules.
Long story short? I bought a DVD and installed Bioshock from an age-old torrent that has been alive for a few years now. To add more irony to irony, the torrent download was faster than the typical Steam download and apart from a single .reg, I did not even install Bioshock. I runs happily from where I extracted it.
People... DO NOT MAKE IT HARD FOR ME TO GIVE YOU MONEY! You would think that should be obvious...
I was going to mod you (+1, Everything You Said Is True), but decided to post instead so I could observe that unfortunately, you and I seem to be a relatively small group compared to the vast numbers of freeloaders out there.
As a guy who runs software development businesses, I can appreciate that a games company isn't doing this for fun, they're doing it to make a living. In cold, hard maths, if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game, which probably does a lot more than doubling their profits after sunk costs are taken into account. I fear that easily outweighs any losses to a few people like you and me who won't spend their hard-earned cash on a game with those kinds of restrictions.
There seems to be an entire generation now who have this "everything I want should be free" entitlement culture. I'm sure it's partly to do with being able to rip things like games and music on-line, but it's also a lot to do with how the kids are brought up: walk through the city centre on a Saturday afternoon, and most of the 12-year-olds have more expensive phones than I do. If I wanted something nice when I was younger, I had to help with the household chores or do my homework, and my parents would give me enough money to buy a little treat if and when I had fulfilled my other obligations. When was the last time you heard about a child having to work for their phone? This is not a healthy trend, but as long as it is socially acceptable to get whatever you want without having to work for it, it's going to be a tough market that companies like computer game vendors to operate in.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
if they are looking at piracy rates of 90% on a DRM-free title and DRM can cut that down to 80%, that doubles the amount of income they're making on that game, which probably does a lot more than doubling their profits
This is a fallacy. There's no guarantee that those missing 10% now paid money for the game. It could easily be that simply less people are playing the game. It could even be that the total number of players dropped by more than 10%, in which case you're actually worse off.
If you want a meaningful comparison, you have to compare the actual numbers of people paying for the game when all other factors (marketing, attractiveness of the game (admittedly impossible to determine)) are equal.