GOG Says DRM Drives Gamers to Piracy

[Aggieknight]

And watch as The Witcher 2 gets pirated to hell

And watch as every game, even those with extensive DRM, gets pirated to hell. It only takes one nerd somewhere in the world to crack it, and it's out in the open.

I don't know what the point of your post was. Were you implying DRM stops pirates?

+1

The importance of his message is not whether the game gets pirated or not. Publishers have to face the music - there is no such thing as an unpiratable game. Every game that can be pirated will be. And not every pirated game is a lost sale.

Publishers need to recognize this and stop screwing their paying customers. I've skipped games completely because of the DRM, stopped purchasing from some publishers (Ubisoft).

Unfortunately, even with as much of a deal about piracy that publishers make, I believe it's a shell game. DRM is about control of content and customer usage tracking, not about preventing piracy.

 

[Zefar]

Actually it was the vast majority of players. Backlash from this fuckup is the reason they 'relaxed' their DRM.

Still, even then my brother could play the game on release for the next 6 hours.

Have you been in my room when GTA IV threw a ***** fit and refused to run because I had Daemon Tools going? No? Well there ya go. And that's just one example.

I got GTA4 and I got Daemon Tools as well and I got the game on release. I remember no such problems.

So I suppose you'd be up for a new law that lets the police search whatever they want whenever they want, right? Because that's the attitude I'm getting from you.

Now you're getting childish.

I have a 24/7 broadband connection too. Lemme let you in on a secret:

ATT are cheap bastards that give out shit equipment. As a result my '24/7' connection is really a '12/4' connection. That is, it's only working 12 hours a day, 4 days a week, and those incompetent fucks won't fix it.

Try to get a better one then. If it's the only option it's tough luck but if there are better options you pick what you get.

It's pissed me off every time I've run a game so 'protected'. I actually make it a point to crack SecuROM-protected games before I ever start them because of this. My hardware, my software, my rules, fuck right the hell off DRM!

It's THEIR Software and THEIR rules. You signed the agreement and need to follow their rules when playing the game.

That is still unacceptable. A single player game should never need to phone home.

For you but for me that isn't a problem.

Doesn't matter. It's the principle of the thing. BEsides....let's just say your windows intallation accidentally's itself, which Windows is prone to do. You're SOL on that activation. You've only got four left now. Now, we'll say a couple of weeks later the hard drive on which Windows is installed gets slammed by lightning. Now you're down to three installs. Now let's say your computer gets stolen about a month later. Down to just two installs. Then you have yet another Windows failure, and wait. What? We're down to just one install? FFFFFUUUUUU----

Contact Support and have them give it back to you. *Gasp* You can do that? :O Actually you can and people have done so. Did I really have to use my common sense on this obvious point?

Btw Lightning hitting your PC is so small that brining that up is like telling people not to walk outside as they can be hit by a meteor.

Install limits are bullshit and I can not respect anyone who thinks they're even remotely acceptable. We're not fucking renting the game, so why the fuck are we being forced to micromanage how many times we install a game?!

You get the install limit back the moment you uninstall the game. Otherwise if you keep installing it on every PC you see you have some issues. There is this where you brought the problem upon yourself as well. So you only got yourself to blame for doing such a silly thing.

They should have had to. Ubisoft insulted it's PC userbase with that DRM. They basically called us all dirty criminal scum unless we could prove otherwise. As I said earlier a single player game should work offline. It should start offline, it should play offline, and it should shut down offline.

You can shut it down offline and you can play it offline. Right now you only need the internet connection once to make a quick check.
But the DRM hold off the pirates for 3 months and everyone who got the game during the time the servers where down. Like 2 or 3 days got the expansion for free.
So much for treating you like criminals.

Now you're just being naive. Where do you think that company's call center is?

Oh I'm quite sure plenty of companies who use phone lines don't forward them to India. It's always other type of companies that does that. Also it's a fact that you can get all your activation limits back by talking to the support. They might just need to forward you to the right person.

You shouldn't have to though.

It's not a big deal.

