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[Jandau]

You can't "fix" DRM so it actually does what it's supposed to do without some severely draconic measures that would invade the privacy of a user waaaay too much.

What you can do is approach the problem from a different angle by providing people with incentive NOT to pirate. Instead of punishing your paying customers, reward them. Free updates, free content, etc. There are many ways to reward actual customers. Multiplayer is also rarely accessible to someone using a pirated version, so there's incentive as well.

Also, the industry itself needs to evolve. Games are getting more and more expensive to develop and more and more overpriced, without actually offering more/better content. At this rate, it's slowly digging itself into a hole and unless it shifts direction it'll cave in under its own weight.

 

[geon106]

Well personally i am not against DRM


However, gamers should be able to install the game unlimited times and should be able to install on every computer in their house for multiplayer gaming(CoD WaW requires a unique key for each machine so i would have had to buy it 5 times for our LAN sessions and therefore forced me to get a crack). Earlier CoD games allowed no Disk for multiplayer gaming, only for singleplayer and online would be specific to the CD-Key.

I don't think CD-Key's work on their own to be honest, keygens etc can get past them so people who have brought the game have the trouble of trying not to lose them

Activation is just useless and causes more problems for everyone who buys the game

I think Steam shows how DRM can work. Steam locks the game to your Steam account, but you don't need to use the CD-Key ever again(heck, don't even need the disk to install ever again) and yet its more secure than most DRM systems. Half-Life 2 for example has been illegal downloaded less than a lot of games(like Spore lol).


Edit: to the person above, there are games that do reward people who brought the game and punish those who didn't. There was an old game on a 16-bit system i think where if the game had been copied the difficulty on the game would be like 200% and the end boss would be impossible to kill

 

[ErGo]

STEAM!!! (don't know what else to say really...)

 

[sumanai]

I don't think CD-Key's work on their own to be honest, keygens etc can get past them so people who have brought the game have the trouble of trying not to lose them

I think Steam shows how DRM can work. Steam locks the game to your Steam account, but you don't need to use the CD-Key ever again(heck, don't even need the disk to install ever again) and yet its more secure than most DRM systems. Half-Life 2 for example has been illegal downloaded less than a lot of games(like Spore lol).


Edit: to the person above, there are games that do reward people who brought the game and punish those who didn't. There was an old game on a 16-bit system i think where if the game had been copied the difficulty on the game would be like 200% and the end boss would be impossible to kill

Instead of CD-keys, I suggest Product Keys. Look into how Stardock uses/used it. It was asked (not required) at install, and in singleplayer games used to download extras and updates from the official site. You had to make an account into it, and then register the key, so just sharing the key didn't work. Of course the content could be made available as a torrent, but it's easier and safer to get things through official routes.

I'd agree with Steam, if it weren't for the fact that I have to run it everytime I want to play games registered with it. It's annoying to wait for a moment for the Steam to start, when I know that it'll take for awhile for the game to start as well. Minor, but unnecessary, irritance.

And about the stick and carrot example: What about false positives/negatives? What about when the player is genuinely testing to see if he'd like it? If he doesn't know about this, he'll judge it wrongly. And those who would know about it would crack it anyway. It needs to be something ultimately minor, so pirates won't bother using a crack in/cracking it. Continued support (extras in updates and so on) in a game that offers automated updating only for registered users would likely work better.

 

[mattman106]

The problem with intrusive gaming DRM is that unlike DVDrips etc copies of games are generally release quality with the benfit of having the DRM stripped. That makes them essentially better than the retail version, rather than merely cheaper (free). This in turn makes the pirated game an altogether better value proposition than the retail game, what publishers and developers need to do is make the retail games a better value proposition - very little DRM, artbooks, steel cases etc - they need to make the payment for the game make sense becasue as it is now I am paying for an inferior product which is just messed up!

 

[koichan]

World of Goo is a fantastic example of matching all 3 qualifiers.

World of Goo had near 90% Piracy rate.

People suck.

do you honestly believe that if they added DRM to it the piracy rate would be any different?

 

[Lord George]

The only proper solution is to scrap DRM completely ,as its only effective at pissing off your existing client base, no DRM so far has prevented the game being pirated to hell and back so it serves no purpose but to annoy people who brought legitimate copies of the game. The best solution is to provide a CD-KEY which allows for free updates of content, that way people will want to legitimately buy the game if they truly enjoy it to get the most out of it.

 

[JohnSmith]

Remove it and decrease the price point so that no one cares enough to pirate or move to a business model that is unaffected.