Poll: DRM - A necessary evil?

[Kilroy17]

The only people inconvenienced by DRM are people who bought the game.

My thoughts exactly, I've had many issues in trying to play the game I've payed for. DRM keeps getting in the way and preventing a genuine customer from an enjoyable experience.

 

[veloper]

The only fans are those million or so gamers who bought the game new. Calling those fans "pirates" is Ubisoft's silly mistake and it's costing Ubi fans and sales.

Pirates are not the fans. The children and the deadbeats are without number and for every fan, there's always many more pirates and you can do nothing about them.

During the StarForce fiasco, there were lots and lots of Heroes fans, who claimed that were StarForce included, they would pirate the game. People who have been with the series for years. Now, we all know gamer promises (cue in the picture of the MW boycott) but assuming Ubi hadn't removed StarForce and somebody had gone through with their promise, would that mean that they are not a fan any more?

Yes, that makes them ex-fans and those who do put up with it and buy it, possibly disgruntled fans, who may also leave at the next incident.
Starforce is a malware. Worse even than securom. It interferes with other programs and it's so finnicky, it won't even work with all discdrives or require multiple tray ejection and retries, so those protests were justified.
A fan is not a person you only have to attract once and then you can push any amount of crap on him.
For a big, hyped audience like for MW, you can still push fans away and still not see a difference in sales. And yes, some angry fans will only bluff.
For smaller, savvier audiences on the PC, abuse will go badly. No DRM and a pro-consumer attitude at CDPR was the final reason for me and many other fans to support these guys through their GOG at launch and not wait for the inevitable price drop.

And I don't understand why you bring up Ubisoft when we are speaking of what DRM should do. How many times do I need to repeat that? What DRM should do is not what Ubisoft thinks.

While Ubisoft are also the prime example in any DRM discussion, in this particular case I brought them up because so like them, you didn't see the difference between fans and pirates. That's another reason for the gamer to say "fuck it then, I'm nolonger supporting your company".

Don't punish the paying customers for something they don't control.

Which is what I want. I truly want that.

And I'm glad to hear it. That's atleast something salvaged from this.

 

[wintercoat]

Well, since DRM is advertised as an anti-piracy measure, and not a single form of DRM has been crack-proof, no, it is not a necessary evil. It's just evil.

 

[DoPo]

And I don't understand why you bring up Ubisoft when we are speaking of what DRM should do. How many times do I need to repeat that? What DRM should do is not what Ubisoft thinks.

While Ubisoft are also the prime example in any DRM discussion, in this particular case I brought them up because so like them, you didn't see the difference between fans and pirates. That's another reason for the gamer to say "fuck it then, I'm nolonger supporting your company".

I still don't. Fans don't have to buy stuff, if you ask me. Let's say Tom Fictional likes Star Wars a lot but don't buy any merchandise or pay for anything. Not pirate or steal or anything else - just don't pay money for SW related stuff. But Tom still knows his geeky Star wars stuff and likes his Boba Fett and whatnot. I believe he should still be called a fan. Therefore, throwing money at something is not a requirement for being a fan. At least to me.

Don't punish the paying customers for something they don't control.

Which is what I want. I truly want that.

And I'm glad to hear it. That's atleast something salvaged from this.

What gave you the impression otherwise? I always maintained that DRM shouldn't interfere with users. In fact, users should generally remain unaware of DRM. (and, no - mal-/spyware tends to eventually attract attention to itself) Punishing customers, as I said, isn't a genuine feature of copy protection.

This has been my stance since forever. I thought I had made it clear.

 

[Vegosiux]

Who the fuck came up with the concept that DRM, at its core, is the spawn of Satan and wants to munch on babies while it steals your games?

People who want their piracy to be as easy as possible

People who have computers so terrible that they actually notice steam running?

Well, doesn't seem to me DRM makes piracy any harder, and hey, some folks have tight budgets and can't upgrade their p...olygon count every half a month.

That said, as long as DRM doesn't make me jump through hoops, I have no problem with the concept.

 

[shimyia]

well... i dont care cuz i can't buy games anyways but i must say... i got to play any singlelayer game with always online DRM without any internet connection thanks to my beloved pirates (sometimes even before the luuch date ).

 

[Something Amyss]

It seems to me that you are committing the same type of fallacy that you claim DoPo is guilty of.

Yes, except for the part where I confess I can't definitively prove it and the part where I say "seems." Of course, those are pretty freaking important points, so....