Then you've never played anything 'protected' by SecuROM, then, because that DRM ALWAYS bitches about Daemon Tools. Either that or they've got a new update out for Daemon that hides it from SecuROM, but that will be patched soon enough I'm sure.

Spore, Crysis Warhead and other games I don't remember. Because most of the time it's like "This game had SecuRom on it?" for me. Daemon Tools is always on for me.

Not really. Most people I know, especially in this economy, can't justify spending 50-60 bucks on the same cookie-cutter bullshit they've already got four copies of in varying trims, so they wait a while for it to drop in price. Then it drops to free.

Except that when you guys can't get the game working for day one or two you'll make damn sure the companies knows about this and will be claiming "I'll BOYCOTT YOU GUYS!!!11" and similar other things. So 3 months is actually a long time. If Assassin Creed 2 didn't work for 3 months you would never touch anything from Ubisoft, even if they made the game of the decade.

So stop lying about it's not a long time. As you probably demand the game to be working right that instant and if it's off for one day someone is going to have a hell from a nasty post on a forum or mail.

Nice assumption you just made there. I'm not poor and I'm not in a third world country. But I still fucking hate DRM.

But you did say something about that cheap broadband provider. So it wasn't that far off either.

You should. It's your rights you're giving up to a corporation that doesn't give a shit about you.

Actually they do and they also care about their game and don't want to see it get pirated. Game companies are not made by soulless people. I'd even go as far to say Activision have plenty of people who actually care for the gamers. Though that Bobby Kotick is a tad bit more bad then the rest.
They wouldn't make games if they didn't like the good response from others and such.

We're talking about DRM, not multiplayer. Keep things straight, will ya?

It's still relative to the subject. If all my games are online types I really don't give a damn if my SP game wants to be connected as well. It's not gonna hurt me in any type of way and if I'm out of internet that one day and unable to play my new game it's tough luck.

At least I know the pirates might not pirate it that quickly.

I buy my software. I don't rent it. I will do as I please with that software. I will install it as many times as I want, I will use it however I see fit, I will modify it to do what I want it to do, and if the publisher doesn't like that they can fuck right the hell off. My computer, my rules, and my rules explicitly say DRM is not allowed under penalty of death...which to DRM software is a crack.

You can wish for whatever you want but the facts are.
1: You signed a contract.
2: You don't own the content on the CD/DVD. Otherwise you could legally re copy up the DVD and re sell it as the company is doing.

You must be a masochist, then. DRM is a blatant insult to the PC gamer. Anyone who cares about the platform should be 100% against it.

Anyone who cares about PC should try to do something to stop piracy. It's the thing that puts most Developers off. Doesn't matter if some of you guys think it doesn't hurt companies. Which it actually does but I'm not gonna bother explaining why.

There is also this where there is a tiny amount of people whining about the DRM when it pops up. Out of what could be a few million buyers.

I haven't had any real bad experience with DRM and the only ones I can remember belongs to like 1 or 2 games. Both where old ones that I still lost interest shortly there after.
So if the program doesn't do any harm to me I'll let it be on my computer. Make a huge fuss about it just waste time.

 

[ThatDaveDude1]

Oh, you don't say...

 

[devotedsniper]

I'm happy one company doesn't bother wasting money on DRM, i mean come on they must spend hundreds of thousands developing it only to have it cracked 2-3 days later, its a waste of money which could be spent on the game to make it better and longer, no matter what DRM a game has it will be cracked.

I'm going to admit something i have a cracked .exe for mass effect 1, wanna know why? not cause i'm cheap but the game no longer lets me play it legally, since it's been installed to much on the same product key (i had a software issues with programs clashing which meant i had to wipe the system 3-4 times), now yes i could have used the remove license function (which i didn't know about at the time) before wiping but you generally don't think oh wait if i don't undo the license i can't play, usually when a system f**ks up it's all of a sudden, you don't get chance to backup your data and such.

 

[TheComedown]

And watch as The Witcher 2 gets pirated to hell

Doubt it. I pre-odered it yesterday and missed out on the top tier special edition because it had already sold out.

