DRM and the Future

[irishda]

There are many hypocritical notions within the gaming community as the old guard struggles to maintain the "vilified/subculture/underdog" status that video games once held as little as a decade ago, while new trends push the gaming community population well beyond the realm of oppressed minority. (Except tabletop gamers...you geeks)

One of the newest ones that's surprising me is the rage inspired by always-online DRM and the flak that Ubisoft has been catching for it (see this week's Jimquisition). I agree, it's stupid to force someone to constantly be online in order to play a game, as any number of variables determine your internet connection. If your wireless signal is lost, if your router fails, if your service goes down, if their servers go down, etc; any number of these things could happen and erase a lot of hard work (figuratively speaking).

But, this monster has already reared it's ugly head before, except some gamers have been celebrating it as a beautiful thing. In fact, even such websites/blogs as Penny-Arcade lauds this beast as the future of not just video games, but shopping in general. Of course, I'm referring to online/streaming marketplaces, DRM's prettier cousin. Steam is one of the biggest names in PC gaming, with other companies trying to cash in via Origin, Windows Live, and Cloud. But what do these require? For you to always be online. Not only that, but since games played through these services are not yours and can be revoked at any time, Ubisoft's DRM even has a leg up on the mighty Steam, since you will own that physical disc forever and ever and ever and only repo men can take it away.

The futuristic dream of a large group of video gamers is that eventually all brick-and-mortar shops will be shut down as people refuse to leave the comfort of their home when everything can be either delivered or sent directly to one's computer/tv/console. But let's say this future comes to pass, congratulations gamers because now everything you hate about Ubisoft is now your daily life. All those variables we talked about determining whether or not you were gonna have to reload from your last save? Now they rule your life. If your connection drops, now you're at the mercy of letting someone use their internet, since there's no way for you to order any of the things you need. You can't vilify something for doing what you want people to already be doing.

TL;DR: You can either have a magical future where there are no more commercial buildings, as everything is done online, or you can repress always-online DRM. You can't have both.

 

[Seishisha]

I think it'll be a good long while before all commercial buildings are packed up and shut down, people enjoy going to the shops and browsing the goods, there will always be some items that you can judge better when actualy viewing them aswell; to list but a few examples: clothes, televisions, phones, the list goes on if however your refering to the entertainment industry: films, music, games etc then yes eventualy this will all be done with digital sales or streamed content.

Again i dont think the always online drm is going anywhere soon, as time goes on the quality of internet connections the world over will improve aswell and the drm will undoubtly be more viable, realy the only way its going to be discontinued is either with age, such as its active for the first six months of a new release then removed or swapped to an other system with less restrictions, realisticly companies only care about early sales figures and an old title may still sell but its probably not worth running servers for drm to games that are several years old. There is always the chance that the penny will finaly drop that drm doesnt work well is easily hacked by the pirates anyway and provides almost no long term protection of the product, which i doubt will happen anytime soon, after all the companies that make the games are often pressured by publishers to include drm as a way of protecting their investment.

Realy though the future of games and drm isnt somthing that can be easily predicted, there are a huge number of factors that go into these choices, who is to say the companies wont wise up and change the current buisness model for games. You are certainly right to be somwhat worried that a product purchased digitaly is not technicly owned by you, this is somthing that needs to be seriously adressed in terms of consumer rights and the protection of those rights in digital property.

With any luck digital purchases will be protected by consumer rights in the near future, drm will get filtered out as a waste of development time and resources, the overall quality of industry will improve as more flexible funding options become available and so forth, take a look from the recent 'headlines' with double fine's kickstarter campaign, its a good example of how things could go in the future.

To close up and stop talking aload of crap now, the industry as a whole is changing in several ways, development, production, marketing, distribution to say that drm is the way of the future i feel is little short-sighted. On a slight personal note the issue of always having to be online doesnt actualy bother me, i have a stable internet connection so im always online anyway, though i can certainly empathize with others who are negativly effected by it.

 

[GonzoGamer]

But let's say this future comes to pass, congratulations gamers because now everything you hate about Ubisoft is now your daily life. All those variables we talked about determining whether or not you were gonna have to reload from your last save? Now they rule your life.

Not mine. If gaming really becomes any more of a ripoff, I'm out. I do have other things I could be doing you know. The problem they're going to find is that the remaining legitimate consumers will go to pirating, where everything is a lot easier and the user is in control & doesn't have to pay anything either.

I hope it doesn't come down to these two choices you stated but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it does. They've already fucked with the console experience which used to be the simple option for gamers: pop in the game and play isn't how it works anymore.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

...since you will own that physical disc forever and ever and ever and only repo men can take it away.

Except that discs degrade and can lose their data. Or get scratched, or cracked, or stepped on. Or you can just lose them, as I seem to have an almost uncanny talent for doing.

There really is no "forever" in gaming. Usually by the time I come back around to wanting to play some 10 year old game again it's now $2-5 through some digital download service anyway, which is worth it to me so I don't have to go rooting through storage to find out where the CDS have gone.