 

[Starik20X6]

I can only speak from an outsider's perspective, seeing as I only play on consoles, but from what I can tell DRM fails harder than the Hindenburg and Titanic combined. It's my understanding that a pirated copy of a game will have had the DRM stripped anyway, so what exactly is it achieving by only affecting the paying customer?

 

[Lungo]

Simple remove DRM, since those who pirate it will do it never the less. Still to date, I haven't heard of a game, where its DRM has stopped Piracy. Even the most hardcore DRM's are craked/worked around.
Even the games which require a online connection has been seen cracked and what not.
Even more offen if your game have some draconian DRM which provides problems for the legal user, to a point, where it would be easier just to go pirate it instead.

Gabe Newell talked about this some time ago. He pointed to the Russian marked. For many years it has been know in the industry, that Russia and the east Europe countries has been a really bad game marked, due to the extreme level of piracy.
But when they launched Steam there, and gave the customers a easy, convenient, legal alternative, it became a huge success.
That combination they provide with Steam (and Origin soon) are a much better way to fight piracy, that we have seen so far.

But my best example will be the first Hitman game. It had no kind of DRM at all... not even cd-key. You bough the game, installed it and threw the cd away. Still that game sold so much, that it founded their studio and gave them the lift-off into being an AAA game developer.

So TL;DR, You can fight Piracy, but that will still be nowhere or you can ignore it and save those money and trouble and use them for a better product or service.
There are tons of better ways to make sure people don't pirate your game, but buys it instead. Give them reason to buy legal instead of give them the impression that the much easier way are to pirate it instead.

 

[Something Amyss]

Technically, I could quote that guy from CDP, but I get what you mean. For some reason, I just took his word for it. And his numbers really are bullshit. 4.5 million...from estimation of torrent downloads. Sheesh, the actual reported numbers for the most torrented game that year didn't hit that number.

That's exactly my point. He claimed that they were pirated more than like the top five games on one of the biggest torrent sites combined.

To borrow from House, "everybody lies." I expect the pirate to lie about his piracy and the dev to lie about his losses.

My problem is with people not realising what they are saying. They say "DRM is trying to stop piracy". Of course, it would be perfectly fine if they don't actually mean "stop" as "trying to eradicate" as they then turn and say "well, as we see, piracy isn't stopped" which of course would mean that it is ineffective. But since the goal isn't "eradicating" piracy, this means that it's stupid to call DRM out on those grounds.

Except most people aren't talking "stopped" as in eradicated. I don't think more than a handful of people expect this to be some sort of panacea and they shouldn't be listened to, anyway. They should be mocked in subtle tones within earshot. >.>

That, again, was my point. There doesn't seem to be a change in piracy figures EXCEPT the distribution seems to go down where there's a bad year/lack of major titles and up when the opposite is true. That doesn't speak to DRM working, it speaks to people pirating based on what they want

Again, it's trying to stop random blokes from illegally distributing the game. Also, yes, sometimes (very often in the case of any popular game) it fails and zero day releases emerge. However, copy protection has so far been pretty consistent in not badly fucking up the first part. The second might be partly a logistical issue, but whatever the case, DRM has shown at least some delay in scene releases. Especially for non AAA releases and some slightly more obscure stuff (as in, there might be a dozen people who haven't heard of the game a month before release). And the odd few "successes" when it was more than a week or so. But all in all, some success looks more promising than no chance of success whatsoever. Therefore, it's a reasonable assumption that DRM does work to some degree. More than "none" would work.

Except the "random bloke" is not really necessary to the initial portion because of torrents. Does it matter, honestly, if I'm (hypothetically) distributing Hot Game Title 2012 from a copy I made myself or one I and seeding via torrent? The latter is actually more efficient for distribution, to boot. DRM has shown an occasional delay in the AAA market, one which comes at an obscene cost because everyone and their brother tries it. The smaller deals are less protected anyway, because they can't afford constantly evolving DRM schemes.

But it is not a far stretch to theorise that there would be more piracy, would there be no barrier for entry. After all - it's simple to give support for that - DRM delays some zero day releases, the absence of it doesn't delay any (unless absolutely nobody could be bothered uploading the game...which would work the same way for copy protected titles) and DRM stops some people who own the game from making copies of it, again the absence doesn't. Sure, this isn't a hard proof that copy protection works, but it hints at it.

And the lack of drastic or even significant changes in piracy rates hints at the opposite. This is the problem: If the end result is not in-step with the theory, then there's something wrong with the theory as applied practically.

 

[luckshot]

i dont think drm is needed at all