 

[Zefar]

YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE TO CALL THE FUCKING TECH SUPPORT BECAUSE THOSE GREEDY FUCKNUGGETS IN THE PRODUCTION OFFICE THINK IT'S RIGHT TO TREAT THEIR CUSTOMERS LIKE THEY'RE FUCKING INSECTS!

/rage

You only really need a few mails to solve it. So no need to call them but it is an option.

This is just asinine. I've had three or four drives get knocked out by lightning AND I have all the proper protections in place. Lightning has killed more hard drives than anything else far as I can tell. But I'm sure you'll pull some bullshit out of your ass to try to enforce your side.

In my entire life where I live I've only heard ONE single guy getting his PC ruined by lightning. So yes, this is bloody rare.

So I guess you have some magical god-PC that never fucks up?

My rig is as reliable as the sun itself, yet I've had plenty of cockups. Motherboards go out, hard drives conk out, Windows corrupts itself, all sorts of maladies. Install limits would fuck me out of my hard-earned money if I didn't remove the DRM or not spend the money in the first place. DRM only hurts the company and the honest customer, the pirate has their game free of any restrictions and any monetary investment.

Yes the PCs I have had have been rather stable. Even when some things did go bad it didn't give me that much problem.

Then Daemon must have updated it, because right on SecuROM's FAQ it says the DRM will refuse to allow the program to launch if disc emulators are detected.

It doesn't state it will refuse to work.
"SecuROM? does not disable any emulation programs. Since some emulation programs can be used to circumvent SecuROM?, it may be necessary for the user to manually disable such programs before a software title protected with SecuROM? can be successfully launched."

Another brilliant assumption. You are quite the piece of work.

Except my assumption was 100% right.
Read your quote here.

Damn right I would. Would you just sit there with a defective brand new car in your driveway waiting for them to recall it? I say not. I know I wouldn't. I'd fix the fucker, if it's still under warranty I'd have the dealer fix it. Games are the same damn way. If it doesn't work out of the box you can bet cold hard cash someone's gonna know about it.

You'd be mad as hell if the game didn't work so if a game wasn't available for 3 months you'd be so mad you would never buy anything from that Developer again. Even if it was Valve.

If they cared about their customers they wouldn't fuck them over with DRM. Just look at Valve. They care. They have DRM that doesn't get in the way at all. Ubisoft? Their motto: "We don't give a shit, bend over ************!"

Valves Steam has a tendency to not work as it's supposed to. Even the offline mode is notorious for not working. People have been unable to play a game for a week or more due to "Can't connect to servers". So you probably been lucky with Steam and so have I but there are those who are not.

This is just absurd. Activision is the worst example you could have put here.

No, there are a few bad people in that company but the entire company itself is not made up of soulless people who're only in for the money.

No, it isn't. MP games require internet to work because internet is how you get more than one player in-game. SP games do not require internet, however, since all the other characters are stored locally. There is no acceptable reason for an SP game to ever phone home.

There is, to protect your game from pirates and it worked pretty well for Ubisoft.

If you want to curb piracy you need to ignore it. Seriously. Just focus on making a good game for your honest customers, give it to them with nothing more serious than a CD key as DRM, and rake in the money. The pirates are going to have at it regardless. DRM is a pointless endeavor, and it only serves to alienate and piss off legit customers who have to go through a bajillion hoops to play what they own.

Ignore it? That's the thing we can't do any longer. Spore topped like 500 000 pirated games. MW2 made that to like 4 million and Black Ops which actually had Dedicated servers and is going to get Mod support was pirated the most and this game was a Steam only title.
Yes, it's very similar to MW2 but it doesn't matter. If those numbers can be potential customers instead because I'm sure plenty of them would actually buy the game in some way if it was not available for downloading..

As for jumping through bajillion hoops. Do you really have to act like a kid? :/ You might have one hoop to jump through and two at most. That's though IF you wasted all your previous installations.

So which DRM company do you work for?

Neither I just know that piracy has to be dealt with in some way in order to get back publishers to the PC part.

So why is Mojang still in business? Why is Valve still in business? They're examples of how to properly handle piracy. Heavy-handed DRM is just an insult.

Because he made a very good free roaming building game. World of Goo was pirated up to 80% or 90% and had no DRM. This was checking the amount of sales vs amount of people using the leader boards. They where actively using the leader boards as well. If piracy didn't exist they might have bought the game.

