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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
DRM only benefits one party, and that's the DRM software provider.
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.
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
Steam requires that you be online once to validate the license. After that, you can go into "offline mode" for as much as you please. It's pretty transparent, and hasn't been a problem for me.
Personally, I prefer buying games on Steam: automatic patches, frequent discounts for various games on Steam, in-game voice/text chat, Valve Anti-Cheat on many multiplayer games (while not perfect, it's better than nothing), and not having to deal with license keys and physical media are major perks for me.
Is there DRM? Sure. Is it far less obnoxious than the stuff on other games (I'm looking at you, Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory)? Definitely.
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?
So steam was the problem in step 4. Every other step the problem was with the shitty game company you bought from.
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
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.