Impossible (to beat) DRM

[Seldon2639]

You'd lose that wager. There are plenty of indie games (with or without DRM) that get pirated equally to any "AAA" title. Also, I take offense to your assumption that indie games are somehow worth less than a game that cost 10x as much to make. The monetary cost of development does not equate to overall value. Of course, not all indie games are great treasures to behold but that doesn't change that many are at least as fun as many games that cost a great deal more to produce.

You really enjoy comparing apples to oranges don't you?

[Needs Citation]. Show me the abundance of indie games which get pirated equivalent to the big-label games, and I'll accept I lost the bet. Bear in mind that I'm referring to absolute numbers, not percentages. Show me the indie game with a million downloads off of torrent, and I'll bow out. So, the 92% piracy rate for Ricochet Infinity doesn't mean much. I don't have the total number of players/pirates, but given that it's the 8,484th most popular game on Amazon tells me that its sales are low.

So, find me an indie game which had half the total number of pirated copies as Spore, and I'll back down. Until then, piracy for indie games is less of a problem because fewer people play them anyway...

Or it is a big problem, and the earlier poster's comments about the developers not caring and not having as much of a problem is false, and pirates are bastards even to those companies who attempt to not screw people with DRM.

Kind of says something, that Richochet Infinity (without DRM) had a piracy rate above 90%, doesn't it? Something in the neck of the woods of "pirates are greedy bastards, rather than people who don't like DRM", eh?

Oh, and you really like making statements of fact without any basis in reality, don't you?

 

[carpathic]

The harsher the DRM,the less likely I am to buy it.

Simple.

True.

Not just that, I generalize, I will likely never buy another Ubisoft game for this ridiculousness

 

[zakski]

You'd lose that wager. There are plenty of indie games (with or without DRM) that get pirated equally to any "AAA" title. Also, I take offense to your assumption that indie games are somehow worth less than a game that cost 10x as much to make. The monetary cost of development does not equate to overall value. Of course, not all indie games are great treasures to behold but that doesn't change that many are at least as fun as many games that cost a great deal more to produce.

You really enjoy comparing apples to oranges don't you?

[Needs Citation]. Show me the abundance of indie games which get pirated equivalent to the big-label games, and I'll accept I lost the bet. Bear in mind that I'm referring to absolute numbers, not percentages. Show me the indie game with a million downloads off of torrent, and I'll bow out. So, the 92% piracy rate for Ricochet Infinity doesn't mean much. I don't have the total number of players/pirates, but given that it's the 8,484th most popular game on Amazon tells me that its sales are low.

So, find me an indie game which had half the total number of pirated copies as Spore, and I'll back down. Until then, piracy for indie games is less of a problem because fewer people play them anyway...

Or it is a big problem, and the earlier poster's comments about the developers not caring and not having as much of a problem is false, and pirates are bastards even to those companies who attempt to not screw people with DRM.

Kind of says something, that Richochet Infinity (without DRM) had a piracy rate above 90%, doesn't it? Something in the neck of the woods of "pirates are greedy bastards, rather than people who don't like DRM", eh?

Oh, and you really like making statements of fact without any basis in reality, don't you?

World of Goo

 

[gmacarthur81]

It probably took 6 weeks to crack because the stupid DRM servers were down so often not allowing people to play.

 

[Lerxst]

DRM's suck - we get it. Can we move on now?

 

[DEATHROAD]

Sorry to sound like a idiot, but what does DRM standfor/mean?

 

[GiantRedButton]

I've had a cracked Assassin's Creed 2 for Xbox 360 since it came out. I don't play online either. Maybe this article only applies to the PC.

yeah if piracy on pc should really become impossible, pirates will simply move over to consoles.
You don't even need a modchip for rthe xbox 360 or wii. Some dvd burners can burn dvds that work on any xbox. And the wii firmware can be overwritten using a sd-card.
The ps3 is apparantly very good against piracy, though it might be the one where people try least. Sony has alot of expierience with formats etc, though.

Also: the drm was cracked by a serveremulator 3 weeks after release, and yes you could do anything with it (tested) but only after 4~ days after release of the emulator. So it took
25 days to be fully cracked. As a comparion, the DRM starforce took 400 days to be fully cracked, when it was new. (and destroyed quite a number of dvd drives along the way, i lost a dvd burner and a dvd drive because of securom messing with the dvd drivers).
A new drm will take alot longer to be cracked the first time, but following releases should now be cracked almosdt instantly.

 

[raankh]

Really, though, a scheme like that would impose a support requirement on the game not of this world. That would be frickin super expensive, believe me, I work with distributed content systems. A much cheaper alternative would be to sell the game on a proprietary hardware dongle, including some physical logic (ie parts of game-logic implemented in hardware).

Of course, the way these companies are structured that would probably not work out in their balance sheets--but that doesn't change the fact that it would be cheaper.

On another note, perhaps it could be Ubisoft's way to chip in against the worrying unemployment rate in the US. Hire a million or so "support" people to deal with the inevitable mob of gamers likely to show up.