So again, I have no choice but to assume that you think because you've never had issues nobody ever has issues and that we should all just bend over and take it like a man, right?

No it's just that you guys make it out like you have every single time you try to launch a DRM protected game or even several times during the playing part. I don't think you guys have that at all.

DRM doesn't harm me in any way so I live with them.

DRM is harmful. If you don't believe that you're either an idiot or you work for someone who uses it, and I'm having a hard time deciding which it is.

DRM doesn't harm your PC anymore. Stop living in the past. Unless you got proof that a DRM lately have actually messed up your PC so much that it destroys it.

so I'm not going to bother replying to you anymore. You obviously don't care about your rights and no logic from my part is going to change that, so you just keep right on taking it from behind by every game dev in the market just about. I'll, meanwhile, only support devs that support their cusotmers instead of trying to screw them over.

I do care about my rights but there is this where some activation limits isn't going to stop me from having fun with my game. Permanent internet connection isn't a problem either. SecuRom have never complained about a program when I run the game. Maybe I'm just the smart type of guy who actually uninstall his games some time later for cleaning up. Random break downs is rare for the average user as well.

Also every time some Developer of a rather large company release a game without DRM of any sort or even a CD key it gets pirated. Usually more than normal as well.

 

[JonnWood]

Now if only the corporate fuckwits will understand this.

"Dear stockholders, I have gathered you here today to tell you anonymous people on the internet are ripping off our products and shrinking the value of your investment, and there is basically nothing we can do about it--wait, no, put those torches and pitchforks down--"

This is a statement that is true. In the same sense as the statement as "crack drives people to commit robberies" is true. Specifically, in that it doesn't actually excuse the negative action, just explains it.

I can tell you a paper napkin is worth 90 million dollars, doesn't make it so. Piracy is at it's heart, like all crime, a response to an untapped market.

Counterpoint: Murder.

you are right but only in the sense that murder is a market in it of itself

What market would that be?

 

[JonnWood]

You must be a masochist, then. DRM is a blatant insult to the PC gamer. Anyone who cares about the platform should be 100% against it.

No True Scotsman would say such things.

Ok I'll bite.

Simple proof go to your local gamestop and check out their catalogue of used PC games. Now compare that to the choice of Console pre-owned. Which of those has DRM?

Piracy has been around for as long as mates/buddies made copies of their tapes/floppies to share with their friends. Certainly the original intent of DRM was to prevent piracy and the ways around it were crude ie photocoping entire manuals but it never actually prevented piracy.

Not totally, no, but it was effective in making it more difficult, which had to have stopped at least a few potential pirates. It's a lot less effective nowadays, though.

Now think about it for a second. What percentage of Pirated copies of PC games actually have a sale attached to them? Sure it may be low but that percentage exists and is probably higher than you would expect.

The rates of piracy to legit copies generally is something like 50%-90%. For the sake of argument, I'm going to pretend that every single person who bought it legit pirated it first.

Now what percentage of used sales have also bought the game new?

I dunno.

I'm willing to bet that percentage is microscopic in comparison.

You're taking two numbers and implying a link which you haven't proven.

Now ask yourself how much money do the devs/publishers make off a used sale?

None. How much do they make off a pirated copy? None. In fact, one pirated copy can actually have negative sales, if people who would've bought it just pirated it instead.

Before day 1 DLC

What is it with D1 DLC being the whipping boy? It's an entirely optional purchase, there's usually several months between the game going gold and it's release for it to be made, and often it's planned into the development cycle from the very start. The only real reason, IMO, gamers don't like it is the entitlist attitude they have; it exists, so they deserve it.

absolutly none and with it I very much doubt they make as much as if the game had been bought new.

This is the part where you made a link to actual statistics from somewhere.

Oh, wait, you didn't.

Therefore logically the modern DRM model is not to prevent piracy but to prevent second hand sales yet they continue to push the anti-piracy PR line because that sounds alot better.

Alternative: Publishers would rather not have crappy DRM, but they have to at least try and protect the interests of the shareholders. Any anti-used game effects are secondary, or entirely circumstantial.

