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.
Then I kept doing it because I'm cheap. Guess they got to me in my formative years.
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.
...DRM is bad for consumers.
I absolutely agree with them. With the big budget games I've bought previously, I've also tended to download and apply cracks to be on the safe side - not just in case their DRM screws up my system, but also to get rid of needing the disc in all the time. There has always been temptation, though, to simply screw them over like they've screwed me over in the past, and get a pirate copy of the game.
I personally have re-bought over a dozen games I previously owned from GOG.com - they've made an effort to create automatic installers for all the older games, and it's a lot easier than breaking out the discs again. Particularly for some of the larger games, like Pandora Directive, which came on 6 CDs.
While I don't personally install pirated games (too concerned about what else may come with it), I could see why people would if they really wanted to play game X. For me, there are enough other games typically that I'll just pass and go buy something else. I think the overboard DRM etc stuff does nothing to stop people from hacking it eventually, and just stops consumers like me, willing to pay for it, from buying the game(s) at all. And then there's also a certain about of ill will you feel towards the companies who do it -- maybe not a tangible, but I think it impacts my thinking and spending towards those publishers.
'The unexamined life is not worth living' - Socrates
DRM only (marginally) benefits one party, and it is intrusive to varying degrees depending on the method used. It does strongly resemble malware those respects. If I got a piece of malware on my computer that required that I connect to the internet or worse, pop a specific disc into my computer every time I ran the program, I'd be pretty pissed.
A little off topic, but did anyone see they recently added Realms of the Haunting?
Dungeon Keeper II - loved the game and bought the game. The problem is it won't actually succeed in doing the stupid copy protection CD check anymore or run properly on XP without two cracks to get it to run - so that's what I do. I'd even considered buying it again at one point but gave up after a fruitless attempt to track it down.
If DRM is a result of the publisher's distrust in me, then my boycot is a result of my distrust in them.
Registration servers down, requiring the disk be in the drive, etc...A quick trip to TPB for a cracked file and I can play with no hassles.
I am a big fan of GOG.com, but I am not so blind to fail to notice that this whole article is just an advert for them. It is hardly "interesting to see them coming from an online game retail business" when that retail business is dedicated to non-DRM games!
I agree that intrusive DRM will drive some people to piracy, or at least stops people (like me) from buying the products (FU! EA). But I am not convinced that the number of customers lost would be more than the number gained by preventing casual piracy. DRM will never stop the dedicated pirates, it is more aimed at people who do not identify themselves as pirates but who just loan their discs to their mates.
I can't stand DRM, and piracy is too much of a PITA to bother. Games are not that valuable for me to pirate, hack, crack...whatever. No, I'll just go back to my old games I used to play 6+ years go. Still plenty of replay value in them.
Life is not for the lazy.
DRM for the DLC of Dragon Age Origins has been preventing users from playing the game since Friday. The verification servers are having an issue preventing authorization. Still no fix in sight.
Meanwhile all of the pirates are playing without issues.
I have a friend who couldn't play some game -- I believe it was Assassin's Creed 2 -- because his internet is so unstable that he's lucky to have an uninterrupted connection for more than 15min. Unfortunately the game's DRM required a constant internet connection, and he got pretty fed up and decided to return the game. After a while he got around to trying a cracked version and was able to enjoy the full game without any interruptions. I think he just went straight to downloading for the next game they came out with, because he didn't feel like doing any research to find out if it had the same draconian DRM.
Then again, GoG's point of view is kind of skewed. The great majority of their games are cheap, making them easy impulse buys. Since they're mostly older I bet the majority of people buying them are nostalgic adults who're willing to pay for something they remember as being really great. I kind of doubt the lack of DRM factors much into the decision for most buyers.
As a legitimate consumer, I hate DRM with a burning passion because I'm the one getting punished for the actions of pirates, while pirates get to enjoy a DRM-free experience. I want to believe this is true, but unfortunately, I cannot let myself engage in argument from consequence logical fallacies nor indulge in confirmation bias. I look at the evidence, and the evidence (to my knowledge) says that DRM-free games get pirated at about the same rate as DRM games.
Someone please prove me wrong.
According to Capcom the PC follow up to Street Fighter IV ,Super Street Fighter IV, was canceled because of lots of piracy. But the sales of SFIV were excellent on the PC. OTOH, there is a vibrant modding community giving away for free costumes and pallet swaps that Capcom charges $1-$3 a pop for...