People fuss too much.

 

[burningdragoon]

Okay, a couple things.

1) Steam (at least, can't speak for products I haven't used) has an offline mode. Having to be connected to the internet to download your single-player game and having to be connected to the internet to play your single-player game are two very, very different things.

2) Ubisoft's always on DRM has very few perks, if any, for the customer. Steam has plenty of perks.

3) (okay, I guess that makes it a "few" things) Not every online distribution system is loaded with DRM, GoG for example. Yeah DRM is going to be more prevalent, but to assume going full digital distribution is going to mean tons of DRM everywhere is incorrect.

 

[TehCookie]

...since you will own that physical disc forever and ever and ever and only repo men can take it away.

Except that discs degrade and can lose their data. Or get scratched, or cracked, or stepped on. Or you can just lose them, as I seem to have an almost uncanny talent for doing.

There really is no "forever" in gaming. Usually by the time I come back around to wanting to play some 10 year old game again it's now $2-5 through some digital download service anyway, which is worth it to me so I don't have to go rooting through storage to find out where the CDS have gone.

People fuss too much.

However if that happens it's entirely your fault. I'd rather keep my old games nice and spend that $5 on a new game. My problem with DRM/DD is it takes freedom away from the consumers. I don't play on one machine, I go over my friends house on theirs and we often trade games. Not to mention I have a shitty internet connection, and my friends are even worse off than me.

I'm still bitter when I bought Portal 2 new and my internet went down that day so I couldn't play it. When my internet goes down I play videogames. If I couldn't do either I would be forced to do something productive. First world problems.

 

[Bagged Milk]

remember everyone, DRM isn't a bad thing! I absolutely love Steam. It provides a much better experience. When it does go down, I can still play single player, offline games. I am able to find what friends are playing without using IRC to ask them the server ip, write down a huge address only to find out after 5 minutes of connecting that I forgot a period, wash, rinse, repeat.

Another thing; yes, you technically don't own your games, but Valve isn't going down anytime soon and they don't just delete your games left and right.

Origin on the other hand is pretty bad. the program itself isn't horrid, It's mainly the repercussions of using the forums. Some of the banning is completely outrageous. Origin itself isn't bad (although much worse than Steam) it's the company running it that's bad.

Windows Live just hands down sucks. Sucks sucks sucks. They don't allow you to go offline at all. if you are, well, no game for you. Yes I know there's an offline mode, but I can't figure it out. When I bought Bioshock 2, I needed to install GFWL, so I did. It didn't allow me to create an account for some reason or another, and after about 2 hours of just trying to get it working, I just googled a patch for getting rid of GFWL and less than 5 minutes later, it was working flawlessly. That is an example of bad DRM. If it is less hassle to just get rid of it entirely, you made a mistake.

Lastly, I think that there really can only be one digital distribution service. Nobody wants to click between 5 different screens to get the game they're looking for. Nobody wants to have 5 extra programs running in the background sucking up all their ram. Nobody want's to remember 5 different passwords(and that reminds me GFWL makes you re-log in every time you restart your computer(at least, when I tried it, it did), man I hate that so much).

In the end, there will be one that everyone will have, and by the looks of it, Steam will win because it's been around longer, more people have it already, and it offers a much better service than anything else.

Wow, this turned out to be longer than I intended. My apologies if I made any errors in my rant!

 

[Lunar Templar]

i actually think the 'cloud' gaming thing is a horrible idea, for pretty much the same reason people have ubisofts DRM.

not that what we think will matter, these company's will do what they want and leave us to just deal with it or don't play really

 

[Athinira]

TL;DR: You can either have a magical future where there are no more commercial buildings, as everything is done online, or you can repress always-online DRM. You can't have both.

Why not?

Always-online DRM is not something that any game REQUIRES (besides MMO's), even if delivered digitally, so your logic doesn't make any sense.

Hell, in fact games don't require DRM at all (besides authenticating yourself as someone with a license to download the game legally, but once the game is downloaded, no DRM is needed).

Your logic doesn't make any sense.

 

[Domehammer]

Steam is the biggest threat to gaming in the foreseeable future in my eyes. It is a form of drm that holds majority favor of those who use it. Physical purchases that require steamplay that are not valve games are just as bad as ubisoft or ea drm. Not only does it remove ownership of game from player it forces updates that they don't necessarily want. If Steam were to do something awful I have doubt anyone would care even if it is something so bad one would associate it with ubisoft. Steam needs to be seen for what it is and that probably will not happen until it is too late.


Physical copy's will never go away. It might be that the 'hardcore' buy physical and 'casual' buy digital in future though.

 

[irishda]

TL;DR: You can either have a magical future where there are no more commercial buildings, as everything is done online, or you can repress always-online DRM. You can't have both.

Why not?

Always-online DRM is not something that any game REQUIRES (besides MMO's), even if delivered digitally, so your logic doesn't make any sense.

Hell, in fact games don't require DRM at all (besides authenticating yourself as someone with a license to download the game legally, but once the game is downloaded, no DRM is needed).

