Ever since I became aware of them via
The Witcher, I've had a very high opinion of CD Projekt - for starters, they made a kickass RPG that had me sleep-deprived for quite a while thanks to the frequent "I'll stop playing and go to bed any minute now
oh crap it's 5AM HOW DID THAT HAPPEN!?" moments it inspired. Most developers would probably have stopped there, or perhaps just have patched out the more egregious bugs before shifting their focus onto milking more money out of the fanbase via DLC (not that I necessarily complain about that in every circumstance, depends on the content really), but with the Expanded Edition of the game, they released what was essentially a "remastered" edition of
The Witcher, and they gave it away for free -
that was truly rare.
Opening up Good Old Games pretty much cemented them as my favorite game company ever, and these thoughts on the detrimental nature of DRM could have been plucked directly from my brain, because that's
exactly what I always argue - if anything, DRM drives sales down, not up. Making your products worse in a futile attempt to convert non-customers into paying customers only drives off the customers you already have - "pirates gonna pirate", that's just a given.
I don't condone piracy in any way mind you, but I
do understand that from a balance sheet perspective, there is
no difference between Person A purchasing a copy of your game and then letting Person B play it whenever they're at Person A's house, and the same situation only this time Person B doesn't know Person A and has instead just downloaded themselves a bootleg copy; either way you've sold the same number of units and made the same amount of money. When someone 'stealing' a product is indistinguishable, from a purely fiscal standpoint mind you, from someone simply
not buying it, that says to me that maybe you should worry more about developing a better product or doing a better job marketing it to people than you should about "stopping" copyright infringement.
DRM, as it exists now, is pure negative reinforcement - it's an attempt to turn the legion of scallywags that nab bootleg copies of your merchandise now into paying customers by making it impossible for them to obtain those bootleg copies. That has simply
never worked, and even when studios like Ubisoft devise ridiculously draconian systems (with ultra-obvious points of vulnerability that literally the entire internet pointed out would be attacked only to be proven
so very right as soon as it went into production) that take a good chunk of time to foil, look at what they had to "pay" for their accomplishment: In the minds of a significant chunk of their audience on the PC platform, Ubisoft's name is
mud - they were dragged through the coals, their executives burnt in effigy, mass calls for boycotts, the works. Even if most of the more vocal element were all talk and no action, the entire fiasco itself was a PR nightmare.
So with DRM we have an approach that's all stick, and the worst aspect is it's a stick that
only impacts paying customers - pirates don't have to worry about annoying online activation codes and running out of "installs", losing their CD Keys, damage to the game disc rendering the game unplayable thanks to a disc check (the only thing discs are typically used for after the initial install these days), etc, because when they get their hands on a copy of a game all that shit has been stripped out.
Spending money to make your products worse for the only people you should be
rewarding because "Hey, those folks are the ones
giving you money" sounds incredibly stupid, doesn't it? Kukawski is an executive with his head on straight - punishing your customers is the opposite of good business sense (unless you are a dominatrix, in which case it is your core competency) - at best they just won't notice or care enough to stop purchasing games from you, but adding on unnecessary (read: any) DRM to your products can only ever lower public perception and reduce any feelings of goodwill you may have generated through past actions; only
crazy people would perceive adding DRM to a game they want as something to be happy about[footnote]If you think that was in any way hyperbole on my part and not
cold hard fact, think about it this way: Imagine there is an airport with an exhaustive and annoying screening system in place that everyone has to pass through to get on their flights. Now imagine you could pay a premium to skip all the bullshit and have a greatly simplified check-in. Got that image in your mind? Good - now
reverse it, so that the people forking over money are in fact the
only ones now subjected to the inconvenience, and everyone else who pays nothing simply get waved on through with no hassle. Kind of hard to imagine anyone who would be willing to pay to make the check-in process longer and more annoying, isn't it? DRM does exactly that now though you say? Imagine that![/footnote].
Me, I never pirate games no matter how stupid the DRM is that publishers attach to them, though depending on the relative awfulocity I may simply elect to boycott anything that publisher produces from now until the heat death of the universe (*cough*Ubisoft*cough*), but I
absolutely turn to the
work of pirates on a regular basis to remove CD-checks and other forms of copy protection from games I've already purchased legitimately; it's generally the only away around a pointless (and frankly insulting) hurdle I'd otherwise have to jump through. That a legitimate paying customer like myself has come to rely on pirates for
anything is the clearest indictment there can be for the industry status quo - DRM is asinine, just bloody get rid of it and put all that wasted money to better work selling more games.
[HEADING=3]There are people out there who want to pay for stuff - the last thing you should ever do is make not paying look more attractive than it already does.[/HEADING]