Put another way, DRM == Control
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That's true if the user is a complete idiot. Typically, you'll be able to avoid most, if not all, viruses if you simply only download from trusted sources. The risk could still be there, but it will be minimal.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
DRM didn't drive me to pirate games, it drove me to give up gaming entirely.
Even on a console, the hassles were just too much.
Game publishers think they're in the game business. They're in the fun business. If they figure out how to sell hassle-free fun on any of my several mainstream computing platforms, I will give them money. But the longer they fail, the less likely they are to ever interest me again.
If I play it on a console I don't get malware on my PC.
Consoles have DRM to shut out unlicensed developers. A lot of indie developers are too small to qualify for a license. So do you just choose to shun games from developers without a console license? Or if not, how do you play these games?
I try not to buy games on Steam because the more games you buy on Steam, the more you stand to lose if Valve decides to cut your account off.
How is Xbox Live Arcade any different?
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
Consoles have DRM to shut out unlicensed developers. A lot of indie developers are too small to qualify for a license. So do you just choose to shun games from developers without a console license? Or if not, how do you play these games?
The 360 does not. You can get indie games all you like via the XNA Creator's Club. You can even peer-review, play-test, and help translate them.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Yes, people will pirate a game because it is free. Hell, I did that a lot when I was a student. Then I started to get some disposable income and I began to buy my games because I knew that it was the right thing to do. There are a lot of people out there who want to do the right thing, but resent being treated like a criminal for wanting to play a game. GOG fills their needs.
There are others reasons to pirate software than DRM, and that is why I said that it drives SOME people to piracy, not all.
Obscene? For a game with thousands of developer and artist hours in it? For a game you're going to get a few dozen hours of play out of?
Yes. The game companies made their money back at a fraction of that $50 to $100. Of course they are entitled to make a profit. And, indeed, they are making an obscene profit, specially for a game you don't even own!
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
...then my boycot is a result of my distrust in them
A lot of people say that - and not just about DRM - but in the end just go out and spend the money on the DRM infestation anyway because they don't want random warez possibly infecting them with something perhaps more offensive than DRM.
Then they don't know what a boycott is. The only new game I've played between Mechwarrior4 and Current (on the PC) is Battlefield2, and that was on a dedicated system. I gave up on PC games after MW4 because it wouldn't work with any CDROM drive I owned. I gifted it to a friend. He doesn't talk to me these days.
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
In high school I used rosetta stone to learn Russian. incidentally, it was around the same time I started trying out linux. Due to teaching myself drive partitioning and my own inexperience, I really screwed up my hard drive a couple times. So I would have to re-install everything, including rosetta stone. I didn't know it at the time, but it came with exactly two licences, so the internet activation only worked twice. After the third time when I found that out, I ended up calling their technical support. After spending 30 minutes on the phone with a hard-to-understand foreign person, I still wasn't getting anywhere. He said I'd have to provide proof of purchase (which I didn't have, because the school bought the software) and maybe he'd be able to get me another licence.
I was pretty fed up at that point, so I decided for the first time to give piracy a try. It was perfectly ethical; I was just trying to be able to use the software that had already been paid for. I couldn't believe how simple it was, just download a small crack from the pirate bay, and everything worked perfectly. DRM was the very thing that introduced me to piracy. I personally still wouldn't take anything without paying for it, but I can easily see how someone might start pirating their media solely because of DRM.
Anybody want a peanut?
Allow me to present you a counter example: Games for Windows Live.
Let's say you're (like me) buying a game. It just happens to include this GfWL "protection" that keeps you from playing it until you jumped all their hoops. This looked a bit like this for me:
1. WTF, I need a Windows Live account? *sigh* ok, let's create one. One should add that back then their page was slow and ... well, let's say not QUITE intuitive. It almost seemed that they're the only online service that does NOT want you to sign up. But ok, I jumped those hoops and handed every kind of info but my shoe size to MS.
2. Ok, start... what do you mean, no connection? Ok, let's dig out the homepage, what holes do I have to punch into my firewall so this software can communicate with its master?
3. Punched holes... still not working. I will shorten it here, an hour later and still no connection.
And so I sat here and pondered. If I wasn't such a dumb, honest idiot, I would now have 60 bucks more and a game that works. Since I am, I have now 60 bucks less, a Windows Live account that I neither need nor want, a firewall I have to reseal (and let's hope I don't forget anything), about 2 hours of time wasted and STILL no working game.
