Oh, dear. This is what happens when people come out of business school and demand "security measures" from programmers too antisocial, lazy or inept to explain the basic impossibility of their success. To them, it's good business to "combat piracy". To anyone with half a grain of technical know-how, it's idiocy.
The only solution, as per usual, is education, education, education. Tell it to them, Shamus. I hope some future developers, if not some present ones, are reading closely.
KDR_11k said:
I'm getting the impression that DRM is just a security theater to fool investors. Investors demand growth (after all if you stay the same size inflation will cut you down) and the company must show the investors that it can achieve growth. However most companies just push out sequel after sequel, few people will be interested in the sequel to a game they haven't played and others won't buy the sequel after buying the original game so growth is limited or possibly reversing. By talking about piracy the publisher creates the appearance that there is massive untapped demand for the products they make that can be reached "simply" by tightening the DRM to make piracy harder.
You have a good point here. The reasoning behind this
could be cynical and attuned to investor appeal.
On the other hand, are investors always technically uneducated about the processes of DRM? Who could say? Not to mention that, in any crowd of uninformed listeners, at least one is going to have a background in games or some IT knowledge, and very likely they will write in answer to a false sense of security.
Unless, of course, it is to their profit to ignore it, which they might believe. Investment is a balancing act, and I think that taking a rubber gun approach to the fight against piracy is a very risky business venture. You might be right - these companies might be taking that risk - but it's impossible to be sure. Usually, you'd expect a multinational like EA to be slightly more careful than that. Then again... we're in a recession for a reason, aren't we?
On a larger scale the industry is facing disinterest issues, investments are receding, so are gamer numbers (what happened to all those PS2 owners? Since the Wii has mostly new users that didn't have a PS2 that leaves millions of PS2 owners unaccounted for!). For now they can claim it's the recession but the entertainment businesses are supposed to be recession proof or even helped by recessions (pinball was invented during a recession). This disinterest cannot be fought by simply making the same games over and over again, if they didn't get more interest before why would they now? Piracy is a neat way to sidestep the product appeal issue and simply claim there are many people who want the product. Turning pirates into paying customers sounds easier than re-engineering your product to turn completely uninterested people into paying customers.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the entertainment industry is not recession proof. Anyone who says that is bonkers, and has no clue how people respond to economic crises. Only one type of industry is recession proof, and that's the essentials - food and water. Anything else is disposable - people can and will go without luxury if they believe that they are in danger of losing their potential to have more luxury later. The exception being addiction (which makes us believe something non-essential IS essential), which may have been held more true for the pinball machine than for the games any of the companies Shamus listed have designed.
The_root_of_all_evil said:
Next for DRM? You can only rent the game from their website. Which they can delete at any time.
Microtransactions as standard?
Too late, you know that whole server-side gaming thing some people are still in love with? That's precisely how it works.