 

[Fensfield]

'Reminds me of that 'Dickstar' Player Owned Starbase tactic on EVE, whereby the POS-user makes all the defences break enemy target locks constantly, elongating starbase siege time by days. Did that get fixed already? If so, Ubisoft evidently needs a page from CCP's book.

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Shamus, please understand this: nobody actually tries to combat piracy with DRM. Hell no. DRM is a way of getting more money from same IP. For example, in 2030 they can shut down AC2 servers and sell this game again as a "classic" edition. See?

 

[lijenstina]

Blow up the house with TNT to stop the burglars come in.
Ingenious and effective.
Whatever makes the guys in charge being happy while watching excel spreadsheets.
"Whoooa this is a great game. Look all those number with + in front of them! Pie charts are all green! I have watched many spreadsheets in my life but I've never played such fun game until this one Assassin Breed something."
It must be realized that games are only secondary for execs. Spreadsheets are their gameplay. If something makes them happy while watching the numbers they will do that no matter what the people think about it.
Who cares about the regular customer. They are just numbers anyway.

 

[Calderon0311]

So why don't publisher's care for the huge piracy markets in the east? Because that's not where the money is coming from, and because huge money making criminal cartels are MUCH harder (and more dangerous) to prosecute than a bunch of tech-savvy guys who crack games for the hell of it. Publishers fight what they know, not necessarily what they should be worried about. But considering the kind of corruption and favor-mongering that's going in in western corporations, this shouldn't really surprise anyone.

Actually, Gabe Newell disproved this last year when Value started to push for more localization for Eastern Europe and Asia customers. With a better translation and localization, selling games became a worthwhile cause in a pirate's market. The biggest draw for Steam and Value in general are not only the sales, but it's continued support on each sale.

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22378

 

[Johnny Cain]

All the DRM says to me is:
"Screw it, go buy the console version instead."

 

[Cynical skeptic]

All the DRM says to me is:
"Screw it, go buy the console version instead."

But consoles are the ultimate evolution of DRM.

 

[Johnny Cain]

All the DRM says to me is:
"Screw it, go buy the console version instead."

But consoles are the ultimate evolution of DRM.

Heh, that's true.
There's some irony in that somewhere

 

[Dr_Steve_Brule]

I just found out this shit is nothing new and has already been done by Eidos and M$ without anyone taking notice.

I made the mistake of buying Batman for the PC.

You cannot save that game without an online connection to games for windows live.
Getting this to work is the most frustrating experience I've ever had on the PC.

They hide it pretty well, but you can make an offline "live" profile for arkham asylum.

The reason ubisoft's system was different is there was no "opt out" option for online saves.

The amount of people here who think onlive is possible without magic future technology at every point of the service model (each piece of which would make the webtv guy (yes, its the same guy) billions if he applied them anywhere else) is very disappointing.

Steam is the only DRM I use, mainly because they're the good guys in the industry.

Careful, this site is very anti-steam. From what I understand, one of the anointed writers (read: this one) doesn't like it, and formulated a pretty crappy argument against it. So everyone around here bleats that argument like demented sheep.

Could you please link me to the article?
I would love to see that argument.
Edit: is it this article?
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_245/7285-Steam-A-Monopoly-In-the-Making
If so, I don't see the way it counters steam.

 

[Calderon0311]

Also, side note: How is Pirating = Stealing in the traditional sense of the word? I would understand if something physical was lost, but there needs to be a better word to represent "Unjustified Copy of the original".

To that end, Growing up in a poor family, all my PC games where pirated aside from a few that where priced low enough for me to purchase. (UT:GotY was my first PC purchase) Now a days though, I relish over limited editions releases and over series memorability since I can afford it. (Seriously, FFXI stuff, TF2 stuff, all that good things) I guess what I'm trying to say and point out is that there's an upside to piracy that no one wants to admit, but if the developers can honestly create a world worth caring about, they Software sales shouldn't be all they need to do.

 

[Necromancer1991]

Look, DRM is a pointless gesture, any lock can be cracked with sufficient time and/or effort, it merely depends on how determined the would-be pirate is. Yes the suggested system would "work", but is would require so much coding that it would give the entire development staff permanent carpal tunnel syndrome.

 

[Danpascooch]

Not only is the DRM gonna stop people from pirating their games, it's going to stop them from playing them all together.

The funny thing is though, that it didn't stop the pirates, just the consumers.

Also, I love this article, I agree with it 100%

 

[Danpascooch]

Fine, but there's an elephant in the room.

That assumes hackers are just a bunch of amateurs sitting at home doing it for fun/the challenge/som perverse sense of duty. That there is no money to be made selling advertising space on sites mirroring cracked games.

If 90% of PC players really are pirates, that's tens of millions of hits every time a new game comes out, that's a lot of bandwidth and potentially a lot of money. As in more than enough to be cracking games professionally.

I sincerely think that not matter how dumb, complicated or plain intrusive DRM gets there will be people sat down coding the crack however long it takes, there's money to be made.

The entire point of piracy is that it's free, how would the crackers make money?

And the point is that if they made it take so long nobody cared about the game anymore when it was finally cracked, piracy would be more or less over.