By the time I was also so pissed at the game that I didn't even want it cracked anymore. But can you somehow imagine why people'd feel, in such a situation, entitled to say "screw you" and download a cracked version? And why they simply forgo the nasty, useless part (i.e. buying the game and trying to get it to work) the next time?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
...how big piracy was even before DRM. People are attracted to piracy because it's free, not because of copy protection.
Before DRM? When was that?
Even with the old 5 1/4" floppy games you often had to be smart enough to make a copy of the install disk before installing, because everytime you ran the installer it would write to a counter on the disk and after a certain number prevent you from installing again.
I know I've downloaded No-CD fixed .exe files for games that I actually bought. If that doesn't tell the game publishers something, I don't know what will.
I've been saying this for years: If you want to lose the "war on piracy", the absolutely best way of doing that is making the legal, bought copy less convenient than the pirate copy.
If one option you have is to go to a brick-and-mortar store, or order a CD/DVD online and wait for 1-2 days, paying some $50, then paying some more for DLC that really should've been in the main release, then spend 10 minutes entering a 243-character ID number badly printed on the inside of the case, half covered by some advertisement sticker, then have to enter your private details that they have no business of knowing, registering some online account, and having to have an active Internet connection every time you want to play, so the rootkit they installed can check you're legit, after crashing your PC a couple times and requiring you to uninstall a few perfectly legal and useful tools because it has decided they're evil...
Or, you go to some random torrent site, download three seperate releases because you know at least one is fake, but the other two are fine, have all the DRM crap removed, and you're up and running within a few hours and without all the hassle...
Seriously, which option would a rational being choose? Ignore the legal and moral, because if you feel compelled to "do the right thing", that's not a rational decision.
Yes, I am exaggerating, but not really all that much. Fact is that for way too many games these days, the torrent is simply more convenient, less hassle, less invasive(!).
And, as I keep telling to game publishers, you can't change the pirates' side of the equation. You can change yours.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Which is why I started to buy indie games. Steam has a huge selection of them, and they are more around 1$ per hour of gameplay. If they have DRM then it's only a key or something (which steam provides automatically)
And if you are cheap, wait for the Christmas sales on steam.
Games I really enjoyed the last half year:
-Super meat boy
-Revenge of the titans
-Amnesia
-The void (one of the weirdest games I played)
-Starcraft 2
People pirate software because they are cheap, unethical bastards.
Yes ... No ... Please don't throw around the word people like you speak for all of us when you have no clue about our motivations. Sure there's plenty of people who pirate because they are cheap, there's plenty of others who pirate for other reasons too. Like the last game I pirated, It costs a whole $0.99 for Angry Birds Rio on Amazon, and I'm sure as hell not that cheap. Actually seems they've released an ad supported version too but fuck em. When they released it they released it Amazon exclusive. On the release date Amazon offered the paid version for free to celebrate. After spending 20 minutes downloading the amazon fucking downloader only to be greeted by a "this service is only available to USA customers" notice I snapped. I intend to pirate the next 10 Rovio games that come out just so I gain the 20 minutes of my fucking life they wasted back.
I would have had no problem with the ad supported version. I would have had no problem with paying even $5 for that game. But no, the endless hoops consumers need to jump through these days just makes it no longer worth while. Why don't they release games world wide at the same time? Why do I need to have the DVD of the game in the drive to play when it has been installed on the harddisk? What do you mean you won't send me another disk when the game I bought got scratched in the drive? What now I need to be connected to the net to play the fucking single player game?
You may be a cheap arse punk, but quite frankly my time is worth more than the effort it takes to do something legitimately these days. Steam is tolerable. Yes it's DRM, but it is in my view nice. The download system works, the games are stored on my computer, I don't HAVE a DVD drive in my computer for the games to complain about, I can play offline, and if I lose my media due to drive failure, or house burning down I can download the game again.
Dear video games industry, If your games aren't distributed by an effort free content distribution system, and you do anything I think is not fair, or the game is not available to download from your website, expect that I will find it by some other means, your shit has wasted enough of my life.
And to you Dave, fuck you for calling me cheap.
Homefront was $60 and took less than four hours.
Bulletstorm was $60 and took six or seven hours.