Huh, funny. My theory works just as well with yours, using the given evidence. almost as if you went into wild supposition from a few unrelated facts, then ignored Hanlon's Razor.

 

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

I suspect he's probably right.

I'll still buy a game with DRM, but I'll be damned if I'm paying full whack for it. It really does sour it to the point where I decide I'll pick it up in 6 months time when it's a tenner.

Thanks for posting this, I know where I'll be buying The Witcher 2 from now.

 

[Vakz]

Haven't bought a single UbiSoft-game since their "have to be online" crap DRM. I don't only buy the games with that DRM, it's really a principle-thing to not accept the shit they do to the gaming-community (and especially to PC).

What I find even worse is that they keep using these crap-DRMs, then removing it with a patch a year later, and thus in some way try to appear as the "good guys" who "listens to the community", but they do it with fucking every single big game they release, and even keep using the DRMs they removed from older games.

 

[risenbone]

You must be a masochist, then. DRM is a blatant insult to the PC gamer. Anyone who cares about the platform should be 100% against it.

No True Scotsman would say such things.

Ok I'll bite.

Simple proof go to your local gamestop and check out their catalogue of used PC games. Now compare that to the choice of Console pre-owned. Which of those has DRM?

Piracy has been around for as long as mates/buddies made copies of their tapes/floppies to share with their friends. Certainly the original intent of DRM was to prevent piracy and the ways around it were crude ie photocoping entire manuals but it never actually prevented piracy.

Not totally, no, but it was effective in making it more difficult, which had to have stopped at least a few potential pirates. It's a lot less effective nowadays, though.

Now think about it for a second. What percentage of Pirated copies of PC games actually have a sale attached to them? Sure it may be low but that percentage exists and is probably higher than you would expect.

The rates of piracy to legit copies generally is something like 50%-90%. For the sake of argument, I'm going to pretend that every single person who bought it legit pirated it first.

Now what percentage of used sales have also bought the game new?

I dunno.

I'm willing to bet that percentage is microscopic in comparison.

You're taking two numbers and implying a link which you haven't proven.

Now ask yourself how much money do the devs/publishers make off a used sale?

None. How much do they make off a pirated copy? None. In fact, one pirated copy can actually have negative sales, if people who would've bought it just pirated it instead.

Before day 1 DLC

What is it with D1 DLC being the whipping boy? It's an entirely optional purchase, there's usually several months between the game going gold and it's release for it to be made, and often it's planned into the development cycle from the very start. The only real reason, IMO, gamers don't like it is the entitlist attitude they have; it exists, so they deserve it.

absolutly none and with it I very much doubt they make as much as if the game had been bought new.

This is the part where you made a link to actual statistics from somewhere.

Oh, wait, you didn't.

Therefore logically the modern DRM model is not to prevent piracy but to prevent second hand sales yet they continue to push the anti-piracy PR line because that sounds alot better.

Alternative: Publishers would rather not have crappy DRM, but they have to at least try and protect the interests of the shareholders. Any anti-used game effects are secondary, or entirely circumstantial.

Huh, funny. My theory works just as well with yours, using the given evidence. almost as if you went into wild supposition from a few unrelated facts, then ignored Hanlon's Razor.

Yet you manage to ignore the obvious fact that PC games where 99% of the product has DRM has no retail support for the second hand market compared to the console market where 99% of the product has no DRM and an extremely large retail supported second hand market.

Now since the obvious counter point to this would be why don't the console people who complain about this second-hand market adopt DRM since it so obviously works for the PC? The answer is they can't yet but Sony is working on it. You see DRM has beeen pushed as anti-pirate for so long the threat of Piracy is the only reason you can use to impliment it. Hence why Sony has made such a huge deal with the Geohot lawsuit. They brought the threat of piracy being rampent on their console to the eye of those interested and will use it to impliment DRM sometime in the future. The piracy numbers won't go down with this implimentation actually I think it would stay about the same but it will certainly wreck the second hand market.

