Poll: How much DRM is too much?

Hairless Mammoth

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Ultimately, no DRM is preferred (especially when you consider some games are already being pulled off digital stores, possibly never to be seen again). But it's a compromise if a publisher only uses a reasonable DRM method, one that does not cause issues for paying customers, to keep the pirates at bay (pun not intended) long enough for the first few weeks of sales. It's just too bad some publishers go too far.

- Always online - Yes for MMOs and game streaming since they, by design, need constant internet access. Hell no for single player modes.
- Online authentication at regular intervals - It better be very long intervals. What's Steam's for offline mode? I've seen everything from 2 weeks to months. 2 weeks might be too short for some people (vacations, lost internet at home).
- Purchase valid for X downloads - That's kinda crappy, and usually services have you make an account to begin with.
- Unlimited downloads, but account bound - It seems to work for most PC games and console digital distribution, as long as they give you a way to move assets to a new system if the old one breaks or is stolen.
- Performance hits (minor to major) - Nope. If it's taking up enough resources to noticeably affect performance on otherwise capable hardware, that's another sign of a publisher who cares only about money and has no care about even delivering a decent product.
- Content locked behind one-time-use key - That's worse than "good for X downloads."
- Must have disc inserted to play - Fine by me (and most console users who won't let go of discs[footnote]You can pry my consoles' discs from my cold, dead hands.[/footnote]). I just haven't seen it in ages since copying discs (and sharing/generating keys) is trivial and many PCs are being built without the drink coaster drive.

I got a couple new DRM models to add too:
- Purchase limited to X installs - This is lame as well. What really counts as an install when some DRM has considered changing your video card (or something even simpler) as a new install. I think Spore was one of the games that did that.
- 3rd party DRM on a distribution client with existing DRM - No, just No. If the service you are selling your game on doesn't have DRM that suits you, take you games off of it. Ubisoft, you should either get access to Steam's user base, or your own DRM, not both.
That's all DRM has been successful at, slowing the hackers down long enough for the majority of sales to made when the title has peak interest (ie. the title's launch window). Someone will always be trying to crack/ or be searching for a cracked copy of any game, no matter the price. Intrusive and restrictive DRM schemes, such as always online single player, just make the piracy all the more appealing, even for someone who did pay for the game to begin with.

The only type of DRM that can stop cracked copies completely are the types that do put heavy emphasis on server processing, online multiplayer, game streaming, games that really do need the cloud. (So, not Sim City 2013. Also, I don't think a single player game needing the cloud for basic function will exist for years.) (Even then, it would not surprise me if I one day read a news story on someone hacking into a publishers' servers, copying all of the game data, and (after weeks of coding) setting up their own private server to play an online game for free. That's a far out story, but I doubt it is impossible.)
 

DoPo

"You're not cleared for that."
Jan 30, 2012
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Hairless Mammoth said:
What's Steam's for offline mode?
It's indefinite.

Hairless Mammoth said:
(Even then, it would not surprise me if I one day read a news story on someone hacking into a publishers' servers, copying all of the game data, and (after weeks of coding) setting up their own private server to play an online game for free. That's a far out story, but I doubt it is impossible.)
This how WoW private servers work. Though the private servers aren't exactly a mirror copy of the actual servers - they are missing features, however, they do derive from some leaked data from Blizzard which was then turned into a server that clients can connect to.

It's also similar to bnetd - this was the private server version of Battle.net. It was reverse engineered and you could play Warcraft 3, StarCraft and Diablo 2 on it. Fairly stable and usable, as opposed to the WoW private servers which tend to not be as much. Bnetd was largely shut down by Blizzard, though.
 

Tayh

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Hairless Mammoth said:
Ultimately, no DRM is preferred (especially when you consider some games are already being pulled off digital stores, possibly never to be seen again). But it's a compromise if a publisher only uses a reasonable DRM method, one that does not cause issues for paying customers, to keep the pirates at bay (pun not intended) long enough for the first few weeks of sales. It's just too bad some publishers go too far.
As DRM, steam is pretty worthless these days.
Most games are cracked in the time between the NA and EU release. I.e. 1-2 days.
Locking your game behind DRM is more about appeasing ignorant shareholders than to secure profit.
 

Bat Vader

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Mar 11, 2009
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Scarim Coral said:
The fact that Diablo 3 launch day was a failure cos of that especially when the game itself is a single player game (multiplayers I can get needing online) is pretty much a no for me.

At least with Steam can still let you play your single player game when it's offline due to internet problem etc (or which single player games on that need Steam online but game doesn't need online stuff).
I hope the person who suggested the real money auction house never works in the game industry again. There's innovative ideas and there are stupid ideas and that was a really stupid idea. They give someone the option to play in a private mode but the player still has to be online. If that's the case why not just make it an MMO like WoW? They would have received a lot less backlash and hate for it.
 

