Farther than stars said:
Vampire cat said:
What I meant was, you cant effectively combat piracy in the same way you cant terrorism because it's impossible to cover all angles. There will always be SOMEONE that slips trough. In my country Norway there was a terror attack by a single person earlier this year, and after his horrible actions everyone was crying "why wasn't he stopped before?!" Well, how do you spot a person like that? Should we detain everyone with a shaky childhood just because they MAY become terrorists? One cannot get EVERY person that pirates games, and one can't easily secure a game from every angle of attack. If they stopped concentrating on protecting the game and put the money into making a great game that people would WANT to pay for, everyone would be winners.
Call me a cynic, but it sounds like you're trying to catch more flies with honey than vinegar and in this situation I can't help making up a balance of what that means.
What you're saying is that if you spend less resources protecting your software and more on improving it, this will then diminish piracy. But isn't at the same time a game with less protection and a better quality also a more lucrative possession and therefore a greater incentive to pirate it?
You see, you say that you can't combat all angles, but that's not the way I see combat, since combating to me means covering all angles possible, so that the ones you can't cover cause minimum damage.
Anyway, I'd also like to go back to the War on Terror thing, as I agree it's a bit of a tangent, but it's the same basic principle. Do you really believe that extremists are going to stop killing people if we keep our mouths shut about it?
How many eyes were on Norwegian terrorism when this happened? Because I'll wager there weren't a lot, but it still happened. Shouldn't we then at least put this knowledge that we've gained of the situation to good use so as to help ensure that this doesn't happen again?
Perhaps it's true that trying to close as many gaps as possible is the correct idea, but some ideas are mutually exclusive.
DRM is an obvious example of this. DRM of any kind whatoever harms your legitimate customers. However, it does delay (but not prevent) the ability of pirates to provide alternate copies.
Further to this, DRM costs money to implement. Both directly, and because it involves doing something really unnatural to a digital file. (Prevent copying. - That's the antitheses of why digital files exist in the first place. A digital file, and the equipment surrounding it are explicitly designed to consistently make reliable copies of information.)
Doing something which goes against the innate properties of the medium you're working with inevitably creates complications and bugs. If you can even get it to work at all.
So...
You're left weighing up something like this:
Direct implementation cost of DRM + Support cost of DRM related problems + Loss of goodwill due to inevitable negative effects on your customers of DRM.
Against
Temporary reduction in piracy rates.
(It's inevitably temporary, because as soon as you have even a single crack for your game, the protection your DRM provides is gone, and you're back to a situation akin to not having DRM at all.)
The question you have to ask, is are the direct and indirect costs of implementing DRM less than the extra profits you'll gain from reducing piracy rates.
Sounds like a simple calculation... But of course the problem is you can't obtain any figures that aren't purely speculative.
There's no way to prove if you would have made more, or less had you made a different choice...
So people just go with a gut reaction, and do whatever...
And then if they make a profit they say "See? it worked." (Irrespective of if they wanted to prove their DRM worked, or wanted to prove you can do fine without DRM.)
If they made a loss, they blame piracy. Because it's easier than trying to figure out if there's anything else that may have contributed.
And you can't prove it anyway. Did I not make a profit because my game sucks? Did everyone just pirate it because they could? Did they pirate it in protest of my harsh DRM?
Did I not do enough marketing?
Impossible to answer with any reliability. So instead people just go with whatever absolves them of responsibility for the problem. (That goes for both developers and pirates by the way. Neither wants to face up to the possibility that they're at fault for anything.)
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