Now D1 DLC this wasn't a whipping boy it was simply a statement on how those devs affected by the consoles second-hand game market were trying to make money off second hand sales without implimenting DRM and getting rid of that particular market. If you buy the game new you get that content for free in most cases but if you buy second hand if you want that content you have to pay something for it. However until they started releasing games with D1 DLC publishers made just as much off a second hand sale as they did a pirate that is to say $0. With EAs' project $10 they at least have a chance of getting $10 off someone who bought the game used. Now while I have no idea how much any publisher makes per new game sale we can get a rough estimate with Homefront hitting the break evan mark with 2 million sales as reported here on the escapist. http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/108407-Warhammer-40K-MMO-Will-Cost-At-Least-50-Million . This means using simple mathematics for THQ to make $10 off a new game in order for Homefront to break evan they only spent 20 million on developing and marketing the game. The difference being with every new sale they deffinatly get that $10 while they have no guaruntee of getting that same $10 of a used purchase.

If what you say is correct that 50-90% of the people who pirated your game also actually bought the game then that means 50-90% of the pirates gave you money anyway leaving 50-10% of the pirates who actually paid you nothing. Unless of couse I interpruted you wrong and what you meant was 50-90% of all the people who played the games pirated the game meaning 50-90% of the people who have the game didn't pay anything for it. I would guess the only way to get any kind of data about how likely someone is to buy a game after pirating would be some sort of survey at the point of pirate that asks 1)Would you buy this game if you couldn't pirate it? and 2)If you like the game would you purchase it evan though you have a pirated version?

As to piracy/DRM being a point of interest to shareholders. Really don't make me laugh. Seeing as how Activision, EA and THQ don't pay a dividend the only way to make money as a shareholder of those companies is to buy the shares when they are low in value and sell them when they are worth more than you paid for them less brokerage fees. All these shareholders worry about is weather the company gains worth and the companies gain worth by the value of their IP's.

Case in point THQ's share price dropped at the release of Homefront when the meta critic scores released simply because that low score undercut confidence in the value of THQ's IP. Before the release of the game the shares were going up and since the news that the game got to the break evan point the share price has rallied but hasn't recovered all it's losses. Piracy numbers and weather the game had DRM or not doesn't enter the thought process of the shareholder. Sony I don't know if they pay a dividend or not but Sony is so diversified in their intrests that any losses from either piracy or second hand game sales can be covered by their other interests. Microsoft doesn't seem that concerned about piracy but then most shareholders in Microsoft are more concerned about their sales of Windows rather than Piracy or DRM.

Besides which would these same shareholders who would be up in arms with pitchfork and torch at the idea that 1 million people pirated this game and thus didn't pay for it also be up in arms that we got paid 1 million times for this game however 2 million played it the other 1 million getting it second hand thus not paying us for it?

Now with all that being said DRM is not the sole cause of piracy on the PC. A big part is the ease of access to versions of games with the DRM removed. The PC market is widely connected so pirates can easily distribute these cracked/modified versions or find the means to crack the DRM open. The main reason console games arn't pirated as much as PC games is they simply arn't connected to a network as wide open and free from controls as the internet so the pirates can't distribute their material as easily. Thats the whole reason why DRM doesn't work as a pirate deterant on the PC all it does is remove the second hand PC game market. On a console with the restricted online access controlled by the company the introduction of DRM won't affect the pirating that goes on in the console market. The people who do that kind of thing will still be there in the same numbers the baseline has already been established. All a DRM introduction to a console will do is remove the games for that console from the second hand market.

 

[Chibz]

It's actually funny how wrong one man can be. He seems to have no idea how the dedicated pirate works. They don't care how good your service is. Or how much/little you sell it for. He's getting the same thing, for a price you CANNOT possibly compete with. Let alone beat.

He gets it free.

And besides, SOMEONE will get through the DRM eventually. It might take a slight bit of waiting.

I know someone like this. Claims to be a "huge rockstar fan", but he never ONCE bought one of their games legally on the PC. Now Rockstar games are coming out, console exclusive. He's screaming bloody murder over this.

All DRM can hope to do is prevent casual piracy.

 

[OldNewNewOld]

I think I'm going to buy this game just to prove them right.