T_ConX

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So there's a game called Fuel that came out in 2009 for the PS3, XB360 and PC. It's a racing game whose major selling point is that it's set inside an open world that's the size of Connecticut, always showing up on those images that compare the relative sizes of open world games.

Past that, there's not much here. The game has no story, no voice work, no vehicle customization (besides unlocking paint jobs), and terrible music. It's really just a bare bones cross country racing game in a huge world.

Fun Fact: The developer would later work on the XB360 port of The Crew, that open-world racer that Ubisoft put out a year ago...

I bought the PC version on Steam during the 2012 Summer Sale, and while I would gladly recommend it to anyone interested in a different kind of racing game, there is one still big problem...

You can't buy it on Steam.

I don't know when it happened. One day I decided I wanted to write a review for it, and found that it didn't have a store page any more. It was still in my library, and I could still download the game, but the ability to purchase the game was just gone.

I don't know when it got pulled, but I sure know why.

Games For Windows Live.

There it is. Each and every time I feel the itch for Fuel, I have to trudge through the GFWL menu. Oh look, it's asking for my password. I haven't had reason to use it in ages, so of course I've forgotten it. Better Alt-Tab out and go to a MS password recovery page.

Having to go through all these hoops just to prove to some online entity that I'm the legitimate owner of a piece of software I paid $7.50 for is nuts.
 

MeatMachine

Dr. Stan Gray
May 31, 2011
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If the game is downloaded, such as from Steam or a console marketplace, slight DRM things are to be expected to combat ease of piracy - that being said, UPlay, Games for Windows Live, 1-time password restrictions, account ties, always-online requirements or any other invasive and unwelcome "service" or "necessity" can fuck right off. In a perfect world, publishers wouldn't feel the need to lock up and restrict their products behind consumer-unfriendly trash like this, but any time you lessen the quality of experience on paying customers, it's just bad for everyone, and pirates are going to pirate it anyway if the experience is restricted, regardless of how well it works in the hopes that a work-around can be improvised later.

As for used games, I just don't understand why the videogame industry sees them as the worst thing ever. You can buy practically ANYTHING used - furniture, vehicles, even DVDs... so why are used games an exception?
 

MercurySteam

Tastes Like Chicken!
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Nachtwens said:
No DRM is acceptable. I bought it, it's my property. And I don't accept restrictions or conditions on my property.
Sadly mate that's not how intellectual property works. Yes you paid for a product but that doesn't mean you get run of the land with it. If you think of videogames as software, then technically when you buy them you're only really purchasing a license to use the software. Of course at some point when you entered a code, clicked "I agree" or even opened the game of the box and looked inside you probably came across a EULA which outlines what rights you have as a user of their product and what rights you don't. It's how they protect what's theirs and cover themselves should any legal action take place and voiding a EULA is liable to get the software taken off you.

As for me, save for always-on DRM I can live with most other types. Ubisoft has a bad history and indeed so does many games that implemented always-on DRM. Let's hope people have learned from past mistakes by now.
 

pookie101

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i dont mind steam, it allows me to be lazy with things like patches. but yeah when i have to use something else on top of it like uplay then ill probably just skip the game even if i own it.. valiant hearts is a good example. i didnt realise it was ubisoft when i purchased it and still havent installed it 12 months later
 

mad825

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DoPo said:
Hairless Mammoth said:
What's Steam's for offline mode?
It's indefinite.
pfffft, So long as it works, QA not withstanding I suppose. I'm not going to get over the fact that they removed the ability to override forced online verification.
 

Frankster

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Mar 13, 2009
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The second I even notice DRM is there I feel I'm being punished for being a legit customer over being one that pirated it so my tolerance threshold is rather low.

Yet even clicking on "acceptable as long as it doesn't have an impact" seems too strong for me. I guess maybe I'm too much of a hippie for these kinda things.

But more I think about it more I honestly feel the best drm is actually just regular support and updates of your game. Pirated versions are always going to be static and a pain to update, if one feels they are being treated nice by the devs for being a legit customer then it'll make the legit version better and therefore the one everyone wants.
 

Xyebane

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Feb 28, 2009
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I already stopped buying games from EA and Ubisoft because of their DRM policies. It's been no great loss. Steam is about as much as I can tolerate for DRM and I would prefer that the DRM was stripped out of it as well. Fortunately there seems to be an inverse correlation between how good a game is and how much DRM it has.
 

fenrizz

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- Always online - I don't mind this one too much, I'm alway online anyway.
- Online authentication at regular intervals - At first start it's ok, otherwise I'd rather not.
- Purchase valid for X downloads - No, no and no. I never know how many times I might install and uninstall a game.
- Unlimited downloads, but account bound - As long as there is only one account to worry about. I loathe having to log into another account when I play my games via Steam.
- Performance hits (minor to major) - No, my PC has perfomance issues enough already.
- Content locked behind one-time-use key - Perhaps if i went back in time to the year 1999.
- Must have disc inserted to play - That is just ridiculous, I don't even have a DVD/Blu Ray drive on my computer anymore.
 