There's a Battle for LA game that sells for $10 on Steam and takes about 30-45 minutes.
And, when you look at conversations on gaming websites about length and price of games, they tend to react favorably. Often, the comment is "I have a busy life, so I don't get much time to play games, so I don't want to pay $60 for a game that I don't have time to finish". It's kind of baffling to me. It's like saying that long books are stupid, because they take too much time to read, so you'd rather pay full price for cliff notes.
Of course, plenty of games sputter out by the end of just a few hours, so you wouldn't want a lot more game that is nothing but repetition or padding. And worse, most current games that are more than eight or ten hours are only that long, because they have added two hours of collecting flags, an hour of collecting orbs, and three hours of kicking a guy in the balls 30,000 times to get an achievement. Not actual value-added game play. Just trivial bullshit to substitute for content. But they wouldn't dare consider selling a shorter game of good quality at lower price, so a game that you can sink hundreds of hours into is $60 and a game that takes four hours is $60. Go figure.
GTA 1 and 2 weren't PC only - they were available for the original PlayStation.
of reading a PCGamer review that actually suggested using a exe stripped of DRM, because it would improve game performance noticeably. And that was back when Morrowind was first released. And DRM have only gotten more invasive since.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
I wonder if you are speaking for yourself here. How are you capable of getting inside someone's head and knowing with 100% certainty all the reasons why they may or may not buy a particular piece of software? Is there some kind of mind reading technology I haven't heard about? I can't speak for other people but the only reason I don't buy games from my favorite developer(s) is due to DRM. Period. I liked Fallout: New Vegas (which I know because I played the free cracked version) and would have bought it except for the DRM.
I used to buy games every time they were released from certain trusted companies like Looking Glass Studios and New World Computing and Black Isle Studios without even reading reviews. I'd just drive to the store and eagerly pick up my shiny new box complete with thick paper manual and maybe a cloth map thrown in. Believe it or not some of us really would like to support our favorite developers. I just feel that I cannot in good conscience reward a publisher who is trying to sell a 3 install game rental that I can only use when I have a reliable internet connection for the price I used to pay for a game that I actually owned. Now that is stealing.
I just can't reward them for their stupid, short sighted, narrowly selfish behavior. I won't. I genuinely see it as wrong to reward them for this pile of shit draconian (and completely useless) DRM. So you can go buy their DRM crap and encourage them to make things even more draconian with their next release. I will sit back and download the cracked version quite happy and even proud of my decision. Despite your rhetoric I call these reasons. Not rationalizations. I used to pay for games back when I could still make backup copies of the discs and only needed to deal with a serial# and maybe a CD check. After things escalated beyond that I just threw up my hands and said enough is enough and started using Edonkey and then Emule and now utorrent or azureus and TPB or Demonoid.
Why would I buy something that I won't even really own? It just makes no sense to me. For my money I get nothing from either the developer or the publisher but distrust. No recognition or any benefit whatsoever for being a paying customer. And if I want a backup copy I have to download a cracked version anyway because the anti-copy protection became too succesful for me to make backups of my own discs. I'm sorry, but that is just completely unacceptable. If the developer were to start some kind of donation fund tied to a specific title I would contribute to it as a reward and to show my support, but I would never ever reward a publisher for this kind of nonsense.
It used to be that you got something of value more than just satisfaction at rewarding your favorite game designers and artists and programmers for making a great game and encouraging them to make more of the same. You had physical copies of discs that were actually useful for something. They worked as genuine backups and you could back them up and keep the originals safe and sound and shiny in the original box. You didn't need to download anything extra at all.
But of course the war of escalation against their own customers continued with publishers raising the ante in the short sighted push for every last dollar. As the war continues to escalate they will continue to lose customers who just cannot take it anymore. At some point it just is no longer worth fighting with them. Everyone has their own limit. I reached mine about 10 years ago. If any publisher ever wants to see money from this individual again they are the ones who will have to cry uncle. Not me. I'm not going to argue with people who want to punish me for paying them for their work.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Are you kidding? I just beat San Andreas last month. I then promptly went out and bought a used copy of Liberty City Stories, which, while I don't expect it to take me another six years to beat, will undoubtedly give me way more than my money's worth of play time.
Then there's stuff like Civ, which is pretty much infinitely replayable.
Are you just playing shitty games?
Hey, I finally got my first freak! Took you long enough!