Your logic doesn't make any sense.

It's not something that's required, which means you should be asking why it's even there in the first place. In an online world, how else do you convince publishers to risk investment on games that can be so easily pirated now that it's exclusively outside the realm of needing a physical copy? In a sense, no company needs any sort of protection from theft (for the sake of this metaphor, piracy is theft), like locking their doors after hours or surveillance cameras, but they do it anyways because it subverts the less clever thieves.

And since DRM would be taken as a sort of necessity for game companies in this online world, remember where everything is done online, why wouldn't they just go with the one that already assumes you're always connected to the internet anyways?

 

[krazykidd]

But let's say this future comes to pass, congratulations gamers because now everything you hate about Ubisoft is now your daily life. All those variables we talked about determining whether or not you were gonna have to reload from your last save? Now they rule your life.

Not mine. If gaming really becomes any more of a ripoff, I'm out. I do have other things I could be doing you know. The problem they're going to find is that the remaining legitimate consumers will go to pirating, where everything is a lot easier and the user is in control & doesn't have to pay anything either.

I hope it doesn't come down to these two choices you stated but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it does. They've already fucked with the console experience which used to be the simple option for gamers: pop in the game and play isn't how it works anymore.

I agree wholeheartedly with this . Also how has console games been fucked up? I see it coming ( you know like square enix keeping ffxiii-2 true ending for dlc , but it hasn't "happened" yet did it?

 

[Athinira]

It's not something that's required, which means you should be asking why it's even there in the first place. In an online world, how else do you convince publishers to risk investment on games that can be so easily pirated now that it's exclusively outside the realm of needing a physical copy? In a sense, no company needs any sort of protection from theft (for the sake of this metaphor, piracy is theft), like locking their doors after hours or surveillance cameras, but they do it anyways because it subverts the less clever thieves.

While i agree on the principle itself, the problem is that more heavy-handed DRM doesn't subvert the less clever thieves more than simple DRM. Instead, it's just a nuisance to the customer.

Ultimately, every DRM is solved with one solution: A crack (aka. replacing, and sometimes even adding, some special files in place of the real files). Always-online DRM. A simple disc-check. Online activation. You name the DRM-scheme, it's still handled the same way: by installing a crack.

To give an analogy, imagine a world where every thief has a bulldozer. It doesn't matter how many doors you have to unlock to get into your home, if the thief has a bulldozer, he is going to plow through all the doors and plunder your house anyway, so the only difference having more doors make is how long it takes for you, the owner, to get into your own home after you return from work. This is how the world of digital DRM works at the moment. It doesn't matter to the pirate what protection you have on your game, a crack is still going to fix it. But it matters to the customer, because stronger protection still restricts the non-cracked (legal) version of the game.

And since DRM would be taken as a sort of necessity for game companies in this online world, remember where everything is done online, why wouldn't they just go with the one that already assumes you're always connected to the internet anyways?

Because people aren't always connected to the internet. Internet-connections go down occasionally (sometimes just for a few seconds, sometimes for hours). And even at the point where people are connected to the internet, your servers might go down, as indeed they did for Ubisoft [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/98927-Ubisoft-DRM-Authentication-Servers-Go-Down], leaving all their customers in the cold while pirates didn't know anything had happened until they read it on the internet (and at which point the probably just laughed).

There is nothing wrong with the inherent idea of using DRM to fool the less clever pirates, but when you push DRM to the point where it massively starts detracting value from (the legal version of) your product, and the protection isn't increasing, then all your doing is bullying people into piracy because the pirated product is simply better. DRM is best when it's used small-scale (for example to prevent people from installing a game they have on a friends computer so they both can play at the same time). If DRM starts making piracy look like the better option (not considering the already free price-tag), then you reap as you sow ! )

 

[GonzoGamer]

But let's say this future comes to pass, congratulations gamers because now everything you hate about Ubisoft is now your daily life. All those variables we talked about determining whether or not you were gonna have to reload from your last save? Now they rule your life.

Not mine. If gaming really becomes any more of a ripoff, I'm out. I do have other things I could be doing you know. The problem they're going to find is that the remaining legitimate consumers will go to pirating, where everything is a lot easier and the user is in control & doesn't have to pay anything either.

I hope it doesn't come down to these two choices you stated but at this point, I wouldn't be surprised if it does. They've already fucked with the console experience which used to be the simple option for gamers: pop in the game and play isn't how it works anymore.

I agree wholeheartedly with this . Also how has console games been fucked up? I see it coming ( you know like square enix keeping ffxiii-2 true ending for dlc , but it hasn't "happened" yet did it?

Or has it? It's sometimes hard to tell as a consumer.
What I meant was that with the ps2 you just needed to pop in the disc and play. With the ps3 (and 360) you pop it in, then you have to put in the online pass code, there may be some other code(s) you have to punch in to unlock other content. Then you have to wait for patches to install because they probably rushed it onto shelves. Sometimes you even have to make sure you have enough drive space. Consoles have gotten all the crappy parts of PC gaming and none of the benefits.