Drathnoxis

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The Almighty Aardvark said:
Here's an (incomplete) list you can use for reference:
- Always online
- Online authentication at regular intervals
- Purchase valid for X downloads
- Unlimited downloads, but account bound
- Performance hits (minor to major)
- Content locked behind one-time-use key
- Must have disc inserted to play
You're missing code wheels and instruction manuals. It was always annoying to have the game interrupted and need to dig out the booklet to find word 8 on paragraph 3 of page 22. I never was able to finish the Lost Dutchman's Mine before the internet, because we'd lost the manual.

OT: I don't buy anything that is digitally distributed or goes past needing the disc and a serial code. That's why I'm not a PC gamer, and if the trends continue as they have I probably won't buy another console either beyond possibly the current gen. That's okay though. My backlog of games is big enough that I don't have to worry about needing something to play for quite some time, and I'm sure there's other classics that I've missed.
 

sonicneedslovetoo

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Ask two questions about it:
How hard will this be to run on computers 20 years from now?
What would the consumer gain by simply pirating the game?

Because if its impossible to run because nobody uses CRT's anymore and your lenslok utterly fails to work on modern LCD screens then you've failed.
And if the pirates are having a markedly better experience than your paying customers then you've also failed even worse than before(I'm lookin at you GFWL making met wait TWO HOURS after I already installed Bulletstorm to get the POS running)

Always online DRM for anything that isn't a strictly multiplayer game without player made dedicated servers is also a failure(see Simcity 2013)
 

RandV80

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People tend to forget or not realize that while over the past 10 years publishers have really ramped up the DRM, that it has always been there in some form. At it's basest level it was a small road block to prevent one kid from buying a game and passing it around his entire school. Generally the idea is to try and keep it to one copy being used by one person at a time, regardless of where they use it or if they pass it along to a new owner. Same thing as the old console cartridges, and this usually required a CD key and the requirement that the CD or disk be in the drive at the time of playing - not really a big deal at the time since disk drives weren't a bottleneck like they are today. And in spirit this is the level Steam takes it to today.

If I recall correctly the actual term for 'DRM' was something coined by the music industry when they started trying to fight piracy back in the Napster days, and that's kind of where the bullshit anti-consumerism started which spilled over to the big game publishers. Honestly with Steam and other digital platforms becoming the norm, not just as a form of accepted DRM-lite but also as a legitimate widely adopted sales platform, I don't know why they even bother anymore.

Or actually I sort of do, the answer can be found in various music artists and their reaction to piracy. Some will be cool with it and say 'okay just by what you can and come to our concerts', while others totally lose their shit over the idea. I imagine the same thing goes on with CEO's, with a CD-Project being in the former group and Ubisoft clearly in the latter.
 

babinro

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Nachtwens said:
No DRM is acceptable. I bought it, it's my property. And I don't accept restrictions or conditions on my property.
I want to immediately call bullshit on the answers givin in this survey.

Perhaps I just don't understand what DRM is but according to this survey almost 40 percent of voters are completely boycotting all games sold on Steam, Origin, Blizzard, Uplay and all other service based game providers that have a DRM storefront to launch games within.

I seriously doubt this true.

My answer to the question so far is that I can tolerate any amount of DRM thrown my way historically speaking. The worst offender was Bioshock with Games for Windows Live. I nearly requested a refund for the troubles I had but after many hours I got the game working and it was ultimately worth it. I wound up buying a couple other games with that horrible DRM but they all made me think twice. Still..despite the inconvenience they still got my money.

When it comes down it...I'm willing to jump through a boatload of DRM garbage to play a game I'm really looking forward to. I wouldn't boycott Half-Life 3 if it somehow got released on Games For Windows Live or anything :p
 

Drakmorg

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Aug 15, 2008
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My tolerance for DRM extends to the point where I notice it being a pain in the ass when I try to play the game. Steam and Origin I don't really mind, since they're also stores and where I can download my games from, so the convenience offsets the annoyance of having to log-in.

Stuff like Games for Windows Live and Uplay, that don't even work half the time and just act as annoying hindrances when I try to play are unacceptable. Which is why I refuse to buy Ubisoft games any more (not that it's a big loss or anything) and avoided anything that required GFWL like the plague. Always online can fuck right off too, I shouldn't wind up getting kicked out of my single-player session because my net blooped for a minute.
 

Fox12

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Jun 6, 2013
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Only the last option is tolerable to me. I don't want to license your game, I want to buy it. I won't sign into your account, and I won't tolerate being periodically checked. I bought your game, don't treat me like a criminal. If that's an issue I'll take my money elsewhere.

This is why I abhor PC gaming, mods be damned. I've never bought a game on steam for more then $5, and I likely never will. And the ones I did buy were small indie titles unavailable elsewhere.