Slashdot Mirror
DRM Drives Gamers To Piracy, Says Good Old Games
arcticstoat writes "Independent retro games retailer Good Old Games has spoken out about digital rights management, saying that it can actually drive gamers to piracy, rather than acting as a deterrent. In an interview, a spokesperson for Good Old Games said that the effectiveness of DRM as a piracy-deterrent was 'None, or close to none.' 'What I will say isn't popular in the gaming industry,' says Kukawski, 'but in my opinion DRM drives people to pirate games rather than prevent them from doing that. Would you rather spend $50 on a game that requires installing malware on your system, or to stay online all the time and crashes every time the connection goes down, or would you rather download a cracked version without all that hassle?'"
I certainly agree. I accidentally bought a game with DRM and online activation that I couldn't return (brick and morter retailer while on holiday). I'm allergic to installing that crap on my system, so I figured out how to bypass it with a modified exe. Why go to all that effort? Because I should control my system, and nobody else. I won't go so far as to pirate it, but I can understand why some people would.
Scientists point out problems, engineers fix them
altslashdot.org: The future of slashdot.
The whole Blu-ray bullshit, too.
I have a blu-ray player, but I run Linux. Playing Blu-ray in linux is difficult and error prone.
So I download the movies instead. I would happily buy them legally if I could pop them in and just play them in linux.
And the fact that the bluray rips are available with little to no effort on all the pirate sites would suggest to me that the copy protection isn't working anyway.
If DRM is a result of the publisher's distrust in me, then my boycot is a result of my distrust in them.
it is more aimed at people who do not identify themselves as pirates but who just loan their discs to their mates.
And what's wrong with that? My friends and I lend each other books, movies, etc. all the time. If I buy a game, why can't I lend it to a friend when I'm done playing it?
Saying your "phone ran out of batteries" is like saying your "car ran out of gas tanks".
DRM only benefits one party, and that's the DRM software provider.
I'll give you partial credit, it's true that the absurd number of AV false positives leads to desensitization, but that blame rests squarely on the AV developers for purposefully flagging anything that looks like a crack or keygen (seems to revolve around API calls for the odd-shaped windows and chiptune playback). That said, viruses are a rarity on "official" pirate channels, since it only takes one infected victim to warn all the others and get the uploader banned (or plonked). Of course, for those getting stuff second-hand from public sites like TPB or old-school p2p such as Limewire, that social enforcement does not apply.
The alternative is to rely on mainstream web sites such as the GameCopyWorld and MegaGames, which have been publishing No-CD cracks for over a decade, and while they have accidentally posted infected files in the past (rarely), they are quick to remove them once identified.
Also keep in mind that today's viruses are usually benign - annoying, but non-destructive - they install some fraudware to run on startup, which either hijacks passwords/financial info, or tries to sell you a fake anti-virus to remove the infection (again stealing your CC info). It's not like the ones we used to write in the Dos days, since back then we didn't have the internet, thus no way to courier stolen data back to the author, so most viruses would simply append themselves to every EXE or COM file and slowly corrupt your entire system out of sheer sociopathic boredom.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
l2 play games. dozens of hours is most definately a thing of the past. now they want you to spend $50+ for a game that you can completely conquer in 6-8 hours. back in the day games were created that took so long to complete you just plain never got around to it, now the company spends eleventy billion dollars on 16 minutes of cinematic footage that, if you're honest the vast vast majority of you press every button on your controller or keyboards to skip it. we need less "video cut scene designer guy" and way way way less "poorly trained sales/management types that think theres actually some kind of effective drm available on this planet/ greedmaster guy" and replace those with "guy who makes the character actually walk properly on the ground and not slide like gumby guy", "old timey manager that understands that you make a quality product and people will want to give you their money instead of having to trick them", and a S--t Ton more cowbell