Ubisoft, leader of the awful DRM protections, followed by EA and the rest.... They need to be stopped. I have several friends who don't want to buy a games imply because the DRM is so annoying. Or they but it and play a pirated version.

 

[742]

I just see those Activation limits as a car key or household key. As long as you keep it you'll be fine.

i live in a great neighborhood right now; if im just out to do lunch or grocery shopping i dont bother to lock the front door. if i do go through the inconvenience of locking the door its to make sure my shit is still there and usable when i get back. this is why you occasionally see jewelry boxes with locks but never toilets. is there any DRM that keeps viruses off my computer and keeps my HDD from failing? i might tolerate that-being the equivalent a "keeping my stuff from going away" function for a PC.

no; DRM is more like your landlord putting a lock on your door, and if you want in or out you have to ask nicely during the hours when he/she/ze is there, if you want out during sleeping hours your fucked. if your landlords mad with you your fucked. if your warden landlord is inattentive your fucked and cant get out of you cell house. i know; the "treating legitimate customers like criminals" thing is tired and overused but who else needs an external authority's permission to get to their own stuff?

and to the "DRM is no inconvenience" ive purchased games that would not run on my OS and could not be run in a compatability mode because of the DRM attached. more often than not its at least a mild inconvenience if i want to back up the game or move it to a different (especially portable) drive or edit a broken save file or any one of a hundred other things. so no its not inconvenient if you dont want to do anything abnormal and live in a perfect world where noone ever goes out of business and no device ever fails. i dont live there, and occasionally i like to do strange things. it should be my right as a consumer to do whatever the hell i want with things i purchased legitimately up to but not including the point where it hurts someone else.

im not saying illegally copying someone elses information against their will is a good thing; im saying that DRM is like kicking pandas as a cure to lymphoma: it is technically doing something, yes, but not about the problem. at the end of the day all youve done is go from cancer to cancer a dead panda and an arrest warrant.

 

[Zefar]

I just see those Activation limits as a car key or household key. As long as you keep it you'll be fine.

i live in a great neighborhood right now; if im just out to do lunch or grocery shopping i dont bother to lock the front door. if i do go through the inconvenience of locking the door its to make sure my shit is still there and usable when i get back. this is why you occasionally see jewelry boxes with locks but never toilets. is there any DRM that keeps viruses off my computer and keeps my HDD from failing? i might tolerate that-being the equivalent a "keeping my stuff from going away" function for a PC.

no; DRM is more like your landlord putting a lock on your door, and if you want in or out you have to ask nicely during the hours when he/she/ze is there, if you want out during sleeping hours your fucked. if your landlords mad with you your fucked. if your warden landlord is inattentive your fucked and cant get out of you cell house. i know; the "treating legitimate customers like criminals" thing is tired and overused but who else needs an external authority's permission to get to their own stuff?

and to the "DRM is no inconvenience" ive purchased games that would not run on my OS and could not be run in a compatability mode because of the DRM attached. more often than not its at least a mild inconvenience if i want to back up the game or move it to a different (especially portable) drive or edit a broken save file or any one of a hundred other things. so no its not inconvenient if you dont want to do anything abnormal and live in a perfect world where noone ever goes out of business and no device ever fails. i dont live there, and occasionally i like to do strange things. it should be my right as a consumer to do whatever the hell i want with things i purchased legitimately up to but not including the point where it hurts someone else.

im not saying illegally copying someone elses information against their will is a good thing; im saying that DRM is like kicking pandas as a cure to lymphoma: it is technically doing something, yes, but not about the problem. at the end of the day all youve done is go from cancer to cancer a dead panda and an arrest warrant.

No, it's like you having a key and if you lose it, you go to the land lord and ask for a new one. After the fifth or third one depending on how many times you're allowed to lose it.

So if you lose it once you just ask the landlord and you'll get a new one instantly. But when you reach the limit and lose it once again you might have to wait a day or two at most for it to get back.

It's not like you need to constantly ask the landlord "Hi can I got into my house?". No, it's like this, as long as you have the key you can freely go into your house for as long as you want.

Now a new hardware is hard to compare to something in a house but lets say it's a new door that the landlord still has a key for.